I'm a writer just because I've chosen to write, I want to be a better one and am using this blog to improve my skills. This blog is my experiences, ideas and views. The content could be absolute bull shit, it could also resonate with you. We are all imperfect people with imperfect ideas, through sharing them and being open to feedback – we hopefully reach higher truths. In the least through reading this, you get to experience another perspective for a few minutes. "A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Portia stood outside her apartment and stared at the sky. The heavens had split in two. The part to her left had turned red. Dark stormy clouds covered a large bit of the blooded sky. To the right of her, the sky appeared to have no consciousness that the world was living out its final hours. She put her Peter Stevenson cigarette to her lips and inhaled a big satisfying gulp of polluted air then dropped the bud to the ground and pressed her brown lace up boots over it. Releasing the smoke from her lungs she breathed out a sigh of relief. It was over!
The masses were anxiously scurrying the streets in the hope of accomplishing something of importance. Other’s wiser, were trying to get to a place or people of solace. To Portia, it didn’t seem that different to any other day. Everyone trying to get something done that seemed so damn important.
She spotted him from a distance. There were huge tree’s planted on every traffic light in the area. It was to try and give a greener living experience to the neighbourhood. It did blend in with all the old buildings here but it unnerved her that these ancient slow tree’s lived in her past paced life. He emerged from one of the old tree’s, she thought that he maybe was part of the tree as his clothes were different shades of dirty green and his dreadlocked hair streamed over his clothes like branches. His skin was an ashen dark brown. She couldn’t help but stare at him as he strolled closer to her. She held his gaze and to her surprise, he came to a stop in front of her.
“Are you lost?” She asked.
“I couldn’t help noticing you standing over here.”
“Do I stand out?”
“You look as if you couldn’t care less about how you want to spend your last few moments.”
“It’s not the case. I care very much how I would like to spend my time. It’s just weird planning out a day when you don’t have anything to achieve after that day.”
“So you don’t usually do anything just for the joy of it?”
“I play with my horses. But I couldn’t possibly go horse riding today. It would be a waste. Imagine…your last day on earth and all you manage to do is ride on horses. I wouldn’t want to be remembered like that.”
I breathe in the delicious bitter scent of coffee and take a sip from what looks like a tea cup. It’s a cappuccino and it has a white foam in the shape of a heart on top. I feel love emanating from the coffee, I take another sip and longingly glance at the french apple turnovers. They have been freshly baked and the tormenting smell of pastry tempts me to part with my even more dwindling funds. How nice would it be to have an apple turnover in this warm coffee shop as I look out at the rain pouring down the outside of the window? I succumb to temptation and place my order. As I wait expectantly for the apple turnover, I notice a man I haven’t seen before, several other heads are turned to note his presence. Cigarette to his lips, he is placing a poster on the window, he removes the cigarette and flashes a smile at everyone who had taken the time to examine him. It was the kind of smile that made you smile back and involuntarily, the right side of my mouth curled into a smile.
He steps into the coffee shop towards us and nodded back at the poster, “It’s to recruit more people for this company I have just joined”. At closer inspection, he has dark rings under his eyes and looks tired. He’s a bit rough around the edges, but there’s something magnetic about him. He carries on talking to the few of us still paying attention to him. “I’ve had the best year of my life, haven’t slept much but I can’t sleep in this time of my life, it’s just too much fun.” He is not making much sense and he can see it in our faces. He laughs it off and carries on speaking. “In my sleepless state a month or so ago, I was partying it up when I met an intriguing fellow, Mr Biggs. I love meeting new people, so I was eager to get to know him better. It turned out he is an entrepreneur of sorts and he is starting a company. He didn’t give that many details but he did tell me he saw something in me and that I would make a great addition to his team. After a few more drinks, I wasn’t able to turn down his offer and so here I am trying to get more people to join his company. He is a very interesting man and if you are good at influencing people, our poster is on the wall with all the details”.
