I love to write. I need to write more than I realize. I want to work towards writing every day. It’s one of the best ways I can process my emotions and thoughts. I excel more at doing so through writing than I do through speaking, and since I’m an introvert it works better for my needs than it does through speaking. My inner life is so rich that I should definitely be writing the stuff down that goes on inside my head. My inner life is much more active than my outer life so it’s best if I make use of that through writing.

I frequently think about how I want to want to improve myself. I frequently think about how I want to get back to having good, productive daily habits that are in line with my values and strengths. I was reminded of something I learned about years ago when I went to the training I went to last week. The speaker brought up “Flow Experiences” and I was reminded of how they really do increase your happiness levels.

Flow experiences are experiences in which you are fully engaged in what you are doing because you love whatever you’re doing. You end up losing track of time and are completely in the moment. Typically flow experiences result from doing things that you are passionate about or strong in, and so they are truly fulfilling experiences. Multiple Positive Psychology books talk about how the more often you engage in Flow Experiences in your day to day life, the greater your happiness levels will become. This is one way to slightly improve your baseline happiness levels.

My flow experiences include hiking, writing, reading, creating music, making art, and meditating. If I were to do these six things regularly, or atleast a few of them every day, I know I would feel happier. I would be doing the things that I truly love and am good at, and would be living a life that’s more congruent with my values.

One good thing is that for the past several months, whenever I have a day off, going hiking is a priority of mine. I don’t always make it since the daylight is gone by about 4:30 pm lately and I have a second-shift schedule, but I atleast have the internal motivation to atleast strongly want to go hiking on my days off. I also want to get to a point where I go hiking or atleast walking before I go to work too.

I forget what year it was in college but I think it might have been my first or second year when I started to really get into meditating. What motivated me to do so was when I start to get panic attacks a lot, and I also had tripped not long before then so that reminded me of just how spiritual of a person I truly was. Before then I was an atheist. During that trip I was opened up to the spiritual plane and it was the most amazing experience of my entire life. I actually saw energy itself, in everything. I saw the energy fields around the people I was with, I saw how people had different aura colors that were more predominant than other colors. At the time I didn’t really know what energy fields or auras were but I got really into them after that.

Everything in the room I was in, which was filled with creative/abstract/psychedelic art, was alive. All of the pictures were animated. The room itself was filled with this translucent yet multi colored goo type stuff that filled the room starting from the ceiling and was formulated in large cylindrical coil shapes. I understood this as matter itself, which I then learned that matter itself was composed of energy, which is primarily spiritual. This experience felt more real to me than any other “sober” experience I had ever had before. My ego was torn away and I was exposed to the spiritual realm, which was directly in conflict with the reality that the ego had formulated and controlled for all of my life before this.

I did experience “ego death” before the highly positive/spiritual part of the trip began. The ego death was the scariest experience of my life. It was like a panic attack times 10, and when I looked in the mirror I felt completely dissociated. I was sure I was going to die, so my panic got worse and I puked a ton. I didn’t know it then but what truly died at that time was my ego, and it’s scary as fuck when it happens because it questions your entire perspective and understanding of reality. The ego convinces you that are in complete control, that you are the center of everything, and that nothing is real except for concrete/factual based information. Ego death reverses all of that programming and so your mind and emotions are given a complete shock. The ego re-gained control later on, but this trip changed my perspective on life for good.

A bit later I went to get Reiki done. Reiki is a spiritual practice in which imbalanced chakras are balanced, blockages are opened up, and repressed emotions are brought to the surface. Your spirit is interacted with in a way that can be felt strongly, even physically. During this Reiki session my Reiki practioner told me that I was an Indigo child. At the time I didn’t know what that meant but I looked it up later and it made *so* much sense. The way that I had experienced my entire life was finally clarified and so instead of feeling like an outsider/alien, I felt like I was here for a reason, for spiritual and healing based purposes, and so I felt special. Again this was a complete turn around from how I felt for all of my life until I was given this information and this experience. After this session I started to meditate daily or every other day for a few months. I felt amazing and my external circumstances didn’t control my emotional state anymore. I felt at one with everything and that was exactly what I needed.

