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

Cutting off the Hand

04/23/2020 / toseealife / Leave a comment

I’ve been going through my history book’s Imperialism section. Otherwise known as the make-white-people-look-bad section.

Our companion book right now is called “King Leopold’s Ghost” it’s got its own movie, King Leopold is quite famous as it turns out, though I never remember hearing of him before now. People say this part of our history has been hushed up. Now that I’ve read of it, I think maybe it was better that way.

I’m not about suppressing the truth, but for as much good as rehashing it has done us, we might as well not.

Think about it, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But do we learn from history?

Or does dwelling on the past lead us to repeat its mistakes?

It’s a sad fact of humanity that we tend to repeat our errors whenever we are most desperate not too.

In our age’s rush to eradicate racism and inequality, we’ve gone to the other end, making more racism and inequality.

Case in point:

In my history class we’ve had two separate discussions of European conquest over black people, some Aborigines and some African.

One week, my classmate and the textbooks ripped one British missionary to shreds for presuming to eradicate the culture of the Aborigines by teaching them European ways, and how to read, and plough, and raise crops.

My reaction?

“Oh he taught them how to grow their own food, and how to read, so shoot him! That’s just so despicable.”

For real, Education, the thing people now say changes the most for oppressed people, and brings about the most Social Equality, is decried in this case because it destroyed their culture.

I’m sure it wasn’t the fact that the army was slaughtering them like sheep, this Missionary was trying to preserve them, in the end he failed to save most of them, and felt it badly, crying at their deaths, as his own account goes. But he felt they were better off dying there than in the bush.

My classmates and the textbooks called this an attitude of “Moral Superiority.”

I called it common decency, thinking someone is better off dying with some dignity, around people who care for them, then shot in the bush like a wild animal. Morally speaking, that sounds like the superior option, doesn’t it?

I wish I was exaggerating how unfair this was. But because he was a Christian, he must be wrong for assuming he was morally superior to these people. He must be justifying his part in this.

Robinson, was his name, if you want to look it up. Robinson seems to me to be more against his own people’s ruthless treatment, then to feel he is better than the Aborigines, but I suppose I’m just too white to understand.

The following week, we discussed the Congo, the subject of the book I mentioned above.

My teacher made the ironic statement, backed up by our textbooks, that the reason things finally changed in Africa after many decades, was because some of them were educated like Europeans, and learned to speak their language and reason with them in ways they could understand.

You catch that? One week, it’s bad to educate them and override their culture, the next week it’s the only path to their freedom. (My professor said it was complicated, which is another way of saying we don’t have an answer for if it was right or not.)

I would add that is why The Civil Rights movement succeeded here in America, slaves who got educated, freed people got educated. One can quibble all day about equal opportunity, but education was the only doorway to it for them.

And it was often White Masters who educated some of their slaves, though later it was made illegal, and white people started schools for them.

It was unfair still in many ways, prejudice is ugly, but it’s kind of funny that the very people (by race) who enacted it, also gave the oppressed the tools to break free.

If you think my Secular history class at my liberal college is going to acknowledge that with any sense of injustice toward the White people for ignoring it, then…you didn’t read the above carefully.

While my class begrudgingly admits there was good Europeans, they pass over the glaringly obvious truth, that Europeans were always part of toppling the Imperialism that they enacted. No nation is entirely unified in how it perceives what its leaders are doing.

They are even more anxious to ignore the other obvious truth: Christianity, which is blamed for aiding in the oppression, was the only reason it ever ended.

It’s like an inoculation. Christianity came into the other countries with the Oppressors, like a mild form of the disease, carrying some incorrect ideas of the times, but also the worldview that does the most universally for the dignity of human life, and the value of charity. Like a vaccination, Christianity helped the native peoples build up an understanding of European ways and religion that they later used to protest their rights to freedom and fair treatment. The Missionaries were also the only ones who usually educated the natives, which is what enabled them to integrate and rise above the culture.

In effect, Christianity was warped into something that would justify White Oppression, but it also preserved the idea of all human beings having value, which later was what put a stop to at least some of the oppression.

People fault Christianity for being used the wrong way,, but will barely give a mention to how it was used the right way, to help people.

