A Resilient Feeler: Feeling Uncomfortable Emotions

After several days of intense conversation and feeling uncomfortable emotions, I discovered that when you have a business in a small town, it’s important to be liked. Just like that, you have a tendency to let people walk all over you.

When your dad is your protector, and he’s always there, even in hunting season, to stand up straight for yourself comes slowly. You don’t even tune into the conversation and steer it toward the truth when you need to. And suddenly your dad’s not there anymore, because he can’t stand that little shit either.

When you never say anything, you might as well be giving permission, because you could have said no. And because you didn’t say no, it’s not considered rape.

It’s your fault for not speaking up, not their fault for taking what was never theirs to take. This truth is so upside down and inverted that merely bringing it to the light of day should do enough to dissipate it, but I’ll not be surprised if it doesn’t, just disappointed.

For all future conflicts, I volunteered to be his heavy. I don’t care if people don’t like me, but they’d better respect me. If not, I’m perfectly fine taking them to task. Watch me become a dragon.

Two weeks later, I couldn’t wait to hear what happened. Did they all lose their privileges and were told never to come back again?

There was, in fact, a verbal explosion, a complete shattering of the walk-all-over-me-guy veil that I had known existed, seen rarely in the decades I’d known him, during which I’d known him to be nothing less than fearsome.

If I hate that little shit too, it is because of who my boyfriend becomes in his company – a doormat.

Strange Selections

Why him, when no one else gets to do that?

The two smallest ones targeted, but still not the little shit. Instead, he walked away thinking that if he just lay low for a while, this would all blow over, and next year, let the partying resume. I know he thinks that because he thinks he got away with it. Nothing was said to him; it was the two who were targeted that were the problem.

Well, I’d say that going from zero to twenty percent is progress. The ring leader was the remaining eighty percent of the problem, but it’s progress not perfection. It was clumsy, sure, but it’s a solid start, and I’ll take it. I’m sure it will become a legend.

That’s how the narcissist does it. No one says anything expressly to him, and he doesn’t listen to anybody. I mean, really, really repeat these words in your own words, so I knew you heard me, kind of listen, and what, like, who has time for that?

If there’s a will, there’s a way, and when you don’t know the will of someone, you have no idea how massively they are crushing it, sometimes, they don’t even know.

Although everything is close to him and goes down under his watch, he maintains the perspective that it has nothing to do with him. He’s perfectly innocent. Always has been, always will be.

Like criticism off a narcissist’s back. A narcissist simply refuses the entire business of feeling uncomfortable emotions. Especially the ones hinting at imperfection.

Making and Taking

The film Matrix is captivating because the number of people caught in the everyday boringness far outnumber the few who took the red pill and can see the underlying ridiculousness of it all. So few people who wake up and make decisions, instead of taking them.

I met someone whose first language wasn’t French or English, or any I’d heard of before. I’d asked what his native language was because he was the first person I’d met who used the phrase “to take a decision.” I’d always used the phrase, “to make a decision.”

To me, there are options on the table, and when you choose from the available options, you take a decision, like it’s one of a deck of cards. When you make a decision, you look at what’s on the table, pull a card out of your hat, and create a new one.

A combination, perhaps, a entirely new way, maybe. But something unique, because I am, my situation is, my goals are, and the list goes on as to why I would refuse to take something if I can make it instead. To innovate is to make a decision. To shop is to take a decision.

Imagine if people knew they could heal themselves. The health industry would collapse. People would be up in arms about paying for health insurance that they never needed. What a dirty trick, they’d be enraged. Feeling uncomfortable emotions is intense stuff.

Imagine how enraged they would be if you told them that their diseases and sicknesses were their own fault. Unfortunately, the bread is buttered on both sides. You have to accept responsibility if you want the power, because if you didn’t have the power to cause it, you don’t have the power to un-cause it.

Biological by Nature

I’ve had people say to me, “I know you feel that way, but…” and proceed to tell me how I should feel. If I can’t change my feelings, I don’t know why they think they can change my feelings. My feelings are chemical, and I don’t control the chemicals. The chemicals are responsible for feeling uncomfortable emotions.

People are by nature lazy, stupid, and mean, and of all the ways to divide people, work ethic might be the only one that matters, because it takes work to be a good human. Hard work, constant work, real work.

Get to work, which actually looks like nothing. Doing absolutely nothing with your eyes closed. How long can you stand yourself?

When you have a bad feeling, inspect it closely. Where, why, focus on it with total concentration, instead of whatever you’d normally do when you feel like that.

Suddenly, the craving for escape is gone, and the discomfort fades to nothing; the rage gets dissipated. What is left is wisdom. A simple fact that you know to be true, and truth doesn’t incite emotion. It just is. Your zap of insight. You might be so relieved that you will laugh until you cry with snot.

Personal growth is personal. It’s not your manager’s job to tell you where you fall short or to draw lines of expectation for your future. Well-rounded is for ball bearings, not people.

Claim your strengths with pride when you realize that what’s easy for you is difficult for others.

Acknowledge your weaknesses for the blessings they provide for growth and compassion. It’s not for the human resources department to treat you like a machine, nor is it up to anyone else to whom you’d like to outsource the job to avoid feeling uncomfortable emotions.

No one knows how it works, and until they can prove me wrong, I can fantasize how it might, and make my fantasy work for me. But I don’t operate under the fantasy that I am responsible for feeling uncomfortable emotions. I can only register the emotion and decide what to do about it. If you can control your feelings, do tell me how you do it.

Freedom is the ultimate key to good health and longevity, as well as the quality and quantity of life. If you can’t leave a toxic situation, it will be your undoing. Physically and psychologically, you have to leave it in the past.

It takes effort, yes, but don’t underestimate the need for precise and accurate communication – expression aligned with intention. In a world that responds to your every word, you need to monitor what you are saying.