I want to start meditating every day again. I want to start writing every day. I want to start making art every day, like I did after my trip for awhile. I want to hike as much as possible, in as many new places as I can possibly find. I want to re-remember that these are the things that I am here for, these are the things that truly matter, and these things are what make life worth living. Of course having deep connections/relationships with others and spreading as much love and understanding as possible are equally important, but the aforementioned passions are all internal/individually based things that fulfill me the most without depending on any other people to do so.

That’s the best word to describe how I’m feeling right now. It’s pretty nice actually, for once I’m not thinking about a ton of stressful shit. Right now I have a playlist of this really peaceful, calm, instrumental music going. I think that’s helping me a lot. I LOVE instrumental music. The lack of words is nice, I find it more relaxing because you can do a lot more thinking, talking, writing or whatever without getting overwhelmed by multitasking while hearing all kinds of “noise”. Sometimes I just want the quiet. Even if I’m listening to instrumental music, it still feels like I’m having some quiet time because I’m by myself and just listening to this really low key music. I’m realizing, or remembering rather, how much peace I need. I desire harmony. I try very hard to maintain it between myself and others and between myself and the rest of whatever environment i’m in.

Of course I desire harmony. I’ve been really attracted to the color teal lately. I want to buy clothes in that color, I want to wear it a lot, I want that color all around me. I was wondering why that is since I know that oftentimes we become attracted to the colors that correspond with the type of energy we need from the chakra which represents that particular color. I researched this, and then I thought about it a lot. I’m attracted to teal right now because teal is the middle ground between blue and green (which are currently my favorite colors). The blue chakra represents harmony, tactful and good communication, speaking your truth, self expression, truthfulness, and purpose. The green chakra is all about love. It’s about balance, compassion, renewal, generosity, and unconditional love.

This makes so much sense to me. All of those attributes are ones that I am first of all very focused on and interested in, second of all I very much need all of these attributes in my life right now, and third of all attaining these attributes will lead me closer to self-actualization. I truly believe in the existence of chakras as I have personally had several spiritual/visual experiences that proved this to me and I have had Reiki treatments in which I physically felt this spiritual healing even though I was hardly physically touched throughout it. I remember that when the healer was hovering over my face with her hands, I saw the colors purple and green. Throughout my life purple and green have been my favorite colors and I’ve been very attracted to them. This also makes sense to me. The purple chakra and the indigo chakra are the two uppermost chakras. They are the most spiritual chakras. The indigo chakra (third eye) has to do with intuition, mysticism, understanding, imagination, and following your soul’s path.

God I love this stuff!! I forgot for a little while how passionate I am about spirituality. I would say I am very spiritual. I used to meditate every day and I would read and talk about spirituality often. I think since then I have gone off my path a little bit due to being preoccupied with other things. Throughout the whole time though I still had the goal and desire to get back to meditating every day.

I had a spiritual experience a couple of weeks ago when I was at work. Granted I was beyond exhausted as I had only slept 2 hours of light sleep the night before, and had to go into work for 7 am. My shift went from 7 am-11 pm as well. And this shift was THE worst one yet, too. I ended up having a panic attack and dissociation, I felt all shaky, eventually I puked and then spent awhile feeling very weak and with an upset stomach and ulcer pain.

At one point I was by myself in the living room, sitting down, and I SWEAR TO GOD that I saw a spirit. It was a entity, it did not have a face or look human, it was just this spiritual mass that moved around in a swirling motion and was translucent in color. I spotted it on the wall that was about 20 feet away from me. I then focused on it and as I did this it began to come towards me in its swirling, slow motion. I began to be able to see more details in it. It’s hard to compare its appearance to anything I have seen in my typical physical reality, but it was very much like the substance that I saw when I tripped and had a very visual/spiritual experience. It was comprised on this kind of web-like material that swirled in several directions but was in a fractal design, with many layers. The pattern was a very tight/detailed stripe pattern. It was like the rings in a tree stump, the ones that represent the amount of years the tree has been alive. This experience was amazing. The most amazing part was that when I was truly open to what I was witnessing, it came over to me, I actually talked to it and said “I hope you’re a nice spirit” and “I see you”, and some other things I don’t remember. I extended my arm out and then extended out my index finger and it came right up to my finger, touched it, and swirled all around it. It had been so long since I last had a visual/spiritual experience and though I felt really terrible right before I spotted the spirit, I’m still glad that I was able to see it because my brain was in a state of hyper vigilance. I think that I was using more parts of my brain at that time because I had no energy reserves elsewhere.

