It Grows Us, Though
- Admit it to yourself.
- Write it down.
- Tell a friend.
What you can’t do is rationalize, sensationalize, and catastrophize.
Hiding it makes it worse.
Categories
Tag: truth
Questions are scary.
They take a lot to ask. You have to get ready to answer them. They are unpredictable. If the world fit into basket we want it to, then there is no anxiety. If no one asks questions after finishing, then we get comfort.
But I wager the scariest thing isn’t that people ask questions. The scariest thing to people is that questions lead to answers.
Questions lead to answers.
Question lead to answers, even if we don’t want to hear them.
The answers can come in many forms, based on how people treat you, what they say, or how they act afterwards, but questions lead to answers.
That’s a hard thing to swallow because we end up having to deal with not being right. The idea of not making the most of our situation, and dealing with the idea that we aren’t going to be right with our assumptions.
It isn’t an easy task, and people block questions all the time. It isn’t an easy way to ask a lot of the time. The people around you shush you, and your ego tries to do so by making your stomach hurt.
Throwing a rock against the glass
Every time we ask a question, we throw a rock. There is fear through throwing the rock, but the bigger fear is breaking the glass.
The glass is our interpretation of the world. Each layer is foggier and foggier, changing our reality.
We all see things differently, because we see with our brains, and not our eyes. It is an important distinction, because if you think you see the world as it is, there is no room for questioning anything wholeheartedly, and you have effectively shut yourself off.
They say perception is reality, but that saying is for people who do not bother to try to see reality. It is a saying of comfort. It is fear talking.
That fear is debilitating.
Categories
Mind Readers Don’t Need Communication
People are not mind readers. There is nothing more frustrating than someone saying one thing and meaning another. It leads into several bad places, chief among them an expectation on someone who doesn’t know what you want. It leaves both the communicator and the communicated upset. It just leaves everyone confused including the communicator. When I hear it it’s often layered in false humility or humor.
We hate when it happens to us, but we seem to do it to others with impunity. We tell everyone else about our issue, but not the person we communicated with. And we begin another cycle of embarrassment and resentment. When questioned, we become masters of body language and cultural edicts. The phrase “they know” is often thrown around. Someone else actions become layered in our thoughts, creating all types of anguish.
Good communication has a level of feeling in it. We are natural BS detectors. We are able to discern something honest and not honest subconsciously. Our lives used to depend on it for most of human history. We have to connect to our emotion and be honest about what we feel as we talk about what we want. This doesn’t mean harsh either. The truth is not license to let off steam. We can talk about how we feel without going to extremes.
You can discuss any emotion with a little practice. Anger, disappointment, resentment – all these things are valid feelings. When you communicate with those feelings, your message becomes more powerful.
The basis of great communication lies in truth. When we open our mouth, make a gesture or write, we are responsible to try to do our best. Bad communication doesn’t allow us to do that, and it muddles our energy. When we communicate effectively, it improves every other aspect of our actions and , most importantly, things get done.
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It’s Weird If They Knew
It would be weird if they knew.
Sometimes, walking into a room I feel like they know everything – everything bad. When they pause, there is a piece of me that thinks they know I put the wrong shoe on that morning, the competitor that had better material, all those times I woke up late and was the last person to walk into the meeting.
I think they know that sometimes I surf Reddit, that I find the TV show Maury interesting, that I haven’t read half of my library. They know that I just recently added to the way I dress, and they have pictures of me dressing poorly, the shoes that I used to have, and an ill-fitting belt.
They will find out that I curse sometimes. That I am comfortable around the meanest group of people (comedians), I can drink a lot and get obnoxious. They know that I can comfort eat with the best of them, I spend too much time playing video games, and I love to binge watch TV. That one time I didn’t wash my hands when I left the bathroom in my apartment.
In short, I feel like everyone else knows that I am an imposter. That everyone else doesn’t do these things, that I am not committed to the mission since I do. But, it would be weird if they knew – since they just met me.
After sitting in a coffee shop yesterday, I thought about this for some time. I realized that yes, I do those things, and I will do things in the future that aren’t perfect. I am not the guy (yet!!!) that has the perfect routine, gym at 5 AM, and asleep by 10 PM. I am not the best read guy in the world. But the biggest problem that I face comes from my lack of self-compassion. People aren’t out to exploit you when they first meet you (except confidence men, beware of confidence men).
So the key to remember going forward is – its weird if they know.
P.S – Now you know all this stuff about me :-(.
Categories
Losing My Self Connection
One of my greatest fears as a kid was losing respect. When I was younger, that’s how the world(my thoughts) measured everyone, how much respect you garnered by your peers. Respect was an equation, with some parts how brave you were, mixed with some parts how funny you were, mixed with some parts how smart you were, finished with a layer of cool. To lose that meant banging around the bottom of the social ladder until you landed in a of victim-hood. It was a scary place.
