Everything I do, I do it for you...
There were extended periods of my life up until a few years ago when everything I did was for someone else's benefit and not mine. I was a people pleaser because I assumed that if I kept making other people happy it might rub off on me at some point. As you should have guessed by now, that is no longer the case. I've learnt that there is a fine dividing line between so many opposites and so many similarities between them too.
Unrequited love for instance... Is all consuming and destructive, but unconditional love is also all consuming in that it fills you up entirely. Instead of leaving you emotionally damaged and lonely, unconditional love frees us from the bonds of traditional romantic love in a way that is neither selfish or unselfish. Rather than being totally out for myself, looking out for number one as I have seen in so many people, you DO finally realise that your responsibility IS to yourself first when you are able to love in this truly exceptional way.
I always did things for myself only under the condition that it was for someone else first...
An example would be looking after myself properly, in the back of my mind was that if I was healthy, looked good, did all the 'right things' then obviously the person I had feelings for would love me. But to do that meant not being myself, as couples often do when they first meet. Dating advice would suggest that you often have to be on your best behaviour to attract a mate, which is a falacy because to do so means that they aren't gonna meet the real you until much later. The end of a relationship is nigh once two people have given up the facade that they created when they first met.
One way to escape from this cycle is to test yourself, to prove to yourself that you are worth something. Self esteem is constantly talked about and the line that you have to 'love yourself before you can love someone else' as cliched as it is, is so true. The pendulum swings that we all insist on until we are in balance cause us to sway from one position to the other, from self loathing to pride which comes before a fall. Whenever I was feeling on top of the world, the next instant would be the fall from grace. The position I'm in at the moment is that having tested myself and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am a good person and worth knowing, I now feel happier, more content and frankly comfortable in my own skin.
To get to that situation I had to go to rock bottom square one and build up from there, which is a terrible waste of so many years. In our society we choose when to grow up, there is no recognised coming of age ceremony apart from the expected pissup on your eighteenth birthday, which in most cases is a farce because the majority of us have been getting drunk for years by the time that milestone comes along... ;) We just carry on as we did before until events cause us to grow and change, rather than voluntarily going through the necessary processes to get there without so much pain and I hasten to add, much sooner than our eighteenth birthday. In all cultures apart from so called 'modern western society' puberty marks the transition from childhood to adulthood.
This makes sense because you are capable of adult thinking and behaviour aswell as sexual reproduction from the age that those primal changes are completed, not a fixed point in time but a biological clock within us that is different for each individual. That's the first area in which we have lost the plot. The rest of the story is far more interesting but we ignore it and hold on to all of our childish ways until the last possible minute, and in many many many cases, including my own, for as long as we can in a bitter struggle not to lose whatever it is that we think we will...
Because of our fear of what we might gain, or a denial of our responsibility to ourselves to grow.
I still have a very selfless attitude, in that I have often found myself thinking of things to do for other people that will enrich their lives, ways to improve a situation at work or at home. I have never and don't ever think about myself or what I will get out of doing such good work until much later when what I 'get out of it' occurs to me and I wonder were my motives truly ultruistic at the time. They were of course because otherwise I would have taken my just desserts into account and decided that I didn't deserve to benefit in such a way in the past. Now that I have that inner child and my inner critic silenced and in a unconditionally loving embrace, to an extent anyway as it's a process made more difficult by our own power to choose the time and place ;) and it's having been so long overdue, I am at peace...
I always did things for myself only under the condition that it was for someone else first...
An example would be looking after myself properly, in the back of my mind was that if I was healthy, looked good, did all the 'right things' then obviously the person I had feelings for would love me. But to do that meant not being myself, as couples often do when they first meet. Dating advice would suggest that you often have to be on your best behaviour to attract a mate, which is a falacy because to do so means that they aren't gonna meet the real you until much later. The end of a relationship is nigh once two people have given up the facade that they created when they first met.
One way to escape from this cycle is to test yourself, to prove to yourself that you are worth something. Self esteem is constantly talked about and the line that you have to 'love yourself before you can love someone else' as cliched as it is, is so true. The pendulum swings that we all insist on until we are in balance cause us to sway from one position to the other, from self loathing to pride which comes before a fall. Whenever I was feeling on top of the world, the next instant would be the fall from grace. The position I'm in at the moment is that having tested myself and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am a good person and worth knowing, I now feel happier, more content and frankly comfortable in my own skin.
To get to that situation I had to go to rock bottom square one and build up from there, which is a terrible waste of so many years. In our society we choose when to grow up, there is no recognised coming of age ceremony apart from the expected pissup on your eighteenth birthday, which in most cases is a farce because the majority of us have been getting drunk for years by the time that milestone comes along... ;) We just carry on as we did before until events cause us to grow and change, rather than voluntarily going through the necessary processes to get there without so much pain and I hasten to add, much sooner than our eighteenth birthday. In all cultures apart from so called 'modern western society' puberty marks the transition from childhood to adulthood.
This makes sense because you are capable of adult thinking and behaviour aswell as sexual reproduction from the age that those primal changes are completed, not a fixed point in time but a biological clock within us that is different for each individual. That's the first area in which we have lost the plot. The rest of the story is far more interesting but we ignore it and hold on to all of our childish ways until the last possible minute, and in many many many cases, including my own, for as long as we can in a bitter struggle not to lose whatever it is that we think we will...
