Miraculous Ladybug is an Empath’s Nightmare! (And other things)

05/06/202005/11/2020 / toseealife / Leave a comment

Chloe is best girl, yeah, I said it.

Man is this show hard to watch and not get involved. Especially if you can sympathize with almost every villain, and the main one. Even if they annoy me.

Now that I finished Season 3, I think:

A. What the heck is wrong with you Natalie? Natalie, vous-ete (est?) tres stupide!

(I took French last year, this show keeps reminding me of it.)

B. Why, oh why, are they dragging out this ship, everyone knows it’s endgame by now.

C. They are wasting Yagame as part of a triangle, she’s freaking awesome, she should be a separate character.

D. Chloe is hands down the best character on this show. Sorry, HawkMoth, go suck an egg.

I am not crazy about the finale, I think they did my girl Chloe dirty, she slowly won me over as the most complex, sympathetic character of the main cast. Unlike the villains, she occasionally makes good decisions, and improves herself.

But by far the crowning moment for Queen Bee was being the very first person to successfully throw off an Acuma (the moth mind control thing, if you don’t know.)

The Mary Sue Marinette does dodge an acuma a couple of times, but only Chloe has thrown one off after already being infected.

Until suddenly, she’s too stupid to know HawkMoth is just using her, or too petty to care. This show has a habit of scrapping Chloe-character development whenever it’s plot convenient.

Even if it did make sense, it’s pretty negative to have a character regress so often, and I don’t see how it helps the message of the show.

But as an empath, this show can be one heck of a ride. The fact that negative emotions are the main antagonistic feature is both interesting, and difficult. They keep it PG, but some of the stuff is very adult, even so. Jobs, money, fraud, all that stuff that adults and kids alike have to worry about.

They have this little sociopath Lyla on the show now, and she’s officially the worst character.

But Lyla provides an all too ugly example of the kind of people we’ve all meant, the ones who embrace and nurse their wounded feelings, and choose hatred and spite on purpose, no matter what someone tries to do to make up for it.

Any little thing is enough to offend those people, and if it’s a big thing, you can be sure you’ll never hear the end of it from them.

One can’t help but think while watching about how we are tempted by our own negative feelings to give into them.

The show does not hide that many of the people who get acumatized feel ashamed afterwards, their private feelings were just displayed for all the world to see, and they do not even remember it.

The show even acknowledges that some people would begin to find the city of Paris a too dangerous place to walk around in freely, but the wiser characters remind them that giving into to fear will only make it worse.

The show kind of skips the distraction of politics that usually make it hard to focus on the point of whether living in fear is wise, or necessary, instead it goes right to showing how living in fear is the worst response to a threat because it gives it more power. Intimidation is a key component of any take over, the season 2 finale even shows this brazenly in its plot.

That being the case, we can draw some interesting parallels to many things in our world, where our fear makes the situation worse.

People decry the world for getting too relaxed, lazy, indolent. Shows like MHA, and RWBY, even have the villains taunt heroes with that attitude, but the fact is, fear driven societies are disasters. They are miserable, and there’s a collective wisdom in our desire not to dwell on fear.

The idea that we should not dwell on our negative feelings is one that strikes home with me too, as you may remember, I have been dealing with depression.

Happily, it’s gotten much better, I don’t think it was ever full force anyway, but I had to do some soul searching, and I came to the conclusion… soul searching doesn’t work.

There are times and phases in life when you have to look at yourself and ask “what the heck am I doing?” but not when you’re depressed, stressed, or anxious. Introspection is a real pain when you aren’t feeling great about yourself to begin with, and it’s rarely honest.

Jeremiah 17:9^“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

“It is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to search it out. 3 As the heavens are high and the earth is deep, so the hearts of kings cannot be searched. ” (Proverbs 25:2-3)

C. S. Lewis gave up keeping a diary because he saw no use for focusing on his own thought and feelings so much anymore. As a young teen, having a journal kept me sane, I did not have a lot of people to talk to.

Now, I still don’t have a ton of people to talk to, but I think I understand emotions a little better than when I was 13.

I do still keep a journal, but it’s become less of a comfort, it can be fun to write out good things, but the hyper-focus on what’s wrong no longer helps me process, it’s become rehashing the same thoughts over and over.

I think journaling does work, but perhaps God has not put his hand into that at this time of my life. So, I switched to therapy.

And in my last talk with my therapist, she told me again that my controlling father will probably not change, after decades of getting away with the same behavior.

At one time, I would not have wanted to hear that. While he was around, hoping he’d change was about all that kept me from despairing of my situation, up until last year, I never imagined he could leave. It’s still remarkable that it happened.

I can’t say I enjoyed hearing that it may be hopeless, but I did realize something, a lot of my hope depends on the idea that other people will change, or that I myself will somehow learn a new trick to manage my life.

In therapy, I’m being encouraged to just keep doing what I’ve already done, with few extra tips. Turns out, maybe therapy is support system for what people already would need to do, but we can get so psyched out if left to ourselves, and not make those decisions. We need someone else to back us up.

See, the approach so far is not that I need to be “fixed” like I thought, but that I need to be encouraged to keep making the right choices, it’s having someone else on your team.

So, if you’ve ever considered therapy, at least Christian therapy, let me say, don’t expect it to be carrying you, but it can give you more resolve and help you feel there’s a way to move forward.

I now don’t think I’d have lost my mind without it, but it is hopefully shortening the amount of years I’ll spend recovering from this, since a huge part of recovery is not walking in the same circles of anxiety.