I can’t say that I’m not afraid of death, I don’t think I’d even use the word afraid though. I’m curious about it, very interested in the soul, and actually am looking forward to the experience. This doesn’t mean that I’m looking forward to dying, I just have a feeling that the experience will validate my theories and opinions on this topic, and that will be really great. I’m sure it’ll be overwhelming but from all of the Near Death Experiences I have read about, most of the time their experience is extremely positive. Typically the person feels unconditional love, hears a voice that tells them that they are loved and that everything will be ok, and generally feels utter peace and acceptance.

I believe there is far too much inside each human and living organism for it to just vanish completely after the physical body dies. We have so much in our minds, so many thoughts, so many complex emotions, so many senses, so many abilities. Personally when I’m in my most spiritual state of mind I feel very full, I can actually feel the existence of my soul, and I can feel that my physical body is just a shell around it. This doesn’t make it any less important or amazing, it’s just certainly not all that we are. Our physical bodies themselves are amazing as well. It’s fascinating that we have SO many systems going all at once in a near perfect condition. We can survive an incredible amount of sicknesses, our bodies are extremely tough and work so well. Sometimes I just look at my fingerprints and I’m in awe. The intricate pattern of the prints, the fact that we all have unique patterns that are all this intricate. Our physical bodies are amazing machines capable of many things and extremely resilient as well as complex and highly organized.

I planned to write about a whole slew of other things but they were more negative. I didn’t intend on going in to this subject so much but I just went with the flow. I’ll write a separate post about the other things I wanted to write about. I want to leave this one off on a positive note.

So I just looked through a couple of years worth of photos I took (of myself during those times, pretty narcissistic I know), and it made me think of a lot. Thoughts that summarize what happened during those years–my 4.5 years at college. Thoughts about what changed and what didn’t. And what lead to me being the person I am now from the way I was at the beginning of my time at college, what influences and circumstances altered and molded me.

I used to be healthier, physically healthier that is. I smoked a lot of weed during those 4.5 years but I also took an entire year off and a few half-year or so breaks from it entirely as well. I experimented with acid and ecstasy. Those things altered me and also helped me to find myself a little bit more. But I won’t say that it was a smooth ride, because it sure as fuck was not.

My small experimentation with acid changed me probably the most in terms of learning the most about myself and what was at the core of me. At first I had a major panic attack/ego death at the beginning of my first trip. I ran to the bathroom when I started to feel severe panic, I puked a bunch, I stared at myself in the mirror, and I didn’t recognize the person in the reflection. I felt separate from my appearance. And I think this was also ego death. Yes it was severe dissociation but it was also the completely shocking and scary as fuck realization that my true self is not my ego. All of the defenses I had been putting up, all of what I thought was my identity, was too centered in my ego.

In a way I think dissociation is not just a response to trauma, but I think it is also a small glimpse into the truth that is: We are spirits, composed of light/love, we are simply held inside our physical bodies, our shells. The first realization of this is so scary, because our egos don’t want us to figure that out, and they fight like hell to convince you out of it, which may be the main source of severe anxiety that occurs during dissociation. Here you are, realizing the separation of your soul and your body, while you have just spent your entire life believing that you are just a physical being.

Acid didn’t make me just freak out, it made me face all that I was repressing, and all that I had repressed for many, many years, came to the surface, and reared its ugly head in the course of a few minutes. It was beyond words actually, and as much as I describe my experience, I cannot explain how exactly it uncovered all of that that quickly. Basically acid forces you to face yourself, completely, and your ego loses the intense control it usually has. The ego’s primary purpose is to keep control, to make sure you reason your way out of anything that isn’t based on reason, so that you can be safe. But this is limiting because in doing so it keeps you from truly changing, from truly viewing things in a holistic way, from letting go and realizing that you are not the center of the universe and there are forces at work that you will never be able to fully explain through reason. It’s human nature to want to explain everything and to relentlessly attempt to learn all that there is to know, thus knowing everything about everything. What people don’t want to accept is that there are so many things that we will never be able to fully figure out or have the answers to. And this scares the shit out of people so they usually avoid it all costs.

One major benefit of using psychedelics is that you can no longer hide behind your ego, you can no longer keep trying to think everything is based in science and reason and facts. It forces you to lose control and to realize that letting go and opening your arms to new experiences and even scary experiences is the key to growth.