It was hard to not measure myself by the outside world. I am what the world sees, at least I thought. When possible, I thought I had to reform to what the world wanted, so I could eventually land at the top of the social totem pole.
This wasn’t a great strategy. I lost myself, my self connection,in the struggle.
I allowed the world to decide my self-worth, and through that I made horrible decisions that cost me nothing but time,money, and connection. Instead of learning how to dance with my peculiarity, I ran from it. I closed my ears off to my internal music, and the result was I became deaf to the most interesting parts of myself.
One of my resolutions this year is to make sure that I get closer to that connection – get closer to myself. Slowly cutting through the wires of noise that were strewn about my mind to get to that signal that lasted as a kid.Its been a process, but I am learning the closer you get to it, the closer the world offers solutions to problems you unconsciously had. Your art comes out, ready to take on these problems ahead of you.
Nothing is scarier, but in turn, nothing is more satisfying than self connection.
Categories
Pledge Two – Another Beginning
Setting things down on paper is pretty difficult for me. You can’t avoid what you wrote if it is staring you in the face. The promise cannot be missed.
My last declaration was to make each blog post three sentences. It was something I could do without too much thought – nothing more of three minutes of time is all I needed to crank something out. Quality didn’t matter, just being consistent.
I feel like through those 8 weeks, I finally built the habit of throwing things on this blog. Better or worse, I have gotten it done.
Now I want to make a new pledge. I plan on taking at least 10 minutes on each post with edits. I will spend at least 2 months making the proper meta data, tweet links, and other things. I pledge to make the blog for fully formed.
If this as any odd side effects I am sure they will end up here :-).
Categories
The World Doesn’t Make You
It isn't the worlds fault if you quit.
They may have set the stakes,found the opponents, and made the weather horrible so it was that much more difficult.
But it isn't the worlds fault if you quit.
The truth is difficult to figure out. Once it is however, be prepared to find push back. Arrows will be slung at everything but that truth, but in the end, that is how you know that the truth is the truth.
Armor up.
Categories
Letting Go
I was talking to my cousin today about comedy.
My life circles around this comedy thing, I think about it a lot, and every day is just another day to learn something new. Seeing as he is an impressive performer, with a ton of time in the business, and the respect to match, I sometimes go to him with ideas and to bitch about what I see and what is happening.
For the most part, he usually says something wise, and I leave the conversation figuring that a lot of my worries really mean nothing in the scheme of things. AS he says, it is a tempest in a teapot – something that makes a ton of noise, but at the end of the day,you will forget it happened.
It usually calms me down, until my next manic episode happens, and I am right back on the cell phone asking advice from a master.
In short, I am happy he is around to answer my questions.
I think people look at relationships like that in the short term. I have in the past. It was always what shows can I get on, what can I figure out, how can I make this club or this date happen. Let me drop his name and see if it can open some doors or me.
After a few months doing that, I retreated from it. I started seeing what this, and by this, I mean comedy, was. It was time and networking. It is building your own brand. It is working on your material so it blows everyone else off the stage.
His presence in my life enhances a lot of that, even if he gives me no shows from this day forward. The advice on how to proceed, on how long to wait, when to submit to things, and keeping me humble has significantly improved my progress in comparison with my peers.
The last part is really important. Last time he was in the city, he kept referring me as an open micer, when I was around other comics. My roommate was wondering why he called me that, but I understood. I am no one in this business until I pull myself out of it. Until I am on the road, making a living, I am that, and that alone.
In short, being coached really has brought the better out of me, and I think it adds exponentially. Like Warren Buffet’s 500 words a day, advice from him a few times a month is enough to keep my head straight, and to realize what I am working for.
I want to be the best, so I have to learn from them.
I am apprehensive about writing the thank you notes.
Frankly I feel like people don’t want to hear from me. Writing the Thank You notes every day, I was thinking of who to thank, and why to thank them.
I got lost in it all. It is scary.
I have these thoughts, where I think I can ruin relationships y just speaking to the person. I don”t quite know where it comes from, but I know it can destroy me personally because I let relationships linger.
I am really good at doing things in the moment – but after that I just retreat to my shell. Frankly it is difficult to break from it, because I always feel like a target as soon as I leave it. How will I get shot today, who is going to hit me.
I do it with comedy, my writing, personal relationships, everything. I am scared to put myself out there. Even as I write this blog now, my stomach hurts, my typing is getting slow. I notice that, every time I put something real down on paper, I lose a little bit of steam, and part of me goes right into PR mode.
I try to clean up messes that don’t even exist, just becaue I think I am going to cause them.
Maybe writing the thank you notes will be a way to get through this process. Putting myself out there – just getting someone to look and care, should make this very interesting. Now i just have to do it.
Done: Water, Reminder, 3 Tings
Not Done: Todo 16/8
From the desk of Adam Thomas 