My apple turnover is on the table and I can’t decide which needs my attention most; I’m curious to see the poster, my primary goal today was to get a new job. The poster doesn’t give away too many details but does say that he is looking for a group of people with diverse skill sets who have the power to influence others. The poster itself is printed on strange paper, very smooth, it must come from another town; I had to apply to get into this company. It detailed that to get the job, you had to write a letter to Mr Biggs telling him about your life and giving a detailed account of how to persuade a person to do something you liked. I wondered what kind of man Mr Biggs was to let people join his company on this basis. What would he think about my past? Thoughts of home flashed through my mind as I began thinking about what I should write.
I walked home in a trance like state as I put together ideas of how I would write this letter. Would I tell the truth? Was I supposed to tell the truth? Maybe he just wanted to see how creative I could be? Sigh, I was an honest person. This letter would be written from my heart and I knew it wouldn’t be the most pleasant of experiences putting down the initial years of my life in a place outside my head. I slightly hated Mr Biggs for the future suffering I was going to endure. Maybe he was a sadist who just got off on reading other peoples sad stories. Even worse, what if he was some a writer who was too lazy to write his own stuff and ended up publishing my letter somewhere!
A cat appeared out of nowhere and started walking alongside of me, three of it’s paws were white which made it look slightly off balance. Cats always seemed to be drawn to me, I must have been a cat in another life. I must have been a bad cat in another life, because I really wasn’t that fond of cats. They made me sneeze and there was also that incident with Josi.
Josi said she needed me to babysit her cat for a few days, which turned into weeks, then months. At first Lulubelle was the sweetest cat or maybe kitten. A small little bundle of black and white fur with slanty, pretty eyes. She was one of the one of the most affectionate cats you could meet. Of course she needed this affection back in a multiplied form. At first I adored having Lulubelle around, it’s easy to love something when you know you only have to love for a short time. As time passed and I realized that this cat slept on my chest every night, scratched my eyes and also made me sneeze. Her litter would stink up my little flat and her little escapades of falling off my balcony were frightening. She was not even my cat, I was looking after Josi’s cat whom I thought was a nightmare of a person, but most of all, I was allergic to cats!
It was all too much to bare and I had to take Lulubelle to a shelter because it had finally dawned on me that Josi had abandoned her cat and I wasn’t ready or capable to look after her. I bundled her in a box and took her to a shelter where I had previously volunteered. I knew they did care for their animals, but it was still heart-breaking to take fluffy Lulubelle out of her box, look into her vulnerable eyes and hand her over to a stranger and hope that there was someone better than myself who would come to the shelter and give her the home she deserved. I spent many days returning to the shelter to see if anyone had taken her. She disappeared after a few days and I told myself she had a better home. I have to think that because otherwise I’m a very cruel person.
The cat was still walking next to me and I picked up the pace so that it would know that I had no intention of making friends with it. The three white legged cat got the idea and left me alone and I got back to my flat in no time. A letter was waiting for me at the door, love letters from my landlord, my rent was late. I quickly put the letter under my mat, I didn’t want to think about such things. I collapsed onto by bed and kept brain storming what I would write in the letter.
Even in retrospect, it’s not easy to figure if what take place was a good or bad force in your life. Change always brings uncertainty. I’ve decided to write down activates and my analysis of all activities going on around me as we start this new era. The old way of things has fallen and I would like to make sure the when people try to speculate what was happening during this period, my writing could be of help. Being a curious person, I would have loved to be able to have read how things were at the start of the previous period. All I have are bits of information that my mom told me when I was young and my experiences to paint a picture of what happened. I feel like I’m missing some vital information and shall never be able to solve the puzzle. So I am writing this so that whoever reads this can have a much better chance at these kind of judgements.
1 New Beginnings
People are confused. They are unsure of who they are or if they are happy with this new change. We, the people, had a contract with our keeper. Our keeper laid down the rules on how we should act to him and in return he looked after us. The lobbyers were not happy with this contract and constantly fought with him to get him to change his laws. The lobbyers also coaxed us into being not cooperative and disrespectful to our keeper. Between the lobbyers, our lack of respect and the keepers need for superiority; he decided he had enough and would no longer be our keeper. The lobbyer’s were going to be given role as keeper, but they had been lobbying for an anarchist society and so here we are now, apparently free.