Psychedelics are also the reason why I know for sure that at my core I am an artist, a visionary, and a highly emotional/healing type person. When I tripped, after I got past the shitty part, it started to go entirely the other direction and everything started getting mind blowingly awesome. I started to see lines of color coming in from the corners of the room that met at the middle, and these lines of color were both matter and energy, and they were made of the primary colors. They were not only in the room but stemming out of all of the people that were around, and the colors were different in terms of which ones dominated for certain people. One guy that was in the room had sooo much red in his energy field, and I remember telling him that and I think he just laughed ha.

The reason I say that I found out I’m a visionary/healing type person is that not everyone sees these kinds of things when they trip. My trip was incredibly spiritual and artistic, very visual but also very visceral. And this totally makes sense because those are the very elements of my core self. Not only did I begin to draw later on in my trip, but I also continued to draw everyday, just for myself, from then forward for a long time. My work was the most creative it has ever been, the most colorful, the most abstract and full of energy out of anything else I had previously made. I basically couldn’t stop drawing. It was like I realized that art and creating art was such a strong and important part of me, and though this wasn’t conscious, I know I did it a lot because I felt inspired *and* like I absolutely had to express these creations/visuals. I had to capture them, because in doing that I was becoming more in line with my true self. I also got very spiritual after I tripped, and I began to research chakras and meditation a lot. I bought a book on all of the chakras and it had meditations in it for every one of them. I began to meditate every day as well, and I could totally feel my spirit when I did so. I’d feel this tingling and warmth rushing to my feet, and I *felt* like I was energy. I felt like I was so much more than just my body and even my mind.

The interest in Psychology has always been there for me but even though it has to do with emotions, it is still pretty based in reason. There are so many categories and definitions in psychology, and then there are so many logic-based responses to dealing with disorders once they are diagnosed. You are to go to therapy and talk it through, you are to take medication that will chemically alter your brain. Even though Psychology is the study of the mind, it is less connected to spirit than my strong connection to art and meditation. But, psychology has the great intention of *healing* souls. The word souls isn’t used very often in psychology, but it certainly is about healing damaged emotions, and emotions are very much a part of our souls.

So during this whole time I’ve been talking about I was majoring in both Psychology and Art, and I was really getting into drawing and meditating. I didn’t choose the best period of my life to decide to take on the intense experience of tripping, as my family life was incredibly fucked at that time. So initially I had a lot of good revelations and I came more into myself, but then a few months later I began to spiral downward. I’m sure this was for a combination of reasons, but mostly I was just so exhausted, and so not prepared to take on college at that time. I could barely handle my family life. I also felt very isolated at college and at home. So basically I was left to face all of these huge changes on my own. And so I fell apart. Uncovering my artistic nature also lead to uncovering the dark side of my unconscious. There’s no way to avoid uncovering your unconscious feelings when you’re working creatively.

So I began to come down from my amazingly great feelings time to return to what my unconscious contained. There was a lot that was not dealt with well, because I had no outside emotional support and I internalized nearly everything that happened in my dysfunctional family. There was no one to tell me otherwise, and I had no real escape or way to live my own life, other than by going inward more into my imagination. So you see what I’m saying? As I learned so much about my core self and what I was here on earth to do, I also learned just how deeply I had been damaged by my family, and by my long-term feelings of being inadequate, a lone wolf, the one who doesn’t fit in with anyone or anything. So I got very very depressed and was for a long time, I stopped being able to be creative because I was so depressed that I turned numb and hollow. I couldn’t sleep like at all, I felt like I had no identity at all and I lost every single bit of that spark I had previously. I lost that confidence and enthusiasm. I never would have come out of that dark pit if it weren’t for starting Wellbutrin, which I’m still on.

So, identity. That’s what I thought a lot about looking through those pictures too. My identity is so fluid. I could be anyone or anything. I am so many different things, I have so many different interests, I have a couple different selves. Throughout that time I went from Hippie, to Indie, to Formal, to Hippie, to Nothing, to Punk/Hippie. It was pretty much in that order, though I would also change my style and interests dramatically between these various scenes. I would often take on the identity of the people around me. I think I still do that to an extent now, but not as severely as before. I know who I am a lot more now, but I don’t *feel* it as much as I did for that period after I tripped, I don’t meditate or make art everyday anymore, and I haven’t been able to put my psychological skills into use yet either.