How does this tie in to the show?

Well… everyone on this show needs therapy. They need to learn ways to make better choices.

Chloe had the right idea, having someone you can trust to care about you is good first step, you need to have hope.

Chloe hit the wall of having hope in a human being though, they will not always understand, or make wise choices.

Honestly, one of the ironies of the show is that Marinette, the person with a good background, loving parents, loyal friends, can be the most insecure, immature person in the main cast, save for Hawkmoth, ’cause that guy is whacked.

However, I’ve been thinking about that.

See, my dad had a royally flipped up background. Some of it might blow your mind, but some of you might have had similar experiences, I’ve discovered that suffering and evil are not what’s uncommon.

I know people with better parents than mine, too. But I have still been lucky in some ways.

The thing is, the people with good parents, aren’t necessarily the strongest, neither are the people with bad parents, despite what anime seems to think.

Trauma+tragedy is not a recipe for strong, brave character. In many cases, they are the most afraid and abusive of all.

But, good family also doesn’t make you compassionate. Marinette is a perfect fictional example of how it make you less able to understand what others go through, while Adrian is far more sympathetic to people’s difficulties.

I used this analogy the other day, your background is like being dealt a hand of cards (I borrowed this from Stasi Eldredge).

The thing is, in most card games, you don’t win with the hand you start out with. With games like Shanghai, you have to add and replace cards slowly over time to get the right combinations.

So, whether it was good hand, a bad hand, or in between, you still can’t win, unless you play the game, and play it well.

The game is life, bro.

What I mean is, you can choose to discard what was negative in your life, to stop listening to that, to exchange it for something better, in a Christian’s case, a new history in God.

You can get help, you can change your course. You can build on a good background, if you have one.

Whether you start off bad or good, you choose where it goes from there.

On the show, Chloe has to look at the very bad examples of both her parents, and realize she wants to be a hero, she wants to be kinder.

Thomas Sanders just released a new video talking about almost the same thing, and asking the question “Why should we be good? What’s our motivation.”

I could have saved him 45 minutes of screen time, I have the answer.

Because God made us with that purpose. God requires goodness of us, and God has provided a way to be justified in his sight, because we cannot pull it off.

When you love God, you will want to be good. You will be able to be, more than if you were just trying for some abstract standard. Love is really all that motivates us.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14:15)

And for me, I don’t love myself so much I want to be a better person just for that reason, I do want to be happy, but there are times I loathe myself, not because I think it’ right, but because I have issues. I can’t always feel pleased with who I am.

But what I don’t do, is hate on myself when I feel that way. I try to remind myself God has a better vision of who I am.

And for the love of God, I can keep trying, He is the one who’s there for me, and I am so grateful for that. Even on days when I feel down, and feel like it’s not worth it, and I’ll never be free.

That’s just an illusion, a Lie, if you will.

Gotta watch for that.

Until next time–Natasha.

If you want to support my other writing, check me out on Kindle and Wattpad 🙂

https://www.wattpad.com/user/worldwalkerdj

Say “I Love You” ?

04/26/202004/26/2020 / toseealife / Leave a comment

Today, I want to talk a little more about a show I mentioned in my last post about anime in general.

“Say I Love You.”

This story is about two people, Mei and Yamato, who run into each other at highschool and somehow end up kissing and starting a relationship (it makes more sense in context).

It was a cute first few episodes.

Then the show does what anime does, and adds drama. Drama, drama, drama. Cue the AJR song.

Yamato is one of the better male anime leads I’ve seen, in that, he comes off as a real person, not one of those bland, too perfect anime boys who has a harem for some reason.

Often anime boys, for the sake of plot, are spineless and pathetically uncolorful. They just aren’t human.

Or you get your Naruto’s, bright, sunny, very human, but selfish and self absorbed to the point where they can never learn from their mistakes.

Yamato is just the right mix of traits to where he was painfully believable as a character. I’m sure some of the girls watching the show knew guys like this, I am sure I’ve met them but never been close enough to know that about them.

Yamato is insecure, easily jealous, and a push over to the point where he sleeps with a girl out of pity because she manipulates his need to be needed. (Which is something often that girls do for guys, but it was odd to see it on the other side, yet I’m sure it happens more than people acknowledge.)

Yamato has a classic White Knight complex, not the Nice Guy Syndrome one, or the cute chivalrous one, but the “he can’t say no if anyone starts acting needy and he just had to be the hero” one.

Mei, on the other hand, is the kind of girl who is afraid to trust anyone. She got used by people as a scapegoat in her past, and she is now very defensive, but also shy and quiet. She has a caring heart, she loves helping wounded animals, and later she learned to like helping people too, but she pulls back from intimacy a lot. She is also so realistic, it hurts to watch.

Mei and Yamato seem like a good match in a way. Mei never tries to use him and exploit his weakness to manipulation. Yamato tries to take care of her and make himself trustworthy, not blaming her for anything, and appreciating her softer side. They even like some of the same things, like cats, it’s pretty cute.

But…

The anime took an interesting approach to their issues, because time and time again, the real problem wasn’t actually ticking each other off, but that the other people in their lives kept getting in the way, and Yamato could never say no, and Mei would not stand up for herself.

They learn a little eventually, but like many anime, the ending is not that good at showing that they truly learned why they are the way they are.

They apologize for their mistakes, but it never occurs to Yamato what his real problem is. It never occurs to Mei why she needs to confront him on that. Even though her friends tell her she should, she chickens out of really telling him all of it.

