anupturnedsoul

An Upturned Soul takes a break… sort of…

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I love this Manifesto by Celestine Chua as it kind of goes with how I do things… even though I never expect things to go my way ever. My life has taught me that it is best not to have that approach, for me anyway, be flexible and see what happens, what actually happens may be better than what you had planned, and even if it isn’t, even if it is worse, it’s what happened, deal with it as it is not planning on changing for you no matter what you do.

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
    Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
    Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
    Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

-Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

#7 is my favourite  – Uncover what you’re really upset about (Clue: It’s not the world) – and makes me chuckle every time I read the clue, because it’s so easy to do and we all tend to do it and it doesn’t solve anything but for a moment it’s kind of nice to blame the world.

Anyway, I need a time out to deal with the sort of sudden – everything happening all at once – in my offline life, which sort of isn’t sudden but I thought things would be a bit more staggered and they decided not to be.

And my coping methods are failing because it’s time to do more than just deal with things using coping methods and mechanisms, those are past their due date.

For instance…

I tried to do a post today connected to The Daily Post’s Weekly Photo challenge… and my photo software has decided to be a glitch bitch. So I have to dig around and fix it.

And then when I tried to post this… more glitches. It wouldn’t let me… so am I not supposed to take a break?

I’m too mentally challenged… exhausted… to figure what it means or doesn’t mean if it means anything at all so I’m just making a random guess.

And it just felt like the Universe saying, take a break from your routine, no matter how much you enjoy it, if you don’t things will happen to force you to do it because you’re using it to distract yourself from things which need your full attention. Or something like that.

I’m not abandoning my blog.

I’m still around to answer comments, although it may take me longer than usual.

I may still do posts but they’ll be different.

But if I don’t do posts, then instead I’m going share posts by other bloggers which I like, which I find interesting, thought-provoking, and whatever else I find them to be.

So, I’m here but not here… whatever that means.

Take care of yourselves.

12 comments

  2. I sure related to this today, given my own post. This was helpful to read. Don’t go too far away! I for one enjoy your presence here and on my blog. I think I can safely say, we are here for you when you do need to vent or share, after all. Hugs!

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    • Thank you 😀

      I loved your post!!! Especially related to the bit about going from being snug in your work from home environment and reality to having to enter a different reality, one which involves other people and socialising with them and sort of having to dress for them to seem normal-ish to make them feel comfortable around you and not realise that you’re not one of them (which may be what they’re doing too). So, turning up in your usual attire, such as slippers and comfy clothes… hmmmm. Or at least that’s how I read what you wrote.

      I came back from my weekly supermarket shop the other day and said – That’s enough socilaising for the week! 😉

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    • Thank you… I do endeavour to do so, much of it is trial and error and just keep going through it all. In this particular case it’s more about dealing with practical stuff, not my specialty, not when it requires multi-tasking thinking 🙂

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  4. No. 7: Uncover what you are really upset about. Oy vey!

    My mind unconsciously goes to “what did I do wrong? what need did I not meet? what did I not give?”. I now try to gently nudge my mind back to myself. How is this “about me” and not “about the other”? It’s a huge shift in my mind. It’s as if a camera had been pointing at the other, and all of a sudden, it turned around and is pointing at me. In a good way. In a “oh, I didn’t see that” way. And when I do uncover what I am really upset about, it usually doesn’t have anything to do with other person. It’s somehow about me, about a pattern or a fear. Or more frequently, my not attending to myself.

    And I love when it happens, that moment. It feels like exhaling, after I have been holding my breath. There’s relief in it. You know, it’s an exercise in futility to need to know someone else, and to need to meet their needs. It’s like aiming an arrow at a bulls-eye and trying to hit it with your eyes closed. We can only really know ourselves.

    This avoidance of self? It’s not just that we were trained in childhood to not have selves. Living in someone else’s reality can be easy. Focusing on the other means we can avoid ourselves, our sorrows, our fears, changes we need to make, things we need to accept. It’s hard work to create your own life, to be a self-actualized individual. It takes work, and courage. It’s one of the things that can draw us to Narcissists, I think. It’s why we can lose ourselves in their reality. It can be tempting and delicious to not have to do your own work.

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    • Very true.

      You have a healthy approach, and keen insight.

      I think quite a lot of what we do in our adult relationships is a reflection of what we learned to do in and about relationships when we were children. It’s not just the training, it is also due to absorbing our environment and the dynamics which were around us, which we observed, and if they were repetitive they became the norm – this is how people do things and are = this is how I should do things and be. As children our social circle is small, and yet it is also our entire world. It’s the microcosm which we think is representative of the macrocosm. It takes a long time to undo our early learning, to teach ourselves ways of being which suit who we are better than what we learned which came from someone else.

      Have you explored transactional analysis. From your words it sounds like you have, but if you haven’t, you’re a natural and might enjoy it from a – adding more information to your wealth of knowledge pot – standpoint.

      For me, the most important thing I realised in the me versus you dynamic of relationships, was that the other person is not my responsibility, but I am my responsibility. Thus I do not have a right to try and change them to suit me – and this is not something I like as an option because I don’t like it when people try and change me to suit them (even more so when they present it as for my own benefit) – but I can change myself to suit myself by changing my story. Also I have no power over the other person – or at least that is not the sort of power I want – and as long as I make them the problem, I leave myself powerless. When you shift all the blame to the other person, you also shift all the power, your power included, over to them. But if I accept responsibility for my part in the interaction then I become the problem and the solution to my problem.

      So, yes! accepting and facing our fears, sorrows, pain, darkness, means accepting our power, and we can work with them, and if we accept those we also get the flip side which comes as part of the package, we own our joy, beauty, fun, etc.

      It’s a paradox really, what we seek in narcissists is what they are seeking in us.

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