Changes
I have lowkey been obsessed with Megan Hellerer recently, and find a lot of comfort and solace in her writing/coaching. I read this post this morning, and relate to it a lot, especially with the wholesale lifestyle changes I am essentially forcing myself to go through right now. Main points are:
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Instead of “Mind Over Matter” make it “Mind To Matter.” The mental framework asks two questions:
- How would it FEEL different?
- What would BE different?
In asking yourself how would things feel different and what would be different if you stopped doing X, it changes the mentality of stopping a bad behavior from “I should stop” to envisioning a life without said behavior. The behavior then becomes an obstacle that you just need to quickly overcome to get to where it is that you’re trying to be.
I relate to Megan’s post a lot right now because I think for a long time, the bad behaviors in my life were a way to push away things or people to see who I really valued. I don’t think it was always intentional, but definitely a subconscious thing.
I can remember being in middle school playing Yugioh and being really into it with the card games club, and girls would pass by and all of a sudden it was like I was an entirely different person. Or, I can remember visiting family in Montgomery Village every weekend because that’s where one of my best friends/cousins lived and we’d play video games and shoot the shit and have fun. But that was a different world compared to Bethesda. Even at John Carroll in Birmingham, you were judged on where you got your weed from. Shit, a recent girlfriend judged me for going to John Carroll because she went to Hewitt-Trussville, and John Carroll kids were seen as the rich, spoiled, smart kids. There’s also being a fan of Phish, which I’m sure a lot of people wonder how people could like such a trash band.
All this to say, I think having so many various experiences in my lifetime gave me an idea of who had a genuinely good heart or not. Who was able to see past you for your shortcomings and accept you for who you are. Or, maybe this is what I told myself and this was the barrier I put up to push people away. Was I testing people to see how much they could take? If so, why did I do that?
In doing so, I was harming my own self and not focusing on my own health, wants, and needs. From having bad habits of smoking, drinking, gambling, and whatever else, I hurt myself and potentially others. The intentions were always good in that I was likely trying to understand and learn about others who I spent time with. The curious journalist in me will never go away. I’m not gonzo like Hunter S. Thompson, but it may as well have been a minor version of that.
Though, where people focus on themselves, that’s just not in my nature. It’s not how I have been raised by my parents. My parents could have been rich and/or selfish, and I’d have been raised a child who went to Landon and probably lived a completely different life and journey. But what mattered more to my parents was supporting their immigrant brothers and sisters because love and family meant more than money. That’s something which many people can’t grasp or understand. It’s short term gains compared to long term happiness. I have seen how the short term gains can ruin relationships for forever, but I have seen how both my mom and dad are loved by many people (especially my mom) to this day for giving so much of themselves to others.
There is a happy medium, which I am personally learning about right now. That is to be able to feel awesome in all facets of your life while having a balance you can live with and easily manage. Like you enjoy what you do for a living, you love your friends you talk to after work, and what you do in your spare time. Though with all that I’m going through or that I have on my plate, having friends be supporting and accepting of who I am makes my life a lot easier.
I have no regrets about anything and I’m appreciative for it all (that isn’t to say I don’t cringe at my past every day, I almost always do). Now that I’m in a place of feeling supported and knowing who I value, I think I’m more motivated to remove the obstacles I’ve placed for myself to push people away. It’s like I’ve gotten a major burst of dopamine, and I don’t want to lose that.
Once you make one major change in your life, the dominoes start to fall and you think to yourself, “What else can I change?”
- Maybe in my last relationship, I held up an obstacle because I subconsciously thought it wouldn’t end up anywhere, so how can I make sure I don’t feel those thoughts in my next one?
- Maybe I like being a Phish fan because it’s escapism, happiness, and a community of people I’ve come to love, so how can I spread that into other facets of my life?
- Maybe in my last job, I wasn’t fully into it because I thought I wasn’t a good teacher/classroom manager, so how can I take those lessons and be better at my current or future job?
- Maybe in undergrad, my grades sucked because I couldn’t figure out how to make sense of all of the different directions I wanted to go in or was interested in, so how can I be more organized or better in my current studies?
The smoker knows how to quit. The alcoholic wants to do anything but drink. The gambler doesn’t want to lose anymore money. They all want the escapism. They all are looking for one reason to stop. All of them are capable if they just think about how it would feel to not have those habits, and what their life would instead be like.
There are a lot of thoughts, but once you make one change it’s like the floodgates have opened and you can’t wait to completely overhaul your past and current life to make for a better future.