Today has been a sick day. I don't mind sick days as long as they are only once in a while. It forces people to rest and take care of themselves, which many people can't afford to do on a regular basis, depending on their job, school, or family situation. Or a combination of two or all of them. Anyway, sick days give me a lot of time to think. The things I see, read, hear, or do provoke a more intensive, deep thought process than they normally would. That may be a side effect of whatever type of meds I take for that particular problem, but I like to think it's more of my brain being more active and compensating for when my body has to be more inactive. I have read a few things today that really caught my attention.
Number One: I ordered a fitness DVD called BBX Hardcore that finally arrived in the mail. It comes with a booklet with an entire 90 day meal plan, recipes, life coaching, stuff like that. One part that hit me said:
"You can't focus on the negative. You can't dwell on the wrong that you have done, or what other people have done to you; how crappy you feel, or how bad you think you look, or how nothing ever goes right for you. By focusing on the negative, you keep yourself there and so continues a very vicious cycle. Change begins with, ends with, and can only happen within you." -Dede Barbantts
Pretty deep for a fitness DVD huh?
Number Two: I started reading this book called "Broken for You" by Stephanie Kallos. I am only 34 pages into it, but it has already got me thinking. One part talks about how one of the characters read a book about writing down affirmations and says:
"If Wanda felt like writing, 'Nobody will ever love me again,' which, according to the book's author, was a lie, she wrote instead, 'A loving relationship awaits me.' If Wanda felt like writing, 'All men are [messed up jerks] who deserve to die,' she forced her hand into a steady calmness and wrote instead, 'There are good men in the world, somewhere.' If she felt like writing, '[Screw] the survival of the species. The world would be better off if humans became extinct,' she wrote, 'Save the whales.' And if she felt her spooks coming on, those familiar voices that said, 'You're going to die alone. People started leaving you when you were six years old and they're going to keep leaving you, so why bother?' she would print, as if she were competing for a penmanship prize, 'I love myself. I. Love. Myself. I do not need another person's love to make me whole.'"
Stephanie Kallos used relationships in that particular part of the book to describe affirmations, but I think it is actually a useful technique that can be applied to any situation. If you constantly tell yourself you are going to fail or that you are going nowhere, then that it what will happen to you. If you tell yourself you amazing and will succeed at whatever it is you put your mind to, then you will. I firmly believe we are our greatest roadblocks in life. We are the only thing holding ourselves back from reaching our full potential. We can spend all our time blaming God or the people around us, but in the end, deep down we all know that the blame really falls on us.
Number Three: I was watching Community since I ran out of other things to watch and the character Jeff, played by Joel McHale said:
"He has nothing to prove or disprove about himself or to himself. He has no shame because he didn't care if you knew. We can't keep going to each other until we learn to go to ourselves. We need to stop turning our hatred of ourselves into someones else's job and just stop hating ourselves."
Now, taken out of context it doesn't make tons of sense. And granted, Community is about stupid humor and being sarcastic most of the time. But what I got from it was that the reason we sometimes hate ourselves is because we feel like we have to prove ourselves in comparison to those around us. We constantly compare our shortcomings to other people's strengths and beat ourselves up for NO GOOD REASON. I read somewhere once something along the lines of, "Would you be friends with someone who talked to you the way you talk to yourself." Essentially, if someone criticized you and was as hard on you as you are on yourself, you probably wouldn't want to be around them. We should all cut ourselves some slack every now and then. Nobody is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone has room for improvement, no matter how old they are. We should all try to be more positive and nicer to ourselves and the people around us. I think that is one thing that could help us all in the pursuit of happiness. And as Will Smith says ON The Pursuit of Happyness,
"There is no [wh]Y in happiness."
