Satya Sins

So my experiment with satya has been illuminating.

If nothing else, it's made me aware of the fact that boy do I lie a lot.

Lies slip out of my mouth so easily I barely have time to register them before they're gone. Maybe not lies. Half-truths. Twisted honesty. Slight deceptions. Retelling facts.

Lies.

I don't understand it. Why? When did it start? It makes me feel like a terrible person.

Maybe I am.

I really don't lie about anything substantial, truly. Nothing that changes the fundamental truth of my life, or anyone else's. My lies are surface and sustainable and never caught because they don't fucking matter. So why do I do it? Is it seriously compulsive?

On this blog, too. I have a disclaimer that allows for fudging of facts, there under about me, which is partially because I don't want this blog to incriminate anyone besides myself, and also for creativity's sake, plus, I want it anonymous-ish and untraceable-esque. I need to be able to mess with the facts. Plenty of people I know have the link, but if it's found I want to be able to distance myself from it with a disclaimer. But as far as I'm concerned my truth does come out as much as possible on these screens, from my perspective. That disclaimer really does only sit there so if someone like a guy were to find my blog and contest his portrayal, or my commentary, I could fight it, because...I do lie...

I'm truly am sometimes a shitty person.

But...sometimes a lie is okay, right?

Sometimes it's just so much easier to lie than to tell the truth because the truth is too embarrassing, or too revealing, or painful, or honest. Sometimes people don't want to hear it, or they really do deserve the lie.

Sometimes I'm lying to "how are you".

Sometimes it's just a lie about nothing. 

Sometimes I don't even know it's a lie when I say it.

I don't know how to learn to speak my truth when I don't know what my truth is.

Satya is hard.

And I'm a fucking liar.

That's all. 

When you're a total cliche.

So I read this today.

It's kind of a smack-in-the-face moment when you realize you're enough of a cliche that the vast majority of items on a generically directed emo blog post written for the masses apply to sad, lonely little you.

Number 1. Duh.

"7. You are constantly doing the things that make you feel like shit and going into a shame spiral about it. There’s no learning curve… yet."

Well then.

When's it time for the learning curve?

"12. You find yourself complaining about the same things you were a year ago."

God, I don't even want to look back at this time last year in my blog.

But let's do it, shall we? It'll be fun.

Sound familiar? And this?

Oh hi, this.

Everything has been stagnant for so long. I feel like so much about me has changed but at the same time I feel like I'm the same as I was at 22 when I moved to LA. I need change. I need something. A new job, a new city, a new perspective, a new brain. Something has to change. I can't keep cycling like this, spiraling, year after year. It doesn't make me happy. And if I'm not happy, why keep living like this? Simple, right? It should be so simple.

I've managed to convince myself I've had periods of health, that I've been getting better, but it's not true. I've been two steps forward, two back. I've been suppressing these bad periods, and they just continually resurface. This is not healthy, it's not the way I want to be. I haven't moved forward at all.

I don't want to just exist, unfulfilled. I want to do more than that, I don't want to just be. I want to be more. Be a better person friend, daughter, employee, maybe girlfriend. Be a better friend to myself.  I don't want to constantly beat myself up and tear myself down and shred my mind and insides up. I don't want to live the way I've been living. I just want peace.

This all sounds like everything I've ever said before. I know this. Believe me, I know this.

I don't know what I'm getting at.

Except that maybe, just maybe, I'm finally hitting fucking bottom. Isn't that what I need? Isn't that what they always say? You can't make changes, true changes, until you really hit bottom. Until you have nothing left.

Maybe I'm there.

Because I'm fucking sick of this. Feeling lost. Feeling helpless. Finding the day to day a constant battle. Struggling against a torrent of loathing directed at moments of total normalcy, because that normalcy isn't what I want. Seeing seconds of happiness as precious and translucent because behind them is a dark emptiness that threatens to swallow them up if I blink too long. Sitting still for hours, paralyzed by complete failure to understand what it is I really want out of myself and my life.

My mind works in strange ways. My thinking goes dark at the oddest of times. I can't stop myself from criticizing my way into corners, worrying my way behind walls. And I just can't figure out how to stop myself from repeating these same patterns. Clearly, I can't solve my own problems while still wandering the same mazes.

