June 21 2020

It's Sunday and I'm still stressed about my job.  There is no real reason why I should be but our minds create our own reality.  Right now my baggage and my self awareness of my limitations are creating this story of failure.  I don't like that.  There is this Negativity Bias principle where you need at least 3 good things to offset the bad experience.  I've not been getting enough good things at work to offset my angst and fears.

I really work on creating good things in my life.  I seek out friends and having connecting conversations and visits with them in order to uplift myself, to validate myself, to feel more inspired.  I am aware of my limitations at work.  Somehow this positive experience outside of work does not offset this sense of failure.

I crave the weekends though it seems almost every weekend I feel obligated to check my email to see what is in store for me on Monday or what I missed from Friday.  This sense of dread does not serve me in fully relaxing.  I still drink in order to alleviate my anxiety and fear.

I think how I am disconnected from my body and don't have a full range of emotions, that I judge myself as not able to fully immerse myself in joy or happiness.  This is the downside of numbing my fears.  But you know what?  I'd rather have it that way.  I have trained myself to be ok being unhappy.  I had modeled feeling that way by my parents.  Both parents learned to moderate their expectations for a happy life.  They forgotten how to be happy from those hard experiences they had to go through.  I learned that was the way to deal with life.  This is how I am now.

I suspect that ultimately does not serve me but facing the pain is more scary than any upside that I can envision.

June 19 2020 Semi Automatic writing

I've been told again and again over the years that having a daily writing practice helps me.  I believe in that as well.
https://health.usnews.com/wellness/articles/2016-08-31/the-health-benefits-of-expressive-writing

Automatic writing, Morning Pages, whatever you want to call it.  It's therapy. It's a spiritual practice.  It's putting down our ego and uncovering a bit of ourselves that normally keeps hiddent.

I feel like I'm running on empty.  I am running away. I lost discipline in my eating and exercise.  I am drinking to deal with the pain.  I lost the care for myself.  I lost hope in creating a more peaceful and fulfilling life without the fear of being living on the edge of poverty or at least a very reduced lifestyle.  I am tried of worrying about that financial part of my life.  I am feel more and more at a loss about my life, my lack of accomplishment, my not being able to make a mark in this world with my talents.  I am tried of my lack of passion, lack of life energy.  I'm at the denouement of my life.  I fighting it for I have not done what I am came here to do.  I am also giving up.  I feel spent in this long, long hard effort on the back end of my life where decades of trying has not moved the needle.

Yes, I have had many, many blessings.  I know that on our death beds that it is not the accomplishments that we will be remembered by or that we wish we had more of but the people in our life who love us.  I believe we all can have it all.  I really want both.  I see that accomplishment looks like having my talents combined with my heart manifest into something tangible that is recognized by people who experienced me and it.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it despite that I have tried and tried over and over not to hold onto that definition of a well lived life.  I totally believe that this is in alignment of who I need to be and do. I keep on bumping up into sadness and yearning by not having this manifest as my reality, my experience.

Doomed to Fail

I am a fan of podcasts. Hidden Brain and Freakonomics are some of my favorite ones.  

After listening to Hidden Brain podcast on Choices which the subject was about choice, the interviewee Sheena Iyengar mentioned something about Asians that really struck me about how I navigate in the world especially now in my work life.   

IYENGAR: Well, I think in American culture, we have a very deep assumption, which goes like this - if a choice affects me, I should be the one to make it. By God, I'm the one who should make that choice if it's going to affect me. How could you possibly think otherwise? And in the Asian culture, they have an equally valid assumption, which says if a choice affects me and is important, then, by God, somebody really important to me is going to tell me or assist me or guide me on how to make that choice. How could you do it any other way? And that's an example of how a choice should be made, what constitutes a good or bad choice-making method. These are cultural constructs.

I still look for outside validation, for someone to tell me tell me/guide me/assist me as I fumble my way through my current job.  This is not the model of American work life.  This is not what they hired me for.  Hence my struggle of fitting in.  This has been a life long issue for me.  This helps explains some of it.

”

Negative experiences were discussed in a Freakonomics podcast.  I think that from my upbringing and background, I have an imprint of negativity in my psyche.  Epigenetics shows that it is possible even from previous generations.  My guess is that as a product of both my parents that I had my Mother's Internment Camp trauma and my Father's pain of losing two of his brothers who were in their early 20s when my Father was still in high school.  Being a racial minority in a white, middle class suburb of New Jersey certainly did not contribute to having less positive experiences than negative.

The negativity bias, the universal tendency of bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly than comparable good ones.  In general, it takes about four good things to overcome one bad thing  (4-to-1). The negativity effect evolved because it helped keep our ancestors alive. As we say,“Life has to win every day. Death only has to win once.” I think most of us have lived a life of little positive things that offset the bad. I fight to focus only on the bad and would rather focus on the good.  I do know that I feel deep inside that the bad has outweighed the good.  

The takeaway from these podcasts is that my life has been unconsciously influenced in so many ways.  Knowing that there are evolutionary, cultural, ancestral, societal factors affecting how I am, who I am and what I am makes it both comforting and frustrating at the same time.  I am not the master of my life.  Do I really believe that I am doomed to fail?  On my bad days, yes.  I still cling to the notion that I can control my destiny or at least make conscious decisions that make my life better or at least happier.  This is still a struggle for it is that darn 4-to-1 "rule."  I seek to have those four good experiences and more or at least to find ways to escape the bad ones. 
 
I discovered two quotes that I had on my Facebook profile which I thought was apropos to this post:

"If you don't find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further." -Mohandas K. Gandhi

 "I'm not a loser. I'm in my sacred moment." - Julie Piatt aka SriMati