And I have yet to hear anyone talk about how Christian based systems basically give power to anyone they oppress to eventually overthrow them, based on moral reasons. It’s like they give the knife to cut off their own arm, if they start to sin.

“If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to depart into hell.“ (Matthew 5:29-30)

The only thing that would satisfy these people is the notion that Europeans should have just stayed home to begin with, never changed anything, and contented ourselves with our eager resources…how unrealistic that option is is negligible, because it’s clearly morally wrong to take over another country…

Says who?

I mean, are we going to start saying it’s morally wrong to take over another business? Where does it end?

Despite what they try to paint it as, the Europeans were not solely violent. A lot happened with trade deals, also. Sometimes unfair ones, sometimes they started out as mutually beneficial and then devolved. Sometimes, it didn’t happen that way at all.

You won’t find it in too many religions that Conquest is actually Wrong, in the sight of God, or the gods. Some cultures glorify it to a divine calling.

Where does the notion that is is wrong even come from?

No country can really back this up. Even if it’s wrong, no one can hope to prevent it from happening in one way or another.

So, I fail to see the point of teaching us that it was wrong, and then leaving it there… well, what now? What’s the big conclusion, History?

The claim can be made that History class should not be giving us new ideas, but telling it like how it happened.

That’s ludicrous. Any narrative of history is going to present new ideas to a student who has not studied it before, and a clearly slanted narrative is going to lead them to blame one party more than another.

It used to be slanted in Europeans favor, it is not slanted against us, we must look bad at all costs.

Maybe it was bad, I think in the context of the time, it’s harder to tell.

But even so, it’s over now. We have real world problems. Oppression continues in new forms, and old forms, but not the forms of the Modern Era, as it’s called.

I don’t think we are being taught to recognize the signs of this any more in our everyday lives, or we’d realize how the modern devices every single student has in their pocket are products of a system very similar to the ones we read about.

And do we care? Can we give them up?

Maybe, it’s harder to judge, hmm?

There will always be oppression as long as people are sinful, and people are in charge, or their creations are in charge. Running things by computers has not improved them.

The question for us, is what can we do to make it better or worse?

We are dependent on these businesses for our way of life, undoing that is not the work of a day. It was the same in the Congo, the same everywhere. By the time people realize it’s a problem they’re stuck, just like with an addiction.

I choose to keep applying my faith to every situation, because I think G. K. Chesterton was right when he wrote that the charge that Christianity obscures progress and keeps us in the Dark Ages is ridiculous when “Christianity is the only thing that has ever gotten us out of it.” (Orthodoxy)

Which is not to say Religion has never been an obstacle to advancements, but it has also been the main drive behind them. It comes down to the individuals every time.

The Bible is also concerned more with men’s souls then their station, and Christians have often taken that attitude also, but in the process, have done more to elevate men’s station in their concern for his soul.

For Missionaries have worried that mistreatment will make men bitter against God.

This is how things come right in the end, that and the Grace of God. There’s ups and downs in history, I for one think we should be looking to see what they did right, and not forever listing what they did wrong, as if we are free from error and know so much better than our forebears.

That’s what they thought too.

Mistakes have to be remembered if anyone is tempted to think their nation is perfect (that has led to a lot of evil) but it’s better to feel there is nobility left to preserve than to feel your people have always been irredeemably bad.

That’s where I leave it, I’d rather be proud of my heritage than ashamed of it, until next time– Natasha.

A little Health Tip

04/14/2020 / toseealife / Leave a comment

Welp, had my first therapy session today, I think it went well.

Not much to report on that. Just setting up stuff.

I hear quarantine might loosen up soon for some people, yay!👍⌛⏰⏳

My mom has been following this doctor who thinks there’s a link between COVID and a vitamin D deficiency. As evidence, countries with more sunshine and more people outdoors, like Australia, do not seem to be hit as hard.👌

California, despite being a major airport stop, has seen less of a spread.

Also, African people absorb vitamin D less quickly than Europeans, and they have been hit more with the virus, supposedly.

It’s not proven, but I’ve been seeing people walk around my neighborhood everyday because they’re going stir crazy. My sisters and I have done the same thing, so has my mom.

There’s something to the theory, I think. Any disease is usually rooted in some kind of deficiency, only a few are just caused by toxins in something, like Cholera.

