My Own Worst Enemy

In many novels, it turns out a character's greatest enemy is themselves, where their self-loathing and self-defeating feelings are their own worst obstacle. In some examples, these characters sabotage themselves, whether due to a fear of the unknown, some kind of deep psychological issue, or just run of the mill feelings of inadequacy. In other cases, the character has a flaw regarding a lack of skill, motivation, or ability, which will keep them from ever achieving true victory. Regardless of the basis, when that spark of happiness, the moment of love or the light of hope is upon them, they will ruin it and maintain themselves in a state of misery without a foreseeable ending.

Whatever the case, wherever the person finds themselves, they won't ever reach true happiness, success or whatever else they achieve until they first reconcile with their inner conflicts.

It is effortless to be your own worst enemy, often seeming like a better idea, preparing ourselves for other the ideas and opinions of others, the obvious path. What we miss when we allow this to happen is understanding our thoughts, beliefs and perceptions are creating our life, regardless of whether we are aware of it or not. I often talk about how the car seems to get me to work and back without much effort on my part. That happens with our lives as well; we are on autopilot, not realizing the point is to understand we control the accelerator, can choose to steer and take the road less traveled.

Being our own worst enemy leaves us feeling lonely, stressed and miserable, that we don't deserve success, happiness or love. We spoil our chances of achieving those things. We identify with our thoughts, feelings or the roles we play in other people's lives. Despite these all being transitory, we focus on them and disregard who we really are: the person who is experiencing all of them. We identify with our thoughts and allow ourselves to become them, which causes us to be a very specific, particular, and potentially damaging reality of who we are.

Being your own best friend is about loving yourself enough to fix your life, to take responsibility for it, to be your own caretaker, your own confidante, your own source of fulfillment. This is no easy task, and we're conditioned against it by our consumer mentality of buying or experiencing external happiness being the key to genuine fulfillment.

Accepting ourselves as we are is literally and figuratively the only way to become more of what we want. It helps us differentiate the things we truly want as opposed to the things we expect to heal us. It provides a space to allow the natural evolution of our being rather than a perpetuating cycle of attempted control and failure.

We all eventually realize that our lives aren't going the way we want and that it's up to us to change them. It's nobody's job or responsibility to love or take care of us. Relying on that thought basically guarantee that at some point someone else will deny us love, and we will be stuck on a hole.

Recognizing we can be our own worst enemy and becoming our own best friend is what we all need to do; when we choose to do so is up to each of us. The solution to a lot of problems in life is learning to be happy and content on our own. When that happens, we can actually enjoy and be content with others as well.

At Least It Was Here

There are countless stories in our human existence, and each of us lives our own. Life keeps moving, time keeps ticking, the world keeps turning. Love is born, hatred dies, humanity keeps marching on. Sometimes we have to completely stop what we are doing and focus on the beauty and tragedy, the happiness and sadness, the stories that make up our lives.

We live our lives through our own eyes, using our perspective of how we believe people feel, how things look to us, how we react to events.

There is stability in what we know, what we are familiar with, what we feel good about. What happens when we take the path less traveled? Does the sense of order we gained fall apart? Or just change?

We are humanity. Many themes, many lives crossing paths, many never meeting. The contrasts of bittersweet yet uplifting and hopeful at the same time. Life can be both happy or crushingly sad. I can feel as free as a bird while being chained to society and imprisoned within my own anxious consciousness.

We define ourselves on the expectation of a society that feeds us a lie it fell for itself. That everyone is okay, that normal is, well, normal, that everything else is not normal. Which is completely wrong, of course, but we can't see it that way.

The world is a place for the crazy, the weird, the chaotic and the broken; it's a place for all of us. It's not about changing yourself to belong, but belonging to those who take you as you are, all your flaws, all your fears, all your mistakes. We don't need to give up on our dreams to keep everything the same, our dreams need to belong to us to change as we see fit.

In "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency," Douglas Adams writes about "the interconnectedness of all things," which is how Dirk viewed his cases. "I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose..."

We look to stories for comfort and safety in this chaotic mess we call life. We look to the "interconnectedness" of it all, the strange, unpredictable nature of life itself, to embrace chaos and weirdness and change because that's what makes up our lives. Life is fun and painful and ever-changing and barely makes sense at any given moment and that scares us. We're all trying to find that path to the perfect ideal life but that path, that road, that direction isn't there because that life doesn't exist.

Everyone has their own individual life stories going on, and we share moments with each other. That feeling, that imagery, that togetherness. Sometimes we walk alone, on an empty street, only with our shadows. Sometimes we walk together, on a road filled with people, and are interconnected.

Time Has Told Me

The ups and downs of the last two years introduced many of us to self-preservation, the more intense version of self-care. Looking after our own well-being physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually has never been more important.