While the anime did convince me their relationship was not a terrible idea, it didn’t convince me it would ever end up very strong, because they just couldn’t say what was really wrong.

The point of the title is that Mei needs to learn to trust enough to “say ‘I love you'” to Yamato. And she does, at the very end, sort of (it was a little hard to tell if she was thinking it or saying it.)

The hard thing is that, what they really need to say is the truth.

Mei and Yamato are an all too real depiction of how people get into a relationship, and some of them, with the best of intentions, think they will be able to heal the other person.

Yamato thinks that, but we find out, he thinks that about everyone. He feels it’s his job to make all the pain better, we do learn that this is because he had a habit of not helping people in the past, and he feels guilty about that.

It’s beautiful when your significant other really wants to help you heal, instead of just wanting you to heal them, I hope I can have that attitude with my husband.

But it’s never enough.

Mei and Yamato hit that roadblock and the show ends because, it just doesn’t have anywhere else to go. I heard the Manga went further, but I doubt it really changed a lot, it was too much of a pattern. I learned from Naruto the hard way that if something starts off not finishing it’s character development, it tends to end that way too.

I’ve been rereading John and Stasi Eldredge’s “Love and War” book about marriage (’cause if you ain’t got it, you read about it, as Family Matters put it) and it describes the problem with fictional relationships to a tee.

In fact, I notice that the best fictional relationships are often ones that ignore something.

I love the ones where the two people understand each other so well that they aren’t bothered by the other person’s temper, because they know exactly what they mean by it, they never get offended by something that’s said because they’ve come to understand them so well, and they know just what to say to make them feel better — #goals.

Yeah… but, it’s not real.

Even friendship is portrayed that way on anime and kids shows a lot, and while I think it’s okay to aspire to be that kind of friend, you really can’t expect people to never get offended.

In a perfect world, we would understand each other that well. We’d never need to worry about offending anyone because everyone would be whole and confident, and impossible to offend.

I’m not too easy to offend with just words, I like kids, so I have to have a sense of humor about what people say to me, it’s easier with kids, because we don’t see them as the verdict on us, so if they insult us, we don’t take it seriously. At least, good childcare workers don’t.

But people are broken, they are a hot mess, and we can’t help but get hurt by what others say and do, it’s infuriating when we know better, we know this person would not try to hurt us, yet we get hurt anyway, and get mad at them. We can’t seem to help it.

I had the story of living with someone who actually did want to hurt me on purpose, which has given me a sense of insecurity about really being sure that other people never want to hurt me on purpose. I feel that they could become spiteful at any moment if I push them far enough.

Add to that that I am a naturally bold person who likes to start conflict if it’s for a good reason, and I end up creating situations for myself that would bring out people’s spiteful/defensive side if they had one.

I’d rather just know the truth.

The reason for that is, the person I lived with who spitefully hurt me on purpose, would lie about loving me, say it was out of love, and say they would not do it again, anthing to get out of the hot seat.

I developed a real hatred for bullcrap (real or imagined), and now I like to make people reveal their “true” colors, and prove they are only being fake with me.

I’m catching onto this habit more and more lately, and trying to control it, but I know perfectly well that I will not be able to every time. I will get triggered. I will react poorly.

I want to get healed enough so that that will be a rare occurrence, and I’ll realize it quickly and repent when it does happen,

but it turns out my biggest obstacle is no realizing I’m wrong, but accepting that I need help, and I need love, despite being wrong.

My dad put me on a very destructive cycle. He set me up to fail (and if I gave you details, you’d see just how very openly he did it) and then blamed me for failing when I could never have won. Giving me both self worth issues, and issues with giving people a fair chance, issues that feed into each other in such a perfectly evil way, that it is only by God’s grace that I am not swallowed by them.

The thing is, I am not my issues. I have them, and the trip me up, but it’s popular now to let them define you.

They don’t have to.

You can know you have a problem with Self Pity, but not live your life defined by self pity parties. You can actually be a sympathetic person, and still know self pity is a weakness of yours, it may have just turned into you strength.

You can know you have a temper, but let that make you more self controlled and slow to anger so that it doesn’t dominate your life.

And you have other traits. I may have issues with self worth, but I do not treat myself like I have no worth. I have tried hard to share my desires with people, to show I respect myself by how I dress, how I act, how I talk about myself. You won’t hear me use self deprecating humor too often. People may think I don’t talk bad about myself because my parents were super supportive, that would be a lie.

My mom had a rule about now saying negative things about yourself, but I know people who had a similar rule, but still lapsed into that whenever they weren’t around their parents.

My parents did not praise me that much, and often when they did, it was manipulation, which adds to the sense of worthlessness.

It’s been a choice not to fall into talking about myself like I’m worthless. Or thinking about myself that way, you know, that Inner Critic that gets all over your case.

I still have it, but I shut it down pretty quickly when it pipes up.

This is what I mean, I am not free from insecurities, but I am not nothing but insecurities. It’s a mistake to see yourself that way, but it’s encouraged by our culture, in some parts of the world, not being that way is seen as arrogant.

But the Bible would not say so. David said “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” and praised God for making him skilled in battle so that he could “bend a bow of bronze” (unless that was the other psalmist, but I think the point still stands).

The Bible is not into self deprecation.

In summary , we are messed up, we can’t fix each other, but that’s no reason to hate ourselves.

Until next time–Natasha.

And if you want to check out a different kind of my writing, I have an anime fanfic story on WattPad that has lots of relationships, and some adventure/sci-fi stuff too:

https://www.wattpad.com/user/worldwalkerdj

Normal?

