I'm smiling
I'm open
Where do you wanna go...?
- from "Awaiting the A Train to Nowehere" by lamontpierre


So, I'm talking to my homegirl tonight and we got into a conversation about the Chris Brown/Rihanna situation, which led to us talking about how parents contribute to their kids esteem and whatnot. This led to me revealing that despite all of my negative feelings about my father, as he has done the most harm to my family physically, mentally and emotionally, he is the one person in my family that I still look forward to his approval and validation. Even at 25 years old. His opinion is of the most importance to me.

I have to say that a vast part of my drive in my professional and artistic endeavors comes from wanting to be able to give my father something to be proud of. When I look at my mother, I feel she is proud of me regardless. And I think back to my relationships and friendships with men. I look at the past few years and I realized that I always work so fucking hard to get the males in my personal life to validate me. And I never realized how these ways paralleled my relationship with my father. My relationships with the men in my life mirror my father. My Dad is very emotionally unavailable and I tend to pick friends whom I feel I have to pull feelings out of. I never realized that I did this so consistently. I am the type of person who is always the one willing to put myself out there, in the hopes that the next person is going to do the same - and when that didn't happen, I felt an extreme amount of rejection. This blog is an example of my tendency for openness. Now that I am more self-aware of this, I need to figure out how to feel that I am enough the way that i am; enough for my friends, my significant others, and most importantly, my father.

My friend says I have to find inner peace because I'm looking in all the wrong places (i.e. friendships and relationships) and still feel empty at the end of the day. And that's my problem.

I believe I got halfway there in recent months where I've drastically reduced my network of friends and associates. I'm no longer apart of the college community where I spent the last almost seven years of my life. I've greatly limited people's access to me. This allowed me to devote more time to myself and reduce the temptation to give myself away to so many different people. I appreciate being by myself more. I've always been the type of person that prefers to be alone than hang out with friends. I'm a loner by nature. And now more than ever I am taking care of myself. I work out six times a week. I watch what I eat. (No more fried foods for me...yesterday I broke out like crazy!) Spending three years around nothing but models and actors can make you feel really self-conscious about your appearance. Lol. And I've been really happy and excited lately in my solitude. Often I feel like the philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). Sometimes I think of him and his cabin in the woods. Now, I just have to go the rest of the journey.

A couple friends of mine have taken up various forms of meditation. Even though I've done it most of my life and been told to do it most of my life, praying, no matter how much I do it, never leaves me feeling as fulfilled as it seems to for others. I believe in God and I always had, but I don't buy into the notion of God as He is presented through Christianity. Call me arrogant, but I just think that I am too smart to buy into the many inconsistencies in Christianity. So, now I'm definitely open to new ideas because I want so much to become stronger in my esteem in myself. Even though, I don't really believe that we as human beings change very much through the course of life, we like to say we do and we very well may change some, I believe that in essence we are who we are, and at our core, we really don't change much if at all.

My homegirl told me that when I get to Los Angeles we're gonna go "channeling". I'm going to look into what that's all about. I'm looking forward to it actually.

So here's to a search for inner peace. I'm looking forward to everyone's thoughts and comments!

2 comments:

inner peace the easiest road to salvation IF only we gave it a chance huh? I find it interesting how you wanted your father's approval after all he basically did was bring pain into your life. I suppose that's the victim blaming themselves for someone else behavior because it couldn't be their fault. However I am glad that you are on your way it takes a lot to realize where you are, how you got there and what you are going to do to about it...keep on bro...

Sometimes u gotta take the time to be with urself to get to know urself and check urself before u wreck urself..I've had to do that n the past and make the necessary changes in my life in order for me to be happier..I see a lot of my past self in this post, and in some cases my present self...i wish u luck on ur journey and hope u find wut it is that makes u happy

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