I guess I never got to the stagnation element that I intended to write about. Basically I am a very fluid person but I am also rather stagnate. There are some things in my life and within me that have been the same for a very, very long time, and I still don’t know to change those things and struggle with doing so to this day. Then there are the other things about me that continue to change all of the time, and I am pretty fluid in thought and beliefs. I get sucked into people’s stories when I read them, I get sucked into movies when I watch them, I begin to feel like I am those people or I am also a part of those stories even though I’m not. That is part of the fluidity, but it’s also that I am very empathetic and highly sensitive.

Ok this post is way too long, but I hope some people read it. I think I will be writing in here more often.

Ok so this is probably going to be a rather rant-based post but what the fuck if I don’t vent here I’m going to vent to somebody else and probably end up draining them too, so here goes nothing. (I don’t really understand that phrase haha, wouldn’t it be here goes something?).

Basically my mother is better than pretty much anyone else (except maybe my father), at sending me into a rage pretty quickly. Here and I got in a ridiculous text war like last week when I had shit tons of school stuff to do. She was asking me to do shit for her/to be around the house at random hours for IN CASE type situations. Like, “will you be here at 4 pm? I might need your help to pick up the MG.” And then other shit was more like asking me to do tasks in fucking 4 different mediums as in for one task she (1) wrote me a note (2) sent me a text (3) called me/left a voicemail (4) asks me in person. What the fuck is that shit?!!! And my god she literally goes through that method EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME she has a new task. Which is all the fucking time. Because she’s a busy body who creates tasks and work that are not imperative and acts as if they are urgent at that very moment. She’s so contradictory- she complains about working too much, yet whenever she is home or off she is constantly doing tasks or inventing some to be done (and seriously, they are not things that HAVE to happen). So, she complains about being too busy but then creates probably half of the things that make her busy.

Another thing she does is make a shit ton of assumptions about things in general and about me. She also makes a lot of judgments about pretty much everything. An example- she finds out I have a few days off from classes due to the holiday and schedule changes, she then decides that means I will be doing nothing at all and thus I should now do a bunch of tasks for her, at any time she wants. She also assumes that because i’m her daughter and because I’m the only one that is still at home, that I should now do all of the things that she would’ve spread between all of us before. And again, many of these things don’t even NEED to be done!

Another assumption is that if I don’t immediately agree to these demands, then I’m doing so simply to spite her and because I “hate her”. Never does she consider that maybe it’s because she’s an energy vampire that constantly demands things or finds ways to force things on to me (i.e., making it so that I have to talk to her every time I go downstairs/in the kitchen, trying to hand me something or have me do something for her when I am in the middle of doing something else already, by literally standing right in my space and basically trying to force it).

The judgments she makes are things like “if a person isn’t a busy body and isn’t able to work a lot, take classes at college, and still have a social life, then their life must be easy” or “they must be lazy”. Also, “if a person doesn’t have a job then they are useless”, “if a person works a non-traditional job, then it doesn’t count as a real job.”

I could write a book of the lists of judgments and assumptions she makes, but I think you get the gist of what I’m saying.

She doesn’t believe that she needs to change, ever. She doesn’t believe that she’s ever really wrong, and she constantly claims people don’t appreciate all that she does for them. She is stubborn and impatient and very inflexible but doesn’t lack the ever-present traits of being demanding, manipulative, and invasive. Essentially her ego is so large that she believes others are below her and should be subservient to her, and that if anything goes wrong in an interaction between her and anybody else, it’s always THEM that’s wrong. I mean damn, she is excellent at taking financial responsibility and responsibility in the most traditional meaning of the word, but she takes next to no emotional or relational responsibility.

When I’m home for a few days or even less, I can already feel her draining me. I can already feel myself bordering total rage and just spewing it all over her if she pushes my buttons one more time (and she always does). The most absurd thing about all of this is that most of her behavior stems from IMAGINED PRESSURE. I mean, of course not with financial or job based stuff but outside of the pressure she deals with at work, she puts pressure on herself and on me all of the time. She is unable to relax or to just fucking stop! I swear she is an undiagnosed case of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. And she’s an alcoholic, which may at particular times mellow her out, but overall increases her levels of anxiety and depression.

