Never Be Complacent Because You Are Afraid

Hi :)

I know I need to get back on here and write another blog when my facebook posts start getting longer and longer...The proof is in the pudding, I guess I have been feeling inspired lately.

So usually, when I DO write on here, I come with a rampant mission of topics to discuss, but today I'm just going to go with the flow.  I know I have a whole lot of things I could talk about, we'll see where my brain takes me.


Usually what starts me is things I am learning in my own life, so we'll start there.  What is the biggest thing I am learning lately?

I am not going to get a damn thing in my life/job unless I not only ask for it, but demand it, remind the people I'm asking, keep showing how great I am at whatever I'm doing, and don't back down.  The things I want are NOT going to be handed to me.  They are going to be given to the person who is demanding harder than I am.

There isn't going to be a change in my life unless I make it.  Life ain't no Cinderella story.  If I want something different, I have to earn it.  It's very annoying, but I'm pretty sure it's like this for most people.

There's always going to be more people who disagree with me or just don't understand me than people who are going to be on my side.  But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.  In fact most of the time, when I do have a conversation with people, they're either very impressed with what I have to say, or they're belligerent and their counterpoints, are so stupid that they only encourage me.  And sometimes, I am just plain wrong.  But being wrong about a couple things doesn't make you wrong about everything.  I think people are afraid to speak out because they are afraid of being wrong.  I love being wrong because it teaches me new things--I want to get my words as far out as possible because often, I am very wise and I think I can help people--and when I am wrong, I'm helping myself by learning.  I don't claim to know it all by speaking out about things that I have a solid logical argument behind.  I do claim to be proud of my own opinions, and I think that's important as long as you are using logic and self-improvement as your motivation, and not selfish reasons.

My life is just always going to be hard.  It's never been easy, it never will be easy.  All I can do now is laugh and realize that it is what I make of it.  I can act like everything's so horrible or really, I can appreciate the blessings I do have.  And sometimes, I can flamboyantly express the 'suckery' of it all, because every one of us is entitled to do that a few times a week.  But, at the same point, I'm not going to make a big deal out of small things by letting them take over my life.  Self-expression and depression are two different things.  Leading me to my next point--

People will always make a big deal out of little things.  Often, as a consequence, this blurs what the actual truth is for people who are just listening in on a conversation, and can cause the weak-minded to see things unclearly, which is why you must always try to listen to things objectively and form your own conclusions.  For instance, when I listen to someone vent about the behavior of someone else.  I can objectively watch this and, while, maybe I don't approve of the behavior of the person who is the subject of the discussion, in the same token, often this would never bother me enough to say anything about it.  To me it's like, you're behaving poorly and you need to improve--but unless you are TRULY hurting others, it's really not something for other people to get all fussy about.  And at my work, watching people get upset because things were left in places where they don't go--that's just hilarious.  It's amazing how things that don't matter can get blown out of proportion by the right people.  Or even when I'm bothered by something.  I've literally had to vocalize--"Hey--it bothers me, but it's not a big deal," because the person I was telling this to was acting like it was horrible that something small and trivial was bothering me (it was loud yelling at a football game, fyi).  When I told this person, who I love dearly that, they were simply like, "Oh," with an -oops- look on their face.  I just plugged my ears, grimaced, and moved on with my life.  Lol.

The title of my book will be, "Dear People, I May Be Annoyed But My Life Didn't End Because Someone Put Eggs In My Frittata."
Life is what it is and you get what you get, you're annoyed by what you're annoyed by, you don't like what you don't like, you go through what you go through and it's NOT a big deal.  Unless you make it that.

When I read over this, it's clear that the main focus of my life is not anything we're taught to focus on--it's self-improvement and the pure happiness that comes with that.  Push others and push yourself ONLY where it counts, and don't cause yourself anxiety by worrying about things that don't matter.  Speak your mind, learn, and you may be surprised by how right you are and how wrong other people are.  And if you are wrong, you may be surprised by how much you've learned and how glad you are for saying the wrong thing--because without doing that, you would never have been taught something new.  Live your life, say what you need to say.  Go where you need to go.  Never be complacent because you are afraid.

Aging and My Three Reasons Why I Think It's Not A Big Deal...Self-Growth

(First of all, I didn't mean to make this post around certain loved ones of mine's birthdays.  That's sheer coincidence and I just realized this about 35 min into writing the entry.  This entry is not directed to anyone at all, and is meant to be helpful, fun, and insightful for anyone who stumbles upon it, just like every other entry I've ever written in the blog).

