#Covidtimes Log Day: 03062021
“Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt
"Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 -1962) is commonly hailed as one of the most influential American women of the 20th century. In addition to serving as the First Lady of the United States from 1933-1945, she was a newspaper columnist, an author, a diplomat and a seasoned politician. She was also a formative leader of the League of Women Voters.
Deeply involved in social justice work, Eleanor Roosevelt believed strongly that women deserved a place at the table when it came to politics. Prior to her husband’s presidency, she worked with and helped lead a number of women’s groups, including the International Congress of Working Women, the Woman's Trade Union League and the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom. After the League of Women Voters was founded in 1920 – the same year that Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for Vice President – she helped establish its policy agenda." (Source: https://www.lwv.org/eleanor-roosevelt-first-lady-league-leader-pioneer)
I've listened to too many people in my life give me bad advice. I'm realizing it's not based on my ability to do things or accomplish goals, it's based off of other people's own fears and limitations. The times in my life I've been most successful is when I took my own advice and listened to what was in my heart to be right, for me.
We need to stop giving people bad advice and telling people, unsolicited, how to live their life. No one learns how to be a strong independent person when all you ever do is disapprove of the choices people make. Those poor choices are just lessons, hopefully, the person will learn from. If they don't well, they will just keep making the same mistakes over and over again, and bring other people down with them who choose to be in their lives. Only if you allow them to.
Don't let other people's poor choices bring you down. They want to ruin their lives, they want to be complete douche canoes, let them. Remove yourself from other people's self-destructive behavior. Let them deal with the consequences of their choices, cause you know what if you don't let them they will always make poor choices thinking you're going to bail them out. You're not anyone's savior and if you think you are you need to check yourself and figure out what your unhealed wounds are cause your just trying to solve other people's trauma so you can avoid your own.
My biggest advice to people, therapy works. If you're willing to heal the unhealed parts of yourself and go to the dark recesses of your mind and do the work to figure out what your hurts and harms and wounds are. You can then begin the healing process. It works. But, it's not easy it's actually really hard, frightening, and exhausting.
For the past year and a half I've been struggling emotionally and mentally, but on the outside I've tried to keep it all together. Except the times I've revealed to y'all my struggle. I do it for myself and for my friends, and family. I've dealt with the burden of knowing when people see me falling apart then shit must really be falling apart. Reality check, things are constantly falling apart around us. It's an illusion that we have any control of what is going on around us. We are just physical bodies experiencing a spiritual journey on this planet. We can go around and live this one life like complete dipshits or we can expand, grow, and be bigger than we believe we truly are. Enjoy the ride. It's taken me a year and a half to come back to myself, to feel whole and complete, to feel enough. With all the cracks, and scabs and brokenness.
I was talking with a friend and I had an epiphany that I've been trying to heal one big wound, when the heart of the matter is that I have several wounds that needed healing. When you have three significant people die in less then five years and two of them killed themselves it does something to your brain and heart. I was so broken on the inside I tried really hard to keep up the appearances because "you fake it till you make it." Keep smiling on the outside than maybe you'll start feeling good on the inside. Maybe if I work harder, do more, accomplish more, succeed at my profession, build a bigger network, get more stuff, be in a happy relationship, grow my friend circle, volunteer more, get more degrees, more, more, more…maybe I can make all that pain go away. Fill that void inside of me with things and stuff. It works for a short period of time, but eventually the weight and burden of it all begins to come crashing down on a person. It became all to real and apparent when all of the things I thought I wanted started falling away. The happy relationship and home, the good job with a public presence in the community, a strong friend network, financial stability, and my mental health. It all just fell away.
My mom died and a pandemic hit. The compound interests of grief and trauma finally came seeking a pay out. All my tricks and tips to avoid having to deal with my unhealed wounds wasn't going to work this time around. It was all too much. For any person just one of those things would break them, but as an immigrant, and survivor of poverty and abuse you just keep pushing on, you keep moving through. That's all you know. That's what we do. You don't feel the feelings you just accept tragedy and loss as part of life. It is what it is. When people talk about generational trauma this is what it looks like. This is what it looks like to finally end the cycle and heal those wounds of hundreds of years of colonization and discrimination and alienation. Non-BIPOC people will never understand what it means for BIPOC people to heal trauma. What it looks like. What it takes. The amount of introspection and breakthroughs it takes for one to finally realize, THIS ISN'T MY TRAUMA TO HEAL. Both my parents are dead and for ten years I was still trying to fix the sins of my father. It took almost losing everything for me to finally realize that's not my sin to heal. It was my mother's choice to stay in an abusive and controlling relationship. That's not mine to heal.
I needed to start parenting myself the way I needed as a child, now. You will fuck up your child when you pretend that nothing is wrong and in reality is everything is wrong. Protecting them from the world that they will eventually have to deal with on their own. Not giving them the skills they need to navigate a judgmental and cruel world will only create unprepared adults who will fuck up and feel crappy about themselves for fucking up. Children don't stop loving their parents/caregivers they start hating themselves. This is all too real. Love your children, but hold them accountable. Teach them to accept rejection and that they aren't going to be the best at everything. Don't just give them awards for showing up, but teach them why people's time is important and valuable. We want these silver bullets to fix mental health when there's still stigma around people seeking mental health support. It's going to take all of us to fix our mental health systems. Public schools and socialization isn't going to fix children's mental health when that all starts at home.
