The Distorted Lens of Insecurity

Lately I've been thinking a lot about how our insecurities affect the people around us and the way we view the world. I think most of the ugly traits we possess can be traced back to insecurity, which can lead to an awful cycle of self-loathing. 

When we hate certain things about ourselves, we tend to idealize those traits in other people. If you're uncomfortable with your weight, thin people can become an extreme source of jealousy. Because our insecurities are so deeply ingrained within us, they seep out in ways we don't always intend. When we idealize aspects of others, we tend to inadvertently make them feel guilty for possessing certain qualities which are often genetic. We can find ourselves wondering why they deserve to have what we don't. The flip side of that is that we end up believing we deserve the bad things. The truth is, no one deserves their genes, good or bad. Every single person has a problem that can be traced back to their genetics. No one is the ideal specimen. As much as you feel you cannot achieve perfection, neither can anyone else. Nothing about someone else's beauty detracts from your own beauty. 

Sometimes the opposite of that can happen: We hate certain things about ourselves so we dislike anyone else who reflects those qualities. If you're working on being a less emotionally sensitive person and you spend time with someone who is highly emotional, sometimes all you see is that one quality. People are vastly complex, and just like you are more than your flaws, they are more than their flaws. There's not equation or timeline for being the right kind of person. No one is ahead or behind you in terms of personal development. We're all on entirely different paths, though they may look similar at times. No one else's bad qualities add to your own or are in any way a reflection of you.

I could go on and on about how our insecurities hinder us from being the people we're meant to be, but these are the ways I've really noticed in my own interactions recently. I really want to strive not to do the people around me the disservice of seeing them through the distorted lens of insecurity. As much as we can strive to edify people with our words, I really think the root of the problem is our inner monologues. If we're trying to constantly watch our words around people but have an inner monologue constantly telling us that we're not good enough, that's going to get out eventually. It can seem kind of narcissistic and self-involved to work on self-love, but I would argue that learning how to spend less time hating yourself is the best way to free up your heart for better things. 

Consciously Me

Over the summer, I was at Disneyland with a group of friends whom I love, but don't know very well. They live far away so I've only gotten to spend a matter of a few days with them over the course of our relationships. I put a lot of myself on the internet, from the good to the bad, to the mundane. My internet friends definitely know a lot about who I am. Still, I am a person who can be very reserved around people I don't spend a lot of time with. It's a lot easier to be yourself and say what's on your mind when you don't have to see the judgement in people's eyes as they watch you fall apart or be a goober. 

As I got onto the Little Mermaid ride (the Little Mermaid has been my favorite Disney movie since childhood), I found myself feeling uncomfortable about wanting to sing along with the ride. I was next to a person I had only ever been around on two other occasions. Then I realized something: The things I'm self-conscious about are the things that make me "me", probably the things that friends love about me. Loudly singing Disney songs is one of my favorite activities. What was I afraid of? Looking stupid? Looking childish? Sounding bad? I don't know. The crazy thing is, a huge chunk of my internet friends have heard me drunk cry about boys. If they can love me through that, they can love me through most anything. The group of people I was with that day are some of the most encouraging, non-judgmental people out there. There was no impending judgement for me to fear.

I am kind of a girl of revelations. I have a lot of epiphanies about myself and how I interact with the world, mainly because I am constantly introspecting. I've shared a lot of them with you guys. But internalizing this kind of stuff is so difficult. As I talked about a couple of posts ago, teaching yourself to be a whole new person is incredibly difficult. I've never felt that I could trust people to see all of me and still like me. I'm trying to be very conscious of this revelation. It's physically painful in some situations, but I do think I've made some progress. I've made a new friend recently and I've really been pushing myself to show aspects of me that my brain tells me to omit on account of the fact that I'm a huge dork. Okay, brain, so what if I'm a huge dork? I like being a dork. If other people don't like dorks, they're eventually not going to like me anyway, and if they do like dorks, they're going to like me better for nerding out in front of them. Being myself is really the best option for everyone involved. Consciously, willingly being myself is insanely difficult, but it has yielded good results so far, and I'm optimistic that it will someday turn into a natural way of engaging with the people around me that will produce a very special form of freedom.

You may remember a portion of this post from a Snapchat story I posted awhile back. I was hoping to one day turn this into a vlog, but as I still don't have a way to make videos, I'm going to be turning my video ideas into blog posts. 

So This Is The New Year

Welcome to 2016, everyone!

I'm feeling pretty pumped about the new year, I'm filled with an inexplicable hope about what's to come. If you know anything about me, you know I love goals and new beginnings. I'm sure a lot of people have been bombarding you with goals, resolutions, and to-dos, but it's a wonderful thing to be intentional about how you use your skills and how you spend your life. I hope y'all set some goals for yourself, for the day, month, year, whatever. Here are mine.