HI party people!!!  (I'm only saying that because it sounds so ridiculous here and my sense of humor is kind of to put things/say things in situations where they completely don't seem to go!  I hear several grasshoppers in the difference, some mouse-clicks over some X's, and I can almost feel the glaring scowls at the computer screen right now...but I don't care, you're going to have to deal with my unique sense of humor, because it's here to stay.)

I have had some time and with time... I GET TO THINK.  And with my thoughts...comes DANGEROUS proportions.

Well, blog entries. :)  Although I prefer to imbue (imbue!!!!  HAH!!  My favorite word...it sounds so funny!!!  I'm sure that was out of context, but I just felt the need to use the word imbue) this blog as a Professional Journal without all the boredom/scientific terms/repetitiveness in my head.

I hope I don't sound like one of those generic youtubers (of which I've been studying way too many for makeup-learning-purposes for my job [OKAY AND for personal enjoyment] etc, etc.  I hope they aren't rubbing off on me!  Why do so many always start and end their videos the same way?  And endorse things the same ways?  Is it just a comfort-zone thing?)

OMG.  *Slaps own wrist*  Time to get with the program. (Considers deleting all of the above.  But of course I won't because...I don't have to! :)  I love that about this thing)



Working sort of in the doorway (well maybe like 8 inches AWAY from the doorway...but still NEAR the doorway) of the beauty industry (as a cashier lol), I've been thinking a lot lately about aging.  And of course because it is MY brain, I had to turn innocent skin-care shopping into some sort of philosophical concept.  Anyway, we all know this already, but clearly...blah blah...there's a lot of dread having to do with age.

But I don't think there has to be! :)

First of all:

.5)  Gray hair is BEAUTIFUL.  I just found my first five or six gray hairs the other day.  They are all rather short, like they all decided to just grow in and decide to be gray a few weeks ago.  'Oh hello there Lyza, we are gray now, just decided a couple weeks ago, what's up!?'  But they're really sparkly and silvery, which I rather like.  And as long as we keep it healthy, I don't see how it's this horrible thing... if you keep your hair as soft and shiny as possible, what's wrong with gray hair?  Dye it if you want...but I don't think it's something to be ashamed of.  (Why did I put this as number one, like it's so important??  Please keep reading...hope I haven't lost anybody :P )

1)  Every year, you get a bit wiser, a bit more comfortable with yourself, and a bit more intolerant to bullshit.  Situations dealing with other people, time thinking to yourself, and thinking about how to handle these situations for the future simply does this to you naturally.  Time does this.  Time creates comfort in places that were new--life--and comfort allows you to be more open and honest about how you're really feeling.  Time also allows you to be comfortable expressing when you're uncomfortable.  You realize--I don't HAVE to feel bad about the opinions I am forming because someone told me I should.  I feel this way based on the knowledge I accrued over time, and it makes a lot of sense that I feel this way.  And because of that logic, you can feel proud expressing the thoughts you have, be they positive or negative.  Even if they are wrong every once in a while--you can feel comfortable expressing your thoughts and comfortable negotiating different opinions and accepting when you are wrong--that is true maturity--and I know plenty of people of all ages, old or young, who are terrible at doing that, but it's part of self-growth and being a good person.  I can't wait to see the Lyza I am ten years from now-because she sure is kicking it now.  I'm thinking I'm about to be a B.O.S.S.  Are you too?

I have heard that our mental stamina is at it's height in our mid-twenties...never to reach it's peak again.  However, mid-twenties is still very young.  It may be at it's height, but who is to say it is being put to good use?  Everyone is a little different, everyone matures differently and I don't think that our supposed "mental decline," has to be so dramatic.  We can NOT however, use our aging as an excuse to evade personal growth and still take true pride in who we are.  We all know people who do this.  If you want to truly be a decent person, you have to be compassionate for others, accept when you are wrong, and be open-minded to new ideas (last one being the hardest as our physical brains do lose plasticity, and therefore lose the ability to be open-minded, as we age...which is why I believe the terrible human traditions, are/have been so hard to break!).

My advice on your brain losing plasticity:  The BEST thing you can do for your mental health is to make it a practice to be open-minded--every single day of every year.  Put changing things up into practice--don't get too caught up in any routine and always allow yourself to hear opinions different from your own.  It probably won't eradicate the problem--but it could only help.

