Must Love Crows

Personal Growth. Self-Compassion. Writing Consulting.

healthy mindset

In Defense of Taking Things Personally

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I’ve had two health care professionals tell me I should read The Four Agreements over the past few years. Must have been something about what I shared with them that had them thinking the book would help me.

When someone tells me I should read a self-help book, it kinda makes me want to tell them to fuck off, depending on the day. No one likes a stranger coming to an assumption about what their issues are. In my humble opinion, I prefer my unsolicited advice from people I know and trust, if at all.

But I ended up reading it because one of the suggesters lent me a copy. hah!

I didn’t love it enough to buy it, at least not yet. I did, however, find the principles to be solid, and now that I think about it, I would consider throwing it in the basket next time I’m at a bookstore (I haven’t ordered from Amazon since I found out the dude that owns it was a Trump supporter. Plus I would way rather touch a book before I buy it. That’s right: I wanna get touchy-feely with a hardcopy more often ‘cuz it feels good.)

So I read part of the book, and this line stuck in my head because it irked me:

“Taking things personally is the maximum expression of selfishness. It makes the assumption everything is about me.

I get that we cause ourselves pain when we take things personally but I also know the value of the feelings associated with taking things personally. 

They act as a catalyst to investigating why we feel upset. And we need to understand why we feel how we feel.

We enter tricky and potentially damaging territory when we shame ourselves for feeling upset about how someone treated us. Especially if we’ve spent our entire lives believing that how we feel isn’t OK.

Self-help books are great. I am a full-time seeker of wellness, which means I’ve always got a new one on the go.

But these kinds of books can get dangerous, particularly if they motivate us to jump ship on feeling our feelings.

We need to make sure that anytime we attempt to better ourselves, whether it be through a book or a course, we don’t abandon our right and need to feel how we feel.

There’s a lot buried within our feelings. For example, maybe you take things personally because you’ve spent your whole life feeling like who you are, as is, is never enough. If that’s the case, validating your feelings is not a luxury, it’s a necessity if you’re to establish the self-love you weren’t taught to feel for yourself as a kid.

And Self-Love is the basis for all healing and emotional evolvement.

Getting defensive is just you trying to protect yourself. The fact that you want to protect yourself is a good thing. We don’t want to bury or dismiss it because a popular book suggested it’s an undesirable way to feel.

We want to unwrap it and give it some light and air, so it can be acknowledged and processed.

It’s one thing to admire a piece of writing or a popular wellness concept. It’s an entirely different thing to throw self-compassion out the window by denying how you feel.

Your feelings tell a story. They give voice to trauma, both known and unknown, that you experienced throughout your life.

Your feelings are born of your life’s experiences, which started at birth, and, some would argue, from the day of conception (Check out the documentary In Utero. It’s rad.)

Is it selfish to take things personally? Maybe. But the hurt still exists and needs to be investigated.

Think of getting upset by other people’s action or choices as a chance to get better: “I need to figure out why this is hurting me so much.”

And work on accepting the truth that feeling angry, sad, betrayed, annoyed, disrespected, or devalued by the way someone treated you doesn’t mean you are a sub-par human being.

It means you’ve got some hurt you need to process, just like everyone else.

These worksheets on my resource page are a great way to start figuring out how to process that hurt.

♥

A

Thoughts On Our Deficiencies

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Lucky = Working with Intention and Gratitude.

Too Sensitive = An innate Gift.

At Least = Denial of Your Truth.

Should Have = Lesson for next time.

Summary: the next time you start ripping the seams on all that you aren’t, remember that perspective is everything.

You are enough, as is. And if someone in your life, including you, thinks you aren’t, step back.

Pause. Reflect. Revisit your truth.

We don’t all have to be on the same page. And you don’t need everyone to want you to win, in order to win.

Also, winning sometimes looks like failing. So give your truth some time to rise to the surface.

Getting Rejected For Being Introspective (It’s a thing)

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What does the word, “declined” mean to you?

For me, it conjures up aged imagined scenarios of public shaming: My visa card, unable to take any more mindless spending, rejects my attempt to fill the lack-of-love void, in front of a long line of people at a high-end store. The horror I tell ya!

More recently, it comes in the form of real-life, when my post was declined from a publication I already write for. The reason?

Too introspective – Not mainstream enough.

In one heart chamber, this is deeply disappointing. The little kid in me wants to jump on top of a table and yell, “I’ll show you too fucking introspective!!”

But the grown woman who is me present day is all, “Thank-you. I’m happy to be living over here in non-mainstream territory.”

Being told my writing is too introspective is an affirmation of who I am and therefore, a righteous compliment.

