Who Are You?

Since I was a young child I’ve contemplated who I am. There are basic ponderings and then deep staggering introspections on this topic. The desire to establish the parameters of who I am have been a major theme. I’m sure that it’s got a lot to do with my introverted side. I know that all the things that I have experienced are culminating to make me this person. I think that, on the daily, I spend too much time sifting through the many life events and I forget the many little things that have delivered me to this stop in life.

This question became a physical and psychological event when I was close to 10 years old. I was out in our little bayou bordered neighborhood with the kids we played with on occasion. We lived in Bossier City, Louisiana very near the Red River and Barksdale Air Force Base. It was the 80’s, we could go out and play on the levies and climb into treehouses that our father’s built us all day long. I was standing in one of the kids’ yards. It was a pleasantly warm, sunny, suffocatingly muggy day, as was usual. I was waiting for the next thing to happen. I don’t even remember what it was we were going to do or what we had actually been doing prior to this distinct moment. I remember escaping deep into myself. my eyes were open but everything else was being ignored as though my eyes were closed. I felt the Earth spinning. The grass beneath my feet was perceptively growing but the sensation was blocked out as I stood there swirling with the Earth and sky. A huge inner voice, my thought voice, loudly said “Who am I…who am i…WHO am i…WHO AM I…” I could see the words as well. It was a calm question. There was no anger just an urgency that the three words must be answered. This wasn’t the first time I had felt this, thought this. However, this time the question was pressing and pulling. I didn’t just feel the words emotionally but physically. The phrase repeated through all of me. As an adult I have done a few chemicals, plenty of a variety of alcohols, an assortment of pills, years ago I tried a smidge of shrooms, once I smoked some opium laced weed, yeah, I smoked weed on occasion, sometimes good stuff sometimes just run of the mill. I’m telling you this to say the way I felt on that day, in that moment of deep concentration, was like the time I smoked some really amazing marijuana and drank quite a few shots of patron. The more I concentrated on the thought the feeling took over and I felt like I was reeling and expanding and shrinking at the same time. My brain felt connected to the universe and aware of everything. I embraced how it felt and pulled in to me. It was intoxicating and I could feel it permeate every cell of my body and mind. It was like a trance state. I transcended the place, places, around me. I was wearing the universe like a mantle and it was frightening and enlightening. As quickly as I sank into the thought I was slammed back into the mundane physical atmosphere. The rest of the day was like a dream. I tended to the tasks of the day and felt a residue of the few seconds I spent fondling the abyss but it faded. I let the time pass, and though I was still very aware of that short time standing there on the lawn in the sun it was distant and just a memory. I didn’t know who I was.

Many times I’ve tried to find that place again. It’s never quite been reached and I often feel a loss that I can’t do that anymore. Some part of me is no longer able to reach that deeper spiritual connection. What I would like is to find that inner child and ask her what she was on the verge of defining. There is a huge problem with this though. The child is still there under my surface but she is no longer that being. Whatever transcendence I had in that brief brush with the universe is only a part of this thing I am now.

What I know of myself today will change tomorrow and life will keep adding to the chasm in my soul. I know that I have a huge character flaw that says I have to find love, foster love, incite love, feel love, in short, do all the things with love. It’s exhausting and it causes much guilt and many failings.  Still, I have one very distinct shortcoming when it comes to love. I don’t know how to love myself. I know it’s the key to finding peace in my life. I like me, whoever I am. I just don’t love me. It’s one reason I constantly try to find love from others. I’m tired of this love topic. Really, I’m so tired from it.

I’m an escape artist. What that entails is truly something amazing. I escape in so many ways. I, on occasion, actually just get up and leave. That’s not too amazing, lots of people do that. The part of this thing I am that I think is impressive is the ability to escape into other people’s lives. I can disappear into someone else’s world and nest there for ages just becoming a part of the structure. I can escape into their thoughts as they speak. I can feel their world encompass me and I feel like I’m in it, in their hopes and dreams, walking through their life actually living it. It’s a bit of a mind disturbance. I do this when I read books and when I watch movies too. The problem is that I can want all the beauty of the worlds I escape to and have every intention of going and living those places and things for myself but all I’m doing is vicariously visiting. Maybe I’m some kind of symbiotic being that supports others while experiencing life to the fullest through their achievements. I feel in my make up that in order to be fully who I am I must have someone in my life to build up and make exalted. It’s preposterous, it’s demeaning. Tomorrow I may feel different but today this is what I see. I only know that I have failed in this role plenty of times. It stands to reason that maybe it’s time to reconsider this and find another way to channel my energies.

