The question of today is a hard one for me as most of my life I have not been happy, actually quite down. And maybe that is the more sad as my main keywords are “Joyful, loving and powerful”, meaning I didn’t encounter or gave a lot of joy.
So today’s question is “Are you sometimes ‘in the clouds’ and at other times in the depths of despondency?”. And I know the feeling and I guess it kind of applies to me, but somewhere, somehow I ‘lost it’ in life and from that moment on it seems my whole life was about negativity, about unhappiness. And yes, there have been a few times where I was really happy, where I really enjoyed life, really had hope, really was ‘building’, but most of my life I have felt very gloomy, like living within a dark cloud of unpleasant things, of ‘unpleasancy’.
And something comes up in my mind right now what a friend of mine recently told me, that she remembered me as gloomy. And that was in my childhood, when I was six or so. So my negativity, my gloom must be very old, must go back to my early childhood, baby time even. And I don’t remember so much of that anymore, except some stories that have been told to me. So it is very hard to figure out what is reality and if it was really my own experience or if it relates to things I am told, even though recently some of the ‘real’ memories come back to me, like the time I was hiding under the bed when I was staying with someone who took care of my as my parents were not there. As far as I know that was during the time my mam was in the hospital because of giving birth to one of my sisters.
And I know I can still do that, hiding, still even do that. And I always considered that bad behavior, but is it really?
And today in my Dutch post I was contemplating if things were changing (for the good), and somehow they are, even though it is not really visible in reality yet. As I am starting to take my feelings seriously and with that my wants and needs, where until now most of my life was about others, pleasing others. And even tonight I did that, thinking what the other would think as I declined a meeting. And the more I think about that the stranger it seems to even consider that you know what the other would feel or think. And putting the others wishes above your own wishes, the others wants above your own wants, the others needs above your own needs. But that’s what I seem to do most of the time, still.
And I was raised as a Christian so I know the Ten Commandments, including “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”. But somehow the world seems to have made something out of it like “you shall love your neighbor more than yourself”, as everywhere I look and read people say and write to first focus on others (and not on yourself?), including Napoleon Hill in Think and Grow Rich. But the more I think about it, the more it doesn’t add up and ‘pleasing others’ certainly didn’t work for me, at least not until now. And I know more people who are doubting the concept of first thinking about others (and then about yourself).
So where am I going with this now? Did it answer the question? No. But I think what I wrote above gives me some more insight on what is going on in my life and where I am going (and where I want to go).
So let’s change direction (more), as until now it didn’t work.