Author: toseealife

Fandoms–what the heck?

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One follower away from 100! Whoo! No pressure.😉

Okay, so I want to talk about Fandoms a little bit, because fandoms are the perfect illustration of this verse I was just reading.

(Read the lesser known books of the Bible sometime, it’ll blow your mind what’s in there. My mom likes to say there are hidden gems.)

I was reading Titus, literally, the whole thing (it’s three short chapters).

Chapter 1, verse 15 says: “To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; but even their mind and conscience are defiled.”

I quote the first of it a lot, but I didn’t know the rest.

My siblings and I are, or have been, part of quite a few fandoms, and I can date my first real experience of realizing that people are fans of things for a wide variety of reasons when I started watching Justice League Unlimited again online.

And whoa, mama, I found some messed up stuff in the comment section.

I’ve mentioned this before. You know, a lot of people say not to read the comment section, even under your own videos. I don’t have this problem yet, but I follow plenty of YouTubers who do.

It’s kind of sad really. I almost can’t blame those who disable the comments on their videos.

I’m just going to be blunt here. The number one thing I find in a lot of comments, but especially superhero ones is: SEX, SEX, SEX, Gay, homo, lesbian, incest…yeah, that last one is especially disturbing.

I’m scared because my 8 year old cousin already knows this stuff, though she’s too young to enjoy it, she know there are sick people like that our there. Goodness knows her parents aren’t going to explain to her.

Anyway, since then I’ve found this problem in every fandom. But what puzzled me is that these people show up in the most innocent, kid friendly of places. Shows you’d think they wouldn’t bother watching, or movies, or even books. Usually you expect perverts to look for stuff marketed to them.

What I had to realize was that there is actually a thrill they get out of spoiling innocent things. They know as well as the rest of us what was intended…they just don’t care.

Likewise, we’ve all been around that rare gem of a person who is exposed to something messed up and is completely unaware of what they are seeing. I’ve been that person. I envy them now, though usually, it’s still me.

And that perfectly illustrates the verse above. To the pure all things are pure. To the defiled, everything that goes into their mind becomes defiled, and they do not even have a conscience about it anymore.

I wish I could say it was unbelievers alone who were like this, I’d expect even a person of a different religion than me to have standards based on that religion, but religious people of any faith are just as likely to do this.

In fact, some of them are more likely. The reason is that, as kids, we were given a high standard. (A good standard usually. I have no problem with plenty of the values of even Islam. They are at least trying to do a good thing.)

When we get older we find out just how few people agree with us, we get into “worldly” stuff…and often its not the material that does it, even in this corrupt age (all ages are corrupt in their own way) I’d say over 50% of popular media is still trying to teach some kind of moral. And even shows that teach morals I don’t usually agree with are at least encouraging moral thinking, not sexual thinking. I can’t stand environmental shows, but I prefer that to nothing but sex and crude humor. What a no brainer right?

No, what does it is finding out that most (or it can feel like most) of the people watching it are just doing it to get their thrills.

So religiously raised kids get cynical, we cease to believe people look for value at all, and our commentary on these things becomes full of bitterness and what we expect people to point out.

I could begin naming names here, but I don’t think it would be fair. I’m sure you’ve seen it yourself and don’t need me to give an example of one of my people I know.

Basically, if you watch any kind of commentary, or participate in discussion with friends, you’ve met this person.

And it’s in humor too.

And these people are also who Paul is talking about in Titus, he’s writing about religious people when he says that verse. Because by overthinking ever little thing, and assuming corruption in other people, they have corrupted themselves.

I’d like to say this very clearly: If you constantly assume the worse motives of other people, you will begin to have those motives yourself.

It’s in another book where we are admonished to rebuke people carefully of sin, lest we also be tempted.

With this, you won’t be tempted by the obvious sin, if it’s there at all, you’ll be tempted by assuming it…and in assuming it, you’ll think of it more than the person you’re assuming about will.

I have to confess I do this too. But I am glad I don’t do it all the time, I can still enjoy some things purely. But the more I listen to people like that , the harder it gets.

It’s easy to write off entire fandoms (and fandoms are just one example of a people group, so it applies to any group of people you know) as corrupt because the ones who are are the loudest.

But the bible warns us of this also, in Proverbs it often tells us that fools will be loud and overt about their folly because they do not have the sense to be ashamed of it, while the wise are quieter about it, often. And wait to be asked. Or the wise offer only part of their opinion until pressed for more.

And in fandoms, I can attest to the fact that the more reserved commentators and analysts tend to have the best stuff. The loud ones can either be empty headed, or… gross.

Of course, if you have a loud personality, it does not make you a fool. It’s more of a rule when the person may be weirdly quiet about the good stuff.

(To me a red flag is if the person says nothing during the lesson or emotional moments, and gets way too excited about stupid or inconsequential gags. Or even worse, sees an emotional moment and immediate goes for the gay joke.)

At that point, their analysis is basically worthless I think. It’s a cheap gag.