I was never interested in pampering myself, taking time to relax. I let work consume my time, stayed busy, pretended to be my own caretaker but in reality let things slide, buried them and moved on.

Others needed my attention, my focus, my time. I would tell them to cut themselves some slack, to give themselves time to reflect, to let me help them. I spent my time trying to make others happy, while never practicing what I preached.

I now know that, for the sake of being positive, to appear being in control, to look like things didn't bother me, I ignored, neglected and pushed away what I was really feeling. It would crack the facade occasionally, causing me to break down and fall apart, but only for small moments, replaced by a joke or a smile or me just being me.

I didn't check in with myself. I ignored my emotions, my feelings, determined they weren't valid or true or important, and moved on. I kept thinking things would work out, resolve themselves, or just go away. I was caught in an endless cycle of screw ups and hurt feelings, thinking I had learned something from the experience and was being molded into a better person, but in reality letting avoidance masquerade as the need to care for myself, making up the perfect lie that I was fine, letting hours turn into days and digging a deeper hole that I eventually found myself at the bottom of, broken, sad and making the lives of people around me miserable.

Life is intended to be filled with mistakes and miracles, used and consumed, saved and spent, felt and shared. That includes caring for ourselves in whatever fashion required, whether it is a day at a spa or a day with a therapist.

As much as we think they can, not everyone can read your mind to read your mind and act accordingly. We need to set our own limits, determine what it takes to make us happy, and to not let ourselves be spread too thin across everyone we feel needs our help.

Self-preservation is our strongest instinct; fight or flight or freeze is built into our being. We don't question the need protect ourselves physically, but not so much emotionally. What is our trigger for emotional stress, the one that tells us our emotional being needs to come first? Without it, excessive loads of stress will lead to burnout, depression, and emotional anxiety.

We are the machines that keep things moving forward; sometime we are everything to everybody, appearing to manage things flawlessly, without much effort, without complaints. Only we know the mental and emotional balancing we go through daily to maintain that appearance, keep those balls in the air, continue to look in control. Take yourself off of line for a while, tune into your self, attend to your emotional needs and start setting some healthy boundaries.

Free Bird

This was our fourth flock of chickens. The first three were all victims of needing to move, to make the yard less smelly and appealing to the next buyer of our home, to conform to what everyone expected of a house and yard in an urban setting. Each found a new home with other chickens and various farm animals.

This time we had a permanent home where first pigeons and then chickens were raised for decades, which had fallen into disuse. We took out the old house, rebuilt the fences and started looking for appropriate free items to fit into a full size Jenga game of a chicken house. First came an old work table, perfect for the base. The an armoire with drawers at the bottom, which served a dual purpose of storage and doors for the back of the hen house. Some fence boards, a free window and a few metal corrugated roof pieces later, and it was a house for the ages.

The chicks went from being fuzzy little things falling asleep in their food to scraggly looking teenagers losing their down and trying to feather out. And then it was time to meet their home. They figured it out in short order, and those soft clucking sounds were once again part of our being, providing a soothing background to time in the garden. The girls, as everyone calls their flock, would run waddle up to the fence to greet us when we went to the garden, looking for leafy greens or scraps, always ready for a handful of scratch.

The eggs were big, beautiful and tasty. You gave them food and water, cleaned out the hen house, and breakfast materialized in the nesting boxes. It was like magic.

We lost one to a predator and a couple more to whatever causes chickens to kick the bucket. We raised three more chicks, one of which turned out to be a rooster and was re-homed, and decided not to add more chicks to the flock. Some others went to poultry heaven on their own time, as chickens are apt to do.

And then there were three.

Chickens are social animals. They will flock together for protection from predators and find comfort in roosting next to each other, helping to keep the coop warm at night during cold weather. When a predator is spotted, one chicken will provide a call of warning to alert the others, and they all run for higher ground. Chickens can get lonely if they live in isolation.

We didn't want to wait until we only had two birds to find them a new home, so the decision was made. Cindy listed them on Craigslist this time, since I still have scars from my previous experience. In short order someone around the corner from us said they wanted our girls to meet their girls (and a duck who thought it was a chicken).

 

After seven years of cohabitation and interaction with Gladys and Eleanor, and about five with MacHenna, we boxed them up individually, put them on a cart and headed down the driveway. They took to their new digs and were walking among the other chickens (and duck) when we left. Despite having a much lighter load, the walk home was slow going

I cleaned out the coop yesterday, distributing pine shavings and chicken poop under the avocado tree, as I usually do. This time no chickens will scratch and help turn it into the ground from where it once originated. It was quiet in the garden and there was time to mull over the experience. People come and go in our lives, as do poultry, and we learn how to navigate the waters, plotting a course that may take us not where we wanted to go, but where we needed to go.