Piece of Mind

~I’ll teach you, and you’ll teach me.~

[I had a whole buttload of words written before realizing how off topic I was when I first sat down to write. It’s like reverse writer’s block, and probably even more annoying, but I guess some of those thoughts I can save for another time. Just a short entry today because I’m too frustrated that I can’t get my thoughts out like I intended.] So it’s not a shot in the dark to say I’ve been spending a lot of time in Pokemon these past few days, and with so much to distract me in the game, plus my zetta slow pacing to begin with when I’m playing games I like, suffice to say I’m taking my sweet time just enjoying the game. And just because it’s a game that supposedly targets a younger audience, doesn’t mean that there aren’t things to think about and/or learn from. One thing I’ve noticed in the new games is that when you put Pokes in a nursery, a feature in Pokemon historically mainly used for breeding Pokes, instead of leveling up as you walk about elsewhere in the game, in Sword and Shield, the two Pokes will now attempt to teach each other their moves.

[For those of you that don’t know, Morning Sun is not accessible to the “Unique Horn” Pokemon naturally. Mine happened to learn it from her friend while I had it accidentally placed in the nursery while organizing my boxes. Yes, she is Timid natured.]

Take from that what you will, if anything at all, but I interpret it as even Pokemon know to always be learning from the ones they’re with and their friends and to help their peers grow.

“Do you wanna know how I got these scars?”

[November 13, 2019]

There’s a phenomenon that some, if not most, people experience, called intrusive thoughts, or some variation thereof. It’s when a random idea pops into our head, almost like a screaming voice, randomly telling you or tuning your thoughts towards some random thing. It’s called intrusive because for the time it’s happening, it’s almost all consuming.

~We’ve all danced through trapped in this machine. We’ve all danced in fire, looking through the screen.~

[November 11, 2019]

Conception, the formation of an idea in ones mind. Inception, when that idea begins to hold you, and you spin its web. You give it your thought, your time, your effort. You let those ideas grow. You let it take control of your mind. You let it take over your mind. Observation, the thoughts and senses you perceive. Reality, the world those details create. You see, you smell, you think. You assume and presume, you assemble. You make a world that is yours. Your truths, your beliefs, your reality.

~Todo lo que haces.~

[November 8, 2019]

I’ve spoken previously on many occasions about how I use emotions and/or thought memories as a means to set my mood or attain some goal. I use pleasantness to make light of moments, anxiety for adrenaline, fury for strength and vigor, et cetera. One such emotion that I ‘tap’ into that I feel like is oft misunderstood is failure.

Failure, in a sense, is an emotion of dread, negative in nature, and a downer, so to speak. But like sadness and anger, just because it’s a negative emotion, doesn’t mean it’s useless. Like how we need darkness to recognize the light, we need failure to recognize our degree of success. For me, the sense of failure is perhaps one of my most powerful emotions, because I use the sense-memory for DETERMINATION, among other things.

But that’s a topic to continue another time.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about a feeling that’s often confused and/or entangled with failure, namely, and as spoiled by the title of this post, shame.

There are very few things that I am ashamed of, and one of which coincidentally (or fatedly) was given reminder to me just today.

I took three years of Spanish in high school. And by took, I mean I was in class, I did learn some of the material (at least enough to pass the courses), but I didn’t really take it seriously and saw it more as a “for fun” thing, even as formal education has never really been a priority for me, I took this course even more casual still. My teacher [probably] knew that about me, and I honestly believe I was one of her least liked students, and this is one of my shames.

Shame is, for all intents and purposes, one of the simplest ways to describe what I call “useless” emotions, and simply put, it’s simply that, useless. Simple. [Alright, enough with the repetition.] There is no good use I’ve found for shame, but before going on, I suppose it’s better to identify what shame is to me.

