Dealing with unwelcome parts of self…

We all have those personality traits we’d rather not have. For some of us, they’re more major than others, perhaps its because that person has more than just a couple, maybe it’s more like 15-20, which is basically, a whole part of themself that they’d rather just go away.
Somethings like that, are too much of a part of you to just banish though. Unfortunately, we can’t treat our personality like its amish and shun the parts we don’t like, that have commited some sort of crime or sin, in the view of the rest of self. We have to live with it, quietly scold it and say to ourselves “I’ll never do that again”. but what happens when you find yourself saying it over and over and over again? The definition of insanity, as defined in the movie “28 Days” is “repeating the same thing over and over again expected a different result.” So isn’t saying to yourself you’ll never do something again, only to keep doing things the exact same way, a bit, insane?
When something happens that you blame on a certain part of you, you get angry at it, then wish that part would just go away. (anger, avoidance). Avoiding it, won’t make it go away though, in fact, it’s not even dealing with a situation or issue at hand. Its just easier not to work through the issues and expect things to magically change, a solution to a better you to fall from the sky perhaps, but things don’t work quite that easily. Sure, pieces of the solution are likely to present themselves to you fairly easily in everyday life, but only as long as you’re making an effort to achieve a goal. Sitting around wishing things would change, isn’t going to help. Things don’t change on their own in a positive way. (and just wishing for change, tends to arrive at the fates and get a bit twisted, and next thing you know, something breaks or dies. It *was* change, but not exactly what you meant when you thought it. Was your thought responsible for what happened? No. You didn’t actually kill them. Something else apart from us entirel is responsible for that, whatever that may be. In our lives, we don’t tend to think about what exists that we don’t encounter every day. We prefer not to, perhaps because the unknown is quite scary to us. But if that unknown is affecting our lives already, it’s not really unknown, we know what it is, to some extent.
Its alot of work, mainly mental effort, to force yourself to break old habits and patterns that make you unhappy. The status quo is so much easier to deal with than the thought of making it change and just ending up in a worse situation. (Which is ignoring the part where it’s likely any change at all, will end up being for the better, because it *is* a change.) At least, that’s for changes in life that we control and pick, changing jobs, getting a job, learning to drive, getting out and meeting people, bettering yourself through learning something you didn’t know, replacing that wardrobe that looks like it should’ve died in 1991. Some of them are pretty small things, but they’re things that make us feel better about ourselves. They’re things we have complete control over.
Sure, there’s baggage, over time we pick up lots of baggage, going shopping is likely to remind you of every bad fashion choice you’ve ever made in your entire life, so you spend more time analyzing what “looks right for you” than you do just browsing. If you were merely shopping for your current self. Then most likely, what you’re looking for, is hanging in your closet. Its a repeating pattern, you’re looking for something like you already have. When attempting to do something different, you can’t think about the present or, most importantly, the past. That’ll just cloud your judgement of what you’re trying to do, you’ll be convinced the right thing, is wrong, because it’s too different. Instead of just letting go and being yourself. The self you yearn deeply to be. Not a clone of everybody else, because even in a world of fashion, where everybody’s similar, we all are unique, to quote Lewis Black, “we’re all like snowflakes”. What works for one, doesn’t for another, and what looks one way on somebody else, will look different on you, because you’re unique. You have to be comfortable that how your own self is presented to the world, is how you want it, to be confident in that even, and just relax about it, pulling the energy from your confidence.
There’s a big exclusion from changes that’re beneficial though, one I’m all too familar with at this point, death. Particularly, the death of people you were close to, be it a parent, or somebody you were deeply in love with, and cared about more than you care about youself. The pain of losss, and the loneliness of the absense of that person in the world, makes the world seem, empty, like there’s nothing to hang around for. How do you push ahead, and make the changes you need to make to get through what you’ve gotta get through, when you can’t think of a reason to? When you never put yourself first and are now being asked to do so by life, and you just don’t know how? I suppose the answer is you can’t do it alone, you’d need the support of anybody who’s available. Its a very tender and easily hurtable and vulnerable feeling. You just have to have faith and believe that things will get better.
“They say they built the train tracks over the Alps between Vienna and Venice before there was a train that could make the trip. They built it anyway. They knew one day a train would come.” — Under the Tuscan Sun