2)  Every year, you get better at knowing what you want, and how to say no to the things that you don't want.  It seems pretty base--knowing what you want, but it's actually kind of hard to really know everything about what you want, at any age, because there's so many choices to be made about so many different things, that we can't really know until we attempt to make these choices, learn more about what we are about to do, or have the wisdom to know that certain things we are being advised to do simply aren't logical for us.

 I had no idea I would hate college when I started it at age 18 or that it was corrupt for my elders at school to pressure us all to make such an impacting financial choice at such a young, impressionable age.  I had no idea that some of my strengths would include being good at reading people, understanding situations, and problem-solving.  I had no idea most of the people making others unhappy are unhappy themselves.  And no idea how to handle those people when push comes to shove.  I had no idea sometimes people stick to a terrible opinion just out of pride, and not because there's any real logic to it.  5 or 6 years ago it was harder for me to separate truth from opinion and to know who was selfish, who was well-meaning but wrong, and who was just using poor logic and needed an upgrade.  I had no idea about tons of things just 5 or 6 years ago.  But now that I know these things--I am standing at the tip of the iceberg on my life--on what I want, what will make me happy, and how I will and do handle situations when things inevitably get tough.  And my logic makes me 100% comfortable standing up for my beliefs when someone disagrees with me.  Beliefs should be formed through logical argument--not through others but through your own trains of thought and your own desire to be a good person.  We're NOT going to be good at everything and we're NOT going to get everything right because we're human and part of maturity is accepting that and being able to be fine with it.  ALSO--what makes you happy may NOT make someone else happy.  But, when you know what the HELL you want for your own life and your own happiness, and you have good foundations for your beliefs--even if you have to be tough on people at first because they want you to be a different way--you make yourself and you make the world a better, more accepting and balanced place for everyone.  That's just what the simple combination of logic, truth, and happiness does.  It starts a chain-reaction of positivity--as long as you act on it.  As time goes on, you do get better at putting yourself in a place where you are happier because of what you'll inevitably learn about yourself, and that's the wonderful thing about aging.

3.)  Life gets easier when you know what you want and know how to act on it.  I'm not saying you won't have as many or more problems than you do now, when you are older.  But, when you're not like a lost baby bird, it certainly does help.  Experience does bring about a certain calm on things that may have totally daunted you when you first started on them.  It's like any new job... For instance, doing the loud-speaker announcements at my job used to give me terrible nerves...now I am actually excited to do them.  You also learn how to pull yourself out of situations that are not right for you or good for you, which can be difficult all in it's own for some people, especially if you don't realize that they're not right.  Hard things become easy...every new thing becomes a new opportunity, to scare yourself, to challenge yourself, and to realize that was scary to you in the past is actually not a big deal at all.  So things in a way get easier--mainly because you know how to handle them better--that's the nature of experience.


ThankYOU. :)

That's all for now, I hope I helped, and I hate writing conclusion paragraphs.


EDIT:  I'm re-reading this and I know some of my wording comes off as really hilarious...almost like a parody and not like something to be taken seriously (example:  "...What the HELL you want..."  I didn't want to professionalize this entry... I just wanted it to come off how I would say it in person, and a lot of times my intention is to make people laugh in addition to teaching them something.  I have a very sarcastic sense of humor that I like to mix in on occasion when I feel I'm making a strong point, but read out loud I'm thinking this could sound kind of ridiculous.  Hopefully the entry helped you in some way and I'm editing this like crazy today (just the day it was posted...it'll be completely final tomorrow...this is how I always do this).  I need to stop submitting my entries so early.  Most of the time they come out fantastically, but today's was a little jumbled and I should have waited before submitting it!!!

You Could Analyze Something To Death

September 8th??  September 8th was REALLY the last time I blogged?!  So it's been 3 weeks.  Time really, really flies guys.  It doesn't matter what I am doing.  I just feel like I'm going to be 100 tomorrow.  I thought I'd blogged last a week ago!!  Are you the same?  I remember, as a kid, time used to feel like waiting for a turtle to lick up a puddle of molasses... Now I savor every moment because I feel they are disappearing like tiny grains of surface sand on a windy day.  And maybe that's the point of this blog in a way... to focus on what's big to you, because the little disappears.