Like I’ve said in the past, I carry memories of failure with me, and constantly think through them. Failures are mistakes or accidents, sometimes avoidable, sometimes due to unknown or unforeseen circumstance, or sometimes just pure misfortune. They are natural, but more importantly, pondering failure usually leads to insight, this process is like finding the silver lining of failure; a chance to learn.

I attempted to take Spanish in university, seeing as it was a possible credit for my optionals. I thought I learned [and retained] enough from my last three years that I’d be able to survive, and maybe continue learning. I was wrong. Yeah, I could read it and had decent understanding and vocab, but that was it. I wasn’t allowed to take the beginners’ class because I had the proficiency certificate, but I definitely did not deserve the title of “experienced”. This was the first and only time I dropped a course. I felt much shame in this.

However, like any looming cloud, failure threatens to rain down its cast, and one of failure’s precipitates is shame. Shame is the dread of failure; the fog of the rain. It prevents us from seeing clearly, or worse, it can mislead us and cause us more hurt in its confusion. We don’t want to fail because we feel shame in that outcome. We’re disappointed when we fail because that’s shame’s toll on our mindset. We fear failure because shame is consuming. For this, I previously couldn’t find a use for it, and despite trying again now, any such use for shame still eludes me. 

My shame didn’t come from failing to perform in the course though, rather it was more from failing myself/my time spent, in part, but mostly, failing my high school teacher. She was kind, and fun, and lax (at least towards me), a trait that I took advantage of. Thinking back, I possibly gave her much reason to be lax with me, as if I didn’t care to learn, she might as well give effort to someone else who was there for a proper reason. I don’t blame her for that, and I should blame myself for the happenstance. In retrospect, this is also a source of my shame.

That isn’t to say that shame and failure go hand in hand and always together though, or at least they don’t have to. Awareness and insight are powerful tools after all, and that’s what we do as learners.

Shame is one of those things that kinda creep their way in. Sometimes it happens slow and insidiously and you feel it growing, but sometimes all at once and entirely. and you don’t notice it at all until it’s already consumed you. That’s how this was for me. At the time I felt no shame; perhaps I should’ve, but I didn’t. I wasn’t shamed after each year in high school when going through my book and seeing my near-minimum effort. Nor when I checked the box to transfer out of the class in university. I realized my shame a little bit later when I chanced upon my former teacher in a grocery store.

When I saw her, I felt panic. Not unusual, if you don’t expect to see someone, it’s common to be lacking words and or not be in the mindspace to want to talk to that person. That wasn’t what I felt. I dug into my mind, things I had learned and used every day during school. I drew upon nearly nothing. Me, the one that remembers, recalled nothing of substance, nothing worth uttering. I went over scene after scene of classes upon classes, recalled words and phrases and activities, but it was then I realized how remiss I had been of storing those memories, and how little use I had gotten out of them in the times that I should’ve. I cited that I simply couldn’t recall anything at the moment and faulted memory. Internally, I conceded that I was actually ashamed.

“Identify the thought and grasp that consciousness. Segregate, determinate, and cogitate the circumstance and happenstance that lead to that thought, learn anything that can be learnt from it. Repeat until there’s no new consciousness to be gained.” This is one of my common mantras when remunerating my experiences. When applied here, it allows me to remove shame from failure. Failure is the feeling about the state and/or situation when something is gone wrong. Shame is a possible attached feeling brought on internally by failing. Gleaming failure brings insight to something that’s awry, or wrong, or could be made better. Shame is the veil that conceals and steers us away from failure because we fear dread.

Being able to confront, identify, and separate shame from failure (and then promptly discard said shame due to its uselessness) is why I say I carry a high sense of failure, but I have very little I’m ashamed of. I suppose that’s also why it’s that much more crushing when I come to terms with things I should be ashamed of, and why I don’t discard the shame attached to those failures.

Perhaps that’s the utility in shame. When used correctly and sparingly, instead of shielding us from particular thoughts by steering us away, shame can function as the accent to highlight something worth remembering, or that there’s more to be learnt.

