The Week of 4/30/2006

Witty one liner: Nobody is perfect, I am nobody. Therefore, I am perfect.

Quote of the week: “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” – Mahatma Ghandi

Planner Quote: “Laughter is to life what shock absorbers are to automobiles. It won’t take the potholes out of the road, but it sure makes the ride smoother.” – Barbara Johnson

Planner Quote 2.0: “How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.” – William Shakespeare

Offbeat oddity (courtesy of the planner): In the Caribbean there are oysters that can climb trees

I feel like this “witty” one liner is a two-edged sword that non-narcissistic perfectionists wield against themselves every day. We are perfect or at least we feel we HAVE to be perfect and we work and we strive and we try, but at the same time there is this feeling that you are no one and that you can never reach perfection and it becomes this vicious cycle. It also indicates this weird cognitive dissonance that I have which is: if I can do it anyone can do it, but if they fail at doing it that is okay because they are only human. The dissonance comes in when I fail at doing something because then the thinking becomes: Well, this is easy, I should be able to do this, if I can’t do this there must be something wrong with me. This ties in intimately with the trouble I have treating myself kindly. I place very high, very tough expectations on myself and then punish myself mentally when I fail “you are stupid, you are bad, you fucked up” is the mantra that goes through my head. It has gotten better, but learning how to switch your thinking from a negative stream of consciousness to a neutral or positive is not easy. It takes time and a lot of effort.

I struggle now with Mahatma Ghandi. He has a lot of very smart quotes and did a lot of good things, but after I read an article about how he acted in his personal life I have trouble happily going along with everything he says, but I do agree with this quote and need to work on the first part of it. I am always curious to learn more and expand my knowledge base (although at times I can be very picky about what I want to learn, I will pick gender/sex/sexuality studies over anything else any time). Living like I will die tomorrow and remaining in the present moment instead of flinging myself headlong into every version of the future in order to manage chaos and disaster is my weakness. I can whip myself up into an anxious mess if The Boyfriend or a friend puts a period at the end of text/instant message when they usually don’t because I read into the tone and then I am trying to figure out what I did wrong and how I can fix and then….meltdown. Like the positive thinking, this is something that has improved, but needs more work : )

I completely agree about laughter. Sometimes all I need to pull me out of a really bad headspace is for The Boyfriend to make some juvenile poop or fart joke or one of my friends to reference an inside joke or my family to tell me a funny story. The laughter unlocks my chest and I can breathe again, I feel a relief so strong I could cry. And then there are sometimes that are just so bad all you can do is laugh, you just have to shake your head and laugh. And I hope that all of my little good deeds shine bright enough to make some people’s days brighter because I know that when my people do them for me it can turn a bad day around.

Oysters are weird. I don’t like oysters or mussels. Gross gross seafood. Nasty.