She has passed these GAD type behaviors/thoughts on to me through genetics and environment, and so I really can’t stand having her continuing to do so when I’m actually aware of being the same way and of wanting to not let it control me. She may be aware of the ridiculous levels of anxiety she has like all of the time, but she does nothing to work on it. She never chooses healthy reactions, and simply continues to go about her life being the same exact way no matter how much it hurts her or anybody else.

I feel paranoid a lot of the time, thinking I’m seeing things or people out of the corner of my eyes, thinking I’m seeing the shapes of some sort of ghosts between the trees/leaves when the wind blows on them at night. I feel anxious a lot too, and that it doesn’t take much at all to send me into a very long cycle of anxious and panic based thoughts. I used to suffer from panic attacks like every day a few years ago. Now I occasionally get the beginnings of one, but I don’t allow it to get to the point of sending me running to the bathroom to puke, think i’m dying, and look at myself in the mirror only to feel totally depersonalized. It used to control my life, until I decided I wasn’t going to let it anymore and I started meditating every day and getting really into spiritual thought/practices. It worked, very well.

The problem with my mother is that she is so incredibly over-grounded in the materialistic world that she thinks that everything is a cause for absolutely freaking out. She doesn’t try very hard to think beyond herself or the earthly realm, and she’s so close-minded that she wouldn’t be able to maintain the possibility in thought that everything she is freaking out about is an illusion. She wouldn’t be able to (or wouldn’t want to try very hard to) think about spiritual ideas and she certainly doesn’t believe in anything that she can’t visibly see with her eyes or hold in her hands.

Essentially, her and I are opposite people and not the kind of opposite people that can get along because they complement one another’s traits, but the type of opposite people that clash because they cannot stand the habits and lifestyle choices/preferences of the other person. The thing is, I feel like I understand why she is the way she is, I mean I’ve surely learned a lot about Psychology through real life experience and through many years at college. I know this kind of shit like the back of my hand. So for me it’s not that I don’t understand why she does what she does or what caused her to become this way, and it’s not that I’m trying to make her become like me, it’s just that I can’t understand why she doesn’t give a shit about how much she ruins the quality of my life by not listening to ANYTHING that I’ve so clearly explained to her about how I feel. And on top of that, she simply does not respect what I say either- obviously if she did she’d actually make an effort to adapt the way she acts towards me for longer than like a few days.

I don’t want to have to feel like the only way I can stay sane or not have to deal with this shit all of the time is to just never be home. Believe me, I try to not be home as much as possible and I would’ve/would move out if I all of the sudden had the finances to do so and all of the sudden had a good job that I could maintain. I just can’t believe that it’s come to this point where she simply refuses to adjust to anything and at the same time randomly uses manipulative tactics to try to scare me into doing whatever she wants. What kind of selfish parent thinks it’s ok to do that sort of shit? Every time I actually stand up for myself and every time I disagree with or “disobey” what she says, she says or does something to try to scare me into complying. She uses the fact that I live with her and that I cannot financially support myself as leverage for why I should just do what she says and never once have my own opinion. How fucked up is that?? I don’t feel I drain her of resources very much because the only thing that I use often is a fair amount of electricity. And if I were to move out, we still have two dogs and I take care of them much more than she does and in a much more caring way than she does. If I moved out, she’d then have to find someone to pay to take care of them and then she’d also have to actually start hiring tons of people to do all of her fucking tasks. And she’d be totally alone in this house (which I know she doesn’t want, she is a very emotionally dependent person and needs people around to drain energy from).

So it’s definitely not that she wants me out of the house because she so obviously makes the point that she wants to spend more time with me, says she never sees me, says she misses me when she doesn’t see me for like a few days,  says she’s happy I’m here with her, etc. I just cannot believe that someone who’s around 60 years old is so completely emotionally immature. And I don’t know how she could go so long never thinking much about why she has fucked up relationships and why she doesn’t have any successful ones or why a lot of people can’t stand to be around her for very long. It’s just pathetic. Trying to be a better person is something that is extremely important and I just can’t even understand how someone could spend so much of their life avoiding such a thing.