Because of our fear of what we might gain, or a denial of our responsibility to ourselves to grow.
I still have a very selfless attitude, in that I have often found myself thinking of things to do for other people that will enrich their lives, ways to improve a situation at work or at home. I have never and don't ever think about myself or what I will get out of doing such good work until much later when what I 'get out of it' occurs to me and I wonder were my motives truly ultruistic at the time. They were of course because otherwise I would have taken my just desserts into account and decided that I didn't deserve to benefit in such a way in the past. Now that I have that inner child and my inner critic silenced and in a unconditionally loving embrace, to an extent anyway as it's a process made more difficult by our own power to choose the time and place ;) and it's having been so long overdue, I am at peace...
To assume is to make an 'ass' out of 'u' and 'me'
You're going down. You're not taking me with you. Here is my hand...
There's nothing special about me, unless there is about you too.
Light & Love
Jon
x
Predatory animals exhibit the ability to think like their prey, it's how they are able to anticipate their behaviour and then hunt them down. We share this mental landscape. We are able to put ourselves in someone else's shoes. We often find it easy to guess what someone we know very well will do in a given situation, or say for that matter. In fact one of the great things about a close relationship is that you often say the same thing at the same time and there are many other examples of the way in which we are able to project from ourselves onto another or vice versa. We are able to guess what another mind is thinking, and we do it all day long.
But where we fall down is when we assume too much...
I often hear people say that they are bemused, frustrated or even angered by the choices that another individual makes. That's because they are them and you are you.
Get over it, grow up.
If you are granted the power to make your own choices, realise that so are they.
No ammount of inner wrangling is going to get your point across but you spend fucking ages moaning on to other people about that thing they said or that thing they did or didn't say or do.
Talk to them! Fucking open your gob and express what you are feeling. Don't keep waiting for them to guess why you are upset or work it out on their own or you may be waiting at that particular bus stop until hell freezes over.
If the only way you can get attention is to annoy then why do you think that will get the reaction you desire? I find it amusing to ignore such attempts if I can, and if not I try to make sure that you don't know that it's working ;) I wouldn't want to give you the satisfaction...
I'm waiting myself, for you to get to the point of desperation because it's a fine line again here.
You only seem to get increasingly miserable until you want some company but the kind you attract in that state is, more miserable people. Get happy, and if you don't know how, ask for help. I can't volunteer my services because ultimately you always throw them back in my face, your ego won't allow you to be vulnerable enough to accept that I may have something to teach you and you something just as important to teach me. These occasions are never one sided. There is always something for me to get out of it, that is the intensely pure unconditionally loving feeling of having done the right thing, a good turn, a good deed.
If you could only realise that and find the courage to accept that doing right by you does right by me too. If you have to do as I did and pretend that you are doing this for me or whoever it is that you care for but are convinced shouldn't care for you, then so be it. Tell yourself that you must do whatever it takes to make yourself the person you need to be to get whatever or whoever it is that you want, and you'll keep running on that same treadmill that I was on. It's going to be speeding up until you learn to take control of it yourself...
I rarely find myself looking back over my shoulder anymore or looking too far forward.
I'm moving on at a sustainable pace towards a future that I can barely concieve of.
Content to make the most of the beautiful surroundings I find myself in now.
But where we fall down is when we assume too much...
I often hear people say that they are bemused, frustrated or even angered by the choices that another individual makes. That's because they are them and you are you.
Get over it, grow up.
If you are granted the power to make your own choices, realise that so are they.
No ammount of inner wrangling is going to get your point across but you spend fucking ages moaning on to other people about that thing they said or that thing they did or didn't say or do.
Talk to them! Fucking open your gob and express what you are feeling. Don't keep waiting for them to guess why you are upset or work it out on their own or you may be waiting at that particular bus stop until hell freezes over.
If the only way you can get attention is to annoy then why do you think that will get the reaction you desire? I find it amusing to ignore such attempts if I can, and if not I try to make sure that you don't know that it's working ;) I wouldn't want to give you the satisfaction...
I'm waiting myself, for you to get to the point of desperation because it's a fine line again here.
You only seem to get increasingly miserable until you want some company but the kind you attract in that state is, more miserable people. Get happy, and if you don't know how, ask for help. I can't volunteer my services because ultimately you always throw them back in my face, your ego won't allow you to be vulnerable enough to accept that I may have something to teach you and you something just as important to teach me. These occasions are never one sided. There is always something for me to get out of it, that is the intensely pure unconditionally loving feeling of having done the right thing, a good turn, a good deed.
If you could only realise that and find the courage to accept that doing right by you does right by me too. If you have to do as I did and pretend that you are doing this for me or whoever it is that you care for but are convinced shouldn't care for you, then so be it. Tell yourself that you must do whatever it takes to make yourself the person you need to be to get whatever or whoever it is that you want, and you'll keep running on that same treadmill that I was on. It's going to be speeding up until you learn to take control of it yourself...
I rarely find myself looking back over my shoulder anymore or looking too far forward.
I'm moving on at a sustainable pace towards a future that I can barely concieve of.
You're going down. You're not taking me with you. Here is my hand...
There's nothing special about me, unless there is about you too.
Light & Love
Jon
x
