Avoiding the Real Trap of Setbacks

First off, there are simply some life factors that will always make certain challenges harder for certain people. You can't simply wish away disability or mental illness, nor force your mind to latch onto what needs to get done or even what you feel like you really want to do. There's no magical solution and I don't have ten steps to overcome any hurdle. You will have setbacks--some that come from within and some from people or situations that slow you down or stand in your way.

What often remains the only thing in your immediate control is your inner voice.

I've had Hulu looping Shark Tank for a few days so I've picked up on some important lessons from the ones that 'failed' to pick up an investor. The show itself often updates to show success stories of the ones chosen to invest in, but it also shows that some of the ones who weren't chosen blew up with success. Often, it was the ones who walked out of that room with a better understanding of their business rather than defeated by what they thought was the lost opportunity that would propel them forward. Even when one of the Sharks told them to burn their business down and move on.

On occasion, yes, people have stars in their eyes on a sentimental mission and the advice to quit is valid. Passion alone could feed some hole in their soul, but they will always be a drain on their finances or those of their investors. It is always a mistake to walk into that room without BOTH passion and a sensible idea of how you can make your ideas worthwhile to an investor. Occasionally, how well you can pull their heartstrings actually works, but the Sharks also have fickle moods and are all business, no bullshit with someone else.

Gimmicks don't really save you when it comes to dealing with any setbacks in life. If you can accept that your passion may be a drain on other aspects of your well-being, by all means, follow them. If your business idea is promising but a tedious drain on any other happiness, would you still want it so badly? Socially, we're often lauded with the merits of grinding through anything that makes money, but it's considered frivolous to grind for happiness. While it may not be a popular risk, a passion is not some panacea for total happiness, success, or even somehow a lazier option. In fact, its failures can sometimes be just as devastating and just as bitter. It's even more socially acceptable to mock a failed passion.

I'm walking a broad circle around this, so let's close it up a bit.

Whatever excuse/reason you have for setbacks, and the way they can pile on so fast there's just enormous shock that isn't easy to climb back out of, you have to train your inner voice to mentor you out of the worst spots. Setbacks can enable you to push away accountability and actions rather than accept it as part of your unique learning process and own it. Going back to the business analogies, you'll hear people say 'my investors backed out' rather than 'due to decisions I made from inexperience, I wasn't able to keep my investors happy.' 

Your inner voice speaks for you. Don't take away your agency to act and correct setbacks by handing them the blame. Cause and effect isn't as simple as the right and wrong. The path of someone's success is not yours. You can adopt the risk involved with trying something that seems right for you, but not a guarantee that anything you do will yield good results.

In desperation, sometimes we think 'if only someone came along who sees how wonderful I am'. I've brought this up before, but that person is you. Another person isn't 'you' enough to really know your best interests. This doesn't mean you should look for emotional support or business collaborators, but it doesn't mean that those external forces should never replace your self-worth, self-confidence and fortitude to forge ahead when all else has abandoned you.

I know that the very common problem of depression and anxiety adds a different layer to matters of the self. It's an emotional override that sometimes sabotages reason and planning. This only means that you need to use your good days, however few and far between, to train your inner voice to override them in any way you can.

Even mentally healthy people fall into setback traps. Sometimes overconfidence makes failure hit that much harder.

Look--one day, you're on Cloud Nine; you're eating healthy, losing weight, mentally focused, have good relationships, love your job, etc. Things start to slip and maybe you eat more junk, gain weight, feel isolated and lose your job. Things fall into disrepair while you're over optimistically trying to tell yourself it will get better. You're not wrong, but you're also not really doing anything to correct it. You don't want to admit its probably depression or anxiety but months pass and it only gets worse.

Your inner voice isn't perfect. Optimism itself isn't harmful but it does need to be acted on. Hope can be a powerful tool, but at some point, hope means little if it doesn't motivate you to make the changes you need to make.

I'm not a self-help guru, so I can't assure you there's a perfect way to train your inner voice. It's mostly about acquiring micro-habits and learning mantras, little bits of wisdom, that spur you into action. Some will work every time, some need serious repair. It's akin to how some people snap rubber bands on their wrists to make cravings they want to kick develop a negative response.

I've exhausted my desire to keep on this topic, so why not plug in some updates?

Although I'm still not super-motivated myself at the moment, I've returned to poking at my book this week. I also ordered a test banner, one that I may use in future shows and conventions if I like how it turns out. I went with a polyester tapestry. I've always loved vinyl banners, but it's a costly option. I had a polyester tapestry hanging in my room for years and it may actually suit my brand. I've been looking for cost-effective options since I really want to put a lot into my booths. I've seen many an author or artist just sitting at a bare white table with nothing but a stack of business cards and their merchandise and they might as well be invisible. If I do this, I want it to be a real visual and hands-on infusion. It's extremely hard to be memorable at a show since there are so many amazing things on offer so there's no way I'm going with anything less than my best potential on display.