Read/finish 65 books. (Be my friend on Goodreads!) 

Get out of debt.

Get paid to publish something somewhere.

Write and edit the novel in my head.

Learn how to paint and draw.

Learn graphic design. 

Travel to a new state.

Maintain a more normal sleeping schedule.

Be less crippled by indecision.

Exercise.

Learn to let go.

Be less personally insulted by assholes and bigots.

Learn when to speak up and when to stay silent.

Get better at small talk.

Find balance.

Be a better listener.

Be a better friend.

Be more vulnerable.

Be less reactionary.

Be more like Leslie Knope.

Be less like Leslie Knope.

Continue on the long path to self love and care.

Be grateful always.

Write a blog post once a week.

Create myself.

Winning

I've been consciously trying to let myself feel the joy of every little win in my life. I say "little", but let's be honest, a lot of it has not felt little. When you're like me, anxiety and strong emotional reactions mean that nothing ever feels little. Everything is in bold colors. And that's why shining the light on the little victories is so important.

Get out of bed when you don't want to? Win.

Leave the house when you want to stay home? Win.

Go to the kitchen when you want to hide in your room? Win.

Put yourself in a setting you're skeptical of? Win.

Talk about something you want to avoid? Win.

Stop beating yourself up for a mistake? Win.

Go somewhere alone that you never imagined not having backup for? Win.

Get your tea blend to turn out perfectly? Win.

Write a novel in a month after two years of failing? Epic win.

I want to talk about that last one, because that was truly a huge win for me. I have participated in NaNoWriMo since 2010. I had never written a novel until I started doing it, but I had always wanted to write a novel. Getting a novel published is probably my biggest life goal, but I need the community and motivation of NaNoWriMo to do it. I need a month where everyone is doing the same draining, insane task I am. It's genuinely one of my favorite times of the year. But I hadn't won in two years. I pushed through 2012 by somehow writing 13,000 words on the second to last day, and nearly 25,000 words on the last day. 2013 came and I was in such a deep depression that I could not get myself to write two thousand words. Last year, I had been having panic attacks and quit a job that made me feel like I would never do anything right again, and I wrote about eighteen thousand words. This year, I can't pretend I'm not struggling. I have had a lot of anxiety and some depression and I have been struggling with a deteriorating attention span for two years or so. Despite all that, I wrote a novel. I persevered and I wrote over fifty thousand words. A lot of the reason I was able to win was because I let my celebrate the little victories within my novel, rewarding myself in some way every five thousand words. It may not be as impressive as writing most of my novel in two days like the last time I won, but this feels like an even bigger victory for me as a person. I have lost anything in my life that felt like a constant. I have struggled with losing myself and trying to rebuild myself. Winning NaNoWriMo is like finding that a piece of myself I thought I had lost was still there. The determined girl I once was is still here. That girl who knew how to push past the pain is still here. The girl who knew what she wanted is still here. I'm still Chelsea. 

If you're struggling, take time to appreciate every tiny (or large!) victorious moment where you didn't give in to whatever you are struggling against. It's easier to get through the next struggle if you remember that you've won before. 

The Double-Edged Sword of Imagination

I've been spending some time learning about my Ennegram type. I am a Type Four: The Individualist. There's a lot to be learned from psychological evaluations of personality type, but today I'm going to talk about imagination.

I've always seen imagination as a pathway to endless marvels. I never really considered that imagination could also be a pathway to destruction until reading about Fours. There are pieces of my imagination that I have known are problematic without even realizing that they are, in fact, connected to imagination. 

Reading about my type and our overuse of imagination, I didn't really think I had that quality. Then, I suddenly realized that empathy is simply the ability to imagine deeply. I'm sure that sounds really obvious, but I had never really thought about it that way. Empathy is such an emotional and automatic response for me, it feels like more of a reaction than a cognitive process. Seeing empathy, something that I highly value and appreciate but also know to be problematic, as a process of imagination made me start to see that maybe I do have this over-active imagination problem.

Introspection is another double-edged sword that I hadn't ever recognized as a compartment of imagination. Knowing yourself and examining yourself is a good thing, but you can get lost in your mind, ruminating on all your flaws and problems. Being hyper-aware of your shortcomings is not a fun time, yet it's a trap I find myself in all too frequently, another trap of imagination.

Yet as I read about the concept of my "Fantasy Self", the idea that I build up an idealized self in my mind, I thought, "I don't do that." Oh, Chelsea. It's so cute when you blatantly lie to yourself. Of course I do this, and I think a lot of other people probably do this without necessarily realizing that they do, so that's why we're here talking about it today. 

