Hi Barry! Thankyou for your insight, I was really interested in your post. I was glad to read about you turning your life around 😀

With regards to the ‘full of crap’ comment – I try and see the crap as lessons to be learned and obstacles to be overcome (I have said countless times before, I’m a sucker for punishment and I have this pathological need to learn the hard way!) I used to be scared and deeply fearful of ‘the crap’ because that would mean attracting more crap and having to let go of the silver thread I was hanging from (metaphorically speaking). I wanted to be safe, I wanted to be full of hope, I didn’t want to give in to the crap. Having to give up this hope I had (even if it was false hope) would mean I would end up with nothing (this was from a really dark, rocky patch in my life from a few years ago, my anxiety problems were at their worst and I thought I was going off the rails). This false hope, this false ‘positive thinking’ was a mental crutch for me, a construct I was trying to maintain in my mind and I didn’t think I would be able to cope without it.

‘The Crap’. Haha, almost sounds like some awful B-list horror movie or some kind of disembodied malevolent entity (like The Blob or something!)

I guess relinquishing the false hope and letting the crap, the fear and doubt in, just letting it be and confronting what it is I was scared of was a liberating experience. I guess I don’t want to become too jaded but sometimes letting go of false hope and broken dreams after feeling scared for so long feels almost like a relief. It sounds weird but it’s the only way I can describe it. Yup, life is full of crap – I acknowledge the existence of crap but I’m not so quick to distance myself from it. If I can manage to turn the crap into something positive – i.e making some kind of snarky joke about it, I’m okay with that.

I used to ponder on worst-case scenarios all the time and be scared that they would come true – I guess they really did happen about 30-40% of the time.

Maybe my problem was the false ‘positive thinking’ – I was trying desperately to think positive things but inside I felt terrible, I felt as though everything was falling apart and I felt as though changes weren’t happening soon enough. Maybe I was just expecting a quick get-out-of-jail card, instant gratification…

But I do believe that there are great things in life, and ‘the crap’ makes the good things even more powerful and intense.

With regards to what you said about feeling instead of thinking – I think I can kind of agree with that – the rare 10% when things were going my way, I felt good about them and I just felt good in general beforehand.

Thanks for posing Barry, I do hope you will stick around for more of this discussion 😀

@Wisdom
I guess the thought that the stories might have just been made up on that website did cross my mind. Still makes me wonder haha

• This reply was modified 8 years, 9 months ago by Joe.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 9 months ago by Joe.