I have come to the realisation that we are still not free. The keepers teachings stay entrenched in our minds and hearts and those types more able to broaden their minds still run the danger of being absolutely wrong about what they free their mind to. We are all feeling very restless. I have gone back and forth in my head trying to evaluate what I thought of our keeper, but there are many layers involved. My perceptions of him are not only formed by what I saw but also of what my mother told me of him. I feel she may be biased so I can’t make up my mind.
Our weekly paper is no longer being distributed because of this new system. I’m running low on money and to carry on with my travels, I need find work to replenish my funds. Without the weekly paper, I’m left with no list of jobs I can scour through for my breakfast reading. I used to enjoy reading all the jobs I could possible apply for and dreaming of what life would come with these jobs. I once sat at the table all the way till lunch time dreaming out all these scenarios before I realised how much time had passed. I just had more breakfast and carried on the process. It wasn’t a productive day but I did realise that I was quite fond of theatrical jobs.
Now, I have to resort to carrying my loaf of bread down to the town centre and breaking little bits and pieces off into my mouth while I look at all the posters advertising new job openings. It’s not that bad, but it’s just not feasible to drink coffee while doing this. Bread in hand and mouth, I see if there’s anything of interest today. Jobs for bankers, jobs for stylists and jobs for the math inclined. I don’t see anything of relevance. As I’m walking past all the adverts, I glance at my reflection in one of the windows, half a loaf of unfinished bread in my arm, my hair is not brushed and my loose fitting flowery dress has faded into a dirty orange. I can see a few threads hanging. I look homeless. How will I ever get a job like this?? Did I mistake to leave home? I’ve wondered this so many times, always with the same answer. All the experiences I’ve gained since leaving home will always outweigh the turbulence of my life at home. I glare at myself and silently tell myself off for letting the darkness into my mind again.
This town is always raining and it threatens to spill over again. I struggle to remember the reason I initially stopped in this town, I can’t think of what I could have wanted here, I shrug it off. The smell of fresh rain starts to get increasingly stronger and the grim streets darken slightly. The café’s and bookshops on this road all seem to have big glass windows with beautiful lights shining in them. I suddenly feel I’m on the wrong side of these of the glass. I’m also craving that breakfast coffee I’m so accustomed to having. My legs take on a force of their own and transport me to my favourite coffee shop.
I say to you today, my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.
-Martin Luther King, Jr
I’m a dreamer. I love to dream. I dream about following my dreams and I get this warm fuzzy feeling inside. It’s all unicorn like and lovely when it’s this happy unattainable cloud of dreams floating ahead of me. Once I start to question what this dream cloud consists of, my mind suddenly struggles to make realistic forms from this abstract concept. What are my dreams?
When I visualise what my dreams are, I come up with the strangest thoughts!
Images of nature, vitality, healing, words of inspiration, freedom, feeling connected, naturalness, self-acceptance…
I like to think of these more as the inspiration behind a dream. Anyone who has a real drive to follow their dreams and change the external has a deep hunger inside to fix something within themselves. If anyone has read Steve Jobs biography, he was ‘broken’. He was ‘abandoned’ by his real parents, then his first foster parents abandoned him too. Though he was young, this left a deep hunger in him to make his impact on the world.
To tap into what you are hungry for, maybe it’s best to analyse those areas where you feel most broken?
1) I feel physically broken (health) – I constantly need to fix my health, when I can fix my own health, I want to help other people become healthy too.
2) I feel inferior – I have been made to believe my needs mattered less than others. This makes me want equality in the world. People, animals and the environment must all be treated fairly. Everyone should be their natural selves and feel they are no better or worse than anyone else.
Once you can identify what those broken areas, you know what drives you. The next step is to identify what you love. These are the things that you still entertain even when you feel absolutely shit, broke and tired.
Stuff I love:
1) Health food
2) Writing
3) Music
4) Movement – dancing, exercise, yoga, walking
5) Culture Experiences
6) Nature Experiences
7) Natural products (clothes, cosmetics etc)
8) DMC’s (I was introduced to this acronym last night – deep meaningful conversations 🙂 )
The things you love are the tools you can use to bring about what you are driven to do. If you use the wrong tool for the job, no amount of drive is going to get you where you need to be. It’s OK if what you love changes over time, there is a reason why you love what you love at a point in your life, use it to get to the place you are inspired to be.