I feel the pull to think, talk and write about the deep stuff, much to the chagrin of folks who are looking for a less intense, “nice weather today, eh?” conversation (FYI I live in Canada.)

Surface-level doesn’t do it for me. And it’s not that I haven’t delved into the lighter fared “10 ways to do something” type post in the past. Being human means selectively conforming – We’ve all got bills to pay!

But with every day that passes I’m getting more real and more me. And I’m not cool with contorting into a mainstream approved version of myself anymore. It’s just not the way I roll.

Do I come off too intense, too deep, and too “crazy” by some standards? Hell yeah, I do.

But my goal – to use my wellness journey as inspiration to produce content that resonates with people who want to evolve and grow and heal – takes precedent over attempting to fit in with people who don’t understand me.

I’m married to that goal BTW, even though there are days I’m confused (AKA, a little bit freaked out) about where it’s all going to take me. That confusion/fear sometimes tells me to dip my toes back into tried-and-true, “that ain’t for me” waters, in an effort to reach a larger audience.

But as I’ve talked about in this post and experienced last week upon finding out my post about feminism was rejected, I always return to the facts:

I seek the truth about what it is to be a happy and healthy human being, and mainstream approval is not required for that to happen.

My truth entails researching, writing, and speaking about why we act and think in ways that harm ourselves and others, in an attempt to motivate people to investigate the sources of their emotional and physical pain.

And as I said earlier, I’m not yet sure where this writing and research will take me. (I’ve got B-school with Marie Forleo coming up which should help out with that.)

But I know without a hint of doubt I’m not going to reach any personal milestones by forcing myself to be less introspective.

I can see myself contemplating ways to get my message across to a wider audience. But to me, if it’s not written from the heart it’s not true.

And I can’t live with that sour feeling in my gut that says, “You’re writing this for clicks – Stop writing this for clicks.” Yuck.

As a quick dictionary search offers, introspective is “the examination or observation of one’s own mental and emotional processes.”

Given that definition, I would happily wear a pin that says, “too introspective” every day of the week.

Rejection is never an easy pill to swallow. But we will never become all that we are meant to become or attain any degree of long-term happiness, if we focus all our efforts on getting accepted.

Which is why I’m making it my priority as a female human being in 2018 to challenge the toxic normalcy that is mainstream thinking.

Top all that off with the fact that it’s a disservice to my soul and the time I’ve been given on this planet to squander my drive to evolve and share what I learn along the way, and I’ve got myself a pro-introspective platform that’s as solid as a rock. 😉

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Listening to the Right Voice

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There is a voice in my head that has consumed my life for over 20 years, and it tells me a lot of crappy stuff. Maybe you can relate. Here’s a quick summary of what it has to say:

  • Making mistakes is a character flaw.
  • You don’t make enough money, and the amount of money you make determines your worth.
  • Your brother doesn’t call you because he is embarrassed by you. That’s also the reason why none of his friends knew you existed.
  • You keep attracting bad employers because you yourself are bad.
  • You need to be stern and serious and rigid. It’s not OK to be happy all the time — Being overly happy is ridiculous.

So that’s the voice that bullies and reprimands me. But there is another voice — One that I’ve tapped into over the last few years — that has a much kinder take on who I am, and what I have to offer the world.

It’s not so much in my head but in my heart, and it’s got a lot of kind and comforting things to say, such as:

  • Human beings were made to make mistakes. And you are human. So your mistakes are inevitable and natural, and not a character flaw.
  • You have enough money to feed, clothe, house, and create a savings account for yourself. If you want to make more of it, work on releasing your fears surrounding it. (PS: I’m reading a great book about that right now)
  • Your brother doesn’t call you because he is busy. And the reason he doesn’t talk about you with his friends is that he is so focused on his life that he doesn’t feel the need to share details about his family.
  • You are not bad. You are learning to release the need to be surrounded by negativity and aggression. And you’re doing a really good job of it.
  • It is safe to be happy, even if you were raised to believe otherwise.

So depending on the day, there are some seriously conflicting beliefs rumbling through me, which lends itself to a bit of confusion. Although logic would dictate that the second voice offers the most constructive conclusions, I am excessively familiar with the negative one. I’ve gotten up close and personal with it for over 20 years, and have built a sort of toxic trust with it — I’ve taught myself to believe what it tells me.

Choosing to accept the second voice — the one telling me things I’ve never known to be true— has been a challenge. Some days I have faith in the foreign assertions and graciously accept them. While on others, I just don’t have it in me, so I default to what I know.