It took 46 years and breaking myself wide open that I could finally start healing wounds from my childhood. Think about that.
Be well. Take care. Stay safe.
Updated: Mar 6, 2021
Life is Always Lived Forwards: Log Day 02232021
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” — Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard (1813—1855)
"Kierkegaard is an outsider in the history of philosophy. His peculiar authorship comprises a baffling array of different narrative points of view and disciplinary subject matter, including aesthetic novels, works of psychology and Christian dogmatics, satirical prefaces, philosophical “scraps” and “postscripts,” literary reviews, edifying discourses, Christian polemics, and retrospective self-interpretations. His arsenal of rhetoric includes irony, satire, parody, humor, polemic and a dialectical method of “indirect communication” – all designed to deepen the reader’s subjective passionate engagement with ultimate existential issues. Like his role models Socrates and Christ, Kierkegaard takes how one lives one’s life to be the prime criterion of being in the truth." (Source: https://iep.utm.edu/kierkega/)
I heard this quote in my mid-twenties and thought it was a profound quote, so it has always stuck with me. I'm turning 47 this year and this quote hits much differently than it did when I was 25. Because, now, I get to experience the choices that I made twenty-two years ago. One of Kierkegaard's many philosophies was that no matter what choices people make there will always be some regret and that no human is ever fully content, at any point in their life. He also created the word "angst." He wrote a lot about anxiety and that there's really no true meaning in life and that we just give it up to go and have "leaps of faith." That's my brief interpretation of Kierkegaard. I guess he spoke to me as a young person because I was undeniably full of angsty existentialism trying to figure out what I was doing with my life or what I should be doing if I was even living my life right. Are we ever? Now that I am no longer an angsty twenty-something I can look back on my life and confirm that Kierkegaard was right. In retrospect sure I would do some (maybe many) things differently and the outcomes would be probably more beneficial for Vangie of today, however how would I know that back then?
We are constantly trying to make the wisest choices for ourselves, but those choices are either based on our own personal misfortunes or others. As human beings we are fallible and imperfect because we are human beings. Do I have some positive words of wisdom? All I have is the only person's opinion you should care about on how you're living your life is yours. You're the only person that knows what your wants, needs, and desires are. You wake up with yourself and fall asleep with yourself and you get to decide every single day how you get to where you need to go. What actions you need to take to get there. At the end of the day you live with your choices good, bad, or indifferent. As long as you do it with love, patients, kindness, and grace. Be kind to yourself, always.
Lent Day 5 | Covidtime Log Day 02222021
I have been around the block a few times. In dating and in life in general.
When I was 33 I had trained to run a marathon. I look at a lot of things I take on in my life as a metaphor. Life isn't a sprint but a marathon and most people if you are physically able can run a marathon. I ran track in high school, but I hated running so I stuck to the high jump (I'm 5'4") and threw shotput and discus (I coulda went to state). Yes, I did. I've played sports my whole life, but running is the worst exercise a person can inflict on themselves. I also have depression, I've managed it my whole life, I also have anxiety and it's expressed through my OCD. Let's just put it all out there. Once I focus on a task I have to follow it through even to my own detriment.
You can run a marathon if you are physically able what stops most people is, "what normal human being would do that to themselves?" Plus, it's all mental. I think it was a four month program, where we started with a mile and then finished by running 25 miles. They said if you can run 25 you can run 26.2 miles. I got to a point where I would run 10 to 18 miles on the weekend and run 3 mile maintenance runs during the week. Runners know what a significant amount of time goes into running and training to run in half or full marathon. It's a huge commitment of time and effort. People who run truly love running. I personally would not wish marathon training on my worse enemy. I did it because it helped me to focus on something other than my depression and it forced me to get out of bed at 7am in the morning to go running. When I plan to do something it's always gonna be extra. I wasn't going to run any old marathon, I ran in the 27th Florence Marathon in Italy. And, I did complete it.
I don't run anymore because of my back injury, so now I play golf. But, I put in just as much effort and focus into golf as I do anything in my life. Why did I tell you all of this? The brain is amazing. It is possible to rewire your brain to relearn new things but it also replays old recordings and old memories. As if it just happened even though it might have happened 20 years ago. Sometimes, we respond to what is happening to us today because of what happened to us 20 years ago.
Don't make new people in your life pay for the hurt and harm that people in the past inflicted on you. We bring old baggage into new relationships and automatically project all our fear on the new person. Thinking they are going to hurt us the same way we were hurt in the past. If we learn from our mistakes that we made in past relationships we will not bring them into the new one. We will not make the same mistakes but just different ones. We will see the red flags, and choose different people. We will choose ourselves instead of sacrificing ourselves to keep the peace. We will not dull our shine so someone else can feel good about themselves. We will walk away if we do see our partner being shady or sneaky or abusive. But, before all of that, give the person a chance. Let them make their own mistakes and not carry the burden of your past heartbreaks. If we do that they will always fail. But, you gotta first give yourself and them a fighting chance.
Be good. Take care. Be well.