A brilliant man, that Einstein. Did you know we share a birthday? Well, we do. So maybe, just maybe, if there's any sort of spiritual magic in this world, I absorbed some of his wisdom through our shared anniversary.

Now: how to change my level of thinking?

Suggestions?

September Satya and Santosha

 Ah, a new month.

What is there to say?

Go back to my archives, the beginning of each and every new month for the last million and a half, and you know what I'm thinking. New. Shiny. Fresh. Starting over.

But I'm trying to curtail this train of thought. I am.

This is no rebirth. This is not a new journey, or even a restart. This isn't a chance to be perfect, alterna-Taylor. It's just me, living my life, trying to do the best that I can, where I am, every day.

There is no starting point to write down, something I'll look back on as my point of failure, where I had to retread the same old path. This is not about the number on the scale, there is not a goal, a plan, a strategy to tear pounds off my body bit by bit. There are just choices, and habits, and health, and wellness. Happiness.

When I wake up tomorrow morning, nothing inside will have changed, no switch will flip as I've been hoping and waiting for. I can't expect some magic to take over and make me suddenly a better person. There is no better. I am just fine the way I am. In all my struggles, in all my setbacks and stumbles, I still remain as whole and complete as ever. To use a quote from a book I'm reading called "Yoga and the Path of the Urban Mystic" by Darren Main, Paramahansa Yogananda said, "Is a diamond less valuable because it is covered with mud? God sees the changeless beauty of our souls; he knows we are not our mistakes." (God is the Spirit here, that's a deeper topic I can't even begin to cover. Y'all know I'm not gonna start preaching religion here.)

I am not my mistakes.

And I can move past them.

But, as always...how?

You know me. You know I like goals, and striving for things. Perfection. Achievements. It's a funny part of my nature that I can't seem to shake, considering I've never really achieved anything in my life. I always make these lists of goals, never reach them, beat myself up for failure. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I'm going to try to channel this particular energy of mine into my greater good, not the superficial good I've always strived for.

As I mentioned when I was studying for my yoga test, there are ten yamas and niyamas, or practices that can help you live a more peaceful, content and complete life. I figure with my focus on my yoga practice, why not focus my goal-drive on something like these principles, and see if I can't incorporate them into my existence, behaviors, and thoughts. If I do, I do. If I don't...okay? What's to measure? What's to say I didn't try? All I can do is be mindful, and conscious of two things about myself.

I can apply this mindful, conscious attitude to my food and yoga practice, too...but more on that later.

For September, I picked the yama of satya, or truthfulness, and the niyama of santosha, or contentment. Why? Well, yes, because they both start with S, but more than that, because they both really spoke to where I am right now.

I picked satya because something I've learned about myself as I've been more and more introspective lately in therapy and on my own is that I have a tendency to, well, lie. A little to a lot. Not big lies, not lies about things that truly matter, but little white ones that make things a little easier. For myself, yes, and also what I think will be easier for the other person. What I ate for dinner. If I already did something at work, when I'm just about to get to it. What I think someone wants to hear, even if I don't agree. A little story fudging to make myself sound better.

So, SATYA. Truthfulness. I must be mindful of these little white lies I tell.

The niyama I chose I think is going to give me peace when I feel stressed and anxious. Santosha is the idea of feeling content even when your surroundings aren't necessarily bringing you any sort of happiness or peace. From the same book, the quote that struck me was, "It is the very belief that contentment is the prize for winning the scavenger hunt of life that prevents us from being content." I have the hope that searching for some sort of inner...balance, or what have you, when I start to feel off center, will guide me towards a more contented life and thus better decisions for myself.

I mean, I can just imagine my inner Maria.

I got on a train yesterday morning just before 7 am, and I got off the plane this morning just before 7 am. In between, I took a number of naps, but haven't really gone to bed yet. I'm heading there soon, and when I wake up I'm not wishing for a full on recharge like usual. I don't have grand schemes and lists and plots.

But I will be mindful of being honest with others, and with myself. I will try find contentment in every decision and situation.

And I will be mindful.

And I'm going to yoga.