Today I finally had some very anxiety-provoking things all sorted out (having a hold on my account at college, not having enough financial aid coverage, not being able to add/change any classes, possibly being withdrawn from college if everything wasn’t sorted out by this coming Tuesday). It took a few hours and working with 3 different departments/ladies to get it all fixed up. I had my Mom with me too so I think that helped in them respecting me and whatnot (sometimes I feel like if they’re just dealing with a student, they are less respectful because they still think of them as only a kid still). Both yesterday and this morning, the first thing that I thought when I woke up was that I needed to fix all this stuff up, and quick. I only have like 3 more classes left to take before I graduate with my Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and an Art minor. So, I only have this Fall semester left to complete. I’m so relieved that it’s all set now financially. Now I have to figure out what classes I need/want, and once that’s all done, deposit the only money I have (my savings bonds), into my bank account so that I can use that money to buy books. Hopefully I won’t have to spend it all on books, but it’s a possibility.

Now, on to what I actually intended to write about.

I think that there are many reasons to exist and many reasons to like life, even if you are in a rough patch. Even if life is going very badly at the time, or has been for awhile, just know that that isn’t all there is to life and that you won’t be in the state of mind or circumstances you’re in forever. Things are always changing, in one way or the other. So here’s a list of some sort to explain what I believe the reasons to exist are.

#1) Love : To give and receive love, to have the experience of being in love a number of different times, to care for lovers, friends, family, pets, nature, etc. To always try to express love or atleast remind people that you love them, even if you aren’t totally on good terms. Love has the ability to give life, energy, happiness, security, and healing to nearly everything it comes in to contact with. I believe it to be the best feeling in the world and I believe that it is what we are all here to do and to share with others.

#2) Empathy : This is more of a subcategory of Love but it isn’t exactly the same thing. Empathy is feeling what another person is feeling, or atleast feeling very similar to another whether it be through interacting with them, reading their story, etc. It is an incredible feeling to not only be able to sense another’s feelings but to take it on as if it were your own (even if it’s a negative emotion, it’s still an incredible experience). If people could spend more time paying attention to their own emotions and to other people’s emotions, or atleast to their body language, they’d see that within them, they have a natural ability to share a part of another person’s emotional experience. Being empathetic expands the experience of your life and can really help other people too. Also, being empathetic allows you to be more aware of everything around you, especially to the people or things that need help. It can be very useful for helping a person or animal that cannot tell you in words about their feelings. Basically, you become more of a healer the more empathetic that you are.

#3) Spirituality, The Larger Picture : Spirituality is a more holistic term to describe a person’s deepest sense of connection to every living being, and to life on the whole. It’s a term that describes what a person believes about the greater meaning of life, why we are here, what is in store for us after life, what we really consist of at the deepest level. The existence of energy between all living beings is something that isn’t often seen by the eye but it is certainly felt in one way or the other. Some people feel it deeper than others because they spend more time working with this area, or because they are more sensitive. We all have the ability to feel energy. The main thing is that it’s nearly impossible to feel something if you don’t believe that there’s a possibility that it exists. The physical world and the typical materialist view of life that is common and constantly pushed on us by the media and society is not important. The closer you come to realizing that you are much more than your physical body and that by nature you are a spiritual, divine being, the more your life will tend to feel meaningful. As much as the outside world tries to push the idea that you are only worth as much as you can produce or attain in the material world, know that this is not true. Know that just by being, you have a lot of value and you can still affect people and things to a very large degree. How much money you have or how high your financial status is has nothing to do with whether or not you are a good person. It has nothing to do with your character, and your character is what is important. The type of person you are, the degree to which you try to do good in this world, is much more important.

#4) Finding Your Purpose : The journey of self discovery is often a life-long search. Sometimes it feels clear, sometimes it’s hard to be sure of what it is. Discovering what you are best at and what you feel passionate about is one of the many reasons to exist. Learning who you truly are and what qualities make you, you, help you in your journey. It doesn’t matter how much time it takes you to do this, it only matters that you try. Finding out what you have to offer the world is just as rewarding as it is frustrating. Whatever you feel comes natural to you, whatever you feel are your strongest abilities and qualities, is most likely what your purpose is. No matter what anyone tells you, just know that you are here for a reason. Some of those reasons are innate, and some of them are ones that you yourself have to define.