I’m lucky to have siblings who enjoy thins for most of the same reasons I do and will encourage me to look at the best, otherwise I think all I would see sometimes is that bad stuff.

I think, if you’re like me, you may be wondering how to avoid getting burned by all this stuff.

I do not have a perfect answer yet. But I know that focusing on what you love, on the good stuff, is the best way to forget about the bad.

And watching your influences. Maybe you can’t get away from all of them, but as far as YouTube goes, I’ve found it helped a lot to search for positive reviewers, and clean ones. Or ones who actually think, for goodness sake.

And outside of fandoms, there are other people who corrupt everything they talk about. It may be better to just not hang around them.

But there are some who do it only because they were never taught anything else. Or, like many kids I’ve known, were not given a standard at all. Often they will change if they simply see something better demonstrated.

And to the pure, even a relationship in real life becomes pure. It all depends on your motives. As long as you also use common sense and set boundaries.

I think this song put it well, I had it playing while writing this:

“This is my brand new day starting now, I let go of the things that weigh me down, and rob me of the beauty that’s to be found, in life all around.

And this is my prayer without ceasing, the negative releasing, and as I rise above, my burden is easing.

I bring the pure flow water around, the rocks of life won’t hold me down.

I bring the pure flow, drink so deep, the river of life, my soul at ease.”–Superchick, Pure.

Until next time–Natasha.

Ladylikeness is weak?

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I was just scrolling though a comment section for MLP and I found someone trolling people about feminism.

A little context: The episode is called “A Dog and Pony Show.”

It ends with Twilight saying that just because someone is ladylike, it doesn’t make them weak.

And there weren’t too many people harping on about it. In fact, I didn’t see any feminist comments, but I did see someone who was clearly trying to get some kind of reaction by calling it feminist and saying “Face it, ladies are weak.”

What’s funny? No girls were taking the bait, but one other guy watching did.

Now, I really think this is not most men. I somehow doubt this particular dude even hates women, he probably just doesn’t like feminism.

But I can’t help but think, feminists overreact all the time to pretty innocuous stuff, but I guess it can go both ways.

It makes me think of a Girl Meets World episode Girl Meets STEM, which a guy who reviewed it said had a feminist message. He wasn’t against the message, but I had watched it and concluded the episode was actually warning girls not to swallow the man-hating pill.

As a woman, I really can’t call it anything else. If I talked about men the way many of these feminists and their shows do, I’d conclude I hated them.

And let’s talk about this.

A lot of women become feminists because they had poor father figures who did not respect them, some come out of abusive households.

It’s just as likely to produce weak women, but I’d also argue that not all feminists are particularly strong.

I have to think of what my Mom said of one woman (it wasn’t a feminist by the way, just some girl on a survival TV show talking about having a hard life) who said her experiences made her strong, but then after two days of the challenge was KO-ed.

My mom made the observation that just because you survived something it doesn’t make you strong.

I’ve talked about why I’m not a feminist before. I believe in equal rights, same as any smart person, I would hope. But its’ for the same reason I don’t like Black History month, I don’t see the point of flaunting it.

Black history should be taught along with other history, as it makes sense in the curriculum, not set aside for it’s own month. If we gave every ethnicity its own month, we’d have a hopelessly disjointed curriculum, and unless we do that, we’re still being biased. Better to dot hem all together as it chronologically makes sense, then we can give everyone attention.

And I don’t seem the point of flaunting womanhood either. It’s not like it’s something you could control being.

I think the real reason for many women who really hate men and demand special treatment is that their father did give them the kind of treatment they should have received. Girls want to be treasured (so do boys) and loved, when they aren’t, they can become depressed or angry, or both usually.

I remember, I was angry. At age 11 or so, I got called out on it. No one tried to find out why I was angry.

Looking back, my problem, among other things, was that my dad did not pour into my life… he was hardly in it at all personally, though he lived at my house and my parents have a decent relationship. But my dad, the older I got, paid less and less attention to me. Unless I was in trouble. I think you know the story.

And I never did the things teenage girls usually get in trouble for. You’d be surprised how little it took to get me sent on a guilt trip as a young teen.

Even to this day that has not changed. But I changed. I’m not living in anger anymore.

And in full honesty, I have had my times of being tempted to put men into a box. I also know men have the same temptation with women. A lot of them have had moms who didn’t do so well with them, girlfriends who didn’t, and so on.

I suspect that they are just quieter about it. Now that the culture is more in favor of women.

I really don’t think it make one gender worse or better that we’re both tempted to stereotype each other, it just make sense. Once bitten, twice shy. You have one bad experience with a man, it’s easier to make all men the face of your problem. And vice versa.

The best thing to do is not to play into it. Don’t be what they think you are. Nevermind if they interpret all your actions into their image of you, if you know you are doing it, then that’s what matters.

Justice, I’ve learned, can come slowly, but it comes.

