Thursday 28 February 2013

Hiding From Life



A few days ago my mom said something to me that hit me like a basketball to the face: “You’re hiding from life.”

I never really thought of it as hiding before. I know I’m not living life as I should be, as I want to be, and I know that fear is the main thing that’s stopping me. But hiding is something that I never associated with how I’m living now. Now I’ve realised how true this is; I have been – am still – hiding.

This has been happening mostly subconsciously for many years now. I’ve been engineering my own failure, mainly when it comes to school work, but also with my creative writing and anything else that I try to do. All so that I can stay in my safe haven, a place that I’ve been forging for years with forbidding walls, and nearly impenetrable defenses. And now I’m attempting to lock myself in.

My world has been comprised of my house, the internet, and the world of fiction, with occasional visits outside every now and then for appointments at the dentist and the like. I don’t know how to live life, or even interact with people. In fact, I’m wary of people and their intentions. I’ve been stung one too many times in the past when I’ve tried to reach out. Ultimately, I am afraid of the outside world (the outside world being the world beyond my home and computer). A world that in many ways, I’ve been disconnected from for a long time. And I can’t seem to find the spot – the socket – where I connect anymore. I know that the world is out there and that I’m a part of it, but I don’t always feel it.

It’s easy to feel insignificant with almost seven billion other people on the planet and a universe that’s so huge that it hurts my brain to even contemplate it. They say one person can change the world but it’s hard to believe it a lot of the time (then again, there is another quote that says that the people crazy enough to believe that they can change the world, are the ones who do). However, that’s not really what makes me feel so distant from the world; that is all on me.

I disconnected myself by choice to protect myself. Now I’m so used to hiding that I don’t know how to stop. I have to find a way though. I can’t keep going on like this. I don’t want to keep on living in such a closed world, where nothing much ever happens and where I’m wasting my life away, never truly experiencing all that life has to offer.

Maybe what I really need to do is steel my courage, face my fear, and take a step outside.

Sunday 24 February 2013

Biological Advantage of Being Awestruck

Absolutely love this video. It's amazing.

My favourite parts:

   Definition of awe; “An experience of such perceptual expansion, such perceptual vastness, that you literally have to reconfigure – upgrade – your mental schemata just to accommodate, just to take in the scale of the experience.”
    “… gazing upon the famous deep field photograph, literally allows us to mainline the whole of time through the optic nerve.”

Thursday 14 February 2013

The Trouble With Emotions



Emotions are powerful, strong, messy, untamed, wonderful, simple, and complicated; a large part of what makes us human. They are what makes life enjoyable and what makes life unbearable. Sometimes, I wish there was a way to put them in boxes. A way to organise and designate emotions so that sorting through them wouldn’t be so hard; it wouldn’t be near as chaotic, much easier to deal with. But emotions can’t be boxed, not really. You can push them down and ignore them. You can hide from them but eventually, they just come back again, more intense and pervasive than before.

I think that part of the nature of emotions is that they can’t necessarily be contained. They are a force all on their own. There are certainly not enough words on earth to properly express the full depth of our emotions. Sometimes I think that it’s amazing that we can function at all considering the maelstrom of emotions that can and does exist inside of all of us.

Allowing yourself to feel and experience your emotions, good and bad, is the hardest part, I find. Especially when you have a lot of negative emotions that you’d much rather weren’t there at all. But as they say, you can’t have the good without the bad. Emotions like sadness, anger, pain, allow us to much better appreciate feelings of joy, excitement, and happiness.

I found that when I tried to lock down on only my feelings of pain, hurt, and fear that all of my emotions got locked down with them. Not feeling at all was easier than having to deal with the horrible mess of emotions that I didn’t want to face. So my emotions, pushed under the surface, simmered for years, building up, waiting for a chance to boil over.

It’s really scary to finally face those emotions, and let yourself truly feel them. It is one of the hardest things that I’ve had to do and it is certainly something that I still struggle with. I have a lot of fear which I have yet to wade through. Fear that has and continues to hold me back from truly living. All my fears were given far too much time to grow and spread, like a parasite, and though I’m much more aware of it now, the fear is still very potent. The fear I have is sometimes so intense that it scares me (hopefully that makes sense).

I know that I still bottle up my feelings to a certain extent, however I’m also much better at recognizing when I’m approaching the “danger zone”, when I have to take the time to let out my emotions in a healthy way (which for me usually means writing in my journal), instead of letting them fester. Otherwise I’d be speedily falling back towards dark places that I’d rather not visit again.

Even writing this was uncomfortable for me because it meant letting my emotions surface and acknowledging the ones that I’d rather not exist in my heart at all.

I’ll leave you with this quote, which I have found to be quite true:
“And the day came that the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to bloom.” – Anais Nin