The idea of Fantasy Self is closely linked with perfectionism, a trait I know myself to have and of which I am trying to break myself. I have been trying to break myself of a lot of things, actually. I have been trying to rebuild myself into a whole new person, a person I have a very clear image of, my Fantasy Self. Working towards a better you is a good thing, but imagining better is only a part of the process, and if you're not careful, you can find yourself imagining without working. Re-wiring yourself is a slow and painful process. There are going to be snags. Everyone makes bad decisions, falls into the habits they're trying to leave behind them. And that's where the Fantasy Self becomes dangerous. I have this idea of who I want to be, of who I "really am" and then I torture myself when I cannot live up to that. My brain throws every instance where I was not the person I wanted to be in my face, played over and over again with no stop button. I berate myself for not having done better, not having been a better person. When you get lost in shame spirals like that, you can't see clearly. It's hard to make any progress when you can't find your footing because you're too busy obsessing over mistakes. And when you do make progress, you tell yourself that it's not enough, you're not enough yet. And if you're not enough, you're not worthy of being loved. You start to think of yourself as a project, not a complete being.

I'm trying so hard to teach myself that I'm a person, not a partially built house that's unlivable before completion. It's hard to know that so much of me needs to change, feeling like I'm learning an endless string of things that are wrong with me. But it's easier when I learn to assess the individual problems. Seeing that my imagination has led to most of my problems in life, I can start the process of learning to hone it into something that's productive and filled with beauty. 

I would love to hear ideas from my fellow wakeful dreamers on how you deal with the self-destructive aspects of your imagination. 

Perpetuating Hate

As I've scrolled through Facebook over the past couple of days, I have become extremely disheartened by the amount of hate I have seen towards an entire group of people. What I really saw was fear, but hate nonetheless. In the immortal words of Yoda, "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." 

It truly saddens me seeing the internet, my beautiful internet, used as a platform for hate. Apparently I process things in fiction, because I couldn't get Theoden out of my head. "What can men do against such reckless hate?" I tried to tweet out some love for people who are being affected by bigotry, knowing it wouldn't really do much, but also needing to try to tear down some of the hate with love.

It wasn't long after sending out my string of tweets before I started feeling convicted about taking offense to social media being used as a hate medium. The impact of my words on social media, particularly Twitter, have been on my mind a lot lately. For several years now, I have used Twitter as a way of processing my thoughts. As someone who had previously done all she could to hide every feeling she ever had, I thought this was a good thing. And it was good. For me. It makes me feel better, more level, than suffering in silence. It feels true. It feels like I'm being honest about who I am, showing the world all my flaws and fears and discouragements and hoping they will still like me. Things like, "I always thought I was the only one who thought that way until you tweeted it!" have gone to my head. I always imagined that sharing my thought processes was helpful to people who shared my struggles.

But the truth is, I have used social media as a platform for hate. I have used it to hate myself. I have used it as a way of saying, "Look at all this junk I have in my brain. See why I can't get anyone to love this?" I have subjected people to my deepest thoughts of self-loathing, perpetuating hate. I have processed thoughts in a way that I thought would sound hopeful, but just sound negative to those whose minds don't work the way mine does. 

Words mean a lot me. I pride myself on speaking the truth. Well, the truth is that I don't place a high enough value on how those words are perceived by other people. I am a very reactionary and passionate person, and that leads to words that don't need to be said. That's something I'm working on, but deeply struggling with. 

Negative words have a bigger impact on people than positive. For every ten positive/neutral things I say, I know my negative ones will be the ones remembered, whether I meant them in a negative way or not. 

I honestly don't know how to process emotions. That's what brings you this post and pretty much every other post I've ever written. I thought that I had learned a more productive way to process my emotions, but it turns out I didn't. I don't want my metal illness and my struggles to be the mark I leave on the world. I will not pretend to be okay when I'm not, but today I commit to stop perpetuating self-hate in my life and on my social media. I'm not sure where I'll take my processing of thoughts, but I will figure it out. I hope you and everyone in my life can be patient with me. 

Thank you to everyone who has made me feel less crazy and less alone through the years. It truly means the world to me and has gotten me through some very difficult times. I'm sorry I abused you as my friends and my audience. Thank you to everyone who has shown me love and patience. You're truly gems.

Walking Contradiction

I live somewhere between reckless optimism and hopeless pessimism.
Somewhere between dreamer and realist.
Somewhere between empathy and apathy.
Somewhere between self-indulgent and self-loathing.
Somewhere between endlessly introverted and deeply lonely.
Somewhere between spotaneous adventurer and anxious planner.
Somewhere between lover of flaws and perfectionist.
Somewhere between loving deeply and building thick walls.
Somewhere between forever determined and easily discouraged.
Somewhere between tough and hypersensitive.
Somewhere between addicted to truth and avoiding reality.
Somewhere between feeling everything and feeling nothing.
Somewhere between hurting and healing.
Somewhere between joy and fear.
Somewhere between crazy and human.
I am a walking contradiction, a stranger even to myself, looking for a path to balance.