As for the question of ladylikeness being weak, I really think it’s obviously not true. The examples are getting rarer now that girls are encourage to act like bros, a thing that suits some women, and puts others at a huge disadvantage.

From my experience, ladylikeness is power. I’m the type of girl who gets doors opened for her, has boys pick up things for her, and offer to carry things (that happens more as a general rule with the guy though.) I credit the guys for choosing to be chivalrous.

I am also the kind of girl who puts effort into her appearance to show I respect myself.

See, the beautifying thing women do, it’s not all about attracting men (though it has been minimized to that.) I think the movie I’ve seen do this best is Miss Congeniality, where Vic asks Grace if she respects herself when she doesn’t want to put any effort into her looks because the contest is rigged.

It’s not that much of a conundrum, really. Men will wear work clothes to work, dress clothes to the office, sports clothes to a sports event. They don’t even care as much as us usually, but it’s a simple matter of showing respect and support.

I think women dress up for the same reason. We embrace beauty as a way to show we appreciate it, and that we want to spread it around. We put care into our appearance to show we respect ourselves, and if we respect ourselves, we are likely to respect others.

There’s a reason decent men usually feel a healthy respect for a woman who dresses with care. It’s always worked for me. Though, I think they can also tell is you’re doing it because you’re insecure. I think anyone can usually tell that.

Ladylikeness is about respect, really. It’s about not opening yourself up to scorn by being unladylike, not because it’s okay to scorn a girl who acts more tomboyish, but because it is also okay to have style that is distinctly feminine.

One more thing: Ladies, for goodness sake, do not freak out if a guy says you look good! I know a lot of you don’t, but if you do, remember, even if he is being a jerk, you don’t have to let it get to you, and chances are he might just be complimenting you.

Personally, I don’t care. I know I look good, if you say it you’re just acknowledging the obvious. You don’t gain or lose  a lot of points either way. So long as it’s not said in a creepy tone.

Anyway, that’s my take on it for the time being, until next time–Natasha.

The Element of Wisdom.

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I’ve gotten into MLP (My Little Pony) lately. I never thought I’d like the show, but I found it surprisingly insightful.

Weird.

Well, I never thought I’d be an anime person either.

Anyway, I’m not writing about the show, but it has a thing called Elements that represent things you need to have friendship, or any really healthy relationship.

And in the habit of using the show’s lingo, I call what I want to write about an element also.

It is an element of relationships, but it’s interesting to me that it’s also an element of writing a good story.

I noticed it over the past year because of getting into two different shows, which I’ve mentioned. RWBY and My Hero Academia.

A lot of people in the anime community like both, at least in the USA. RWBY has a pretty good sized fan base for the production level it’s on, and MHA is the top rated anime in the world.

And the only thing I’ve ever seen besides Frozen where I could say “It deserves the hype.”

But you aren’t here for me to talk about that, (I think).

And my real point is the difference between the two.

Before I say it though, let me clarify: I by no means intend to say that MHA or RWBY are exclusive examples. Any two shows you liked for different reasons you could make the comparison between, it is only because they are the ones I watch that I use them, I can’t very well explain a show I haven’t seen. But I’m not one of those fans who think the only good in anime or any genre has to come from their favorite. (Seriously, though, they are so good. If you are into that sort of thing.)

I like the shows for very different reasons. But the difference I see is that MHA has actually helped me figure out and work through some of my problems. It feels like no coincidence that I started watching it at the beginning of 2019, and this year has led to a lot of developments in my personal life that I’ve wanted to see happen for years. The show encouraged me to look at them more closely.

RWBY did help me realize some issues, but did not provide a lot of answers. To be fair, it is not as far along in some ways.

What struck me though, was that MHA makes the most of every opportunity to nail home a lesson, a meaning, and people who normally hate that are eating it up.

The writer is very good. He uses characters very much like I do when I write. He also is possibly even more preachy, in the best way, and I love it.

It had such a different feel from RWBY, and I wondered why, because a lot of plot elements are extremely similar.

Yet, there is one character on RWBY that I think explains what happened.

Everyone who watches RWBY knows after season 3 things changed. People argue whether it was for the better. I’m sure you’ve read series or seen shows where people got into the same thing after some big change.

For RWBY, as in many stories, a huge change was the death of fan favorite Pyrrha Nikos.

I’ve been in my share of fandoms, this is one of the first that I got reactions to negative changes in. I’ve seen other fans upset, but the torrent of grief, anger, desperate hope, denial over this was unlike anything I’ve seen before, and I haven’t seen it since.

Personally, I felt terrible over it. And I spent months wondering why. I felt like a real person died. More than that, I felt like the story changed drastically.

Everyone kept saying it got darker. But that is not strictly true.

No one else important has died since season 3, it’s now season 6. The heroes have won, instead of losing, as they consistently did before. And Ruby has gotten stronger. All in all, the actually story isn’t doing so badly. I’d say it looks worse for the villains, not better.

But despite that, everyone continues to feel uneasy. The fandom and the characters. No one quite trusts the writers anymore.

