Living life as it comes
Growing up, I had this friend who liked to quote Oscar Wilde. “Be yourself, because everyone else is taken.” She would tell me that over and over again. While it was an important thing to hear as a pre-pubescent, adolescent, the thought built on itself over the years. With the amount of people who are afraid to be themselves, I’m not sure everyone else is taken.
There’s a lot of talk in the mental health community about setting boundaries with acquaintances and loved ones. We hear about codependency, independence and interdependence. We wonder what our lives can really get from these concepts. Are you good at setting boundaries?
Continue reading “Setting boundaries and why we hate it”
When I was a little girl, I was a very honest person. I never saw any reason to lie to anyone, and I could count the times I had done so on one hand. It was a beautiful thing. However, as I got older, I learned a couple lessons about honesty that would change my path forever.
Self- love has become sort of a buzzword these days, and I’m glad for that because here on the Thoughts that Bind, true self love is a transformative and important journey to undergo. In fact, it informs nearly every post I’ve written on this site. Yet, I feel there are some misconceptions about self-love that are rarely, if ever addressed. It is for this reason that I have chosen to make this article today.
When you’re young, it can be easy to go into life guns blazing. You have dreams, places to go, people to meet and problems to solve. It’s great to have ambition, but what about peace and contentment?
There is a phenomenon amongst people who have their lives turned upside down, where they find themselves stuck in the past, even after they’ve conquered it. You see, after years (or maybe even a lifetime) of fear, anger, shame, abuse or pain, you begin to get in the groove. You start to believe on a daily basis that the world is going to end, the other shoe is always about to drop.
We open with a familiar scene to everyone. Each year, we gather with family and friends. We discuss the past, we dream up the future. When the clock strikes midnight, we find ourselves suddenly accountable for this new person we said we would become…or not.
We live in a wonderful world today that is, as a whole, striving towards religious tolerance. And as a whole, I believe this to be a good thing. People deserve to believe what they believe, without being chastised or harassed for it. However, religious tolerance is not always extended to everyone, particularly by people who tend to benefit from it the most. And freedom from any religion, well that is looked down upon strongly.
On my journey from slob to relatively neat person, I had to do a bit of personal decluttering—that is, decluttering my person. To be honest, I still am and will continue to do so for the rest of my life.
We’re all human, and as humans we have this innate sense of wanting to feel like we’re on the right track– wanting to be on the right track. This can give us a lot of different ideas of what that “right track” looks like with regards to forgiveness.
Continue reading “Should I forgive? (Permission to make your own decision)”