Actually, I have to take some of this back. I didn’t totally fail at my role. In fact, I’ve probably done a very good job of this symbiosis. I did become a part of the structures of others’ lives. I mirrored the beauty of their accomplishments and enhanced their good qualities. I shone a light on their strengths and supported their weaknesses. I opened my heart and gave them all the love that I could. I stretched myself to the limits of my abilities. Even when that wasn’t enough I tried to keep going so they may know they were worth the effort. I may have escaped into their worlds but I helped them create new worlds. Then I escaped again and flitted out when my job was done. It’s an egotistic view. I get it. I’m under no guises that I’m making myself into some saintly sidekick. It’s my view here, right?

What I’m really addressing is the inner part of my motivations. The bulk of who I am is the encourager, the Poly-Anna optimistic, the desire to be the cheerleader, not the kind in a short skirt and pom poms but the kind that cheers you on in struggle and strife. It also makes me a dreamer, peacemaker, a go between to those I love and their full realizations. it makes me a catalyst, a creator, an artist. For all the things I’ve seemed to fail at I hope that those that know me have felt enhanced. I hope that they feel my sincerity and desire to give beauty, calm and fulfillment. I hope they felt my acceptance of all the parts of them. I hope they could feel that I would bleed my soul dry for their preservation.

There is one key glitch, self preservation. So, this is where the final escape comes in. For all the intentions to give it my every fiber, the bleeding dry part, my base survival keeps me from giving that last little drop. That’s when I exit stage left and go somewhere to lick my wounds. When I do achieve liberation I realize the span to which I’ve depleted my reserves. I start over, basically. I am hurt and I am empty. It’s then that I feel the crushing weight of a sense of failure.

So, I could fix this. I could find a better version of myself and I could love myself as much as I try to love others. If I could do for myself what I feel I must do for others I could be a very successful woman. Who I am could be a giant of a person always pressing forward to procure greatness. That’s not who I am though. I’m just me. If you don’t know me, you probably should. I’m a whirlwind of pure determination and good emotion. Yup, I’m too much to really write out on a page or screen. That makes me happy. I can not be contained! At least not today…

Pour Your Heart Out

So many times I find that I must pour my heart out and say the things that I feel I just can’t not say. A majority of the time it’s when I have dosed myself with “truth serum”. What is my “truth serum”? Well, it’s alcohol, usually. I don’t seem to be able to not say some filtered version of what’s on my mind in general but add alcohol and that filter is completely torn asunder. I try to remain tactful and kind, regularly, or at least mask harsh comments with humor when I’m sober. When I drink I feel less inclined to try. I’m pretty sure that’s not unusual for the average person. The trouble is I am very opinionated about almost everything. What most people don’t know about me is that I rarely feel my opinions are set in stone. There are exceptions where an idea is cemented as absolute truth based on a bevy of experience or scientific proof or a combination of proven sources. I am very in touch with my feelings and I play scenarios through my mind quite frequently in hopes to find optimal conversation results. I don’t do it all the time but I do it.

My ex-boyfriend often asked many questions on how I felt about things that I didn’t think I should have feeling about. That always threw me off and would send my poor mind into dead silence. I constantly answered his questions with “I don’t knows” and “maybes”. I know that drove him crazy. It drove me crazy. I think that after careful introspection I’ll just blame it on him and say that I felt constant criticism when I did try to form replies on the fly. So, clearly, it wasn’t my fault (I’m being a little facetious).  In addition to the criticism, I distinctly remember a time when I would answer his numerous questions with the first thing that would pop into my mind. Being the person that I am I would say how I felt with all the flooding emotion in my soul. On one such occasion when I poured my soul out in wordy exhalation he turned and said, “I don’t need all that mushy stuff. How does it make you feel? Tell me without all the mushy talk.” That just really hurt me. In that moment the part of me that wanted to please him and be perfect for him blamed my cursed brain for being flowery and I corrected what I said to make it plain. As soon as the stripped version of what I had said escaped my lips I realized what I said I felt without the frills no longer had the true meaning left in it. The actual emotion was completely gone from the statement. It felt pedestrian and, quite plainly stated, empty. This is what I felt with him. I felt frustrated at the lack of being able to express myself and I felt hopelessly empty. I know that I’m not the only person to ever feel that way and I know that it’s not the last time or only time period in life that I will feel that way. I’m convinced that he actually feels that way most of the time as well. A frustrated person unable to communicate actual emotion as it presents itself. The main difference between his frustration and mine is that I know what I feel. I feel everything to the inner core of my very being. I understand it and embrace it in order to comprehend it. I believe that he, on the other hand, has very little connection to his emotion center. He is disconnected from it in such away that he has no idea what his emotions mean. I think that he has convinced himself that this is a strength but in reality his lack of understanding his own feelings has not made him less emotional and more logical but rather, it has made him a debilitated ball of pure emotion. He works on gut reactions based not on logic, but on basic, literal, emotional assumptions.