It was actually the guy who created the series idea to kill Pyrrha. He passed away that same season, and his friends have been carrying on since. Very decent of them–and also the show was too popular for the studio to drop.

They seem to be trying hard to make a good story.

I can’t blame them for what happened, though plenty of people do. It’s a puzzle.

Well, I moved back from RWBY for awhile, and got into MHA. But I still like RWBY, and I still wondered why it was different. Some shows don’t drastically change after a character dies. The tone remains the same. Some do. What was the difference?

It, I decided, is actually because there’s an element of story telling that certain characters tend to embody. Especially on an action packed show.

That element is Wisdom.

Pyrrha Nikos was a very loving person, that’s why people adored her. But I liked her also for her wisdom. She was the only character who seemed to have any sense of how to solve problems. As time went on, the mentor characters on RWBY were all shown to not really know what they were doing. One is even a liar. We all expected it, but the immediate feeling we got was that the characters are now lost.

They are directionless. They don’t know what to do, why to do it, or how. They are guessing. Going on instinct.

Their hearts are in the right place.

I used to think that was enough.

But it hit me that in stories, just as in real life, you have to have wisdom, not just good intentions. Wisdom tells you how to direct your intentions.

Pyrrha was this for RWBY. She was, actually, the only character on it who had peace enough to make her own choices. She guided other characters.

Her death changed a lot. No one knew where the show or the characters were going anymore.

It seemed like just outrage. But three seasons later, we see the same lack of assurance. Even in the characters. They are not bad, they are just wandering, uncertain.

The writing feels the same. Good, but hesitant.

There are some characters that just inspire writers, they guide them. I have them in my stories too. The character keeps me on track. Some stories have more than one, and those are the best.

RWBY had only one, and she died.

There is hope for RWBY, but the damage is real.

I think it hurts a story to lose its wisdom. The effect is that all the bad things in the story just beat up the protagonists, and there is no way to process them. To make sense of it so that you can keep going.

Dark and gritty stories are that way because they lack wisdom.

Proverbs 29:18 “Where there is no vision the people perish,

but blessed is he who keeps the law.”

 

Hosea 4:6 “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”

To tell a story is always to tell someone your view of the world, even if by accident. It’s clear, hearing some stories, that the person telling them missed the point of their own story.

I am not accusing RWBY of this, rather, I do not think it knows what its point is.

I’ve seen other shows and series do it worse. At least it has some ideas, if nothing else.

But this is why I think it changed. And why MHA is different, that show has an amazing amount of wisdom. I am not used to shows saying things I have not even thought of myself. (Sorry, I think I think things through more than a lot of writers.)

But, I think if I hadn’t seen RWBY first, I would not have thought of it. I’m glad I watched both so close together.

Well, I hope you got something out of this, until next time–Natasha.

Check out some of my fiction writing on Kindle!

 

Real Talk: Intrusive Thoughts

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So, Real Talk.

I watched the latest Sander Sides video. If you read The Snake Cycle (drybonestruth.wordpress.com/2019/05/19/the-snake-cycle/)  post I did, you know who Thomas Sanders is, if not, then suffice it to say he’s a YouTuber who makes Inside Out-like videos about life issues.

His latest, as of this date, is one about something called Intrusive Thoughts.

Apparently roughly 2% of the population deals with them, I personally think the number has to be much higher, and that the 2% just are the reported, extreme cases.

Intrusive Thoughts are weird, nonsensical, disturbing, and often violent gruesome or sexual thoughts that seem to come form nowhere, and persistently annoy or bother us, especially when we are stressed or going through a hard time, or feel low on self esteem.

The more you fight them, the worse they seem to get, yet you are horrified that you could even think of these things or think about doing them.

One example form the Sanders Sides was thinking of murdering someone, molesting someone, or eating them. (Ew.)

Now, I have a confession, watching the video my reaction was “So this is more commonly recognized as a problem than I thought.”

I assumed everyone had these thoughts, but that few people saw them as that unusual or problematic, beyond an annoyance.

I still think everyone does have thoughts like this. Is there really a person who’s never thought about killing someone?

Not seriously, but like, pictured it.

IF there is, they have less of a temper than me. I’m betting than you too. We make jokes on shows so often about killing people.

We often say “I’m gonna kill him/her.”

Do we mean it? Not usually. But just that that has become a figurative thing shows how often we have thoughts like that, and we minimize them.

But honestly, that’s not even the worst of these thoughts.

Apparently, some people have them in dreams too. I don’t typically dream them, if I do, I wake up.

I also don’t see my dreams as evidence of my deep desires or serious considerations. To me, a dream is more like the realm where all reason can be off the table for why anything happens. It’s where the  things you worry about can’t be kept at bay with distraction and common sense.

But, I also don’t fine them impossible to resist.

That’s what I want to talk bout.

The conclusion in the video is that you cannot reason your way out of Intrusive Thoughts, you also can’t fight them, you should never check to see if their gone.

