Media is like Alcohol

Here's another thing that makes you feel shitty that is pretty easy to eliminate (and thus make you feel better right NOW): Media. Like the title implies I think media consumption is a bit like drinking: a little is ok, and maybe the occasional binge, but for people of certain ages, and when it becomes a constant habit, it's totally inappropriate and self-destructive. Don't get me wrong here, when I say media I'm talking about corporate-sponsored (owned) mainstream media, I'm not talking about the fabulously creative independent media produced by real artists, and I'm (mostly) not talking about books. Yes yes, we could have a fight over what constitutes a "real" artist, but for my purposes let me just say this: if there was a focus group involved in its production, and it advertises specific products, and has a brand attached to it, it's on the chopping block here.

Media is the collective story of our society, or rather, it is the product our society puts out to explain who we want to be perceived to be. Yeah, it's kinda complicated and confusing, but the basic idea is that corporate media creates a picture (fantasy) of what our lives are supposed to be like, or how to get what we are told we need to be successful and happy and then we consume whatever it is so that we can be a part of that fantasy. And don't get me started on how the news is just one giant fear-mongering machine that activates our reptilian brains between commercials making us more likely to buy stuff. Ever looked at a mainstream magazine and noticed how all the images are more clean and perfect than anything you've ever seen in real life and yet somehow they are the ideal? Let me tell you something: every single thing in every single image in mainstream media is precisely choreographed to make you think and feel certain ways. It is brilliant manipulation. My sister works in advertising, and my goodness, the things she does to make food look sell-able are... well, let's just say it's no wonder your casserole didn't turn out like the picture!

Have you noticed how much we are surrounded by screens, plugged in to some giant information machine, or placed captive to billboards in traffic jams? Have you noticed that children are brilliantly creative in their games until they start to get the hang of super hero cartoons and food advertising? Have you ever turned off the radio to find that your own thoughts were way more interesting and important that the song of the week you heard 8 times today?
My point here (and this applies to movies, music, news, corporate internet stuff, you name it) is that there is a lot of stuff out there that is designed to make you feel less than perfect, less than wonderful, less than ideal- it's a bunch of lies. They're really clever lies, they're pretty convincing, but the reality is that nothing real is as perfect as that fantasy, and while it is important to have goals and to strive to have good beautiful things in your life, you are the one who should be deciding what those things are. You, by yourself, without corporate media loudly or quietly commanding you, without some weirdly hairless model or some too-clean kitchen or some messed up slogan about how beer makes you cool. You are the one who decides what is important, beautiful, attainable, challenging, and if you tune out media on a regular basis, or only tune in occasionally, you can be a lot surer your decisions are based on your own wonderful self than on corporate manipulation. And knowing you are making your decisions based on things you actually intrinsically care about feels really fucking great!

walk, write, eat

To the lonely and faint of heart:

walk.

Don’t be afraid – let miles pass

hours

days.

There is nothing to fear.

Walk near water, train tracks, moss

walk lost.

Somedays it takes getting lost to get found.

Walk in the rain, the cold

walk home.

Be in the home of your body

feel what walking feels like in your hips

your pinky toes, your armpits

feel your clothes brush your skin – don’t let judgment in.

Walk until you find something you’ve never seen

it won’t take long.

Walk until you have no idea where you are:

keep going.

Walk until you want to give up:

keep going.

See how long it takes to find stillness of thought:

keep going.

Walk until happiness is the squelching sound of your left shoe

walk until despair doesn’t exist.

Walk until all you can think is littlefeetlittlefeetlittlefeet

and littlefeetlittlefeetlittlefeet and

love.

Feel the vibrations of the ground beneath you

no excuses, nobody has listened in years.

See a magical sand dollar seashell collection

let rain soak you, littlefeet wet, socks felt in shoe

I promise you

won’t melt

Wandering Lost

"We're lost, aren't we?" he said.

"Well, I have no idea where we are, but I'm sure we'll find out where we are when we get where we're going."

Destination? Why do we always have to be going somewhere and knowing everything about it? Where the hell are we? Here. I am where I am, in this chair, in this house, in this body. For goodness' sake! Not knowing stuff all the time is ok. For a smarty-pants, teacher's pet, know-it-all like me, this is a lesson that can be hard to swallow. You don't have to be right all the time. You don't even have to know enough to have an opinion. Give yourself a break. Let yourself not know what the fuck is happening for once. Let go of judging yourself based on what incomplete information you happen to have at the time. You are always going to make decisions based on incomplete information. You're human.

It's ok to take things as they come. Planning is overrated. You can be prepared for something that never happens and then something completely knocks you out of your element and all you can do is get up, dust yourself off, and deal with whatever comes. Letting go of the pressure to constantly become something other than you are is liberating. Just be. Just be for one little bit of time every day.