My second ex-husband was always very soothed by my pure emotional reactions. That’s how it seemed. That’s probably why I’d say that he and I were very well paired. We accepted each other in all the glories of our emotional outpourings. We existed side by side in parallel happiness, sadness, turmoil, joy, self loathing, and narcissism. We complemented each other in many ways. On the whole we were the perfect team because our moods supported each other or complemented one another. Our interests were similar as well as our tastes. We both aimed to please one another and often did. The truth in our relationship was that we held back. More than he and I would probably admit we kept parts of our raw emotion at bay so we wouldn’t scare each other. While I feel like I was most open with him than with any other human I have known I feel like he didn’t communicate as freely with me. I think he didn’t because men aren’t supposed to let their guard all the way down. I think that’s what he felt. I don’t think men should be any more stoic than women. I will say that the stoicism is admirable but there should be at least one person you can drop the wall with. If that person isn’t your wife/partner/companion then maybe you shouldn’t be married to them. For me, I’ll say that with second ex-husband I didn’t always feel I should let go the emotion because I learned that being loudly “mushy” was not acceptable. I could have let go but I didn’t. I also didn’t think it right for me to ask of him what I thought I was supposed to suppress. In fact, we rarely insisted that either of us alter our ways to accommodate each other. I think that we were both very adept at reading situations between us and just going with the flow to keep each other happy. Hey, it worked for a decent amount of time. Six years with someone is far from nothing in this era. Why didn’t it work then? At some point it appears that both of us became too accommodating. We became roommates. We loved each other detrimentally. Instead of voicing all the flowery agony in all it’s glory we suppressed in hopes that out intuition would save our relationship from a fatal blow. All the beauty left us and he went to find it somewhere else. I hope that if he finds another woman like me in this world that he will risk her anger before he walks away from her like he did me. Honesty is far better a route than abandonment to save yourself some hard work or a woman’s potential feelings/anger. I could have expected more. I should have asked for what I wanted. I should have told him there were things I could never be ok with before we were married. I shouldn’t have married him thinking that love could save us from feeling pain. If only we could have poured out every ounce of our hearts to one another. I think we would have made it.

Why isn’t my first ex-husband mentioned? It’s not worth mentioning. It was too brief. I feel that the whole thing was pure pretense. I felt like I loved him. I felt like it would be forever. I felt connected to him but in the end the reality of the relationship was so humiliating that I felt too ashamed to admit that I ever loved that broken, destructive person.

Where are the other ex-boyfriends? Well, as non progressive as I feel that this sounds, I’m a serial monogamist. If you know me then you probably know that I want to experience life to its very limits. Monogamy can be perceived as having limits, so, I often wish that I could be poly-amorous. That’s why I feel being a serial monogamist sounds non progressive. I had one other ex-boyfriend that could be mentioned but I seriously think that the truth of that relationship was that it was devoid of any dimension. The honesty, which is the goal here, is that I never felt that we were paired well. He was a nice guy. He was kind enough to me. He was actually very open with me. I was not open with him. I now feel a sense of cruelty on my part in retrospect. I never intended to be ingenuous to him but I don’t think I was actually in love with him. In fact, I am revealing a very horrible version of myself by saying that I probably treated him like a project. Ugh, I now remember that he was a really nice guy that even asked me to marry him and I shot him down. I am so glad that I didn’t marry him. We would have been so very indescribably unhappy together. There was no pouring out of my heart to him that I remember. I’d apologize to him now if I had any knowledge of his whereabouts. He got the very emptiest version of me I know of. Such selfishness on my part. I’m ashamed about this admission.

I’d venture to say that there have been many meaningful, mentionable other times that I have poured my heart out to others. plenty of times where I haven’t needed a truth serum to get me through the words of emotion. I often have to incorporate music to accompany these pourings. Facebook has seen many of them although they probably seemed to just be basic musings. I have blurted the pouring out of my heart to my sister and brother, the siblings I grew up with. I have often bled my heart out to my mother. I have never done that with my father. I have a couple of close friends that I have done this with. One of them never understands what impact the words should have, the other often pours her heart out.