Times I Was Wrong

I know you may think I'm perfect. I hate to burst your beautiful rainbow bubble, but alas, I am quite flawed. There have been a few times in my life where I've just royally fucked it up. Sometimes actually, sometimes only in my own head. Part of my anxiety manifests itself in obsessing over thing that happened years ago---seriously, I will be sitting at home, enjoying a kitty cuddle and a flick, and a flash of some old misdeed will come to mind and I'll suddenly think, "I hate myself."

Fucked up, no?

Let's discuss.

Times I Was Wrong

A Not At All Comprehensive List

1) When I was in second grade and living in Saint Louis, my school was in a very wealthy part of the suburbs. Some of the students came in on buses from the inner city (is that phrase okay to use still?). When we had choir performances at night, you could sign up to have of these students come home with you for the afternoon since there wasn't time to bus all the way to the city and back. I can't remember the name of the girl who came home with me one day, but we were playing in my room, and she admired one of my stuffed animals, a little lamb. I spontaneously told her she could have it, and she was so so so happy, her entire face lit up and I felt all smug about my charitable good deed. But when we left for the concert that night, we both forgot, and the next day she meekly asked me about it. I never brought it to her, because I suddenly decided I didn't want to part with it even though I had dozens of other toys. I'm sure she did not have nearly as many. She never asked me about it again. I was a selfish bitch of a child.

2) When I was abroad in Ireland, the first night we were in the dorms, the girls on my floor invited me to come into the common room for birthday cake for one of them. I thought they were just being nice, and it wasn't a real invite. A girl from my program was having an emotional breakdown over her boyfriend back in the states, and I stayed with her and didn't go eat cake. The Irish girls barely spoke to me again, and it took me forever to realize I had been super rude. They were being REALLY nice, and it was a genuine invitation, not just a pleasantry. But I'm actually not as good at social cues as I like to think I am.

3) Along the same lines: there was a girl in college who tried very hard to be my friend, and I really didn't realize it until years later. In my fucked up self-hating brain, I somehow interpreted her overtures of friendliness as...what, again, just being nice because she thought she had to be? Who knows. Eventually she stopped trying, and I feel awful thinking back that she must have thought I didn't like her, when in reality I was so stuck in my own dark hole of depression that I couldn't recognize her kindness for what it was.

4) I had a best friend my freshman year of college, who became a roommate sophomore year with two other girls, and our relationship deteriorated severely and we stopped speaking by the end of that following summer. I was never honest with her about why I no longer wanted to be her friend, and I should have been.

5) There was this very dramatic situation a few years back with my best friend getting a new girlfriend who did not like me. In retrospect, I probably didn't make it very easy for her to like me, while I didn't have any romantic feelings for my friend he was definitely the biggest part of my life at the time and I was very possessive of him and our time together. I don't actually think I was wrong in my opinion of her, she just wasn't my cup of tea the couple of times we hung out and she seemed shallow and cruel, but I probably could have handled the whole thing a lot better. And maybe I wouldn't have lost my friend. But he was spineless about the whole thing, so whatever, he clearly didn't care about our friendship very much. Oh, right, this is about ME being wrong. Yes, I was wrong: should have been more flexible, less selfish, not quite such a superior cow. Guys will always pick the girl they can fuck over the one they can't, I should have realized that and backed the hell off. And hey, they're still together, so I guess I was entirely wrong. And maybe she's lovely.

6)  My friend thought she looked fat in a picture I took recently, and I'm afraid my response to her made her think I agreed, which is absolutely not the case. 'Cause she's bitty and beautiful. I'm sorry, friend. I would apologize directly, but I don't want to bring it up and have you think I've been obsessing as much as I have.

7) A few weeks ago, a coworker was watching a YouTube video when I walked by. I cannot keep my goddamn mouth shut, ever, so I blurted out, "Oh, is that the goat video?" Just for good measure, when they didn't reply, I repeated myself. Ruining the video for them, effectively. I'm sure they didn't care, the video was still funny regardless of whether or not I mentioned the goat...which, actually, they knew was the case because it's in the title. But you would not believe how long I obsessed over how stupid I was for ruining this dumb video.

Which is hilarious.

Enjoy.