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 |   A journey of self-improvement - or not. |
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Sup? I'm Char. You may know me from timeless classics such as
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I blog for things like
[Embed For Use By Upgraded+] Believin' all the lies that they're tellin' ya Buyin' all the products that they're sellin' ya They say jump and ya say "how high?" Ya braindead, ya got a fuckin' bullet in ya head |
  "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  Prompt: Write about something you collect. If you don't collect anything, write about the collection of a friend or family member.I’m feeling very on edge today. It’s times like these that I wish I was more easily distracted by random lighthearted conversation or prompts. But I’m not. It feels too near to avoidance for my brain to accept. Between the election tomorrow and the pandemic raging, I can’t get past the dark cloud, this vague “bad feeling” that is consuming me. I keep telling myself, “It’s out of your control; let go.” It’s much more difficult in practice. The energy in the country right now reminds me of my childhood home. Just this oppressive, insidious energy that snakes its way around your body and constricts, constricts, constricts. I’m on this crazy sleep pattern where I’m sleeping 2 or 3 hours at night and then another 1 or 2 hours in the late afternoon. If I’m asleep long enough to hit REM sleep, I’m having nightmares, which is pretty usual for me. I just usually sleep more so I’m less tired in general. I’ve been watching businesses around the city board up their windows in preparation for election results and potential civil unrest. I’ve been seeing the Trump caravans shutting down interstates ahead of the election. I wish the best for everyone, regardless of the outcome. When you wish negative things on others, those negative things might come back to you twofold. Hopefully everyone else has enough sanity left in their tank to do the right things and attempt to stop the divisiveness. I’ve been the bigger person more times than I can count. It wears on you, but it’s not like you can rely on anyone but yourself to take the high road. As far as collecting things goes, I could lie and say I collect stamps or coins or something. The truth is that clutter around me clutters my mind. If I don’t need it, there’s no point in collecting it. One non-physical thing I kind of collect is lines that I like. Quotes, lyrics, movie lines, etc. Things that might spark my creativity if I want to write. Mantras that help me get through times like these. I’m featuring my favorite stoic quotes at the end of my blog entries this month because they’re helping me to cope this year. I thought this quote was apt for today’s entry. I’ve used this quote to examine myself and others during the pandemic and election process. I’ve caught myself absorbing other people’s anger that I don’t want or deserve. I’ve witnessed people enraged about things that have no basis in reality simply because they’ve listened to a politician or they’ve listened to opinions within an echo chamber. I can’t control what other people choose to do. All I can control is my reaction to those people and my own sources of positivity/negativity. I’m careful about how I absorb information and where I look for it. One person’s word means nothing to me. One site, one media station, one friend... it goes in one ear and out the other. If others adopted the practice of objectively taking in and analyzing information from multiple sources with different perspectives before drawing conclusions, we would all be much less divided. I choose to keep myself fully informed, even if others don’t. When I find myself feeling angry, I ask myself why I’m angry. What information am I working with? Where did I find that information? Who did I talk to? What do I know about the people I talked to? What other research have I done on the topic? What other analyses have I relied on? Here is the conclusion I’ve drawn: If you always, without fail, find yourself agreeing with one “side” on every single issue, every news story, every conversation, and every event, you might need to look a bit more introspectively at what you’re doing to form your own thoughts instead of absorbing other people’s thoughts. If you cannot find fault within your “side” in any way, ever, you’ve almost certainly sabotaged yourself by adopting the negative energy of others and raising it as your own. This is why I think collecting quotes is a good thing. It allows me to calmly reflect on things and draw conclusions that are really common sense. It’s underrated, especially this year. I’ve found myself concluding things with hatred in my heart because I don’t want to allow myself to be open to something that I consider wholly bad. But if we can’t learn to pick and choose our battles and form our own thoughts, we aren’t ever going to be able to make the peace that we desperately need. It feels wrong to “give in” to certain types of people, but at the end of the day, it’s about letting go of the negative things we can’t control so that we can build on the positive things we can control. Of course, there are things that aren’t up for debate. Science isn’t up to your personal opinion. You don't have rights to get others sick during a pandemic by refusing to cooperate with basic hygiene and mitigation efforts in public spaces. You can't hate other humans based on their skin color, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, etc. These things simply aren't up for debate because my personal convictions don't allow me to fraternize with people who are evil for the sake of being evil. There are those very easy situations where someone just lets you know straight up like, "I don't think women should be treated with human decency because they're women and I also don't think gay people should have basic human rights." Then you can just be like, "Oh cool, you're dismissed from my life forever." But outside of those situations, I think almost everyone can find common ground if they just listen to their heart and their conscience. If you're religious, you likely have an actual guide to help you. Otherwise, you can just not be a hateful person. Either works. I'm often surprised to hear religious people say extremely hateful things. I know they didn't read those things in their scriptures. A lot of hate has come from religion, but it's typically not from the scripture itself. I think a lot of religious people haven't gone in raw on their own beliefs by reading their religious texts. Instead they were preached to through some kind of negative interpretation of the religious text and the followers just shrugged like, "Sure, why not." Which also fits this quote like a glove. Examine yourself. Rethink your beliefs, more than once, do it continuously. Develop basic empathy and compassion for other humans. Listen more than you talk. It's not going to happen over night or even in the next several weeks or months, but we're ready to go through a time of healing. We need to find peace amongst ourselves. Think about who benefits from us hating each other. Stop believing everything that you hear any one person say. Don't bother thinking or talking about a news headline unless you've read the accompanying article and crosschecked the story with at least 5 different sources from a variety of news outlets. It's a lot like when you were 12 years old and you were taught to never draw conclusions in a paper without having multiple valid sources cited to back up your claims. Just pretend like every single thing you say is going to get meticulously fact checked by your middle school English teacher. Stoic Thought of the Day: “Other people's views and troubles can be contagious. Don't sabotage yourself by unwittingly adopting negative, unproductive attitudes through your associations with others.”-Epictetus |
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