mental-health

You and you

Standard

How often do you hear people (or yourself) say such phrases – No one cares about me. No one loves me.

I am here to tell you that this is untrue. There’s always someone who cares about you, even when the whole world seems against you. That person is you. Allow me to elaborate.

Question: What is you?

As it turns out, at any given point of time there are two forms of you. The first form is the sum total of your life experiences, your values, your work and whatever makes you the unique person that you are. This is the steady state you.

The second form of you is the mental state that you are in at this moment. You may be in panic at this moment as you are about to lose your job, or sad because your pet is sick, or thrilled because your favorite soccer team won. While this is also you, it does not represent the actual you. This is a transient you. It is your state of mind only today and now, but does not represent the steady state you.

The steady state you is the actual you. The transient you feels more real, but in a few days, or even as early as tomorrow or later today, it will change to a different state. Even if the transient you takes months to get out of this current issue, it is still transient in the overall timeline of your life.

The mistake we make is that we think that the transient us is the real us. This is not true.

So why is this a useful bit of information?

First: Because understanding that the transient you is not alone and not all powerful will bring you peace. Understand that any momentary feeling that you are experiencing today is a teeny tiny bit of information that has been added to the steady state you. It is likely going to make no change to the overall steady state you.

Second: If you understand this truth, by logic, you have found a friend. The steady state you. Keeping the steady state you in mind makes you realize that the transient you is not alone.

Let me give you a small proof that the steady state you is indeed your friend. When you said “No one cares about me,” you have actually exhibited care for yourself. You cared enough to articulate this idea, right? So, care has already happened. You have nurtured yourself. The only issue is that you failed to recognize this fact. You did not notice that you had already exhibited self care and self love. Recognize this. One way to organize your thought would be to think that the steady state you exhibited care to the current, agitated, transient you.

Recognizing yourself as your friend is an all powerful thought. If you start drawing strength from yourself, you stand tall. You are able to calmly shut down criticism to your self. Allow the steady state you come to the defense of the transient you. Do not allow the transient you to defend yourself. This is because the transient you is agitated and can’t think straight.

When you have practiced the skill of defending yourself through thoughtless criticisms, you will find people getting attracted toward you. Take their new found admiration with a pinch of salt, just as you take their criticism. Do not let it affect you or get complacent. This will disturb the steady state you, and make you less able to take care of the transient you in times of trouble.

One last thing: The way that the transient you deals with life’s challenges will determine how powerful the steady state you will be. A steady state you that has been built out of falsehoods cannot support you adequately. If you want a strong friend in the steady state you, you must work through each challenge that the transient you faces with truth, courage and a fight. If you do this, you will have a powerful ally that will guide you through life.

Ladies, Do humankind a favor. Stop being perfect!

Standard

Why do women always try to show a perfect house, perfect yard, a perfect husband and family, perfect kids? You get the idea. Women are fixated at the idea of showing that their lives are perfect. They will go to any lengths to hide the glaring imperfections in their life and to only show the carefully edited, perfect world with pained, but smoothened, happy smiles. Why do we do this? Let’s do a pros vs cons list of this to analyze if showing or pretending that we have perfect lives is a good idea or not.

Before I am taken apart for aiming this at the ladies, men do it too. However, men do a lot of strange things and I am less involved and interested in their reasoning. I don’t have the energy to figure them out.

Pro 1: We make our friends jealous! Oh yeah. That bully who always tried to put me down. Well, here’s my perfect life right back at you! Let me rub that in your face. Take that, miss. Look at my perfect husband, y’all. And my beautiful car, my picture perfect vacations. Ah, that felt nice. Revenge is sweet, isn’t it?

Except for one tiny thing. That bully is still living in your head. She still has power over you that makes you lie about your life. Wouldn’t it be much better to shake her off?

“Hey”, you say. It’s not just for the bully. I am showing off to all my friends.

If we are talking about friends, or in other words, people we like, Guess what?! Basic human nature 101 dictates that you will actually never show off to people you like, if they are inferior to you. You would be compassionate and try to downplay your fortunes to make your unfortunate friend feel better. In other words, you are only showing off to people you consider are more fortunate than you. You may be jealous of them, and are competing with them to create an illusion of your life that is not true. So if we do need to create this illusion, are our so called friends actually our friends? Or, are we being nice to our less fortunate friends?

Pro 2: We make our neighbors or any random stranger who happens to see us either in the real world or on social media jealous. Why would we want to do that? Why put in all this effort and live a lie to make unknown people jealous? All we achieved from our hard work is to make other people feel bad about their life and existence. And to do this, we had to spend time, energy and resources. What can possibly be good about such a situation.?

Allow me to list the cons.

Con 1: It is not real. Everyone’s life is very challenging. We are only wasting our time and energy showing a perfect life. We know it is not true. Such a lie will drain you and make you feel empty. The praises are meaningless, you know it. Now, we don’t have to share our misfortunes with anyone and everyone, but we can choose to be silent, rather than sharing a lie. It’s also exhausting to keep up with a lie.

Con 2: It is a waste of our resources. We could spend that time doing something useful. We can learn a new skill, pursue our hobbies, read a book, watch a movie. Learning a new skill or pursuing a hobby might actually lead to a better life thereby making your artificially perfect world actually achievable.

Con 3: Such showing off is bad for the larger society, the world, our planet. We might be wasting money buying useless stuff to show off our shiny homes. We might be buying brand names, or indulging in travel, or other wasteful practices. This is bad for the environment. There is no positive, and plenty of actual, tangible negative in this scenario.

Con 4: You open yourself to being exploited and conned by advertisers. They target this exact urge to show off to push you to buy a new this or that, thereby further deteriorating our environment. This means, you are playing with the future of your kids by indulging in such practices.

Con 5: You are pushing other women to do similar things. Women are already overworked. They are already expected to show perfect behavior. Do not be a part of this toxic culture. Let women be themselves, pursue their interests and make a place for themselves in the world. Do not derail others by your show of perfection that others will then pursue. This chain reaction is bad for everyone, and especially for women.

For the good of humanity, and especially for your sisters, stop pretending that you are perfect and have a perfect life. It is ultimately the imperfections that spice our lives up. A mediocre, perfect life is boring and uninspired. To aspire for it is a death sentence to your personal growth and aspirations. Let us be ourselves, show ourselves as we are (or keep it private), and strive to be better people, rather than show ourselves as an artificial, fake person.