Get Dirty

Some people go whole years without touching dirt, without running their fingers through the moss or walking barefoot on the grass. Some people go whole lives without stopping to love the earthworms and the beetles and the lowly things that busily make life happen all around us. This is the root of sadness. We are made to love. We are made to love things that hold us. We are made to hold things we love. Touch is essential. Babies wither and die who are not touched. Adults who do not love things become hard and cruel.

Touch the earth. It will hold your grief and your worry and your pain. Don’t be afraid, the earth has always held you, has always opened willingly, given you all that you need. Touch her rich soils, her barrenness, touch the earth, bury your hands in the dirt until you touch the worms, bury your face in the grass until you inhale life. Smear mud on your skin, put your nose in the dark richness, close your eyes, this is the smell of life. Even the decay, the rotting, molding masses, even the fungi that tear living things into death, make way for seedlings.

Some conifers produce seeds that must be cracked open by fire. It does not take intellect to know that life needs death. When you are lost, hungry, yearning to hold something dear, to be held in the embrace of all that came before. When you are hard and calloused by the harsh weather of your life. When you have curled, perhaps slowly without realizing, into a tight mass that is barely breathing. Touch the earth. Let it crack you open like the cone of a Douglas fir, let it break you into tiny shards so that the seeds of hope can spill forth from what is left of the past. You must dig beneath the surface to lay those seeds; touch potential, ever-present.

Who are you really?

I was walking my mother's dog (an animal I'm not particularly fond of with the personality of a fearful cardboard box) and I started to slip into that icky 'what if' thought pattern where I comb through recent events that didn't go how I wanted them to and wonder about minutiae. It was getting to the point of utter ridiculousness (what if I had decided to wear my black high-heeled boots instead of my slouchy leather ones, would we have had sex?) when I just -- stopped. I thought, wow, this doesn't matter at all. If I met me at a party and had this conversation I would be bored out of my mind. Honestly, who is that vapid? Of course, I am, and I really believe that most of us, on some level or at some moments annoy the shit out of ourselves. So I started thinking about things I like about myself, things that are awesome, things I appreciate. You know, stuff like: I'm a really loyal friend, I trust easily, I ask for what I want, people seem to think I'm cool. And as I was thinking this stuff I realized how much of it was based on other people and circumstances I have no control over. I started to think about what's left when everything else is gone. Because, really, that's the only thing that you get to keep no matter what. So I asked myself: who are you, really?

It was a very fruitful question. I challenge you to ask it of yourself.

In a way, you have to fight to experience life. It is easy to sit back and sleep through it. In order to really live, to grasp the nature of being a living entity that is connected to all other living beings, you have to dig into the soil of the earth, you have to sweat and labor out of love, you have to plant seeds of love inside yourself and you have to tend them. Happiness is growth. This is what it means to be passionate. You are a connected, interdependent being outside of societal structures and within them. You are more than any one part of your life, and you are more than the sum of all the parts of your life. Feeling lost is about forgetting you are connected to things. So, who are you, really?

Bodies Don't Lie

I have been thinking about my previous post where I stated that the only concrete thing I could come up with to make you feel better involved not doing certain things, and well, I was being painfully incomplete and framing self-love as the absence of self-destruction. There is so much more to it than that! You also have to be proactive, which brings me to the other thing that is really, really, SUPER important for feeling good right now.

It's really simple: listen to your body and do what it's telling you.

Bodies don't lie, they tell you what they need. Hungry? Thirsty? Stressed? Horny? Tired? Restless? Your body will tell you. How does your body feel when you're happy? pissed off? nervous? Bodies don't lie when it comes to feelings; if you've got some internal conflict, it's probably because your mind is trying to silence your body. Love your body enough to listen. Treat it like someone you respect and pay attention!

Your body is not just a vehicle or a means to an end. And hey, I get it, maybe you have a hard time figuring out what your body is telling you, maybe you've spent so much time figuring out ways to ignore and silence your body you've forgotten how to understand it. I know it's not always easy, particularly when your mind or your ego or all that pain accumulates and you just want to feel in control of something. Maybe you have a hard time listening to your body because you carry a lot of shame about it. That's ok, our (American) culture promotes a lot of fucked up shit about bodies particularly around gender. Letting your body talk again is an important step to getting rid of all that shame and bullshit that wasn't really yours to begin with. Here's some stuff that works for me, that might be worth a shot if you're at a loss about how to listen to your body.

1. Stillness. Let yourself be still and quiet, take some deep breaths, feel what it feels like to be in your own body. Be present. Find those spots where you hold tension and let them go if you can. Try to be still both in your body and in your mind. Try not to judge yourself or anything else. You're not perfect and you never will be, and neither will anyone else. Think of your body as a gift and think about all the things it can do.

2. Movement. Get up and move! Do something you enjoy or used to enjoy before you stopped listening to your body and started judging it. Lace up your shoes and walk, or bike, or dance (bonus for one-person dance parties). Do things that feel good! Climb a fucking tree, dig in the dirt, swim, rent a paddle-boat, do anything you like, just move your body. Every day. Things get better when you move your body joyfully.