Now that you have identified your inspiration, drive and tools, let’s describe the end goal or career you could get into. This is the part I absolutely hate the most. Call me crazy but thinking of long term end goals and careers are not for everyone. Do you think if Steve Jobs was asked what his dreams were that he could have been able to even describe what the Apple concept is today? No! He loved typography in college and this ended up being one of the only classes he went to before he dropped out of college. This later became important because he was the first person to add fonts to desktops. Now this is not everyone’s approach, we all have our ways of doing things. Don’t jam a screw into a hole that doesn’t fit. If you have always dreamed of being a doctor or something similarly tangible, great! For the rest, don’t let what you already know about the world limit what your dream should be! Stick with knowing what inspires and drives you, the dream will become less abstract when the time is right.
If you are seriously considering chasing your dreams, you’re probably dreading all the comforts you might have to give up and the hardships you will endure to get where you want to be. It won’t be easy, anything that you don’t have to work for will not seem valuable anyway. Keep in mind, you don’t need to be so drastic. I don’t know why so many books on spirituality or following your dreams (think the alchemist, bible, Koran or any other religious books) like to make you believe you need to give up everything and follow this new way. I’m not a fan of this! Any change like that can scare anyone away from pursuing what they love. Like any diet or lifestyle change, unless you are literally about to die and have to make drastic changes this instant, rather make small adjustments until you automatically want to let go of the old ways of doing things. You don’t need give up everything or have everything figuring out now.
Lastly, you will need to identify the next step to follow your dreams, not the next million steps…just one step in the direction of your dreams.
Next step:
1) Health: Step 1 -> I have my ideas on what it is to eat healthy and exercise well. Put it into practice 5 out of 7 days a week. Journal it.
2) Inferiority: Step 1 -> Write! Write at least 2 posts a week.
In taking that first step, you have already started following our dreams…
“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong.” ― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Thought this was an painfully beautiful metaphor and one of the saddest quotes I’ve read in a while…
I came across an article that enlightened me to the subject of “Acts of Deprivation”. In summary, we have this need to re-enact our childhood traumas that left us feeling abandoned. We want to go through them again because we believe that this time round, we can fix that feeling and feel whole again. This makes us attracted to people with the characteristics our caretakers had that made us feel abandoned. Hence, we all fall in love with our bad boys/girls. Below is a link describing Acts of Deprivation. There are also exercises you can do to identify this in your own life. Interesting stuff!
This is the sort of thing that manipulators love to use. All you need to do is identify the acts of deprivation in a victim and boom, you can get them to do all sorts of things for you. To any manipulative people that are reading this – whatever you have to manipulate to get is not yours to take, you will have to work very hard to keep manipulating to keep it. It’s not worth it!
From a writing perspective, this is the stuff to use for characters in a story. Let’s take 50 Shades of Grey; I can now understand why so many women were literally “wetting their panties” reading this book. A man with the looks she adores in a powerful position; he represents a twisted father figure very well! He spanks her, controls her, tells her when/what to eat, when to sleep, how to look after herself, buys her toys and even overly intervenes in her daily life to tell her what to do as if she can’t look after herself. Most fathers can’t be perfect all the time – they can’t always be there for a child and in return the child feels she can’t quite get what she needs from him. Christian Grey is not perfect! Add a lot of sex everywhere that you didn’t think was pleasurable and is suddenly pleasurable; the sex itself is also an act of deprivation. It’s a lot of scenarios that under normal circumstances would make you feel degraded – but all of a sudden, you read this and you realise it turns you on! (Like when that boy says something degrading to you, you suddenly want him more). Spoiler Alert – but apparently the 50 shades of grey books go through 3 books of him being out of her reach leaving her deprived until the end where Mrs Lead Character whose name I can’t even remember manages to “fix” all their/his issues and she is finally no longer deprived. So in reading the books, most woman’s childhood issues are recreated in some twisted way, then fixed in the end. We all have our happy ending 😉
On a more positive note. Acts of Deprivation has an opposite force called Acts of Inspiration, to be attracted people that accept us for who we are but whose characteristics inspire us to something greater! The challenge here is to get around that mentality that we don’t need to win someone’s care but just accept it, especially when we are hard wired to believe that nothing that isn’t worked for is worth having. My answer to that; we still need to work to fight that side of ourselves that loves to be deprived, and at least this time we will grow and have a better chance at a happy ending.