#5) Learning, Experiencing : Everything that I mentioned above has to do with either learning about things or experiencing feelings or events in life. You never really stop learning things in life, and learning is not only about getting an education or going to school. It is about a lot more than that and everyone has their own types of learning to do, at their own speeds. Simply taking part in the emotional experience of life is a huge reason to exist. Taking part in whatever events you are curious about are as well. Their is value in learning and experiencing all types of things. Everything that you experience or learn from in life is here to lead you down your personal life path. All of these things happen as lessons and whether or not they feel helpful to you now, they will be helpful to you eventually.

There are so many reasons to live life and it is valuable. Many of the things I’m thinking of writing about are more of sub-categories to the things I put in the above list, so I’m just going to write more generally about the rest of them here.

Self exploration and general exploration are other valuable and engaging journeys. It’s an ongoing thing and I don’t believe that either of them are fully finished, atleast not in just one human lifetime. Existence goes on forever. It just alters in style. Continuously trying to understand yourself and why you are the way you are, is rewarding in and of itself. The more you do of it, the more ease you will have in interacting with and exploring the outside world in ways that suit you personally. Exploring various ideas, concepts, activities, and perspectives help to open you up as wide as you can get to all of life.

I know that everyone has a different take on what their reasons to exist are, and so I hope that no one takes the style in which I wrote this as me trying to tell everyone what their reasons to exist are. I just wanted to share my perspectives and invoke responses from other people. I’m also hoping to lift people’s spirits because it’s not very often that you hear someone commending another person. I just wanted to express that no matter what people say to you or what you hear, your life has value and your existence matters. Everyone matters and makes a difference simply by existing. It is your choice whether or not you want to focus more on making a stronger impact on the world.

I just wrote a really long post, finished writing in the Tags to add to it, then pressed “publish post”. It said “invalid request”, that made no sense to me, so I clicked it again. Same thing. I really don’t understand what the fuck that was about. So then I clicked the ? icon above and it took me to another page, which made it so I totally lost my huge post. God dammit. I really enjoyed writing it and wanted to post it aarrrggg.

I suppose I probably got the therapeutic effect of writing the whole thing still, but I do also hope that some people will have some things to say in response. Maybe this incident can teach me to cut it short or atleast not be so extremely long winded when I actually do write things.

Let’s see if I can summarize what I wrote before it got lost (Gah so lame that that happened).

Basically I wrote about how I went on a hike with my brother Billy and this hiking group. There were like 10 other people there and I got shy immediately. I kind of felt like hiding and I kept to myself, atleast at the earlier parts of the hike.

Later on I spoke more with this older couple because they were talking to me more and they were more friendly. My dog Miles came along on the hike too. Other than this couple I just mentioned, I didn’t really talk to anybody else. Nobody else really seemed interested, was more interested in talking to other people, or whatever. Also, I basically need people to initiate conversations with me when I first meet them. I feel like I need to be convinced that they accept how I come off and that it’s a good idea to talk to them. I also feel like I’m socially awkward when it comes to big groups, especially when it comes to meeting a big group of people.

I think this has a lot to do with being pretty introverted. This is not to say that I don’t love people or socializing (because I really do, I’m very interested in the human psyche). It’s just that I hate small talk and am not interested in it, and I feel that it’s practically required in meeting new people. I am only really interested in discussing deeper topics and in conversations that go somewhere. I also feel that I’m out of practice with social things as of lately, since I’ve spent the past number of months primarily at my house, by myself, in a small town, with no car. All of these factors lead to complications in more demanding social situations.

I’m glad that I’m more introverted than I thought though, because this proves to me that I really like to think things through and go really in depth with things. I really like people, conversations, and topics that involve the deeper aspects of life. I guess to an extent I take life rather seriously, or it’s more that I don’t think it’s something to be careless with. Some of this is personal preference and perspective, some of it is due to the environment I grew up in. Meaning my parents are very serious people and my father is especially concerned with doing A LOT of deep thinking and analyzing. This definitely rubbed off on me.

I felt very strong today on this hike and I realized just how much I love to climb very steep and windy hills to eventually reach a summit with a beautiful view. I like to climb these steep trails fast, too. I feel the same way about track events- especially the 50 meter dash. I feel I am best at this event because I have the build for it and I’m good with being explosive with my energy. Sometimes I really feel like the Capricorn (goat) that I am 😀

In the post I wrote that goddamn got lost, I went in to a lot of detail about my build and upbringing and yada yada. I’m not going to write all of that all over again. Maybe another time lol.