Month: June 2016

I have heard so much about posture and body language and it is totally true. I get that. But what I recently have been hearing about is power poses. Poses that increase your self confidence. A lot of them, or the main gist of them, is to open yourself up. When we get scared or feeling insecure we curl ourselves up, it’s a defense mechanism. But to master a power pose you need to open yourself up, fake it till you make it.

Stand up, straighten your shoulders, look people in the eyes. Don’t cross your arms or fidget. Take up some space.

This is going to be a short post because I’ve talked already about taking up space and posture. But it’s a reminder to find your power pose.

When you are uncomfortable or anxious, remember your power pose. The pose that makes you feel like you can conquer the world. Your superman pose. Your game face.

Find that pose and rock it, use it, make it become a part of you until you don’t even have to remind yourself to do so, like drinking water, and standing straight.

You are a beautiful and unique human being. Own your power whether it be the power to love, to care, to give, to cook. Whatever your power or powers is/are, take them and let them fuel you.

I have a lot of flaws, I am human. Here are some of them, in no order

1. I can be pretty impatient and intolerant (I hate repeating myself many times)
2. I snap, I can feel like it’s okay and then in another moment it is totally not okay and the world is crashing and burning
3. I am pretty self righteous. If I don’t agree with what you are doing, you will know it.

This is also something I read from Dear Sugar. I will quote the problem below in a much clipped version.

I’ve always considered them to be my ‘role model couple’…I asked her what the ‘secret to marriage’ was, and during our conversation about it she revealed things that surprised and upset me. She said while it’s true she and my brother-in-law are happy to be married to each other, there  were several times over the years she doubted they’d make it…that both she and my brother-in-law have cheated on each other

She and her fiance felt that infidelity was an automatic deal breaker and wondered if she should share her marriage with them still (walking her down the aisle). The writer asked Sugar what the secret to a good marriage was, seeing Sugar’s marriage as perfect. Sugar related her own experience where she found out Mr. Sugar was cheating on her and how they dealt with.

Marriage is indeed this horribly complex thing for which you appear to be ill prepared…that’s okay. a lot of people are…a perfect couple is a wholly private thing…it’s only defining quality is that it’s composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times…if you really want to live happily ever after, it you honestly want to know what the secret to sustaining a lifelong ‘healthy love’ is, it would be a good idea to openly grapple with some of the most common challenges of doing so, rather than pretending that you have the power to shut them down by making advance threats about walking out, ‘no conversation required,’ the moment a transgression occurs…people get mucked up in it [life] from time to time. even the people we marry. even us. you don’t know what it is you’ll get mucked up in yet, but if you’re lucky, and if you and your fiance really are right for each other…you’re probably going to get mucked up in a few things along the way…the woman who sent him the postcard pushed us down a path where we made ourselves ready, not to be a perfect couple, but to be a couple who knows how to have a duel when a duel needs to be had…not perfection, but real love. not what you imagine, but what you’d never dream

This was something that captivated me. I think it is because I took back someone who did cheat and it didn’t work. Did I regret doing so? No. I believed they could change and they did too, I think. It’s okay they didn’t, some people cannot change or need a lot of time and motivation. But I stayed to try to make it work because I felt that they were worth making it work, that our love deserved another chance. It didn’t work out in the end. And it was hard, it made me jealous and suspicious, it made him secretive. Our relationship didn’t fail because he cheated and lied and betrayed me, it didn’t work because we were not right for each other on a fundamental level.

Would I do it again? I would. Because I believe that people do make horrible mistakes. Betrayal is hard to deal with and a breach of trust is even harder. What is the key afterwards is open conversation and patience from both sides. I have dealt with a lot of harbored resentment, that I am getting over finally, yay, so I get that, trying to get over something you don’t even realize is there, and once you do it seems like the worst thing and you don’t know how to come out of it. But you do. We all make mistakes and we are all human. Cheating isn’t necessarily born out of a desire to deliberately hurt, it is a mistake and can happen for a lot of reasons. Open communication is key, knowing when to open up issues and talk about them. I have read so many stories about it. I know that dealing with cheating is hard and it can not work, not cannot, but it can just not work. But I believe with the right person, two people who love each other and are willing to try to make it work, it’s worth it. I know not everyone believes in the same as me, and that’s okay. This is just how I feel. I’ve been in situations where I’ve said deal breakers and drawn lines and I’ve crossed them or stood by them. What I’ve learned is that with the right person and with dedication and communication, these things can be a lot less harsh. It’s about the individuals, their ability to change, to work out their issues, to dedicate themselves.

I didn’t want to post this on my book review site because I wanted to talk more personally about the advice I read in the book. Dear Sugar is a book with advice columns from the same woman, Cheryl Strayed, who wrote Wild. I found the book really easy to read and get into. It reminded me of reading the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, except more honest.

Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

I don’t even know truly what that means to me, it just stuck out to me and I had to write it down. To me it means following your gut, sticking to what you know to be true, believing in the power of your own intuition and instincts. There are so many things in the world trying to convince us not to, but we need to listen to that little voice and find the ability to live true to ourselves.

Another thing that resonated me was Sugar’s realization that she didn’t need to be broken for a man to love her. It reminded me so much of when I first started my current relationship. I was in such a vulnerable and broken place. I knew I left my other relationship for the right reason. For the first time in my life I was certain that I was done. I felt like the door had closed on me and I locked it (with a clarity I have now that didn’t because at the time it felt like even after all the shit I went through I still got the door shut on me and it felt unjust it felt like I deserved to slam it and be the one to close it, but I realize now that no matter why it closed, I got to lock it and walk away and that is the best actually). I felt so irrevocably lost and broken, so done with love and everything. I thought maybe I was totally messed up, incapable of feeling and deep into hurting myself emotionally (it felt like the last years had been a roller coaster of ups and downs that had just numbed me to the reality, it had cut my friendships, isolated me and I had no idea what I would do). I needed to get out to just completely leave and get out of there. I found it lethargic and it provided me with this complete outlet to sort my life out which was still messy as hell and totally complicated. I jumped into this fling which I had no clue would become anything (although I am a pretty in depth monogamous person so this ‘fling’ idea was already going to be another emotional battle, but I denied that and totally didn’t think about it – oh except when I went walking and cried in the rain). I jumped head first into this relationship and poured my heart out on the daily about all the horrible stuff and the stuff I hadn’t told anyone. I seemed like a crazy person, not only because I let it all go, but it made me seem like a mad woman to have endured it so long. I was even told this. It was true, but at the time I had been blinded by home, naivety, and ‘love’ (although what it was was just a warped up twisted distant twice removed cousin of love who no one can let out of the basement because it is so toxic). I had no clue who I was, and yet I found someone who could deal with it, could see me at my very lost and broken self and accepted it, even loved it.

Now here’s where I get back to the post and off this giant tangent, did I feel like I needed to be broken in order to be loved? While I never would have believe it before, I believed it then. Why? Because I thought that being vulnerable was attractive? No clue. But it was so much a part of me that I couldn’t not be broken and smashed. I couldn’t separate this temporary, which didn’t feel like it at the time, and my strong little flicker of self who was just being given the freedom to grow for the first time in five years. I poured myself into thinking I was broken, because it seemed to me that is what you do. Until I believed it so much I pretty much thought, I have so much baggage it’s probably going to take a ridiculously long time to undo this.

I don’t remember a lot of when I healed, when I moved on. I still have baggage, while a ton less, I just left it behind when I left my relationship and that train wreck behind. So this whole tangent doesn’t really provide that much substance to the actual story or the question, but it’s what I thought of when I read that one story.