|

Silence Speaks In Terrible Ways

Byjack
Silence Speaks In Terrible Ways

She told me she thought I wouldn’t notice

When she only replied to a handful of things

Of a series of long letters I wrote

How could I not notice

When I spend an hour

Pouring my heart out

Waiting every second of the day

For a response

She tells me she likes it when I write long letters

But I have grown wary of them

When I know

Most of it

Will never receive a response

She probably thinks that no response is better than a bad response

But silence is a response

It’s a blank check

For the deepest fears

And paranoia

Lurking in your brain

Letting your mind fill in the spaces

With explanations

For why the reason why the truth was too hard to say

Similar Posts

|

The Trifecta of Growth and Progression Down the Path of Truth

Byjack

There was a big journey I went down in terms of working on myself, becoming more mature and being able to live a free and meaningful life.

  • I started by thinking that you needed to meet your own needs
  • Then I thought you needed to be good at asking for your needs
  • And finally, I thought you needed to process traumas and emotions

But I realized that they are all part of the same things and have different parts to play.

In a way, everything is about not abandoning yourself and taking care of yourself. You surround yourself with people who you can talk about what is on your mind truthfully and emotionally. They help you understand what you need. You are able to then give yourself what you need and walk down further along the path of understanding different parts of yourself that are in pain.

From processing emotions, we can truly love ourselves, and the people around us, and be present in the moment.

There is a sense that being with people who don’t accept us, don’t allow us to feel safe speaking our truth is self abandoment. In a way, even if someone meets some of our needs (for example is attractive enough to make us feel special), if we settle for someone who doesn’t love us or allow us to be ourselves, we are putting ourselves down.

Not allowing ourselves to meet our own needs (for example, asking for validation from others because we refuse to give it to ourselves) is self abandonment.

Refusing to look deeper, and shielding parts of ourselves from the world (for example, keeping a confident outward appearance when we feel anxious) is abandoning parts of ourselves and placing the outside world’s comfort above our own.

Core Wounds 9

Byjack

I kind of dropped the ball on these because I don’t know if I feel like challenging my core wounds, but I think I need to keep going for the 21 days at least. It is interesting because you are supposed to focus on one core wound. I don’t know which one I would focus on, but maybe if I just keep going there is one that I will want to focus on.

I was talking to a friend about how it is hard to work on yourself sometimes. What I told her is that it is sometimes scary to think about who you might change into, but I think there is another reason. Sometimes it is hard to work on yourself because in order to work on yourself you first need to look at yourself in the mirror and face who you are, and that isn’t easy to do.

I think a big core wound or belief is that there is something wrong with me, that no one will actually like me if they know who I really am, that I’m weak and creepy and unattractive.

She Said I Made Her Day

Walking up to her out of the blue

On the streets of new york city

On the college campus

They both told me

I made their day

The next girl

Will think you are the one

She told me

And when I asked the girl

Lost in her own world

In a song she just found

Whether or not she thought I was attractive

She said yes

I felt she wanted to say more

But was too shy

|

Workpost 33: At the End of My Rope

Byjack

I feel pretty awful. I’ve lost focus in work. I feel overwhelmed and unhappy. Every day I stay up late at night. The only solace I find is in games. Everything that I wanted to do now feels like things I have to do.

I struggle to regain the mentality that I use for these workposts.

I guess I feel extremely tired and depressed.

There are a couple of things that filter through the haze that I’m feeling:

  1. I want to find a way to post on LinkedIn again. That is the one thing I want to work on achieving.
  2. This new idea in taichi, and breathwork. To receive what is coming instead of taking. To allow things to come to me. To receive breath instead of taking it. To receive emotions, purpose, and understanding, instead of creating it. I feel this is the essence of patience.
  3. To be curious. I want to do more IFS therapy, but I feel overwhelmed by it. Too much thinking about thinking that is too cerebral, non-intuitive, and downright frustrating. However, we can take the core concept of IFS – the concept of creativity. Ask how do I feel? What do I need? Why do I feel that way.

It’s not been all lost I suppose. There was something I worked through recently – two people that I am jealous of. One who went to Harvard and ended up starting a successful youtube channel, and another who worked on my software company before leaving and getting big on youtube for his music, and is now a famous musician.

In speaking with my friend Edgar about this I came up with the following concepts to remind myself in times of jealousy:

  1. How do I want to succeed my way? The issue with a lot of these people is that they got successful in things that I want to succeed in, but not in the way that I want to succeed. There is great value in succeed in the way I want to succeed.
  2. Hardship creates growth. Success isn’t the end goal, success just leads to creating more challenges for yourself to work through. The ones who go down the harder path to begin with will still succeed but will be more complete when they do.
  3. Is my goal to succeed a little in the short term? Or is the goal much bigger? This is the concept that if I want to gain one rank in Valorant, the outcome of a match matters (because my elo will be impacted directly). If my goal is to get to radiant (the highest rank), one loss in the scale of a huge journey is not significant.