Why do I go through this entire entry just rambling on about how I once gave or I might have given insight into my thoughts and emotion? Because Christmas day, or rather night, I poured my heart out in a text. It’s a limited form of communication and may not constitute a full heart confession. Nonetheless, I tried to express something that I felt was a pouring out of my heart’s deepest emotion. What I put out there wasn’t fully dismissed by the recipient  but I’m not sure that the impact was fully realized. It makes me kind of sad but also happy that I’m learning to let what I feel be said again. There was some truth serum involved. Now if I can learn to let my heart be known unabashedly no matter my state I’ll count myself a changed woman. One that has improved. Despite all the ramblings that have preceded this statement I now want to say we should open our hearts for all the see. We should pour out our intents, desires, and emotion to every audience as long as it is genuine and free of intended malice. I want to show myself and be understood just the way I am. I’m not saying that I should never have to explain what my emotion means but I should be heard. We should all be heard but we should all take the first step and open ourselves to others we trust. If we have no one to trust we must find someone to instill our trust in. If we feel we love someone or want to love someone we should find a way to pour out our hearts to them. I want to take the risks, I want to show it all and I won’t be ashamed to hear your confessions too.

Because the truth hurts…

I’m not sure what I want to say so there may be a lot of blurting in this entry. I haven’t had time to organize what I’m thinking but after a day off full of contemplation I have decided I have to let this out of me. There are many things that I have started learning about myself at this late stage in life. Most of these things I’m learning because I am single, in the dating pool, and living alone. I have whole days to spend alone with just myself. I spend entirely too much time binge watching Netflix (I don’t have cable, internet is a necessity). I can split my attention between painting, facebooking, and Netflix. I sleep a lot and smoke plenty of cigarettes. One thing that I like about being poor, bored, and living alone is that I get to try recipes any time of the day. I want to make biscuits? It’s 1AM? Who cares? Let’s do that stuff! A thing I don’t like about being poor, bored, and living alone is the constant self doubt. There is no partner to be a sounding board. There is no one to aimlessly talk to and tell your thoughts to. There is no one to tell you you’re obsessing. No one is going to say, “Hey, you’ve picked up your cell phone and started to text someone like 10 times in the last so many minutes. Are you gonna text already, or what?!”

I’ve learned that I love attention. I find it to be the most unflattering thing about myself. Hi, my name is Mandi, and I’m an attention whore. I really had no idea how ridiculous this was. I mean, I can go for lengthy periods of time with no attention at all but when I need to be noticed I HAVE to have attention. I don’t like it because that’s not the person that I thought that I was. I am very much an observer of life. I’m am completely satisfied to sit sideline and just watch the world but I’m finding that I am only content to do so if I believe that someone is somewhere thinking of me. This is why I love being in a relationship. I don’t even have to have that person with me a majority of the time. I just have to know they think of me often and that I am their number one love. I crave adoration. They can be self serving and prone to roving. They can have many lovers as long as I am their first and last thought of every day.  This paints a very obscene picture of my psyche but this seems to be part of who I am. So, why would I ditch my last partner in exchange for loneliness?  I guess that a narcissist and egotist just can’t cohabitate. Maybe I’m not being fair to myself in that statement. One thing is clear, I’m telling on him a little bit.

Now, the story at hand: I have many hours to obsess about my current crush and how he relates to me. I feel like the girl on the back burner. As I have described, I don’t do back burner. I can play a supporting role but I have to be a present presence to play that role. That’s not possible at this point in time. We live in different cities almost an hour apart. We both work full time and he has children. While our interaction seems very meaningful and genuine I feel very left out. Feeling left out just doesn’t seem to work for me. The people pleaser in me is also very unhappy. He asks very little of me and he doesn’t need me. I am a mess. All I want is for him to notice me, every second of the day. I know this is all very childlike and it infuriates me. Next week I may feel all together different but today has been rough. All I think about on my day off is how I wish he would show up at my place and demand my time. He could text and tell me to come see him. He could just text anything and I would be happy. It’s been over twenty four hours since he sent or responded to any communication. It’s driving me mad.

We’re here to be honest though, right? Honestly, I would have ditched this whole thing over a month ago if he didn’t so sufficiently feed my ego when we are together. If there wasn’t a certain amount of worship for one another in our encounters I would have written this off and found someone to adore me. If I wasn’t so attracted and he so emotionally unavailable I would have given up. If I didn’t think he was capable of understanding me and accepting me it would have been easy to let go. I have a fear that I will be hurt quite thoroughly in the near future. However, I have this perverse belief that he is a good person and that I can trust he’ll do right by me. All the while, my subconscious is screaming at every turn trying to tell me I’m playing in the wrong league and I will be crushed at some point.