I hate to be a party-pooper but this weekend and the next will be stressful. Loud popping noises are extremely stressful for me and even more so when it's in the hands of amateurs who are drinking. Between the summer heat and the fireworks, I'm already both drained and nervous. I might not get much done, but it will pick up again later. For now, I'm just going to keep planning and plugging and building myself back up the best I can!

Solitude, Survival and the Importance of Having Great Friends

Apparently, Blaise Pascal is not just known for being a mathematician but credited for an idea that man's downfall is his inability to handle solitude.

While I can say that I'm no stranger to nor abhorrent to solitude, I can't say it's always preferred. I've been able to stare into nothing and contemplate everything, but there is such a thing as too much. Of anything. Men's miseries are also compounded by an all or nothing attitude. I get what Pascal may mean here though. More and more people seek happiness that is dependent on what you're doing and who you're doing it with, forgetting to connect to the self, to be uncomfortable with your own thoughts and problems and not look to others for permission to be happy.

Evolutionary speaking, we know humans were not built to embrace prolonged solitude, even if some are perfectly capable of enjoying it (usually after a life of being weary with humanity's issues). High infant mortality rates, low life expectancy, disease, etc. made it imperative to not wander through life in a state of prolonged solitude. There's an imperative we don't quite understand to pass on our genes and even studies done on how smell is often part of the chemistry of finding partners. While some humans favored the idea of monogamy, a 'guaranteed' partner for the breeding, it was just as important to be a flexible breeder (the death or separation of a mate or even a lack of fertility or surviving children). Breeding expectations that were imperative for survival are destructive and unnecessary today. That's not to say it's lesser to follow any biological imperative, but we're also a species that has advanced with intellectual potential that can make more informed decisions on whether the results of breeding are worth it (or even the consequences of sexual contact). While I don't think it's morally necessary to be monogamous or that every pregnancy should result in a child, I do think sexual and reproductive choices are still something society is applying too much unnecessary interest and pressure to. Regardless of your feelings, bodily autonomy is a human right that we need to stop treating like a topic of debate. I won't argue your feelings about how you weigh life, but what you do with your morals and body should never decide for another. I bring this up because often, starting a family is sometimes not done for the sake of the child itself but from a fear of being alone. Just like entering into bad relationships is justified by 'not being alone.' People who never realize they were not going to just automatically find happiness in being a parent or a partner only compound their own misery if they still fail to connect with what they really want from themselves.

I'm going to jump around a bit here and there or the three topics at hand will drag on too long to reach a solid point. 

Practices that humans have been doing for 'thousands of years' are failing us in modern times. It's constantly under the microscope that the convenience of social media both makes more people accessible and has made it socially normal to ignore the people in front of us while connecting with people through digital channels. And the ease and convenience isn't making us more secure. In fact, it's making us more inaccessible, more stressed, more dependent on the temporary approval, often of people we don't actually know and who just as easily have no loyalty or staying power. And often we don't look at the name behind those Likes, but just at whether or not the number of Likes validates it. And no, not just in social media. The problem exists in texting and calling, older than the technological boom of the last 30 years in the case of calls. We expect people to be almost instantly accessible and even amenable to our desires and not responding, again, within our personal time frame of impatience, there is often hostility that we once reserved for people we dislike. We can contact the people we love more often and quicker, but it doesn't fulfill what we really need in a social connection and we find ourselves clogging up our days with the microscopic rewards that only cause spikes in depression and ultimately, a feeling of loneliness.

Back to the ancestors, it was necessary for hunting and farming and sex to be imperative when humans were struggling to survive. It often was an arrangement that was unromantic, practical but still required a level of amicability and cooperation. Sure, throughout history, there was courtship and romance, but there were always conditions of undesirability or arranged marriages, just plain snobbery and politics, using their own bloodlines as currency (and some of the freakiest consequences of prolonged inbreeding for that matter). Humanity, as a whole, has ever been misdirecting biological imperatives and expectations, ever miserable in never quite finding what makes them truly happy, sometimes doing little but passing misery to the next person by using moral signaling to mask the crime.

Liberals and conservatives of the extremist variety are BOTH responsible for society's inability to enjoy human relationships, not just technology alone. Modern humans still take the romance, patience, and pride out of being a decent and open-minded person. There are still antiquated attitudes about skin color and culture and using both as an excuse to isolate ourselves. There are also confusing ideas about gender and personality (and yes, as someone who is mentally fluid about gender roles, what people mistake as gender fluidity is just personality, curiosity and exploring your potential as a human-- why complicate it and just make more boxes to further isolate each other?). We don't need more labels for sure. I'll say that again and again. The more sure someone is of their myriad labels, the more miserable they are trying to make complete strangers adhere to them. And often the less time they spend developing skills and relationships beyond this ridiculous pride in being completely average.