I see a lot of folks out there claiming it’s as simple as swapping out a negative for a positive. Heck, I’ve been one of those people at one point or another, because I wanted so much for it to be true. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a really good thing to get in the habit of doing, but science proves it’s not so simple.

These are subconscious beliefs, and those suckers aren’t so easy to change, particularly after years of programming. On top of that is the physiological stress response to the negative thoughts we have(1). This stress response triggers the amygdala, which over time becomes more reactive to apparent threats, like our negative thoughts. This results in anxiety, even when there is no perceived threat.

And then the hippocampus — which assists in developing conscious and clear memories of what actually happened — get’s worn the F out by the repetitive stress response. This makes it harder to create new, positive memories because we are overloaded with the bad ones. So pretty soon our brains get overwhelmed with all the stress-inducing thoughts, and we end up in a state of chronic fear and anxiety — with no clarity on how the heck it all came to be.

Then we bash ourselves for how we feel. And others minimize our struggle, with dangerous statements like, “Just think something different,” or “What do you have to be stressed about? My life is harder than yours.”

It can be wildly difficult to shake heavily engrained beliefs. We have to work hard at eliciting a relaxation response (more on that in the coming weeks), in order to keep the stress from consuming our bodies and minds and creating dis-ease. We essentially have to re-train our brains, a process that takes a lot of time and a strong commitment.

And we do have to swap out negatives for positives, but with the understanding that it’s not going to be a one-off act: they will keep coming back to haunt us. And there may still be times when we wonder what voice is right: when we follow the crappy thoughts down the rabbit hole and have to pull ourselves back out. But we have to commit to the process, even when it seems easier to just let ourselves fall backward into the abyss.

Because one voice accepts — the other rejects.

One creates peace, while the other creates discontent.

One voice is love, while the other is hate.

Life to me these days is about figuring out which voice to listen to, and cultivating kind messages instead of hateful ones — about myself and others. It’s about choosing to love myself, by choosing to reject the voice that hurts me.

It’s about chipping away at the beliefs that tell me I am less than, and replacing the chips with ones that tell me I am more than.

It’s swapping out a less than (< )with a greater than (>), and realizing that when you choose to believe positive thoughts about yourself, the equation balances out like never before.

What does the voice in your head tell you? Something crappy? If so, I urge you to look for other beliefs — ones that support you achieving a state of wellness, rather than a state of discontent. Start chipping away at the crappy thoughts. I’ll be doing it with you.

(1) Rankin, Lissa, M.D. The Fear Cure, ed (2015).

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Why Your Parents Are Jerks and That’s OK

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About 10 years ago I got arrested for being drunk in public.

Long story short, I was in a really bad state. I was severely depressed, drinking heavily, and couldn’t see past the bottle in front of me.

No one in my family was capable of helping during this time: they didn’t know how to deal with me. Neither did the psych nurse that came to see me in jail when I’d sobered up. She basically told me that if I did it again there would be charges pressed. No offers for counseling or help.

So it was all on my own shoulders, to heal and get better. It was like, “You’re fucked up and there is no reason why you should be because none of us are fucked up. So it’s on you to figure out your issues and get over them.”

Do I think I deserved better treatment? If I was eager to jump on the self-pity train I’d say yes. But I’ll repeat what I said previously: no one in my life was capable of helping me. They didn’t know how to deal with me. And I think I scared the shit out of them because I was like this volatile fucking rocket that was ready to go off at any time.

I learned a lot from my experience. One being that generally as a society, we lack compassion for scenarios and people we don’t understand. We get so scared, and default to simplifying and minimizing another person’s struggle.

So we say “You fucking loser drunk” instead of “You deeply troubled girl who doesn’t know how to love herself.”

And obviously, it takes less time and energy to call someone a loser, or a fuck up, and wipe your hands of them. No one wants to take ownership of a shitty scenario so they just blame it away.

Parents do it too.

And egos don’t like compassion or empathy. They are horny for power and control, and there’s a ton of that in the judgment process. So generally, our ego-dominated society digs judgment, because it boosts people up, albeit under dirty, false pretenses.

What am I saying? I’m saying I wouldn’t change a thing. I got better on my own and I’m proud of that fact. It didn’t happen right away – not even after that night in jail – but it happened. And through the process of recovering and discovering some love for myself, I learned a lot of stuff, particularly about my family.

I learned it takes two to tango. That just because someone does something shitty doesn’t mean it warrants them a lifetime of judgment and ostracization. And I’m not talking about myself here, though of course, it is relatable to my scenario.