It’s true, checking for a thought to be gone is to think it again, that’s only common sense.

They are like moths around a lamp, actually, if you turn the beacon off, they’ll go away, but turn it back on to look for them, and they’ll be back.

Unless it’s to remember where you put something, am I right?

I agree that these methods do not work to fight Intrusive Thoughts, but I do not agree that there is no way  to fight them.

I find Sander’s conclusion to be based on something that I do not agree with. That we can’t control what we think, that there is nothing to turn to besides ourselves when wre are thinking those things, and that thinking those things is okay.

I don’t mean that we should beat ourselves up when those thoughts pop up.

It is also hard to say where the line is. People who have these thoughts continuously can go crazy from it. They can cease to be bothered by the thoughts.

I believe I know why this is, I study character.

When someone has terrible thoughts or desires that beat on them relentlessly, more and more over time, they start to feel like a monster.

When a human being feels like that, they do one of two things. They try to fix it, to change themselves back from it, they may hide it or they may go to someone else (that is better), but they try to do something about it.

Or, they embrace it as a way to not fear themselves. C. S. Lewis mentions this in The Great Divorce, adding that to fear oneself is the last horror.

Imagine Dragons also has done some songs about just this feeling, one is called Monster, I’d say Polaroid is the same thing, toned down to a more relationship oriented version.

I think Intrusive Thoughts break some people, and they embrace them in order to stop fearing them. I doubt most perverts and psychos started off liking those feelings, but they may have given up fighting them so long ago that they only have distant memories as of hating them as a child.

I don’t think we are born enjoying the worst kinds of things, at least not most of us, but if we are not guarded as kids, things can creep in.

As a kid I did things I now know are serious perversions in adults, as a kid, I stopped as I realized it was wrong, I think the fact that I did it unknowingly helped. But I also had better influences.

If someone doesn’t they are likely to give in and end up with weird addictions, fetishes, or worse.

What years of being in Church and reading books about it has taught me is that just about everyone has these dark places in their life, either now, or in the past. I think the devil sneaks in to put us in chains at a young age.

What’s amazing is that none of us seem to realize it’s not just us.

It’s actually sad that humanity is so messed up as a whole, but it’s not, really, so very surprising.

It’s even less surprising that the influence of the Information age has made it easier and more common than ever. We’re exposed tho things by accident, some of us were exposed to them on purpose.

I say this because it does help to find the root of the problem. I’ve retraced a lot of my past problems.

Fear was major factor. To comfort ourselves we develop weird habits.

I really dislike how some shows are portraying this as funny, when it’s a very serious problem, an unhealthy coin mechanism.

Using masturbation as a comfort thing is one common example, even the BIG Bang Theory did it.

How many kids watch that? I know my cousins have.

That’s not even an Intrusive thought, it’s afar too common to be. I doubt the people who do it think about it overmuch. If they do, it’s because of guilt.

Things got a lot better for me once God started removing my fears.

The thing is, Thomas Sanders has been so open about things that bug him, that I can easily draw parallels between my experience and his.

He mentions being afraid of demons and other monsters. That was me once.

I do not think he has seen the connection between this and intrusive thoughts.

Though he did link anxiety with the problem, so he was close.

For some people, it’s an easy leap from “I fear this” to “I fear being like this thing that horrifies me.” And it can be easy to dull the pain of that by embracing it, easier to give up than to keep fighting.

And direct resistance to those thought doe snot work.

But I break with Thomas over saying these thoughts are our own.

I maintain that only thoughts I encourage and welcome are my own. Once I take ownership of them, I say they are okay, because they are part of me.

Even if, like Thomas, I say they are bad thoughts and that I am not completely good because I think them, I am still softening the blow by saying they are mine.

Plus, these thoughts to me are less about how bad I am, and more about how weak I am.

I think Intrusive Thoughts have two, maybe three sources.

1 . A huge contributor is the World. We are exposed to so much messes up stuff by wack jobs who like it because they gave in, that it’s almost an audible voice (sometimes it is audible_ telling us to give in and accept this way of thinking. A siren song of disturbing elements.

You think I’m exaggerating?

Oh no, think about it. 50 Shades of Gray has done a lot to make having kinky tenancies, as they are called, okay. Even sort of cool, in a you-do-you sort of way.

At the very least, they are talked of more even if mostly to say it’s messed up. PEple read it into innocent remarks on shows that are far from endorsing it.

I doubt that one book or movie is solely responsible, but it’s an example of how something can be popularized through such methods. And those thoughts people used to keep to themselves the now feel free to share, not to get help, but to revel in their own disturbing nature.

I see this on reviews of My Little Pony for crying out loud.

Ugh.

2. This will not sound reasonable to a skeptic, but I think the devil is behind plenty of it.

The very nature of intrusive thoughts reminds me of how Lewis portrayed the demonic in his book Perelandra. Pure evil is not rational, because Reason still comes from God, once God has been fully rejected, reason goes with it. Evil just revels in being evil, mindless, directionless, destructive.