The power of our words, of our thoughts, of our voices is the power that we all have at our disposal, and the one that makes us equal. In every second of every moment, we have the power to choose a direction.

Choose forward, choose better. Don’t dwell on the past; intentionally and consciously learn from it. Don’t live in the future; intentionally and consciously prepare for it. Use your power in a way that feels right to you.

Recently, a box of chocolates came in the mail. What a delight! However, I looked for the map of flavors, and there wasn’t one. I had to kamikaze my selection. I chose and would have described the flavor as chocolate-covered eggnog with a hint of rum. However, the second time, I thought, you need a map so you don’t wind up with the mocha one. A mocha one, I got.

Crystal Clear

They make so many cliches about women not knowing what they want as a whole; it’s high time to be crystal clear with what you do want.

Be 100% certain. Be one mind about it. As I listened to a friend tell me what she wanted, it felt like she was on both the gas and the brake at once. She wanted this, but not a large part of what came with it. When you are on this journey, and it is a useful, credible journey, you are trying to become clear on what remains when you wipe out the things that come with feeling uncomfortable emotions.

If you could just ask for it and know in your heart that you aren’t lying or holding back, then you will get it.

I had a dream once: a hot-air balloon was hovering just above me, and I was standing on the edge of a gully. I reached out to it and found a blank notepad in my hand. I heard, “When you need money, just write it on there and give them the paper.” I laughed, “Won’t they know it’s just a piece of paper, and that is just a scribble?”

Laughter from the other side, “Just do it.” I wondered whether the point was that one day people would pay for my autograph, and the laughter came again. Good laughing, like my grandmother, and not mean laughter like my mother. I wondered if I was supposed to go back to art, because they were going to pay for the images I produce. Again, innocent, non-judgmental laughter of how far off base I was. I asked, “What do I do if I run out of paper?”

Like everything I said was funny, I heard, “Just ask for another one.”

Always Enough

Then I realized I was off base, because I was assuming there was a necessity for an exchange. I had to do something to give in order to get. That’s when the laughter stopped, and all I could feel was peaceful warmth. Maybe some people call that feeling love. With my experience of how the word was used and the actions taken by those who used that word, I was absolutely confused whether it was something you were supposed to want.

From that day forward, it was the end of feeling uncomfortable emotions about money. I didn’t have enough money to retire, nor to cover the bills without dipping into savings, but I knew I would somehow, someway. In more concrete terms, it was my subconscious telling my conscience to relax, stop worrying about the exact figure.

I spent many hours calculating, projecting, budgeting, and using every tool available to me to answer the question, “Do I have enough to quit my job yet?” Many months later, I still had no clear answer from anyone.

Everyone said, “You should keep working.” Had they ended the statement, “For as long as you can,” I could have explained that was what I needed to know, because I’d basically been holding my breath, and I was running out of air.

At the start of my career, I heard a life-defining talk. Betty Jane Wiley was speaking about working hard to pay bills, and one day, she realized that if she had fewer bills, she wouldn’t have to work so hard. She sold all the things she needed to live an upscale, successful urban lifestyle and swapped them for a cabin in the woods. She kept her cashmere sweaters and silk stockings for their warmth factors, and sold China and stilettos. I was sold.

Work and Life

Writing is a career that lets me live the lifestyle I want.

Yet, I knew of something different. My mother had told me she was a writer. I had never read anything she’d written, save for one article about me and my selfishness for abandoning her for my dad. Feeling uncomfortable emotions, I didn’t read all of it.

I knew for a fact that she hadn’t made much, if it could even amount to a hobby, instead of a decades-long pursuit. Certainly, if she went to university for it, and had more and higher titles than I, and she couldn’t pull it off, how was someone to pull it off without the proper schooling?

I found myself in a small house, with the lifestyle I wanted, ready to write. Okay, what’s the next step? I read books, took courses, and sat in seminars to discover that it’s all about relationships. You can move to the cabin after you establish relationships, because it’s mighty slow and difficult to do from there.

I’d assumed that books exist because of the necessity of the content. If people need to know, it’s in a book.

Books are a business, not a public service. Whatever sells is what is published, or what people are willing to pay to say they own or read, or who want no one to know they ever read it. Like any market, there’s many ways to appeal to someone with cash, and the promise that some problem will disappear if they buy now.

You can sell a lot of books, for instance, when you are a university school teacher of a popular lecture, and can make your book a required purchase for every student. In fact, you can count the number of books you can sell.

When you understand the motivations of a business, you can better grasp why things work the way they do, and if you don’t like it, well, do something different. Refuse to participate. Build an alternative and attract the world to beat a path to it. Watch the old, yucky way crumble away.

Business replaces morality with money. Make marketing, make a sale, make a buck, buck the tax, buck the employee, buck the puny little consumer.

Some businesses take what they earn and spend it to do good, which is typically the role of the government, as operationalized as people paying their taxes, taking care of their workers, and the cities in which they work.

But some businesses minimize their taxes and labor expenses and escape any damage they cause with impunity. Then we are supposed to call them philanthropists. Just know what the definition of one is – someone who doesn’t only want to play God, but Government. How about, don’t wreck it, and then you won’t have to fix it.

I wish I knew a better system where everyone believed in abundance, as I did in my dream, but it might be from feeling uncomfortable emotions, like scarcity. Like elation only makes sense when you know depression.

Not everyone I know has lived with a thermostat set as low as they can take it, while wearing sweaters and blankets, and sometimes the cat.

As far as I was concerned, if it gave me one week of retirement sooner, I’d do it. I walked everywhere, cancelled all memberships, and got anything I needed from the library. Believe in abundance, but be accountable for results.

Feeling uncomfortable emotions, I’ve been filling notebooks ever since.