Day 5
I also realized I didn't have my driver's license and only one spare. So rather than risk it, I turned around. I worked on Chapter 2. The chapter covers negativity.
I’ve been trying to unpack the question of if I spend a lot of energy on negative thoughts. I realize in my 20s and 30s a lot of my mind was spent in frantic behavior. I was constantly challenging myself to explore one of the thousands of JetSki’s that were going on at the same time in my mind. I was hyper-productive and successful. I was also annoying.
I did go to town at the end of the day to get more spare tires and Tacos. One plate wasn't enough so I ended up eating six tacos. They were wonderful.
During that time my stress and anxiety helped fuel my mania which led to a lot of productivity. When my mind functions like that I do tend to find and solve problems quickly. Sometimes it did become negative thinking. But a lot of times it was just pragmatic.
Recently (as in just this last week) I’ve been spending a lot of time meditating trying to understand if my distracting “small brain” (in contrast to a calm and quiet “big brain” found in meditation) are feelings or thoughts and if they are positive neutral or negative. This test probably isn’t super valid as I’m on vacation and my mind is very far from a stressed anxious state. Also meditating isn’t typical behavior. Maybe when I'm channeling my Zen-ass-mother-fucker I can be less negative than when I’m near anybody who wants to talk to me about their love of Jesus while also telling me about their right to not get vaccinated.
But in this state, sitting in a chair meditating in Mexico quantifying if my thoughts are negative or positive, most of them are neutral to positive. As I’ve left the mania of trying to chase corporate success and focused on living in a more value-based mindful life my mania and anxiety have decreased and so has my negative thinking. It is still very easy to fall into that rapid-fire highly productive goal oriented driven way of thinking. It’s addicting to think that way. I have to actively resist situations that encourage me to think that way. Hence my avoidance of “work more than needed” (and i have learned I don’t need much).
Part of addressing negativity is about releasing anger through forgiveness. Last year when I went through the book I did the forgiveness exercises. On most levels, I think I was able to forgive my parents and myself. I know a certainty I was able to forgive those who helped me end my corporate career.
I still hold a lot of resentment towards my parents for the hypocrisy around religion/politics and withholding love and affection due to my disagreement with their views. I think I’m able to forgive for most of that. But the deep sadness from not being able to have a relationship is still overwhelming enough to cause a different form of resentment that I haven’t been able to figure out how to let go of.
I made a list of other people that I may do the forgiveness exercise with at some point.
- The person who helped excommunicated me from a friend group because I wasn’t “autistic enough” while also waving the banner of ASD Ally.
- The family member I had to unfollow on IG because they continued to post “all Democrats were stupid” and I just couldn’t take it anymore.
- A loved one's resentment towards me for not helping fix their mental health issues earlier. (Not applicable as I have unconditional forgiveness for this person).
But for the most part, I don’t have a lot of people close to me that I feel negativity or resentment towards. Sure I have had people or employees steal things or do other dumb human tricks. But those are just idiots being idiots. It’s not that big of a deal. I am far from angry with them.
I know the largest task to work on for me would be figuring out how to forgive the fundamentalist evangelical American “Christian”. If I could figure out how to do that it would probably let go of a lot of my anger/negativity. I guess that’s this year’s to do? Fuck.
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