I have daydreams of future rendezvous. In them we go on a trip together and spend hours, days even, soaking in each other’s existence. I daydream that he meets my family and most of my friends. Then I think about our interactions so far and I wonder why He’s only briefly met one friend of mine. I’ve never met anyone that knows him. I met a girl at a bar that sort of knew him because he must have dated her friend. I saw him talk to a girl in a store once and I swear it must have been a chick he went on a date with or something ’cause I could see his instant hesitation and her apparent affinity for him. Come to think of it (actually, it’s not like I’ve just thought of this in this moment, I’ve contemplated this many times since) he disappeared right after that girl in the store approached him. He disappeared for a weird amount of time. I was just standing outside the store waiting for what seemed like forever.

When I play our little story in my head, as I’m oft to do, I am astounded at the huge gaps in actual communication. I start at the beginning and see the lack of interest on my part and his very active pursuit. Then the middle comes and I start pursuing to which he seems to respond to very nicely. Then sex happens and pursuit wanes….

Yup, ok. I know how this all looks. I mean, I’m reading it too. I am a CHUMP. What is wrong with me? Seriously, I can’t help myself. It’s very clear from a removed point of view. Without all the little highlight reels playing and just the basics this sounds like hogwash. All right, even if I did take the time to type out more detail to this story I don’t think it looks any better. So, can someone, anyone, PLEASE tell me why I’m ignoring what’s very possibly going on here? Can that someone also tell me why I am actively still thinking about how, when I’m done with this entry, I’m going to text him and ask how his day was? Sadly, this is my reality. If you’re going to tell the truth you might as well tell the whole truth. God, save me from myself…

Just to add a little something to this. All day a song, or rather a lyric from a song, has been playing in my mind. It’s from the band Muse’s song “Muscle Musem”  it goes like this: “…I don’t want you to adore me, don’t want you to ignore me, when it pleases you”. Pretty much the whole song is a great score for the way I’m feeling. The part I haven’t gotten to yet is the lyric that says, “…I’ll do it on my own”. Man, I just don’t know how to do this on my own. Correction, I probably do know how to do it on my own, but I just haven’t found the desire to yet. I really don’t prefer to do things on my own all the time.

So there it is and there it was…

I regret that I didn’t actually apply myself to writing more frequently. I could have used the timeline to judge where I and now to where I was. It’s great to get a hold of some hindsight on occasion. That aside, I think I’m headed in a good direction in this life. I do feel it necessary to lay out some temporary life outlines just to get my bearings. I think I’ll do that now.

At this point in my life all I can think about is what is coming next. I know that can cause an unclear view but it keeps me trying to stay prepared. I only have 2 and a half months of school left (roughly). At that point I’ll be released from my current daily routine and then I’ll have to take a huge State of Missouri Board Exam in order to prove that I am a qualified Cosmetologist (No matter that spell check just underlined my first spelling of the word “cosmetologist” in red and I had to correct it). I know that I can do all this but I also feel anxious and fearful because this is the first large task that I may fully complete. I don’t have kids, so no “joy in birth” successes here. I didn’t finish college. I did finish high school but that’s about it. I have two divorces under my belt and a wealth of unfinished business, mostly in the form of old debt.

What will my actual future hold? What will I be able to achieve? I feel tired, used, and somewhat lost right now. School has ripped me a new one on many an occasion. Just making it there in timely manner and with a smile on has challenged me. Will I really be ready to go out and get a job as a beauty operator? If this is the first large completion does that mean I have to really grow up and be and adult? I like me and I want to continue to be me no matter what. I feel pressured to change my personality on some level so that I can appear to be a better human and I resent that. I thought this whole experience was worth the effort because it let me keep my artistic side pushing forward. Man, I sure hope that I don’t have to give that up. Moving on…

So, I am going to graduate from Cosmetology school. I am going to take my State Board Exams. I am going to preserve my artistic nature. I’m going to have a trade and enjoy working in that trade. I will finish this milestone even if it is a little late in life.