~Put to rest, what you thought of me, while I clean this slate, with the hands, of uncertainty. So let mercy come, and wash away, what I’ve done.~ Apparently some dumb things happen when you fall asleep outdoors as an adult. It was all fine and dandy when I was a kid, but apparently now it’s either dangerous and/or creepy for me to just hang out at the park in the dead of night. And I thought it’d be nice to just enjoy myself for a bit.

“Every hand is turned against you. Even the ground beneath your feet carries the seeds of your destruction! “ [Written November 3, 2019] I’ve make it no secret that I’ve always had a certain disdain for the month of November, I won’t bother retreading it here (link if you feel like reading), but basically, I’ve always viewed it as the end of the year, and thereby, the end of things. It’s when the skies are darkest, when the cold is most bitter and there’s no refuge from the wind. Most of all, for some reason, being out in November just makes me feel…naked. It’s recently come to my attention that I have what’s considered a rather unique ability to change my mindset almost completely, usually to suit my need for the moment, but also, just to avoid/prevent myself from thinking about certain things. No more often do I abuse this ‘ability’ than in November. I hate the desolate feeling the month brings me, the melancholy in my being and the austere of the air. Ergo, I simply don’t, or rather, didn’t. I’ve been putting some thoughts into, well, my thoughts, lately. I typically have no use for thoughts I deem, for lack of a better word currently, negative, I’d cast them aside and brush them off as useless, rarely revisiting those thoughts when it comes time for recollection. I keep happy or serious or even angry and sad thoughts for use when I need them, but not lugubrious or saturnine, as I have no use for them, or so I thought.  Lately, I’ve come to the conclusion that perhaps it was rather that I was just not wise enough to understand such negativity, and/or not clever enough to find use for keeping such thoughts. I had a solution for dealing with them, in that I didn’t, but I question the effectiveness of my chosen route.  One of my closest friends from elementary school once did a report on a short story about the anomaly that is boredom. That there was no beginning to it, only an end, and the best way to get past boredom was to delve straight into it, let it consume you, let it pass you. For some reason, her words struck me hard, and I do recall her words every so often, especially in moments of intense, jittery boredom. Melancholy, the way I’ve seen it lately, is like this sense of intense boredom. It comes suddenly and without reason, it wants to consume you, and you typically avoid it by doing or thinking its opposite or otherwise change your mindset. I’ve never really considered the other option in the case of melancholy, what happens if I let it consume me instead?? And on that vein, I’ve challenged myself this year, this month, to allow myself to be consumed by my thoughts, all of them, and see wherever they might take me. That isn’t to say that I’ll be avoiding the positive or cheeky or otherwise thoughts, but that I won’t stray away if I bring myself to a doorway of tenebrosity, I'm turning off my 'filter', as it were. Even if I’m left in utter darkness, then the gleam and sparkle of something seldom seen will catch my eye, and I’ll have that aspect to explore. So, as such, rather than my normal abstaining and feeling dread that I purchase for the month like I had in years previous, I’ll be writing -something- almost every day instead, Monday through Friday. If anyone cares to join me, favours the prose of my writing, or heck, if anyone enjoys reading about my [redacted because the word I’m looking for eludes me atm] thoughts, all I ask is for you to enjoy and maybe even be inspired to think a little deeper about yourself as well.

~Well I believe it all is coming to an end, Oh well, I guess we’re gonna pretend. Let’s see how far we’ve come, let’s see how far we’ve come.~ [Written June 18, 2018; Edited September 4 2018; Rewritten June 30, 2019; Posted July 1, 2019] [Part 2 of x] [Huh, so it’s been about exactly a year since my last post. I was doing some thinking lately about some certain topics relating to “Forgiveness” and it got me going back to thinking about this. So I guess now this multi-parter will be a yearly entry (it won’t, and I do actually want to finish typing it up in a more timely manner, but finding the effort and time has proven to be difficult, apparently).]