04/08/2020 / toseealife / Leave a comment

Today I’m feeling better… I got in touch with a therapist, set up an appointment, fingers crossed.

You know, though, Anxiety and Depression is very frustrating for me. I’ve dealt with them my entire life, and the only time I have been free of them is since turning my life over to Jesus. Yet, periodically, they come back. Always in a different guise. School, sickness, emotional issues.

In times of stress, like currently, when my family life is rough, I didn’t always feel depressed before, but it’s like there’s nothing else, so my mind goes to that.

Being worry free can actually be outside my comfort zone.

I read that one thing people with Depression feel is Self-Loathing. I always thought that meant I hate who I am, and I used to, but Id on’t any more. I don’t always love myself, sometimes I am downright frustrated with her, but I wouldn’t say I hate her.

Only, I’m noticing, the times I’m more frustrated with her, are when I feel anxious or depressed.

It’s not enough to just feel bad, I feel bad about feeling bad. I feel like I should know better. Like it’s a waste of time. Like if I could just stop focusing on it, I’d be fine.

Come to think of it, that’s what my parents always told me. Well, it was either that, or telling me how much worse they had it than me, and how they considered suicide, etc. Not exactly reassuring.

It’s easy to see suicide as some kind of quick fix, if you lose sight of what’s important in your life. Right now, that’s tempting for me to do, because it looks like I’m experiencing a lot of what my dad experienced. It’s been ages since I had a really good experience with God, saw a real breakthrough, and my finances are not great, plus my family is a mess.

All of those things are things that caused my dad depression. He indulged it, it cant be said he really tried not to feel that way. My dad never worked proactively on his emotions, he just tried to remove stressors. I wonder if he feels better now that we are out of his life, as a huge stressor for him. My mom thought he might be relieved.

Well, good, I thought. So am I.

So, I’ve found myself in my dad’s position. Things are a little less desperate. I’ve not had quite the same level of trouble as him, but it feels much the same.

My dad does not like being happy. I do, but I can feel uncomfortable with it, like I can’t trust it. Misery was company so much of my life, what do I do without it?

Yet, I could see potentially there being a plan in this somehow. I have dreaded becoming like my dad. It’s why I hate the idea of having depression, but why does that scare me so much? Is it because I saw it ruin my dad for being in our lives, and he was never happy, and he was always angry at me?

It’s like for me, there is no in between, if I have it, that’s the end of my life as I know it. I’ll never, ever be able to be normal. It couldn’t just be a phase.

Out loud, that sounds dumb. Many people move on from depression. Many only have it as a phase. Those who don’t can still learn not to be ruled by it. Knowing that doesn’t make me feel any better, it feels like a rationalization.

I have always felt like there is something wrong with me, deep down. It seems to be a weakness common to human beings to feel, especially women, but in my case it makes sense. I was treated like there was something wrong with me since I was a baby.

#relatable

Always blaming myself for the lack of love in my life. Always afraid I was just too wrong to be happy, or fulfilled. On and on the cycle goes.

I used to try to fix that by self-improvement. When that didn’t work, I gave up on it and tried to move toward accepting myself. When that still didn’t quite do it, I thought I should move to focusing on God. Then to trying to enjoy life.

All the while, walking around with the emotional equivalent of a hole in my chest, spilling all the hurt out.

What could I do? It was hard to explain this to anyone. People praised me for how joyful I was. I thought I was.

I think, I am too. Sorrow does not suit my nature. Though I can describe all this, it might surprise you to know how little of it I can easily stay in. Half a day at most. It’s not easy for me to stay sad. It is easy to worry about being sad.

Anxiety is the sneaky agent of losing joy. It sneaks in when direct sadness would alert you too much to the attempt.

I get so furious at myself for feeling bad, and then I start this inner dialogue of all the reasons I don’t really feel bad, and if I’d stop thinking like this, I’d be fine.

What if I just had a reason to be sad? What if my parent’s response was not always to say I should just choose not to feel that way, but to listen? And listen without trying to fix it with cheap advice. Just be encouraging and kind. I do not even know what that feels like–well, I had one friend once who got it. But I moved and we got out of touch.

I have always found it hard to just feel feelings, without panicking because I feel them. I am not a very emotional person, that could be because I am terrified of emotions. They seem so uncontrollable, and I never had anyone who would pick me up if I fell apart.

I expressed this fear to my family not too long ago, and they had no answer for it. Nothing. No reassurance they would be there for me if I did. I have been hanging on by my fingertips it feels like.

God has been my outlet. I could cry and rage to Him, and not feel He could not handle it. Lately that has not been so easy to do. All the suppression seems to be reaching my prayer life too. I can sit an roll the problem over and over gain in my mine, never learning anything about it, but I can’t just cry it out, rage, and maybe feel better.

Oh, gosh, I actually do need therapy don’t I?

It’s kind of hitting me this week that all this isn’t normal.

The thing is, I didn’t choose to be this way. I’ve tried many, many times in my life to open up to my family, and to other people. With the same result of being brushed off, and shut down. No real help in learning how to process emotions well. I was fortunate to have an outlet, I was able to get this far because of grace.

But, if people do that to you, eventually you pay the price. It makes me angry, like, you all screwed this up, took out a loan from love that you couldn’t repay by making yourself depended on us for you happiness, but I’m the one who’s paying back that interest.

Somehow, it’s easier to blog this than it is to say it. I hit the same roadblocks when I try to talk, like “you just can’t say that in this house.”