Was doing some research for my other blog, and was inspired by gradients.  When one color fades into a different color, so seamlessly it almost looks like the two could be one uniform shade.  And they could, if you backed away far enough.
I wanted to compare how an artist's gradient looked from farther away to how it looked very close up, and when I saw the close-up, it occurred to me I could see the lines of blending.  It did not look seamless.  But then it occurred to me, if I could fix the imperfections and unblended lines at the close-up, and was able to get an even larger close-up of the corrected close-up, you would still see more lines of blending.  No matter how much you, "fix," something, the closer you get to it, the more imperfections you will see, down to the microscopic level.  Until you can get to the tiniest point of existence, perfection does not exist.

So, you could spend a life-time trying your darndest to get the most, "perfect," thing, look the most, "perfect," way...Please notice, I often quote (or sometimes first-letter-capitalize) the words I don't stand by.
And when you had that perfect mesh of what you believe you're supposed to have, that gradient that may as well be one object, what have you?

Well, you have something that looks very nice.

Whether it holds moral value to you is another subject entirely.

Everything you work for, everything you do, none of it truly matters--unless it has moral value to you.  Everything aside from love and happiness are just extras in your life.  And when we keep trying to fix small things, we often are, point-blank, wasting our time.  We, for some reason, are very good at blowing tiny interactions, tiny choices, tiny situations, completely out of proportion.  And because we are giving that petty list of things meaning, whatever the list and whatever the meanings are, we focus on them and forget about what will truly fulfill us.

So when I say, "You Could Analyze Something To Death," in the blog-title, I mean it heartily.  You could analyze all the tiny things that you feel need tweaked until finally, you have no more time left.  In the end, will you appreciate the product of your work more than the experiences that it took to get you to that finished product?

Whether you are at a company balancing moral and sales, or at home balancing your life, this applies to you.  People in your life will always tell you at certain points in the path, that something needs to be tweaked.  You have to make the changes on it that are worthwhile to you.  What will you be proud of more?  How something looks, or the love and happiness you gave to get yourself there?



PS: This blog is my darling.  I love writing in here, and I don't plan to stop making posts.  I'll write in here at least once a month, if not more.  Also, please feel free to ask me questions and give suggestions for topics you'd like me to discuss. :)

It's Okay To Ride Up To A Dead End...

There might be a beautiful sunset there.

Or there may not be.  It's still perfectly okay.

I like to go on bike rides in the evening sometimes when the sun is setting.  I'll ride as far away as I can from the sun, maybe 20-40 minutes before the sun sets, and then, when I see it start to set, as fast as I can, I ride my bike to the closest view possible of the sunset.  It's my time to look at everything around me, feel everything around me, and take nothing for granted.  It's also exhilarating!

Today when I was doing this, I noticed something about myself.  I got nervous every time I got close to a dead end.  Worried, that because I didn't know if there would be another road around the corner, that people might laugh at my bad directional skills.

How silly this is, yet I've clearly been trained to do this.  We all do this at points in our lives.  We don't want to be seen doing something that might look foolish, when actually, what we should feel foolish about--is the fact that we feel foolish to begin with about whatever we are doing.  Would you feel foolish doing it if you were on your own and no one else knew about it?  There comes a point where you have to realize that it doesn't MATTER what people think.  Do what makes you happy.  So many of us choose to go the safe route.  The one where we know people will not judge us.  This is often at the sacrifice of our own happiness.  Why miss out on the things that we enjoy simply because other people, usually ignorant of our intentions and quick to judge, waste their time making uninformed conclusions about us (instead of focusing on what is actually important in life--even more of a reason to not care about what those people think).  As long as we aren't harming others, it really doesn't matter one flip what others have to say about what we are doing.

The most adventurous path, the path that is right for you, is not always on the road where people travel.  You might end up in a valley staring at the sky for a while.  Or you might end up lost, or working really hard to find yourself in a better place.  Or you may take a wrong turn at a dead end.  But the last thing you should be doing is worrying what others think about it.  Make the life choices, and the little choices, that are going to make you the most happy.  You cannot base these off of what other people think of you without sacrificing some happiness along the way.  The biggest regrets are lost chances.  Do you truly regret that you chose not to achieve something you did not want to do just because other people wanted you to?  Priorities need to be rearranged... YOUR life is about YOUR happiness.  Not others.  Things you could have done to improve your life--for YOU--that you missed out on, should be your only regrets, if any.  So go for it!!

(Of course, please try to be conscious and help animals, the world, and humanity while you are at it.  Little choices count.)