Of The Best Stuff, but Cracked

Back to bother and live a lot being lost?

-AmandaBot

That's a computer-generated status from an online toy called http://what-would-i-say.com/. I discovered it on Facebook this morning and was quickly fascinated with that particularly narcissistic curiosity that has often driven me to fill out dozens of pointless "personality quizzes" online. The premise is simple: you give the bot access to your Facebook status updates and, with a similar action to a particularly dynamic word cloud, it spits back a status that it "thinks" you would say, based on your history. It's both hilarious and damning. Clearly over the years I've quoted a lot of poetry, complained an awful lot, and obsessed about cooking. Swearwords, anxiety, and silliness are prevalent.

A euro worth of shrill desperate meows. I think I somehow doubt this

-AmandaBot

It's an explicitly self-conscious exercise but randomised just enough to startle me into seeing myself in a slightly different light. I don't consciously craft my social media "persona", and though I've grown a lot of filters since I was last blogging, I think I was surprised to find how much of the bits of myself I think I'm good at hiding still come through. I'm self-centred, somewhat dramatic, somewhat profane, often uncertain. I guess what this shows me is that I'm better at hiding from myself than I am at hiding from the world, even through the screens of the internet. 

They are terrifying the exhausted and hardworking blackbird parents currently cloistered existence.

-AmandaBot

In a similar but more serious way, reading back over some of this blog again was difficult. There's a large part of me that would like to knock it down and start again, but I find the ugliness and the pain instructive. I'm amazed at how different I am now, and equally amazed at how much the same I still am. The parts I like best and least about myself are all still here and accounted for.

That feeling when night I addressed the light. Someone needs to sleep.

-AmandaBot

I have a fairly respectable lifetime behind me now, and as I turn again towards "something greater than myself" I'm struck again by how interior, and how self-centred I have always been. My religious explorations of the past have always been (by necessity it seemed, or I thought) entirely based on my own experiences, thoughts, ideas, and longings.

"Therefore be still awhile from  your own thoughts, searching, seeking, desires and imaginations, and be stayed in the principle of God in you, that it may raise your mind up to God, and stay it upon God, and you will find strength from him, and find him to be a God at hand, a present help in time of trouble and of need."

I'm sure I've probably quoted those lines from George Fox before on this very blog, but I know I almost never succeeded in putting them into practice. The second half was especially difficult, because my thoughts, searching, seeking, desires and imaginations were all about "God" and again and again I found myself stopped there. I desperately desired an exterior God to swoop in and heal me and cure me and make me fit for life.

So stressed about my life has been wanting to sip a little sick.

-AmandaBot

My mental health is sound now, but like many people, I still often feel as though I am somehow not quite equipped to face the day, even in its most practical and selfish aspects. It leaves me feeling weak and afraid when I think of trying to reach beyond myself to help anyone else or to make any difference in the world. Without supernatural intervention (which seemed at best a fickle thing, obviously outside of my control to command, in the unlikely event it existed), it seemed to me that getting through my life day to day was a big enough job for me, so I shut the rest down. 

I have heard and read and encountered the truth many times, in religious and psychological contexts, that the only way to "Salvation" was to go beyond yourself, to "deny yourself" through love, for the good of another, and I've misinterpreted that truth in various ways with various unhappy results, so I withdrew from that, too.

So I switch to defensive tactic #2 self mockery. Works every time, most of it

-AmandaBot

Starting again, I have had to come to a very calm and silent and empty place. No god there, no no-god there. Myself as it exists: the movements of self-protection, the movements of love, the layers of experience, the celebration, the worry, the strife. Daily failure and daily triumph, and all of those thoughts and desires and seekings and imaginations. I am not trying to judge them, or destroy them, or even to sift through them, I am only seeking to be still a while from them. Even the principle of God is a risky thing for me because it so often consists of all that stuff, and it gets in the way of moving out of my own narcissistic circle.

So the principle for me is this: to put aside the grandiose expectations for and of myself which give me an excuse to feel like a failure and give up. To be honest about who and what I am, to give what I actually have in the moment, and not demand or expect more. To value and have gratitude for my gifts as they exist now, and not as I wish they would be, if I were "better". To see abundance in myself where I am tempted to see only lack. To find the humility to accept and exist in the moment-to-moment struggles and joys and (most of all) choices with a sense of faithfulness and purpose, and to lay everything else aside.