Err, how am I going to do therapy?

Well, I pray that’ll be worked out in time. The COVID crisis isn’t exactly helping, face to face is out, and I prefer that. But I don’t think I can wait till it’s available again.

One thought that does sometimes help, even when I feel helpless, is this:

I did not choose to have this happen, to be pushed into this dark hole, but, I can choose to leave it.

I can do what my dad didn’t, and try to get out. Early on in life. (Well, he did, but he didn’t address the real problems.)

The last year has felt like one long test to see if I will become like my dad, and do the things he did, I keep choosing not to. Lately, when I hear the same crap coming out of my mouth as he used to say, I think “This needs to change too.”

I hope that this is the right way to go about it.

Well, I guess therapy will give me something new to post about. Who knows, maybe I can help some people understand it better?

(I mean, you don’t have to talk about it, but I tend to talk/write about everything, I don’t really care much whether people know or not, once I commit to something.)

With that, I think that’s about all. Hey, thanks for reading my basically venting-about-my-life post, stay safe and healthy–Natasha.

The D-word.

04/07/202004/07/2020 / toseealife / Leave a comment

Time for some real talk.

I don’t like to get super vulnerable on this blog because I prefer writing about other stuff,

but I also write about what’s on my mind, and lately, it’s been the D-word.

Depression.

I loathe depression. I’m one of those people who grew up with a constantly depressed parent, and even my other parent never seemed happy to me.

I struggled with depression for a few years while living in fear, then it was gone for a while, it came back whenever I went through a dark place where I was fearful or stressed a lot.

I always just put it down to the stress.

I have never been one to wake up with a dark cloud over my life every single day. I do not have mood swings. I don’t like to sleep a lot.

So far, I’ve never thought about it being a medical issue, and I still think that is unlikely.

But, I got to see Depression modeled for me by my father. It made for a very stressful last 8-9 years of my life.

My father would tell us, when business got bad, that he had considered ending his life so we could get the insurance. That he would get really low, and think about it. Unlike me, who has always been horrified at the idea of taking my own life (even though I have been plagued with thoughts of it at various times throughout my life) he seemed to feel it was a viable option.

It put a lot of anxiety on me and my sisters, and my mom. We wondered if he meant it.

I now think that my dad wanted attention, from us, from God, and turned to desperate methods to get it. And I have now experienced he same temptation when people disappoint me, to do the same thing.

The extreme selfishness of saying things like that just to make a point has long been apparent to me also.

I have spent years trying to get the horror of those moments out of my system, it’s still a work in progress.

Somehow we kept on, and we didn’t talk about it. Ever. I learned to keep my fears to myself, as well as my fury at how he tormented us.

Now, I’ve been paying the price for all that repression by having a lot of stress that seems to just come from nowhere. And I get depressed.

I think that the idea of depression scares me more than the feeling itself. For me, sadness tends to be a short feeling, but to come repeatedly throughout the day or week or month. I will shake it off, but then something triggers me to worry again, and with that comes the Depression.

“Anxiety in the heart of man causes depression,
But a good word makes it glad.” (Proverbs 12:25)

Every time in my life I have ever felt depressed, it was because I had anxiety, and it was persistent. Then the Depression would make me more anxious, and I would start to have a panicky feeling, I think it’s called Extreme Anxiety or something.

The Bible also says, “There is no Fear in Love, but Perfect Love casts out fear’ (1 John 4:18)

I was not loved well as a child, or as the young woman that I am now. Since last year, I have only realized just how much I was neglected and abused, and that I still am.

Frankly, God is the only reason I did not end up a Basket Case, but I am still a Hot Mess.

On top of that, I am an Empath, and I feel the suffering of other people very keenly. So, growing up in an emotionally negative house really was stressful for me.

I am also the one who tends to try to hold myself and my family together in a crisis, and this last 8 months has felt like one continuous crisis.

The Depression showed up 3-4 months ago, probably because the stress continued for so long unabated. At first, I did not feel this way, but the constancy of the situation, and how little it changes it beating me like the ocean beats a stone.

Yeah.. now that I write it out, it kind of seems obvious to me why I feel this way.

Not to mention now we have a National Crisis too, always helpful.

Somehow, I am hanging on to my sanity by prayer, worship, and being able to still laugh at things with my sisters, but it gets tough a lot.

I’m sure I am speaking some of you’s language. Right?

I can’t say for sure why I find it so terrifying to have negative feelings. I remember a lot of times my mom and dad would tell me not to have it, refuse to come and comfort me after a nightmare, and force me to go places that terrified me to go to. With zero reassurance along the way.

I had to tough it out, deal with it myself, and if that ever became too much… well, they might help, but my dad had a way of saying the worst possible thing, and my mom has a way of saying she just doesn’t know how to help.

That led to me feeling my problems are either just too big and complicated to be understood and I shouldn’t be so much to handle…or they are actually way worse than I thought.

So, I tried to solve them myself, or to pray through them.

I was lucky to have a few friends for brief periods of my life that showed me my problems did not have to be overwhelming. But it did not last. I was so hungry to be listened to and not shamed, I quickly got needy, and that lesson has now made me very hesitant to ever open up to people.

That and a few other bad experiences after trying it.

Yep…you know, I’d expect this to be surprising, but I don’t think it is. Anyone whoa voids talking about heir weaknesses as much as I do on this blog is bound to be uncomfortable with it.

I’m not afraid of people judging me, if they did, I’ll laugh it off, I don’t take that very seriously.