That’s more that’s more than enough inspiration from me, I would like to go brood on more deprived characters…
The character in my mind that haunts me most, is the image women create for themselves, she is Self Image. If she were to materialise from my mind, this is what she would say.
It would be hard to place the exact date I came into existence, I would guess I’m roughly 21. I have stayed this age for years. I don’t remember the first few years of my life or even the powers that created me. I like to think I was conceived around the time Madame was 3 years old. You will think I’m a woman when you meet me; I am probably a woman but I can be anything, I can be a man sometimes, I’m not the expert on what it is to be a man, but to be a man I basically take on some characteristics that Madame believes are masculine. She usually panics when I do this! It’s very important to her that I am a woman, feminine and perfect.
Madame has accepted me as I am on a few occasions but mostly I’m always being compared to some crazy perfect creature, who is ever changing and a figment of her imagination. I feel abused and hurt by this constant comparison! I used to take all that nonsense but now I play tricks to get my revenge. I wait for incidents that cause Madame to feel fragile then change the way I look. It scares her and she feels terrible. She also blames those incidents for my changes which is quite funny, but then she punishes me. That manipulative Madame knows that she is the sole reason I live so she punishes me by punishing herself. She thinks that by being cruel to herself I will become perfect. Not so! Oh I used to try, but I’m over that now. When she is kind to me, I reward her by being someone that will makes her happy. When she is cruel to me, I make small changes to myself that will make her believe that I will turn into her worst nightmare, Madame knows I’m the key to her being happy with herself – if I turn into her worst nightmare, she will never be able to be happy with herself.
Madame does not like interacting with the world; she uses me to interact with everyone else. She likes to stay locked away in that state of nothingness where she feels safe, she makes me give the illusion to everyone that I am her and I have to do everything for her. Now that I have told you this, you can understand why it’s so important to her that I am perfect – she wants to be seen as perfect too. Madame can be a cold unfeeling person, then there are those days, even months when she is besotted with me. It’s always those times when parts of me have come close to what she would like me to be. It’s intoxicating to be idolised, it worries me though; she idolises me so much that I feel like a god. To think you are a god is not healthy! I’m in charge of interacting with everyone – when I’m feeling like a god, I probably don’t treat people that humanly. Being a god makes me feel as if I’m so much better than them, this would cause me to act in a way that is not fitting. Madame doesn’t think how I feel when someone decides it’s time to bring me down to being a mere mortal, that is until she realises her idol is substandard. Then the phase passes and I’m back to being improved upon!
When I’m interacting with others, Madame doesn’t have access to try and control me as much. I can just go through the motions and send all the information I receive back to her. She loves new information so she is mostly well behaved during these periods. I say mostly because there are those times when others give her feedback that I’m slipping up, she gets into such a state and I’m left on my own to pretend everything is alright in case I make her even madder.
I am very tired these days, so much time is spent on trying to keep Madame happy. I thought she just wanted me to impress everyone else but it’s even worse when we are alone. She thinks all this alone time is the perfect time to coax me into being something better. I don’t mind improvement, we all need it, but she always wants instant change. She is not realistic! Teach someone how to ride a bike in a slow caring manner and it’s a lovely bonding process. Show someone a picture of a bike and say, “That should be you! Be that!” The person will fall and hurt themselves. In this instance Madame would probably get even angrier because the picture she pointed at hasn’t emerged. Absolute madness! I long for the day we can have a less turbulent relationship. I don’t want to be idolised, I want to be loved and accepted with all my flaws.
Crazy Thinkings 