Honest Freedom (originally written August 25th, 2011)

I’m all wrapped up and ready to go. My cellophane a bit tattered and torn. Let this Dragon fly. Soon I will break out and be all mine. Soon I will come forth like a butterfly. Soon I will emerge into this new world and be free. I must remember not to look back once I leave. I must remember to keep my vision forward or I may lose sight of my goal. Let go, you binding wrappings, you blinding trappings. Let go, you anchor of doom. Be free you mighty wings of life and fly to places unknown. Be free to understand your fate, indeed, to reinvent it. Do not hesitate to pass the closed doors in life to find the open windows. Be who you are. Be what you are. Be all that you are. Be that you all the way in and all the way out. Do not be contrite to be you. Do not lament your uncommon spirit. Feel who you are and love you. Go to those places you never knew you could reach. Touch those hearts you never knew you could teach. Be in every moment a present consciousness that consumes the eating, breathing, speaking, loving, sleeping, sexing, nurturing, working, driving, stumbling, falling, ruinous universe we live in. Surrender your soul to spew your beauty and understanding where ever it is that your wings take you. Show your poise, your imbalance, your love, your anger. Do not apologize for who you are just be true to that inner self. Be authentic when no one is looking. Don’t tell yourself lies. Know thyself and to thyself be true. To thine own self be true and all other manner of pure decency will be the reality in your world. Show them the mystery and they too will follow to freedom.

Where I’m coming from

I don’t know if I mentioned that I have been going through a very odd patch in my life. I think that may be another reason to list for blogging. I feel like I need to write. It’s not something that I always choose. Sometimes writing is just the automatic response to life situations. I find myself taking a deep breath when things bother me while remembering that I’ll be writing it all out soon. It kind of helps calm me. I don’t know that it’s noticeable but I feel a little better. This odd patch started in November 2011.

Last year in October, I ended a nearly seven-year relationship in front of a judge and a room full of at least 10 other people seeking non contested divorces from their spouses. The understanding was that we would remain friends. We had separated in July despite a pleasant trip that month to California. It was a last-ditch effort to see if we could stay together. I’m pretty sure that we both knew it was just a last hurrah. We hadn’t even slept in the same room together for weeks before the trip and the trend didn’t change in California. Maybe this is too much information but it’s the lead in to my topic. This storm had been brewing for a while. The disconnect between the two of us was getting too obvious to ignore. We had gone from the perfect couple to something no one was envious of in the least. We didn’t fight. We didn’t really argue. He just gave up on us. To this day I have no explanation of exactly what truly ended our relationship. I know that I was the one that finally gave in and moved out after he said he wanted to call it quits but I have no idea why he wanted to call it quits.

Ok, this writing is supposed to be about honesty. In light of that, I’ll try to be more honest about this. He said that he didn’t want to make me unhappy. He said that he didn’t want to “ruin” my life. At some point when I pressed him for more of an explanation he said that I got fat (Yeah, he played the fat-after-all-these-years card). Later he recanted the fat part. When he said the part that he didn’t recant I told him that I wouldn’t let him leave me. Which sounds utterly psychotic to me now. I’m laughing just typing that. How silly I was. He said that was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to him. I guess I do have an explanation of why we ended though. He felt inadequate.

So what sent me packing up and moving out after declaring I would work us through whatever was wrong? I started to look at our lives together. I realized that he had been pretending to be happy. He came to me that unhappy person. While I came to him an unhappy person in the beginning I had just found good ways to go out and be happy with and without him and I had grown. He had stayed locked in his past and unable to grow with me. I let his stagnation make me feel uncomfortable. Eventually he let my growth make him feel inadequate. The healthy relationship we started became something else altogether.

After I moved out, there were things that kept us in touch. Although we have no children together I think it is imaginable that two people who have been together for almost seven years are going to have reasons to stay in contact. In that stage we weren’t even saying divorce. One Sunday I was going through files on my laptop. I had barely used that laptop because he always seemed to have more use for it. There were lots of things on there that wouldn’t be of any use to me. I needed to delete stuff I wouldn’t use along with basic computer housekeeping. Thanks to thumbnails (<— said sarcastically) I saw something that shouldn’t be on my laptop and that definitely belonged to him. I called him immediately and so, on that Sunday, the deal was sealed in my mind. He had cheated. It was over.

Maybe this is all just a long-winded way for me to tell this story that I have been storing inside me since then. Maybe all of this is totally not coherent or not as coherent as I would like it to be. I wrote all of this to try to get to the reason for my “odd patch”. The series of events left me reeling. In the end he passed his inadequacies to me through his betrayal. I thought that this was real. He and I were what we had been looking for all our lives. The stars aligned the day that we met and destined us to be together forever. It sounds silly when I say it that way but how many people have decided to get married based on the feeling that the relationship was “different” and they “just knew that he/she was the one”? The whole time their friends and family are cringing at the obvious issues. In this story, there seemed no blaring obviousness to anyone. Well, almost. He had cheated on every other woman he had ever been with before, by his own admission. He was not a totally sober person when we met either (not that I require a 24/7 sober partner but more sober than he was on a day-to-day basis). I should have known. So, now I also have a sense of feeling naive. All seven years feel almost wasted. All that growing that I did feels like a lie. All those lovely things that instilled a confidence in me to my fellow mankind seem null and void. I feel utterly invalidated. I’ve felt that way for months. I felt ok about everything for a bit after the split but within a couple of months the sense of betrayal and deception really set in.