What I don’t like it the idea that people might think it’s all I want to talk about, that I live here, that I have no life outside of my issues, and I am very against that.

Part of how I cope, in time where I cannot completely overcome, is by remembering I have interests outside of the areas that trouble me. There’s a world out there, I am a part of it. I enjoy things still. That’s my therapy a lot of the time.

I just can’t stand people who make their problems a badge of honor. To me, they are just problems, if I’m in a good place, I’ve stopped thinking of them as a mark of shame, but I won’t parade them. I hate that.

It was always important to me to be normal, and the realization that my childhood and teenager years were not, in fact, normal, has been a shock. I’m still fighting it, that I could be that jacked up from all that.

I may not be crazy, or hell bent on destroying my life, but I do have issues.

If Depression is one of them, that’s probably normal.

It’s important to be to choose differently than my dad. He let his Depression and Anxiety push him around, he didn’t try to stop it, he left it up to us to drag him out of the pit, and we couldn’t do it.

I have anger too. I have found that Fear leads to Anger. Anger is like a drug.

It could have been so much worse, the gladness I still have, even now, is all due to God preserving me. Sometimes (a lot lately) I wish He’d work faster to heal me, and I doubt that He will. Yet, little by little, I am also learning to not give into those thoughts.

Today I have felt pretty bad, but there’s been less intrusive thoughts and less doubt than there was two months ago. One thing the Enemy cannot do, and that is, last forever. There is always an end to it. Every dark time in my life, I came out of into a better grasp of happiness and joy.

This will be one of them, even if it takes a year. (Though, please God, make it shorter than that.)

I am not a quitter, that is the main reason I made it this far, and now I am trying to get counseling. I didn’t want to, but God has sort of impressed on me that it is not right to go through this alone, and I should not have to, I always had to in the past.

I guess it’s a change I need to accept, I cannot be a loner anymore. I never wanted to be one anyway. (Hence blogging about it.)

Hey, if you read this far, thanks for your interest in my life. I do like how people are always ready to hear personal stories, it gives me hope social media has not ruined us for understanding each other.

More posts about anime, and life, and whatever else I think of coming soon–stay warm and healthy–Natasha.

A tree by its fruit: My reflection on past experiences with a church.

03/05/2020 / toseealife / Leave a comment

Well it’s been too long.

I got busy with finals and then I hit writer’s block.

To be honest, I just didn’t feel like blogging about my thoughts and life because it’s been kind of rough lately.

Now I’ve started my new classes and things are a little better.

I was thinking about something today.

How the bible measures being Christlike.

Story time:

So, way back when my dad started making us all go to his church, which I hated, as part of his insistence on control of the household, he would always praise the pastor of said church because he had over 20 attempts on his life, and he’d been delivered from them all by the Lord.

This pastor had some amazing stories. It was impressive.

As a young teen, I supposed that this pastor must be a very godly man if he had continued on through all that and been protected miraculously.

And I am not one to judge how close someone really is to God. All I can say is that God sounds very different from a traditional African perspective (as that’s what the church was.) They are all about God’s judgment and hatred of sin, and his power and majesty in our lives.

I do appreciate a focus on the sovereignty of God, but I kept noticing, year after year, a discrepancy between what they talked about, and what went on at the church.

The people were generous, and seemingly well off based on their clothes and cars, but there was always talk from the pastors about God showing them that gossip and dishonor was going on among the congregation. I never heard any of it, but I did witness a lot of inconsiderateness from the Sunday School, which I helped with. And I got in trouble for being disrespectful to the teachers. (Though I was mostly just exchanging looks with my sister that the teacher didn’t like, and they claimed I encouraged the kids to misbehave. Instead of it being their disorganized teaching style.)

The pastors claimed to hear the voice of God, and there were healings and spiritual manifestations on a regular basis, seemed like a great church in that way.

Yet I never felt at home, or really comfortable around the people. As a younger person I was expected to sit quietly and do whatever I was told. I didn’t appreciate being bossed around at the age of 15-17 by people who were not my parents, or teachers, and who I did not really know.

Finally it came to a head after I and my sisters had left the church officially, and the whole abusive situation with our dad has blown up into something too big to ignore. We went to his pastor, who we were angry at for telling him to come home when he has been going to leave it for a few days. Much needed solitude, we thought. Let him feel some consequences for his actions.

For some context, this had happened years before in one of m dad’s childish tantrums and in his desire to punish my mom, he had been going to move out of the house for a brief periods of time. He also told us girls that he was tired of getting no respect in our house. Our pastor came to the house to talk him out of it, and my mom into thinking she was partially at fault.

I remember she told me that my dad was upset that she didn’t try to stop him, but she hadn’t because she didn’t know “what else to give.” She had done he’d asked.

But of course, with both of them saying she was partly at fault, she went long with it.

Now,several years later, when we’d thought we were past this, Dad pulled it again, because it worked so beautifully last time.

Now that I have delved more into this, I realize my pastor should have seen a red flag in the fact that this same thing was happening, and my dad had no sense of irony about it.

Instead he did the same thing as before.

So, us girls took initiative and had a meeting with him. During which my sister said he’s handled it the wrong way, and we said he should not have given such advice without more information.

The pastor got angry when we said that. He felt he should be blameless in the matter and it was very serious for us to say he was in the wrong.

What got more alarming was we also told him about the physical abuse and he said Dad had told him about it and repented… he told us with a smile on his face.

I told him that dad had threatened me with violence since that time, (implying I doubted he had really seen the error of his ways), and he seemed unbothered by it. He asked what we wanted him to do to help.