Very much like Intrusive Thoughts. We human are rational, so they make us feel sick. But if someone gives up rationality, they cease to be bothered by it. We have plenty of ugly historical examples of this happening.

3. It’s possible that everyone is born with some capacity to fall prey to these thoughts because of our sinful nature. The fact that the thoughts so rarely are appealing at first makes it hard for me to believe it’s a temptation.

Its our fear of them that is the temptation. It’s easy to panic over it. We are weak, we can’t fight it off, so we panic.

But it’s that temptation that then opens to door to temptation to accept it in order to escape the fear. And then what we once found horrifying can become pleasurable.

I hate it as much as you do, but I can’t deny it’s a fact.

I never could resist temptation effectively until I ceased to fear it. My fear made me more likely to give in, if I was already paralyzed, what else could I do.

Fear is like a bully. You do as it says to make it go away and stop punching you, but it only comes back crueler next time.

Which brings me to my solution:

What actually destroys Intrusive Thoughts is…Joy.

I’m not kidding.

Once I began to get more grounded in who I was in Christ, and began to believe my identity was not based in these thoughts and fears, a strange thing happened.

I began to find them pathetic, and funny in a pathetic way.

Like “That’s the best you can do?”

And once I could laugh at them, the power of them disappeared. Even if I had them again, I knew they were ridiculous.

It is not the same as enjoying them. You laugh at these thoughts like you laugh at an angry dog behind a fence. The danger i rendered innocuous by how stupid it is to be threatening you when it can’t even reach you.

But always keeping in mind that if we go in the fence, the danger is real. To laugh at these thoughts is not to accept them. It’s to block them the way a clique blocks outsiders by mocking them. They are not taken seriously enough to be talked to.

Joy takes a while to build up to. But what started it for me was deciding I had to trust God with y thoughts.

And I think Sanders and I differ on this. I hope his method helps him, but I think one day I will be rid of this problem, and I do not think he will unless he looks outside himself.

Well, this was long, but good to talk about, until next time–Natasha.

 

Friends or Family?

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Well my family has left for vacation, and I am staying at home.

I’m not completely alone, my grandma is still here.

This is going to be the longest I’ve gone without seeing my family. Three weeks. It will be hard, my siblings and I are each others’ closest friends.

We spent our last full day together with another friend, and then watching our favorite anime together, (it’s My Hero Academia if you’re wondering.)

One thing we talked about in passing was how we’ve had difficulty befriending someone we know, and it seems like they don’t really want us to.

I pointed out that church (where all but one or two of my friends are) is supposed to be family, as the bible says, but if you look at how we’re instructed to behave to each other, it sounds more like friendship.

Proverbs even says better is a friend close then a brother far away, and there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Then I pointed out that we three have always been family, and we have always related to each other as sisters, but that it was only the past 5 years or so that we chose to also become friends.

Up until 13-14 I’d say, I treated my sisters like sisters. People who annoyed me, and who I could annoy, with no fear that it would end our relationship. There is a security in a healthy family, room to grow up and develop, while making plenty of mistakes along the way that family blows off, while it would end most friendships.

Of course, the biblical way to treat siblings is nothing like that, but as most adolescents, I didn’t care.

But after returning to Christ, I began rethinking how I acted. It didn’t change a whole lot until my sisters did the same thing, but overtime we began to build our relationship into something very strong. We enjoy it now. We enjoy each other’s personalities, and we are our closest confidantes. We have the kind of sibling-hood you read about.

And sometimes that amazes me, because I know it didn’t have to be that way. I’m so glad we all chose to become friends. (There’s actually a show on Disney Channel that addressed this idea, Liv and Maddie, “Sisters by birth, friends by choice.”)

I was comparing it to the Church family. Once you become a christian (as our doctrine goes) you are part of the family. And the basic instructions off the bat are that we accept you as such. overlook you faults the way a family would, and be your support. If we fight, we also forgive quickly.

That’s a family dynamic, a baby Christian needs that because they will get a lot wrong in the first year or so. That’s okay. I did too. And I was raised in Church. You cannot teach spiritual maturity, only exhibit it and hope it will benefit other people. I had my  mom as an example of it for years before I learned to emulate any of it.

A new Christian is only beginning to be a new person. And that makes them immature. We are meant to show grace.

The sad thing, a lot of churches do not even reach the family dynamic. They don’t accept people, they don’t forgive, they don’t support.

This does not mean that it doesn’t work however. The problem with corporate church is that the same flaws tend to creep in as with businesses and charities, many just don’t do what they should because management skills are not adequate.

Which is why I think the church was never meant to be a corporate experience, but there are people who find a way to work the system.

Many churches do find the family dynamic. But what the New Testament instructs us in is far closer to friendship in many ways.

We are not just to support each other, but to find each others strengths and talents, and develop them. We no longer just accept, we are also to correct, to sharpen each other. To hold each other accountable.