3. Nourishment. I am not going to talk about dieting. Food is the fuel for your brain, your body, your soul. Eat food that honors all of those parts of you. Eat food you like, try new foods, find as many vegetables and fruits you've never tried and try them. Learn how to cook something raw and vegan. Learn how to cook something with a lot of fiber. Don't starve or stuff yourself. Get nutrients that you can only get from green things, red things, yellow things. Eat as many natural colors at each meal that you can. Indulge yourself in empty calories once in a while. Food is not a weapon, punishment, or reward. Also: drink water. All-day, every day. Cheaper than soda, better than coffee, being hydrated feels really good. Try it and you'll see what I mean.

4. Rest. Get plenty of sleep. Take a nap if you can/must. Try to keep a consistent sleep schedule every day. It feels good and your body will thank you. Also, your loved ones will thank you for being more fun to be around.

Recap: Listen to your body, love it every way you can. Loving yourself feels good, and it draws good people and good things into your life. Be still, move, nourish, and rest. The more you love yourself the more you will love other people and the more they will love you (and if they don't love you more for loving yourself, you probably don't need 'em around)!

Open Letter to lonely, slutty, depressive, types

Being happy is a full-time job.

The most concrete advice I can come up with to improve your emotional quality of life: stop having sex just to feel close to somebody, anybody. Stop having sex with people you don’t care about, and definitely stop having sex with people who don’t care about you. Stop having “casual” relationships when this is not actually what you want. Stop accommo-dating. It sucks. You can probably fuck yourself better than most of the people you’ve slept with in the past 10 months, and there are always more things to try. You can pour your heart into yourself, or your schoolwork or your writing. You can cuddle with a just-friends friend, or a pillow, or hold your own damn self until a good person with good intentions and compatible desires comes along. You can be patient. You must be patient.

You must learn to be happy right now and always. Let yourself cry. Cry as you write -- it’s ok. Let it flow out in words and drawings and sculptures and tears, scrub it off in the shower, beat it out with a belt, fuck it out with yourself. Fill your room with all the shittiness you feel and then buy some garbage bags and rent a dumpster and fill them with the shit until it’s cleared away. It’s ok to feel like crap, but not for more than a week. Really, not for more than an hour. But we’ll stick with a week to be safe. It will pass, and it will be ok. Sometimes this stuff takes time.

Let go of those projections. They are full of pain. Grab on to the moment, the thrill of typing fast as thoughts form and flow out moment by moment – it’s exhilarating! Actually, it’s almost like an orgasm only ongoing and you can return to it in many more places without causing a scene. Let the act of writing acknowledge your feelings and help you sweep them away. It’s a process. It will always be a process. There is no such place as “happy” so don’t treat “sad” like a destination. Emotions are clouds. They move. Even in the Pacific Northwest where it’s possible that the same cloud will stay overhead for 6 months, even those clouds move. Really, you do see the sun here at least once a week even in the dead of grey-sky season. And really, your life is like that too, no matter how much you let yourself forget it.

So live like you’re seeing the sun or about to see the sun or just saw the sun because you are, you will, you have. Because if you live like it’s always cloudy in Portland you will cheat yourself out of appreciating all the sunshine you do get. Obviously there’s sun here or it couldn’t be so damn green, right? Think of yourself as a plant, as resilient, as timeless. Think of yourself like a seed about to burst, bursting, putting down roots, bearing fruit. You are, you are, you ARE. And don’t you dare cheat yourself out of it!

Do Something Nice For Yourself

Ok, so I woudln't describe myself as the bloggy, make-everyone-I-know-read-my-half-baked-internet-post person, but today I had an experience worth sharing. So I made a blog.

I was feeling pretty crappy, you know, winter, cold, unsexy, bored, lonely, blah blah blah when I thought "hey, if I'm not quite enlightened

enough to transcend to bliss yet, why not act on a little masochism?" So I took a very hot shower, scrubbed off most of my skin, and smeared moisturizer all over. I got so into the act of scraping off and then rubbing on every inch of myself that I forgot to feel crappy. In fact I forgot almost everything except what it felt like as the washcloth moved over my skin, and my own gentle firm touch with the lotion. All those shitty feelings about being lonely? Gone. Replaced by a sense of well-being and love. Somewhere between literally scraping myself raw and gently soothing myself I lost emotion and became present with my body.

Of course, then that presence became a really great orgasm, (hey, self-love is important!) and that was the real moment of clarity: I am the only person who can really make myself feel sexy any time I want. So I did. I looked myself in the eye, put on sexy lingerie and danced for myself. I got all dressed up for myself, and did a strippy, grindy, feel-myself up dance, and made the most of being alone. So, reader(s?) do something nice for yourself. Love yourself in every way you know how and then learn more ways. Seriously. Be present in your body,it feels good and it's one of the most important things you can do to feel better right now!