It's true enough that the world is simply overcrowded. No, I don't vouch for genocide to 'fix' this. The problem with that is humanity has no gauge for who 'deserves' to live or die because it's either based on emotion or some petty disagreement on what traits are desirable in continuing the human race. It's too emotional or too logical and neither is a solution. Some people who think they have high moral gauges don't realize the hypocrisy when they have ever considered that some people 'deserve' to not exist. It's a lazy thought process because many 'bad people' develop beliefs out of fear, not ignorance, and can learn once you remove such lazy hostility from your confrontations with them. Either way, trying to regulate life is always going to have moral and practical debates that will never reach resolution, nor should they. We already live in a world where romance is dead for most of the population. People wait longer to decide if marriage is a good idea or rush to nullify or divorce when they realize it was a big mistake. Some people are desperately alone, so sure that given a chance, everything would just magically fall into place. Often these people become more undesirable, less self-aware, and lash out. Rather than meet them with the hostility they expect, the only actual way to reach them is to listen. Like most people, they want to connect but are sorely lacking in some aspect of their humanity.

Either way, Pascal wasn't wrong about the importance of 'a quiet place'. Solitude is also something we can suffer from even when surrounded by others. That's not new to our age, only the heightened level that modern conveniences have blown it up. Toxic family or friends, apathetic strangers, entitled people who only try to groom you for a relationship then bail if you make it clear you're only interested in friendship. We have such instant access to distraction and weak social bandages that we are losing the ability to connect and value that connection-- that much is true. Connecting to others and to ourselves-- we're avoiding it or making weak connections, there's no dispute about that.

That being said, I am not a person that 'suffers' from loneliness, despite my 'lamented' (pwahahaha) single status or my long hours of writing and drawing. I am not experiencing the inevitable depressing effect of loneliness. When I am alone, I am still connecting to my inner voice. I stare at fish, look around my room doing nothing. We live in a society that pegs this for laziness or inertia, but at the same time, people are drawn to me because I telegraph this air of contentment and purpose BECAUSE I understand its value. I solve problems, I slow down my rapid thought processes, I start to listen to myself and what I want to give and receive.

I rarely see my real-life friends but those moments are absolutely magical for me and maybe more so because it's neither expected nor frequent. Even many of the people I only know through the internet are incredible people. Because I am so connected to myself, I am never 'wrong' when I have a good feeling about someone. I DO choose 'friends for life' and even my working relationships have that kind of assurance. I study people without looking like a stalker, just subtly absorbing who they really are without exacting judgment. My friends are nothing alike (I've never had a 'type' in any sense, romantic or otherwise-- sense of humor and respect is about it). They have a range of jobs and/or living situations, sexuality, races, religions and so on. No, it's not some subtle way of saying 'my friends aren't only white', but I don't have unconscious barriers that prevent me from opening my mouth when I sense a possible kinship.

These are people that demand nothing from me, either in frequency or status. They know not to take it personally that my work and livelihood often sets me in a place of solitude for months (they also know I'm likely to drop everything when they call to include me because I'm spontaneous and impulsive). I am incredibly grateful that these people are in my life. Some I have known for years, some for a few months, but time doesn't set priority. I'm well over ranking my friends by their 'use' to me. I brag about friends to other friends and let them know I brag about them to other friends too. I would love to name them, but I know the list would grow and grow and grow because I can credit a lot of people in my life now towards my growth and support. Leaving anyone out would devastate me and a long list is something that bristles on my humility. It's never about quantity and I don't want them to feel like names on a list when they're so much more.

There's a lot of love and support that is far more important to becoming a better human than placing expectations on your social acceptability ever could. I had those shallow clubbing days where I was always making shallow connections. I would never go back. We are creatures looking for the balance of dependency and independence-- total independence just sounds like a place of isolation. We need to rely on each other. The internet is great for information, but it will never ever beat personal experience and the subtle cues on faces and bodies a page full of words can't replicate. 

I do think that we will get a grip on this fast-changing world, one way or another, but things will need to change. Attitudes will need to change. We'll need to understand and seek the value of both isolation and great friendships and relationships. I can't MAKE change, only encourage people, lead by example and hope people can find their own way to happiness. That the people they bring into their lives are simply there because they truly enjoy each other's company, not fill a quota to banish solitude or 'complete' some missing part of them. The best thing you can do is be a complete person for any and all of the people in your life.