Family can do this, but it is something that comes more naturally into a really good friendship. Family can be too close to see the problem. Friends build distance on purpose by having diverse interests, getting space from each other, and so they learn more about the other person because they see them from more angles than if they lived with them constantly.

The church is designed to meld these two dynamics into a hybrid I think only is possible in spiritual ways. It is really difficult to explain until you experience it. My family became my friends. I hope someday to have friends who will be family.

The trouble is, churches can not really support friendship. I have a church that supports family a lot. Better than most places do. But it is still trying to figure out friendship.

A lot of discipleship we do is focused on family, one girl who’d been through their school of ministry even admitted to this. Not a lot of it is focused on friendship.

Yet, I think a lot of what the epistles show us is how to be a friend as well as a brother or sister.

I think in Acts, the apostles already had a family dynamic, but after they started to travel and organised, they had to have friends.

My dad has learned the hard way that family can be heard to organize to do anything if everyone acts as and individual. It takes the build up of friendship, the learning to work with a very different person, to speak their language, that allows for teamwork.

Some families achieve this with seeming ease. My family never had been particularly good at this except in crisis situations. I think it depends on how well the family knows itself.

A lot of friends now are not on this level, thanks to the lack of interaction we have except through technology, but you’ve probably met or known people who still have this teamwork ability. Hopefully you are one of them.

And my whole point to my sisters was that this ability is a choice to develop. That is what makes it different.

We have no choice about our family. We need to accept hem no matter what.

But within the family we tend to have friends. It won’t be every remember, an not the same for every member you do have it with, but there will be the odd person here and there.

I have a bond with family I only see once or twice a year because we are family, but I have a different bond with people I choose to be around and are not related to me except by faith or being in the human race.

I realize a lot of this post may only be interesting if you are a christian, but it was something I had not realized before, and I’ve been in church my hole life. Plus, it’s always interesting to think about social circles like this and how they work.

Plus my real point that friendship is choice, it doesn’t just happen, is one I think many of us need to understand. Myself included. Movies show friendship as something that can happen in an instant…sometimes it can, but I have never found those friends to be the ones I am likely to see the most often or talk to the most… Maybe God in his wisdom reserves the instant friendship bond for a more eternal significance. The people you surround yourself with are going to round our your rough edges, and that’s better for you.

Until next time–Natasha

Speaking of friendship, it is a factor in the book series I am publishing on Kindle, here’s a link if you want to check out the first two installments, more coming once I replace my laptop-

You can also visit my author page and ask me questions about the series if you’re curious about how me and my coauthor came up with the idea.

Thanks for your support!

Aftermath–plus special announcement at the end.

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“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”–C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man.)

I’ve written about this brilliant little book before, but one thing that interests me that I have not really touched on is what happened in the aftermath of it.

The system in England when Lewis wrote that books was followed pretty quickly by America, it was probably already in place in the rest of Europe at the time, at least the countries at the forefront of our minds.

Nazism, the great evil of the War, was leading to the abolition of most men, but Lewis was concerned that what they were teaching schoolboys (and girls no doubt) was going to lead to the abolition of all men, in feeling if not in biological form.

Wise men saw where it was going, but where has it taken us now?

We live in the Post-Modern era. It is rightly called that, if we mean by modern Modernism, which Lewis and his predecessor G. K. Chesterton were both very much concerned with. Modernism was not about being modern in a fashionable sense, like it’s usually used now, or referring to technology or medicine. Modernism was the principles, or lack thereof, of thorough rationality. Which Chesterton showed in his book Orthodoxy to really be irrational.

It is basically materialism, but with odd ideals on top of it, that really make no sense whatsoever if you take the idea literally that nothing has any value except in our own emotions.

But as Lewis pointed out, the men who taught this didn’t believe it themselves. They were teaching values in spite of themselves. The problem is, even if they were better than what they taught, it had the same effect on their students as if they hadn’t been.

My parents, and perhaps your parents generation were the prime victims of this teaching’s first effects.

You’re probably familiar with how psychology got very popular in the 60s-90s, and it still is now. It was beginning before then, but at least in America, it really took off once we began pushing religion aside and needed explanations for all the phenomenon’s sin and human nature used to explain.

We’ve come full circle almost in the pat few decades, we’ve come back to realizing that psychology explains nothing. Now we are looking to physics and other such things, we’re looking to sexuality, we’re looking to race, we’re looking to everything except what originally worked for people: Religion.

My dad had behavioral issues as a kid, and born when he was, he was medicated, put in Special Ed and diagnosed with mental illness, he tried rehabilitation. Like many people of his generation, and ours, he also tried drugs.

It’s strange that drugs and psychology both took off at around the same time. (People can bicker about dates, but a few years or even a decade on the grand scale of time is pretty much the same time.) Both were around before then, but they got popularized, jsutfied, studied, and theorized about. They came to be seen as normal.

Clearly they aren’t the same thing, but strange that the very thing that told us that our dependence on substance was a problem coming from deeper issues did nothing to stop us from abusing substances.