I’ve realized that the avoidance of any and all responsibility for one’s actions causes great imbalance. I’ve long held one parent responsible for all the issues in our family, sheltering the other from any ownership. When in fact it takes two to create a shitty situation.

To capitalize on the other’s mistakes and use it as fuel, in order to dismiss ownership of the unsightly, and proclaim “I didn’t do anything wrong; I am innocent” is to create an imbalance that causes much discontent — for all parties involved.

Blame is high-grade procrastination — it’s like the THC in weed. It keeps you from seeing your own contributions to the discontent you feel. For whatever reason, my journey has entailed blaming others and outside sources for all the shitty stuff that went on in my life. I was taught how to blame away my problems, and now I’m teaching myself how to release the need to do that.

Because I am hyper-cognizant of the fact that blame is a recipe for suffering.

Truth: if you find yourself in a shitty interaction, you had a hand in it. You are not innocent.

However, This does not mean you are a piece of shit and unworthy of love.

It means that to say you had no hand in the events surrounding your discontent is to avoid the lesson. And I don’t know about you, but I WANT TO KNOW ALL THE LESSONS.

I want to make sense of the struggle, and come out of it like a fucking phoenix rising from the ashes.

I think my hope for what I wanted my parents to be was so intense that I couldn’t see who they actually were: flawed humans. 

That’s not a slight, it just is what it is. Yes, they have talents and abilities and positive qualities — but they are human, and to be human is to be flawed.

Part of my journey has entailed realizing that they will not always be right, or kind, or compassionate, or loving.

They are capable of being jerks, just like me and every other person walking the planet.

And they weren’t and will not be capable of being my saviors. They won’t be able to fix me or teach me to appreciate myself; they won’t be the ones leading me towards enlightenment. Though through their dysfunction and perceived failures, I have learned to love who I am, and function at a higher state.

So even though they aren’t good with apologies; even though they judged me and gossiped about me in the past; even though they may not consider the repercussions of their comments and behaviors — each moment of disappointment I feel is actually an opportunity for me to just accept them, as is, for who they are.

Because when I do that, I open the door for me to accept myself. 

xo

A

Why You Need To Keep Putting Yourself Out There, Spelling Mistakes and All

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Part of the reason why I’m happy today is that in spite of the fear of how I might be perceived or what may be said about me, I put myself out there.

Pressing post on my first article for my blog on Dec 31st, 2015 was the catalyst for drastic change in my life. It was also what propelled me towards this idea that I might be really awesome in my inherent state.

Me as is, was something to be celebrated, not frowned upon.

It also taught me that it was OK to be me on a global scale, on any scale for that matter, and that I had a talent, of which I didn’t have to feel bad about celebrating.

I could stop minimizing my worth.

In putting myself out there, I was able to get myself into a state of wellness.

But it was really hard to do in the beginning.The reason I was so scared was that I was so deeply concerned about what others might say or think of me – the underlying issue to that being that I craved perfection.

And without an editor, the perfect amount of sleep, a peer review and the clarity of a Buddhist monk, it wasn’t going to happen.

I mean heck, perfection just doesn’t exist. And it’s in correcting the errors that we find greatness.

I believe in the process of life. I trust it. So when I find an error days later and gasp in horror, I look at it as a chance to give myself a pep talk.

“Andrea – just because you made an error doesn’t mean you suck. It means you were in the zone and your eyes skimmed over it.”

You also never know where that edit and update may take you. After I update something I usually share it on social media again. And who knows who might come across that post? Maybe they will find some common ground in what I’ve written? Maybe it will help them face something they have been scared to admit to or talk about?

I believe we need to do our best, all the time. But sometimes my best isn’t the best of the best. For example, when I’ve had a rough sleep, but I wake up with this idea for an article and it just pours out of me like syrup.

The idea might be amazing, but the packaging might not be that great. That day, the article as a whole might not be my all-time best. But because I’m feeling it, and I follow the goosebumps, I post it.

I believe those pulls to do something are things we must listen to. So I do. And every-time I do I get better at being me.

Days later I often find an error or two. But you know what? That’s inevitable. It’s gonna happen. The eyes that are reading it two days later aren’t the eyes that skimmed it two days earlier at 6 am.

Plus, with clients, dishes, and laundry I don’t have time to take my posts through a rigid editing process. So I choose to post it and move past the fear of judgment or shame that sits on my shoulder telling me I should be scared to share my words with the world.

So to one and all: put yourself out there. Do your best. Just know that your best isn’t going to be Harper Collins editing team quality, at all times. And don’t hate on yourself when you inevitably realize that.

The world needs you to be you, so keep putting yourself out there.

xo

A