When It Is Time

Spicy peanut chicken over brown rice… yum, and plenty of leftovers for when M gets home from work, if he is hungry.

Feel happy.  

Have been working on releasing old thought patterns.  I do not need to find fault with others, but instead, I let go of the habit of taking responsibility for "failing"when things are not perfect.

• I have not failed if someone is unhappy.
• I am not responsible for what anyone else chooses to feel.
• If someone tells me who or what they think I am, that does not mean that is who or what I am.  I don’t need to prove anything.
• If I try to imagine what someone else is feeling, I am often inaccurate, because I am feeling through my own filters and experiences.  Better to ask, not assuming I can tell what someone is feeling, based on a look on their face or some other thing.
• I can let people have their feelings, even ones that might make me feel uncomfortable or judged.  It is not all about me feeling comfortable.  People are not here on this earth to do or feel what makes me comfortable.
• I do not need to buy approval.  I don’t need to step so carefully, hyper vigilant to signs of others’ displeasure, trying to adjust my actions in order to control their approval of me.
• It feels like I have an empty spot instead of a solid sense of me as an okay person.  Having the feeling that someone thinks I am a bad person feels like I am being killed, and I fight with everything I have to prove and make them understand that I am good.  Their opinion does not define me, but the reliance of others’ approval to, in a way, make me exist, is my most difficult thought pattern to release.  I need to recognize it when I am giving someone the responsibility of defining me, and let it go.
• I stop telling myself that I can control unpleasant situations or people, if only I try harder or somehow do better.  "Being better" will never succeed as a method to control other people.  It is the wrong path.  Being better may help me to feel more at peace with how I face life, but it is not a way to manipulate anyone else.  Since it cannot work, the only outcome of this path is to conclude that my better is absolutely never good enough, and I am a failure.  Now, who wants that path? 

In order to stop my attack on myself, by thinking I am failing if I can’t make everything comfortable and right according to my rules, I have a few things to do.  Step one right now is to notice that other people are not perfect and are not better than me.  It is not automatically something that I am doing wrong if things feel uncomfortable.  I can just let people feel what they want to feel, without trying to fix them, or more accurately, trying to make them behave as I want them to behave.  I keep in mind serenity and acceptance of others and myself…

I can’t change my past.  I can only change my perception of it, and of myself.  I learned false concepts and ways of thinking when I was a very young girl.  I am not helpless and dependent any longer.  I can recognize the real and good me, and know there is no "empty spot" where I should be.  I am here; I can see me.