It became clear, after a certain point, that he was not really getting it, and that he wasn’t going to. We settled for telling him not to counsel Dad to come home again if the situation repeated itself, but beyond that, we saw that we couldn’t rely on Pastor for back up.

I really hope reading this story you were shaking your head in disbelief and not thinking that this sounded about normal from your experience.

But it was normal in my experience. My dad picked friends and a church that encouraged all his ideas of himself. The emotional manipulation he used on us was doubled down on by family friends, fellow believers, and we ourselves in our blindness to it.

I had one lady from the same church come up to me with no prelude, and start telling me to stop pulling the princess act with my father, and to respect him more, while he stood there smiling and nodding in a satisfied way. I stared at her in disbelief.

No one ever asked me my side of it. They assumed there wasn’t one. I don’t know why adults assume kids who are difficult to their parents are always just brats, I was not a rebellious kid in other ways. I was well behaved, polite, and there was no uncontrolled behavior.

Everyone judged me based on how I treated my dad, coldly. My dad had made it impossible for me to show him affection. If I ever tried, he turned it into a guilt trip. He was so unpleasant to me, I didn’t often feel like it, it was all I could do to hold back my biting words at his cruelty.

My dad, even now, has tried to manipulate me again about the situation. But now, I have words for it. I tell people what was really going on. Not in great detail, but I tell them. It wasn’t my fault.

I haven’t spoken to anyone from that church since my dad moved out. I haven’t spoken to him either.

I now know kids at my current church who are kind of like me with their parents. In the past, I judged kids like that as having bad attitudes, because that’s what I was told, but now, I am starting to think twice about making assumptions.

Kids often know whether they are really, truly loved or not. The people who buy books trying to figure out how to love their kids or spouses either already do, or are doing it because they see they have an all around problem with relationships and want to figure out what it is.

I couldn’t get my dad to read a book like that, because he didn’t really love me.

I begin to think we just don’t give children enough credit. I saw the problems between my parents a decade before they did. I still see it more clearly.

What the point of this was is that my pastor would have done well to be more humble. He was so concerned with being spiritual, he was not even really hearing us. In their culture, it seemed that situations like what happened to use were just assumed to be normal, and if the man just apologized we could move on.

Broken trust was not really understood.

But Jesus said, whoever wants to lead and be great among you must first be a servant. While 1 Corinthians 13 says that even if we can do miracles, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and can prophecy, if we have not love, we are nothing, we gain nothing, and nothing comes of it.

It’s so crucial, yet it is so easy to forget. Love is what God measures our works by, not how many times we survive an attempt on our life, or how much we know about each other.

If we cannot have compassion on people who are suffering, and humility enough to know when we are wrong and need to change our opinion, than what good is our advice? Our knowledge.

I know people who can give you a textbook diagnosis of your problem but can’t hear you out patiently to save their lives. Maybe you know someone like that too. Or maybe you are the person.

Hey, I’m argumentative, I know the acceptation to just talk about your perspective, but I am at least becoming aware of when i tend to do that, and how I can stop myself. So, I’m not judging, I’m just warning.

I also know now that people can think they are hearing God, and only be hearing what they expect to hear.

I am no expert on the voice of God, and that’s a topic for another time, for now suffice it to say that it’s dangerous to assume someone knows what God wants, if they are not full of his kindness or care for other people.

You know a tree by its fruit. Jesus said that too.

With that, I will conclude this post. Until next time, stay honest–Natasha.

What it’s like to be an Empath.

01/20/202001/20/2020 / toseealife / Leave a comment

I looked at my Home Page post today, I hadn’t updated it in ages, boy, it was rough. Now that I’m used to blogging, I feel it was too rigid.

But it’s a great reminder how I didn’t know what I was doing 5 years ago, almost, and now I do–sort of.

In many ways I’m still an amateur who doesn’t know how to market themselves, but I have a blast writing this anyway. And thank you for reading it.

Between shifting family dynamics and shifting cool perceptions, this past year has not gone as I expected.

You know what I have discovered? A lot of people don’t put in effort to understanding each other.

Shocking, I know.

Seriously, though, I am that semi-rare individual who studies people around me constantly and I have done it for as long as I can remember. My mom even confirmed that I did it as a toddler. It’s in the genes, I guess.

Not sure whose, neither of my parents are like that.

I realized I am something called an Empath.

“An empath is someone who is highly aware of the emotions of those around them, to the point of feeling those emotions themselves. Empaths see the world differently than other people; they’re keenly aware of others, their pain points, and what they need emotionally.

But it’s not just emotions. According to Dr. Judith Orloff, author of The Empath’s Survival Guide, empaths can feel physical pain, too — and can often sense someone’s intentions or where they’re coming from. In other words, empaths seem to pick up on many of the lived experience of those around them.” (Andre Solo. 13 Signs that you’re an Empath. Link here: https://highlysensitiverefuge.com/empath-signs/)

1. You take on other peoples’ emotions as your own

Turns out the feeling I get when other people come in a room, like I am feeling their energy and emotions, is something empaths tend to feel. That’s number one on this list.

6. Tragic or violent events on TV can completely incapacitate you

So, it’s also why I hate scary and tragic stories, it’s never just a story for me.

Poor baby.😢

Freaking why?!!!😠😣 (Not the ship, the afterward.)

(I love both shows, by the way.)

Also, apparently, I can tell when people are lying (No#10.).