How do I reconcile my ideals with the concept that some of them were based on lies? I realize now that I was more than just naive, I was downright stupid. I let someone else be the foundation for building my happiness upon. Most everyone knows that’s a bad idea. I’m starting over and it really sucks. In the mean time I feel a little lost. Where do you begin…again? I need to find the truth that I learned and go from there. I know that I can never rely on someone else to make me happy. I need to learn to calm my thoughts and stop blaming men for the unfortunate insecurities that my ex developed because, naturally, not every man has those insecurities. Someone shared a statement recently that really spoke to me. It was sort of a set of thoughts to live by. “How to save your heart. Should never expect, never demand, never assume. Know your limits, where to stand, your role. Don’t get affected, get jealous, get paranoid. Just go with the flow and stay happy.” It sounds like an uninvolved way to live but I learned this lesson before and it worked amazingly well. The one part I’m pretty sure I forgot was never assume and don’t get affected. I assumed that he meant what he said and I let his actions affect me adversely when he proved himself to be lying. I am still me and none of what I said or did negated the life that we agreed to be in together. His actions changed the plan and I have no control over that. Even if I “got fat” it should never change the vows we made. Reality is, I can lose weight, he can’t take back the desire to leave. It’s that simple.

I think I’m trying to learn that my life has to be mine. If I want to include someone else I need to live by the rules. I can’t expect them to understand me. I can’t demand that they give me happiness. I should never assume, well, anything I am not solely in control of. I have to know my limits in all things (I better start figuring that out). I better know where to stand and where to let others stand. I better know what my role is and what I want my role to be. I can’t keep being affected by things I don’t have control over, it’s too painful. I won’t ever get jealous if I remember that only what I work for is what I have and what others have worked for is only theirs. I won’t get paranoid if I’m not concerned with the specifics of things that don’t pertain to me. I can find my flow and go with it. I can stay happy. I can lay my past relationship to rest and move on with life. I’m tired of analyzing all that past hurt. I want to be free from it. I will be. Honestly, I feel less affected by it already.

Fraudulent Food Vision

Here’s some “naked” honesty for ya: I am one of those overweight Americans they’re always talking about on the news. I’m pretty positive that it has to do with my lack of energy and my lack of energy is probably because I don’t exercise. I don’t exercise because of my lack of energy, go figure, it’s a catch 22. That’s what they call it, right? Whatever the specific cause of my large waistline I find the ability to reduce it just out of my chubby handed reach. I don’t want to go into a total list of weight loss lamentations. It is true that I have tried many diet plans. It is also true that I’ve never been able to keep that weight from coming back. What I want to talk about is something that I saw in the online news today.

The University of Tokyo’s Professor Michitaka Hirose did an interview with AFP concerning some virtual reality goggles that can trick the human mind into thinking that the wearer is eating a different sized portion than the actual portion consumed. It sends a picture of the wearer’s hand holding a portion of food to a computer which resizes the image of the food and leaves the wearer’s hand the same size. The computer then sends that picture back to the wearer. It would appear that this mind trick actually works! Studies showed that subjects ate 10% less when the image made biscuits look 50% larger than actual size. They took the experimentation in the other direction as well. When subjects viewed cookies reduced to appear at only two-thirds their actual size, the subjects ate 15% more. The Professor’s team experimented with further trickery. In this project Hirose’s team came up with something called a “meta cookie” using the goggles with scent bottles and the computer image resizing to trick the wearer into thinking the food they are eating is something other than the actual plain biscuit they hold in their hand. The Professor says that the experiments, so far, have proven to work on 80% of the subjects tested.

I’m sure most people who have read this article are wishing they had some of these goggles. It sounds genius. Eat all the imaginary chocolate cake you want because it’s actually an apple. I don’t think that I would have ever imagined a device like this. I just never thought that people were that gullible. It seems like your brain would be smart enough to know that the texture of a biscuit is nothing like a cookie. I should mention that the article didn’t discuss any proof these subjects would lose weight due to this fraudulent food switch. That aspect has yet to be thoroughly tested.

