How much attention do you pay to your thoughts?  How aware of them are you?  What do you say most often to yourself?  How do you treat yourself when you do something that you would prefer not to do?

When we are young we learn how to speak to ourselves by listening to others speak out loud.  We hear adults judging others and themselves.  We hear adults labeling things right and wrong.  We may belong to a religious group that says anyone who is a non-believer is a sinner, or less than.  We are given the blueprint on how to be against not only others, but ourselves.  Some of us may be told directly that we are flawed in numerous ways, at a young age.  We may be put down for being something our families have decided was wrong.  There are direct and subtle ways our self-love is sabotaged.

We manifest our past abuse by becoming abusers ourselves.  We may not treat our families the way we were treated but we probably say what we learned to the person that is most precious to us:  ourselves.  We speak unspeakable things to our own mind.  We say things we would never say to another (most of us) and yet we wonder why we struggle here and there, why happiness is an effort.  It is only effort because many of our thoughts don’t support it.  Most of us are so used to living in an abusive relationship with ourselves we don’t realize that that is exactly what is happening.

When I am about to ‘beat’ myself up around something I may have said or did I sing.  I have gotten to the point where my subconscious takes over when negative self-thoughts bubble up (which is rare).  In the past I would say the word “STOP” to the voice that sounds like an enemy from inside.  There are other ways to get someone to do things that are helpful for themselves.  There are other ways than to be mean and abusive.  The first step is becoming aware of how you think and what you think about.  Once you become aware of the voice of your own enemy you have to look at it as a lost child.  The child that heard all of the mean things and learned from the adults around him/her.  How is that child going to learn if the abuse never ends?  Stop the tape from going on and on and on, the one you recorded unintentionally that has become the soundtrack of your life.  Record something new, something you want to hear and play it over and over and over and over.

Now, watch your life shift towards the direction of your most recurring thoughts.  :)

xo

a

Not about the name of my dog but about the task I did before the phone was ringing. About the last step I undertook before the instant messenger drew my attention. I remember I closed my active windows and opened new ones for the requestor on the phone. I typed some regrets into the messenger but what happened before?

Heureka! After a couple of seconds I have the idea and I’ll keep it until the next disturbance, a task reminder, an inbound email under urgent subject.

Doing more tasks in one shot does not seem to be my thing. I do mistakes and I waste time to correct them or to remember what I did before. But thanks god I am not alone, or should I say, unfortunately? In other worlds how much time could we save in total by stopping this multitasking silliness? Is it negligible or is it like abolishing the stand-by function on our electrical devises and in consequence to shut down a number of power plants just supplying these?

I don’t know but researchers confirmed that the human brain is not made to handle more than two tasks simultaneously. The explanation is easy to digest: we have two brain hemispheres only.  And in the end it doesn’t behave like duo core computers performing on both tasks with 100% but one always suffers. What we experience as multitasking is just working with quick changes on more tasks subsequently.

Estimations how much this effect costs the US industry have been made, it is half a billion dollar each year. And the number does not reflect late effects like my forgetfulness losing the name of the dog one day.

I decided to stop doing it.

I feel like the author of this devotion took the words right out of my mouth; weeks like this one are jam packed with errands, meetings, appointments and that hardly leaves time for me to sit down and think and truly pray and just be with God.  And yet these are the weeks when I need to be doing that even more because right beneath the surface of the business lies the fear and anxiety and brimming tears from driving by a certain exit on the highway or noticing a particular date on the calendar.  A phrase that a girlfriend said to me months ago keeps repeating itself in my head – I’d emailed her about missing K and just being really sad about him not being in my life anymore and her response, not meant as anything other than purely trying to understand, was “I just don’t see how the emotions you are feeling could  be missing someone like that; I understand anger but I just don’t understand how you can miss someone so awful.”  And they just keep replaying themselves in my head over and over again.  I’m not exactly sure why or even how it makes me feel because sometimes I think, yeah, why do I miss him, he was terrible and then other times, it brings tears to my eyes because I miss who I thought he was and that I thought God had brought him to my life in an answer to prayers and I just don’t know that I have the strength to put myself out there and try dating again.  The two opposing patterns just keep circling in my head.  And instead of beating myself up trying to figure it out, I’m just going to let them be and I know that God will be working in my heart with an answer; I just have to be willing to hear it.

These two words always summon up a memory of the Arnold Schwarzenegger action-packed 2002 5.2-imdb-rated thriller. This summoning, in turn, always has the collateral effect of reminding me of The Game, which I have just lost. I don’t mean the great Michael Douglas thriller, 7.7-imdb-rated.

Collateral Damage

After the damage to my time that these words create, I can return to my initial thoughts. By definition, a person can be collateral. In order for that to be true, said person must be unrelated to the military operations, or whatever caused the damage. For us to sympathise even more, said person must be truly innocent. Not just in regards to said military operations or the such. Said person must not have beat his younger brother when they were growing up. Said person would help his elderly neighbour with their groceries. Said person would refuse receiving money from said neighbour for said help.

Remember any movie about a small town or village, featuring many old characters, with a young character who is finding something about himself while finding something about the world. That is the innocent that is the truest collateral damage when his or her family are slaughtered by drug cartel related bombings in downtown Los Angeles.

• I am Seriously Depressed
• I am clinically depressed
• I am never going to write another poem
• I should write a novel
• I am never going to write anything at all
• My blog is a clusterfuck
• If I said this to you in real life I would feel insecure and be very quite after I told you

I am taking over the internet with my series of poems that I have been writing for my entire life.

I spent 20 months at a boarding school from the age of 16 to 18. It was in upstate New York in the woods.

I wasn’t there because my parents were rich I was there because I was “at risk.” (Quote taken from the school’s brochure.)

I have been writing poems about this boarding school for 5 years.

I can’t finish the “series.” I keep starting over.

• I will never write anything worthwhile
• This is my life’s work
• This is a masterpiece
• I will never finish this

I want you to recognize my accomplishments.

I want you to publish my book so that I will feel happy because life is a series of depressions which I pull out of via publications and sex and many hours playing video games on a very large computer screen.