Have you noticed that to highlight a problem in society is no to weaken it, but exposing it makes it become uglier, more used, more prolific, draws more people in.

Exposing it just to comment on it, that is, real solutions are different.

But Psychology did not fix anything, it diagnosed things. Medication could not fix those problems, in face many meds make the problems they treat worse. My dad went off his, and does better now that he did while on them. (Of course, you should be careful about getting off medication, the process is difficult and should be walked through with a doctor’s help. He didn’t quit all at once.)

Now, we live in the information, option generation. In the aftermath of all that identifying, we’ve become clueless about what to do.

Relationships have been diagnosed, studied, and tested; the result? We have a really hard time maintaining even eye contact.

Are they directly related things?

I think so.

Exposing how bad we are at relationships did not help us fix them. It made the revelation overwhelming.

Before, people knew some folks were bad at relationships, but those who were were seen as responsible for their own actions. Since no one thought it was genetically inevitable, people could try to improve, or could be ignored by the general public if they chose to remain unpleasant. Not knowing how deep our mental problems supposedly went, we thought we could move on.

Having it blown so completely out of proportion crippled us. Because it made us think we were powerless to do anything about it.

Doubting our ability to control ourselves is now common phrasing for young people. “That’s just the way I am.”

But we took it further.

It was too depressing to live in that, so we began to take these things that were exposed so that we could not hide them anymore, and we began to say they were not bad, not shameful, after all. Instead they were cool, enlightened, they were our identity.

It’s okay to be gay, it’s okay to have mental health issues, it’s okay to have a disability, it’s okay to do what makes you happy.

Not all the above examples are on the same level of crazy of course, but they all stem from the same thing, a desire to take a shame and turn it into a pride.

In some cases that may be okay. But we’ve gone way, way too far past that line.

I do not blame young people all that much for being so stupid, not really.

When I read books written in the 60s-80s, I often find them depressing.

The infamous Men are from Mars, Women are From Venus was one of the most insulting things I ever read on the difference between men and women. A lot of authors who commented on it were condescending to both genders.

Like our differences can be summed up in quirks. Try it and it fails you, you’ll never find any one thing that makes men and women different other than our sexual organs, if you look only at what we do and what we enjoy and what we hate and how we think. The difference is harder to pin down then that, anyone who tires just makes fool of themselves.

When the explanation for differences was so stupid and limiting, it’s in line with human nature to throw it out and go to the opposite extreme, that there are no differences. That’s insane, but it’s less boring. Youth do like exciting things.

Plus, the new and different aspect is attractive to many people.

If you look at any popular attitude held now, you can trace it back to evolving from an attitude the previous couple of generations have. We have mutated it into something different.

We now speak less of the values they valued, and more of vague ideas about self-fulfillment. But it all make sense, that age of reason led to discrediting pleasure and fulfillment as in our own minds, leaving the young people weaponless to defend pleasure on the grounds o fr eason, the natural result we that young people ignored reason, ignored common sense, and ignored restraint.

Now we have this mess.

IF you listen to how we talked now, it’s becomes obvious. People acknowledge that there are reasons to ear healthy, exercise, and focus on happy things; but then make a joke out of doing none of those things. They laughed it off, but behind the humor, there’s a secret guilt, and a secret bewilderment.

Why, if it is so obvious, do we find nothing compelling about reason? And why, if it is so unimportant, do we make a joke out of not following it that hides a note of serious concern.

We are unsettled. We are drifters. The previous generations removed the foundation of our lives, tried to put a weak one in it;s place, but like sand, it crumbled when the floods of real problems struck again. It was never going to hold up.

But, lacking both  a solid foundation, and now even a sandy one, we have none. Hence our myriad of problems that center around confusion, uncertainty, and depression. Our general feeling of purposelessness.

We now do not have the logical skills to explain why we feel this way, only words of mental illness, social anxiety, and being addicted to screens.

We laugh at it because we have no idea what to do about it.

This, I present to you, is the aftermath of the abolition of Man, our humanity is not gone completely, thanks to God and the preservation of some values even so, but it is hanging by a thread because our defenses are so weak.

We are glorifying our weaknesses because we have been robbed of our strength and glory.

That is what happened. And it turns out, abolishing man’s strength and glory is very close to abolishing man himself, it is good for us that God redeems our weaknesses, or we would have no hope.

But we do have hope. That’s what this blog is about after all. That even dry bones can live again.

It is now almost the third or fourth anniversary of when I started it with just that premise. And I still think that  a return to truth is the only way to preserve hope.

So, with that in mind, until next time–Natasha.

Announcement:

I have now published the first two parts of a series I wrote on Kindle!

It is about superheroes, mystical creatures, and mysteries.

There may be over 20 parts in all, at 0.99 an installment (lowest price possible), if you would like to check it out, here’s a link to find it, the series is called “When It Started.”

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=When+it+started+Natasha+Queen&rh=n%3A154606011&ref=nb_sb_noss