Are we really this susceptible to suggestion? If humans are this apt to accept everything they see, I fear we are most surely doomed. I want to have more hope for future generations than this story instills. I don’t know that I would want to lose weight using this method. What ever happened to dedication to mental and physical discipline? Given my admission in the starting paragraph it’s pretty laughable for me to mention “mental and physical discipline”. In any case, I feel that those noted future generations are going to be hopelessly lost when all the mind trickery we develop doesn’t work because there is something even more tricky with the human brain: The memory of reality.

See, the human body is so amazing that it has developed processes over time (what some like to call Evolution) to deal with the many things that our bodies have encountered over the years. One thing that our bodies know how to do is process whole, natural foods. It might not process them the way we want them to. It might convert my favorite snack into more of my ever-present flab but if I put natural substances into my body I’m going to get a consistent reaction to that food till something in me malfunctions.  Do you know what happens to rats that eat artificial sweeteners? They didn’t slim down according to a study published in the February 2008 issue of Behavioral Neuroscience. Biological brains are so amazing at keeping track of all the systems in our bodies that they can remember that certain tastes mean an influx of calories and it can start revving up the metabolic engines in order to start burning off some of that influx. The rats in the study showed that their bodies quit revving the engines when it tasted sweet stuff after their bodies had been conditioned to eating yogurt sweetened with zero-calorie saccharin. The conditioning achieved with the zero calorie sweetened yogurt broke the body’s memory of the link between sweetness and calories. This trick broke the body’s system. That sounds like a bad thing to me.

I can’t imagine what other tricks have broken human functions. Our obsession with using our amazing minds to “enhance” our world and trick our minds into believing something is what it isn’t on a rapidly increasing scale could be the thing that breaks our existence. It would seem that the trends we are supporting in our society may have some long-term consequences in a distant future. It’s sad to realize that many people have little concern for the what will be in exchange for their precious here and now. Instead of incorporating a discipline about our lives we have opted for a deception that has permeated us more fully than we have any way of knowing. There is very little outside our instant gratification zone. Maybe if we start living honestly now we can save ourselves. Maybe if we examine why we feel compelled to overeat in the first place we can eliminate the need for devices and deviations from reality.

I’m still just fleshing this idea out as I go, but I’ve been curious about why our society seems to be derailing so rapidly for quite a while now. I’m just one person in this big place, I might be questioning all the wrong things. I feel that I need to find truth. I need to find it, if for no other reason than to live a more peaceful fulfilled life. I desire the richness I think I see through the ages that came before us. It’s possible I may find that the meaningful honest lives I think our ancestors lived are mere illusions that our present generations have mimicked. I seriously desire some feedback on your perception of society’s present fake phase. Has it always been a war between our desires and the actuality that surrounds us? What modern common practices of dishonesty will affect our futures, and those beyond us, adversely? What do you really think?

Because it’s my first…

…and it just happens to be after 5am, we’ll keep this post brief. After many years of speaking my mind to friends and family I’ve decided I have to make my voice more public. I’m sure that this attempt is being loosely defined as “public”.  We’ll see how this turns out. I’m aware that I should put something out there that draws the reader in. I’ll give it a bit of a try. I mean, if a writer isn’t interested in drawing in their audience then what’s the point, right?

Here we go! I think that the art of telling the truth is lost in our present society. It seems like everywhere we turn someone is trying to get someone else to believe a story that is quite less than the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy fiction as much as the next guy, I just prefer that my conversations with others contain more truth than fiction. I think that one of the problems with our society is that we have developed this mindset that it’s ok to lie to everyone right down to ourselves. We are constantly told to create a new us if we don’t like the us we already are. I mean, what’s all the makeup, spanx, and hair dye got to do with honesty? These days it doesn’t stop there. We’re encouraged to sell ourselves to each other all day, right down to selling ourselves to our family and friends. That’s what Facespace is for. Make a profile that gets people interested in everything you do up to and including what you ate for a snack today. In time we can create a whole persona that fits the kind of person we want to be. We can be interesting, funny, involved, and happy all the time. If you like, you can be witty, dark, or optimistic. The disguise is up to you.

I challenge you to count how many times you filter an honest response this week. When someone asks how you’re doing what is your gut reaction? I realize it isn’t feasible to answer with the gut reaction every time. I’m not trying to fool myself into thinking that people should have no filters at all I’m just saddened that I see a very few number of people who feel like they have a place to be genuine. I am reserving the privilege to be honest right here in this blog. I hope I don’t bore anyone to death but if I do, I ask that you be honest and tell me all about it. Let’s be honest together. Tell me something that you didn’t tell someone else this week because it was too much truth. Let’s go adventuring for The Lost Art of Honesty together.