Being an empath is also the reason why I am an introvert. I don’t need alone time because conversation and activity drains me, people drain me because I pick up on all their energy and emotions(No#2 and 3).

It is as natural as breathing to me to do this, it blows my mind that other people do not walk around constantly noticing this stuff.

Oh, yeah, right, that’s why.

Every little change of expression and voice come across to me.

Another sign mentioned in the post is being able to feel pain and even sickness(No#8).

I’ve talked about this before, but all the way up to my tweens, I would feel sick after reading about sickness, or feel pain after reading about an injury. Hypochondria, in other words.

It used to scare me, it no longer does, but there are times when I still feel it, even if I don’t think I have it.

Now imagine this, having a confrontation with someone, only you can feel their anger, sadness, and frustration as well as your own, the entire time…

“I can feel your anger…” (Not an empath, just to be clear.)

Some of you who have a hard enough time dealing with your own want to curl up into a ball at the mere thought of that.

That’s my life. I’m Natasha, Nice to meet you.

And yeah, if anyone is every BS-ing me, I can tell pretty quickly.

I never used to believe my impressions of people, I thought I was just mistrusting…and I can be. But I am very often on point to a degree that amazes my family.

This even works with fiction. I can predict show plot points very easily. I pick up on patterns of characters. and the author, based on what they feel and how they act when they feel that way.

You may have see reviews that over analyzed every detail of something, that’s me.

However, though I have experienced all 13 of the signs of being an empath at some time in my life, I do not deal with all of them all the time, anymore.

I realized I could not take that pressure. It’s easy for me to compulsively take care of people, but I still have feelings of my own that I have to divide from everyone else’s.

The reason I want to share that with you here is that all of us, obviously, have a personality type.

But you are not limited to your type.

I am an empath, I will always pick up on what people feel, but I have grown much stronger at rejecting negative feelings when they are not my own, and positive ones, when they are false. I will feel their pain but I do not have to carry it.

Suck it, Pain. You think you’ve got it bad.

It could be easy for me to be a sucker. What’s an annoying sob story or pep talk to you becomes a barrage of emotions flung at me, and if the person believes it, I can tell.

And if they are wrong, I have to consciously choose to reject what they said.

If you wonder how this can be dangerous, then think bout this, I come form a background of having an Emotionally Abusive Parent.

The delusions of emotionally abusive people is that they often think they are right. Emotions are tricky like that.

Even when my dad knew he was wrong, he used my emotions against him. He could tell when I was weakening, and he’d latch onto it.

This man liked to tell me, when I came to apologize for some stupid fight that he usually started, that he was going to give up on trying with me.

I would feel his pain, yet, I also would feel his intention to make me feel bad, and get furious.

It was not fully fake but it was never honest.

Take that, multiply it by dozens of incidents over the years that I’ve lost count of, and you have a really bad set up.

You might think as an empath that I am easily offended…

…but as this blog and the book it was talking about point out, not all empaths are HSP (highly sensitive people).

I was once, but I am no longer very easy to offend.

In fact, instead of being weaker emotionally, I am actually stronger emotionally than many people. My ability to process other people’s emotions and my own at the same time has made me stronger, because I have to hold both.

And I had to learn to let stuff go, otherwise it would always weigh me down.

I have evidence that the empath ability starts at birth, as even as a baby I reacted poorly to people who were stressed or angry.

Empaths aren’t really easy to explain with science. Unless you believe in mind reading (and you’d be surprised at the evidence that mind reading is actually somewhat possible, though not like in sci-fi, where it’s conscious concrete thoughts) how will you explain that we can actually feel feelings and read people so accurately.

But there is, as always, a biblical; explanation where science has not yet reached(though it’s getting close.)

In the bible there is a gift of the spirit known as Discernment.

Someone with this gift can tell truth from lies, and one emotion from another, and make sense of it.

Discernment is dangerous without wisdom.

I can attest that empaths who do not have wisdom can end up very unhappy and make the people around them miserable. Also, we tend to get asked for advice, and if our priorities are not straight, we aren’t going to give it well.

Discernment is gift from God, but you can have it without knowing God, just like with other talents. People who do can end up in a world of hurt.

But walking with God and letting him refine and hone my gift, I have enjoyed it a lot for the most part.

God helps me avoid pitfalls, as I can’t always be right. Where my gift comes short, He will provide an answer.

Being an empath enables me to be interested in a lot of people, and to always have new things to notice about them.

If you were to ask me, after all this, what the hardest part about being an empath for me (as it is like a job in many ways, to monitor all the people around you without even wanting to) is, I would say this:

Trusting yourself.

When you know what everyone feels, deciding what you feel is right, is hard. Sometimes they can be so passionate, and yet over the wrong thing, that it’s hard to say no.

You doubt whether you made the right choice, because you can sense their disappointment or anger.

But if you keep giving yourself enough credit for when you are right, it gets easier.

I am at the point now where I can stick to my guns even if I know someone is getting upset with me. I just have to choose to think that what is right is more important that if they get upset.

And that’s an interesting thought. Because many people now say that what people feel is more important than what’s right, empaths might be more likely to buy into that, yet here I am, saying I don’t.

Which is why I say, your type does not control you. You are still a person with free will. Whatever your natural inclination are, you can choose better, if you know that there is a better.

Learn to make your type work for you, don’t let it drag you by your hair, if you have hair.

And that is all for this post, stay honest–Natasha.

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drybonestruth

Honest Thoughts about Life, Love, Writing, and God.

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A tree by its fruit: My reflection on past experiences with a church.