What’s keeping you from being you? The affects of the world around us highly disrupt a personal straightway agenda. Being overly engaged in other’s lives and emotions is dramatic. Being absolute of the world around one is madness and seething with loneliness. Where a person sits in their own accolades of activities and personality traits has the stamp of the things they let them affect them along the way, and make no mistake that there is always a choice. One cannot do everything as they cannot make the perfect choices or avoid them all together. Deciding what affects a person is actually the biggest of decisions a person makes apart from whom they decide they want to be. How can we be affected and in what natural ways does a person logically decide what gets to affect them?
My best friend gave me a metaphor about this as the rock and the stream. One can be the rock and ever eroded by the stream or one can be the stream and flow through the world. Things only affect you because you allow them to and you put energy into them. Without imputed will, time and worth things do not move us; the world is not intrinsically changing us, we are reacting to the world and changing ourselves. All the things we say are part of us can be reduced down without emotion, adjective, and variation to the core of what we are. When those things are affected or change in moments, then we have found ourselves giving in to the outside lands and giving up our own control. Nothing affects us, it is all scenery and we are flowing through. The worst of times has already happened and will happen again, you and I made it through and we will again. Our core values are only affected when we allow ourselves to feel affected and then change our own behavior. It is our choice to be drawn in by the scenery then changed by it or to be the river and keep flowing. Rock on, as my bestie suggested.
One of my closest friends is dating a really cool dude who explained how he has a process by which he curtails who can affect him. It’s not like a survey or interview but evaluation over time. If every Joe-Shmoe who walked on by could affect me then I’d be some sort of shitsmeared M.C. Escher Salvador Dali chameleon. Not everyone affects us, that isn’t normal. Neither is deciding logically, stringently, and pragmatically whom is allowed to put pieces into our own jigsaw of a personality. Being able to shift that decision in a moment is being free and powerful with your personality. Having standards in a precise system as to what can and cannot get to you is having pride in yourself; and that’s not just good or noble, its fucking sexy.
The woman I loved the most, so far in my life, was one who fell into books. The words touched her like colors caress painters in a euphoric high on drugs. And there was something staggeringly beautiful to her describing words. She grew by being affected by the world around her and was incredibly picky about what world she made up. It is incredibly important to get into a world you can fall in love with, without losing yourself in them. I feel safe in calling her lost. Diving through the beauty and ecstasy of art can pull a mind to pieces which means you just can’t fucking swim. Finding depth in things is essential to letting them matter and that change they have on you being important… losing your perspective easily means that you have decided you’re not good enough to analyze the art at hand, that the values you put into your persona are second rate, that things are better than you could have figured; that’s just not fucking acceptable. The world we make MUST change us or we’re being terribly boring and missing out on life but to find a loss that rips us to pieces means we are looking for a fix, a new obsession and have a poor grasp on what the self is or we were lazy and lacking in designing ourself.
My favorite thing to do is try and destroy myself; indirectly through challenges. The more dangerous things I go through and survive then the fuller a life I feel I have lived. It is not an adrenaline high or the thrill of scaring people but finding the edges of my world’s map and my mentalities undefined terms and expanding them. To find situations where you think and feel you’re going to be ruined, then you’re on my beat. In this moment it is very easy to remember the stream. You will flow through this, you will go on, there will be a tomorrow. A new art movement for people with depression is getting a semicolon tattoo; it’s not a period because it is not an end and they will go on. Similarly a popular tattoo of the Hebrew words,”gam zeh ya’avor” meaning “this too shall pass” from a solomon story states the simple truth of the impermanence of a situation to the permanence of life. In a moment it is possible to decide that no matter how horrible something is, you’re going to enjoy it. No matter how terrifying the event may be, it will fucking pass and you will stay.
Only if you think about it, will it actually affect you. There are romance stories of wallflowers and the reason those people pine so hard but nothing happens is because the object of those wallflower’s love doesn’t have the chance to think about them… because they don’t talk to them. The people who piss you the hell off do not bother other people who also run into the same problem people for the simple reason that they don’t think about them. One can dive into emotional importance, behavior connectivity, cause and effect personality damage ebb and flow, personal growth and problem solving but all of that shit is circumnavigated considering the stuff you don’t think about. There are, statistically proven goddamn fact, a ton of things which you do not deal with but that would piss you off or excite you greatly but you simply do not think about. Too much goes on in the world for a person to deal with, we’re just apes who stand up right and learned how to use tools then enslaved all the other species with our tools. Our brains ain’t that big. We have the choice on what we think about and when put in perspective on how much we miss out on, the vast majority of things because our brains are tiny compared to the library of knowledge that is the world, it gets easy to pick and chose. What we think about is what makes up our day in that it continues the flow. Where do you want to go and where is this thought taking you? If they don’t fit, pick another thought; you have missed a few million, mathematically guaranteed.
Whats your core? At the base of all things lays a person’s core values, drives, and goals. Allowing a self to be moved away from these is dishonest to the self, a poor investment of one’s soul. Every dam day should include refreshing these and moving towards these goals, or you have wasted you on this day. And who do you work for?! Reduce yourself down, take out the adjectives, nouns, situations, circumstance of anything and you find your core. If you don’t find your core at the base of a situation then you’re not being you. Which is natural for someone living a fake life, not chasing their own wants. Cigarettes, sex, breaks, candy, the gym, your favorite TV show should no be that which drive you. Being infatuated with what you believe in is what creates sustained and powerful drive. That is your core and the evocation of them is what keeps you going. Love yourself by defining your core and staying true to it. Then unleash your passion and go take on the day like the adventure you deserve.