So, hey, here’s a tip, take Vitamin D supplements and get outside if you can. They say 20 minutes a day is sufficient.

I wonder too, they think COVID came from bats, creatures that live out of the sun, which is where Vitamin D primarily comes from.

We think these things are coincidence. But some people eat bats. What you eat becomes part of your biology for a certain length of time. WE get vitamins from plants, but also animals. Iron and Omega 3’s are easier to get in meat, actually. So, you do get a small portion of Vitamin D, or at lest the healthy benefits of it, when you eat animals and plants that absorb it.

It’s one reason animals that live off plants are healthier for us to eat, and animals that eat rotting stuff are dangerous to eat.

The Bible gives a whole list of things not to eat, that I’m sure seemed arbitrary to the Israelites at the time. No pigs. What’s wrong with pigs?

Well, back in the day, pig meat had a parasite, I believe, that was harmful for human beings. There’s a way to cure it, but there wasn’t at the time, especially for people wandering in the wilderness.

Carrion birds, also a no-no, for obvious reasons. Some animals have digestive systems that destroy the harmful stuff in rotting meat, but humans are not one of them.

The Bible, fun fact, also says not to eat bats.

It’s in the Jonah Veggietales movie, if you’ve ever watched that show.

Along with flies, beetles, gnats, etc. Flies are full of germs, they eat waste. Beetles can also eat dung and dead stuff. Gnats…I can’t explain that one, maybe they carry stuff like mosquitoes?

None of this was known at the time, you’d almost think God knew what was in the animals and bugs when he gave these orders.

Cows are allowed. Cows eat, if they’re fed right, mainly grass, which is very clean. Their excrement actually isn’t as full of germs as ours is, because of how clean their food is. Fun, I know.

Also sheep, same thing. Goats, same thing. And a few birds. And locusts are edible, locusts also eat plants…in case you didn’t know. Like grasshoppers.

You may also not know ( not many people even in church do) that quarantine is an idea from the Bible, as far as I know, it’s the oldest record of the practice, if I’m wrong I guess I’ll fine out later.

It was for people, but also for clothing, and houses that got infected. Before we knew that clothing and house s can carry germs. Even fever germs can linger for ages at the same location. People burn items that were around a person while they were sick.

The quarantine in the Bible went by weeks, I forget if it was 1, 2, or 3 weeks. But about the time it can take for germs to die out, or for a disease to become obvious.

Washing as a cleaning practice is also in the Bible. Washing after touching anything dead, and being unclean for hours or even days after exposure to something harmful.

We don’t know what the Israelites thought these rules were for. Every theistic religion has forbidden animals, and certain rituals.

But not every one has had those practices verified by modern medicine. There’s been reasons found for all of these things.

People have long treated gods like they were fickle. Why they demanded certain things, why certain animals were sacred, there are myths behind it, but never any practical logic.

Why is the Cow sacred in India? No clue. I’m sure there’s a religious reason, but if it has any practical applications, I don’t know.

Not there needs to be practical reasons for all rites, but it’s interesting how the Bible touches all the areas of life with its commands.

God did not tell the Israelites what germs were. I doubt they would have understood. They were often simple. Every nation had gods, they had to obey. The Israelites often abused God’s forgiving nature by disobeying Him because He would be kinder than other gods. Some of the prophets developed a sense of humor about it, realizing that they cannot help but fall back on God, though they know they are sinners and He is right to punish them, they also know He will forgive because that is who HE is, and there is no changing hat, no matter how much we act ungrateful for it.

Does that mean we can do whatever we want? Of course not. But our sin will never make God unkind, we change, He does not.

That’s good to remember right now. I’m sure some people think this sickness is God’s judgment. I don’t know.

It could be, for some people, it comes as a judgment. The acts of God tend to mean different things for different people, depending on whether they are right with him or not.

A though to ponder is, if someone knows they are not right with God, they will see any bad event in their life or the world as a judgment, even ones they cause themselves. I’ve known people like that.

Someone who feels they are right with God accepts suffering as something we just have to endure because we live in a fallen world.

I, so far, am finding it a time of surprising blessings by way of getting better acquainted with my friends.

Hope that it has some pros for you too, even if you’ve been hit with the really hard part.

Until next time, stay healthy-Natasha.

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.

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