I had a friend, a long time ago. Grade school days. From when I used to play a certain arcade racer, and was actually quite into it. I hadn’t known it at the time of the encounter, but it proved to be one of my most important, and probably among the most defining ones for my mentality. I’ll likely tell this story eventually, as it is quite amusing to me, but for now, we’ll leave that for a time, she was one of the most important characters in my life, who I happen to have back now.

I was never very close to my extended family. I wanted to be, but it wasn’t quite a thing for us. My mom’s side aren’t on very good terms, and for one reason or another [we’ll just leave it at that], we don’t talk very much to my dad’s side. I have six cousins, two from each of my uncles [and boy would it be awkward if I’m mis-remembering right now...], but only one unit lives within visiting distance, not that we’ve seen each other in years...

It was earlier this summer, in fact, I’m basically just coming back from, a weekend away. The first time I went on a getaway with friends, actually, excluding camping. We went to a convention an hour or two out of town, just for fun. I’ve never been to a convention of any sort, and although I’ve been known to hate and avoid crowds and interacting with others when possible, loathing nor nervousness weren’t anywhere on my mind. I was going with my friend, L, her cousin, A, and the cousin’s boyfriend, J. For context, I’m pretty decent friends with the cousin and boyfriend. I was later informed of the possibility of being joined by two more of L’s friends. Not a big deal, the living arrangements were already putting me off center, so a tad more awkwardness wouldn’t really faze me. For me, the idea was trying something new, and at the time, I was seeing it as a chance to “get out of my comfort zone” as they say, so in the back of my mind, it was just adding to the challenge.

The trip roles around and the original four of us drive out and find our rental place and settle in, et cetera, et cetera. Eventually we meet up with the other two friends on the grounds, and we kick off to hanging out and having a generally good time, typical convention stuff, I assumed. I am just meeting these two for the first time, but the conversation flowed naturally. At first it seemed uncharacteristic of me, but then I thought a bit.

I couldn’t help but reflect on the thought that, at the time, was still nagging at the back of my mind, the time when my character was called into question, as it was something I recently decided to revisit and think about deeply. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this weekend would be the bookend to that chapter of growth and realization of that aspect of my character. As it turns out, in conversation with A and J later on, I had gotten along so well and naturally with the L’s friends that A and J thought we had met before and I was part of their group from the get-go. Upon hearing that, I actually burst out laughing, because during that weekend, Both L’s friends had thought A, L, and I were all cousins, because of how friendly and close we seemed. It was this moment that I realized it had only been two years prior when I met A (for real), It had been a sticking point for me lately. Like one of those things that you randomly can’t stop thinking about, coming up so randomly after all this time, but once you’re confronting it, the thought doesn’t go away until it’s settled.  Y’see, one of the things that was called into question was my ability to be friendly, to be personable, and to be likable. I had always taken pride in my language and tact, but it wasn’t ever a thing I really bothered to flex in spontaneous interaction. Like I know I can carry a conversation if I had to, but I did doubt the quality of my interaction. When I first thought it was uncharacteristic of me, this time, it got me to realize that if the feeling of being ‘uncharacteristic’ came up so much, perhaps it was my own perception of my character that was wrong. That weekend made me realize that my fears were unmet, that I can put forth my best self, even in front of strangers, but most of all, that I was congenial. I had never forgiven myself for letting some think otherwise of me, and holding onto the critique has also opened my eyes into seeing the presence of this aspect in myself, as well as in others. It was sort of like a poison, what was said, casting doubt. But it wasn’t a bad thing that I held onto it for so long, nor is it bad that I’m now forgiving myself for believing it, and for letting it come to a head. Life’s certainly been interesting since coming to this realization, at least moreso than before, as it’s given me another means to put forth effort for others.

[previous] [next] [If you're new, or want to start over, press here] P.S.: It would also turn out that L would become friends with my nearby-ish cousin(s) through other connections. So that’s where the serendipity comes in to this story, I suppose. Story to follow if requested.