Finally, I’ve put off doing a LinkedIn post for far too long.

Let’s tackle the steps:

  1. Answer a list of questions in a letter to my girlfriend.
  2. Come up with a research plan and timebox it.
  3. Timebox getting everything “on the canvas”, move very fast, get messy, take big risks, keep going until it coalesces into what the art wants to be
  4. Break to do other things, view work from different angles
  5. Put on strategic hat to finish

Questions to ask myself (step 1):

  1. What my vision for the ideal post?
  2. What am I worried about and feel uncomfortable by?
  3. What do I want to learn when creating this post?

Strategic Hat

  • See the work as something in itself, not just as a manifestation of my ideas
  • Put on creative hat, check: is there some feeling here, is there some beauty, fun?
  • Put on producer hat, check: if this was a work created by one of my clients, how would I promote it? If it was done by my brother?

*One Big Thing I Noticed*

It’s a lot easier for me to be motivated to workout than to work. Plan workout sessions for the entire day and bring work to do during those times. If no work gets done, I am still being productive and will be healthier, guaranteeing better work in the future.

Workpost 17: Sick

Byjack

I’ve been sick in the past two days. Not a terrible sickness thankfully. I credit that to the copious quantities of water I consumed as well as the zinc I took and the lymph node massage to clear my stuff nose. I can’t smell anything, I feel tired, and my mind feels fuzzy but other than that I’m actually doing ok.

Earlier my throat was hurting and I woke up many times in the night, but overall I slept pretty good. I’ve been self-medicating a lot by playing games, and I want to stop. I did go for a walk this morning and workout, and I feel that helps.

To Love and Lose Love

Byjack

A dear friend of mine who I was deeply in love with just cut ties with me. And I’m surprisingly calm.

Part of it is because I don’t think there is much left unsaid or anything I really regret about the whole friendship/relationship we had. I loved so many things about her. The way she made jokes, the sound of her voice, the patience and love she showed me at my worst. I will never forget that and I think she’s changed my life in ways she probably doesn’t even know.

I only wish she felt safe enough, trusted me enough, to tell me about how she truly felt. The worries, the emotions, the anger she was going through, I wish she trusted me enough to be open about it – so I could be as loving as she was for me and be closer today for it. In the end, she gave up on me – just like I had almost given up on her earlier in the friendship.

There are two things that still make me feel like someone is ripping apart my heart with a fork:

  • The fear that I wasn’t ever really special to her. That maybe she will turn around and say and do all of the things she said and did for me to the next person down the line. Maybe she has already found that next person. Maybe that is why she left. This hurts me somewhere so deep it’s hard for me to face fully.
  • The hope that she will come back. Hope is pure torture. I’m afraid it will drive me mad if I dwell on it too long.

There are more steps of grief, more growing I will need to do. But this is how I feel right now.

Deep Reflections Late At Night

Byjack

I was in a men’s support group tonight and I was mulling over some of the recent discoveries I had:

  • I realized that the right person in your life will be someone who will accept everything about you. Someone who isn’t like that may just not be right for you.
  • I usually walk away at the first sign I feel someone doesn’t understand me. I learned not to give up so quickly if it’s someone I love. If they care about you, they will try to understand. It may take some time, but they will. 
  • I realized I have a very deep-seated hatred of women that is shoved down so deep I didn’t know it existed. I feel this has affected my life in profound ways and I want to explore this deeper and understand why.
  • I realized that the way I work myself to death isn’t healthy and I need to find a better way.

I chose to explore the last realization – how I approach work. Through the discussion and coaching, I realized the following:

  • I feel deep shame for asking for help because I feel like this means I’m not good enough and disorganized.
  • I think of everything in terms of lone wolfing everything  – when in fact I work on a team. The work I do benefits the company I work for, my colleagues and my customers (as I believe in the product).
    • There is no shame in asking for help.
    • In the past, when I used to troubleshoot customer issues, I would work until 4 am in the morning and not feel like it is work because I know who it is for, and how  I am helping them (I felt good about it).

I resolve going forward, that every time I get overwhelmed and feel the urge to procrastinate I’ll do the following:

    1. Ask myself who I am helping
      • Myself for the money and experience I will gain
      • My family, and friends because of the money and time, and experience I can share with them if I succeed at my work
      • My colleagues for how my work will benefit their lives and careers
      • My customers for whom my work will transform their businesses and their personal careers.
    2. Focus on doing the work to help them (not just to get it done).
      • I will never forget the story of the teacher who said the moment that teaching transformed for them was the moment that they stopped trying to teach, and focused on helping their students learn. This feels like that moment to me.

I need to be kinder to myself. To enjoy my life when I’m tired and my body is hurting. I should eat out, take breaks, watch tv. There is no shame in asking for help. I’m on a team. Most of all, I should focus on how my work will help others not just myself.