Channel Changing

Thoughts are uncontrollable.

They come and settle in your mind.

They embed themselves like relentless ticks, simultaneously sucking your blood while leaving unsuspecting disease which slowly infiltrates your body over several days or weeks, sometimes affecting you for years and literally changing the course of your life.

A single thought can spark an attitude.

An attitude can inspire a prolonged mindset.

And that mindset?

That will ultimately provide you with the lens which you see your world through.

And that’s sometimes scary.

I’ve often talked to people who struggle with recurring, destructive thoughts.

And for years, I was one of those people.

Thoughts so pervasive, you can’t throw them off.

You feel like you’re drowning, suffocating in your own body.

And you stopped believing there’s any other way to live.

They paralyze you, saying things like:

“You’re going to screw up, anyway. Why are you even trying?.”

“You think they actually like you?”

“You’ll never be beautiful.”

“You’ll always be alone.”

“This is just my lot in life.”

“You don’t deserve to live.”

What if I told you these were all lies?

What if I told you, you have the power to change this?

Your brain works a lot like infrastructure.

Thoughts create pathways.

The more you think a thought, the more “worn in” that pathway is, and the quicker you jump to that same thought the next time you’re faced with a similar situation.

And just like the roadways, those pathways can actually be changed in your brain.

And also just like the roadways, sometimes it can take months of you intentionally catching your thoughts and rerouting them through another channel for them to naturally flow in the direction you want them to.

I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago where someone presented this idea as channel changing.

When you have a negative thought, you train yourself to immediately change the channel.

You change the channel to another thought.

And then you choose to believe that new thought.

I’m not going to lie to you and say this is easy.

It isn’t.

As humans, we have this natural tendency to want to wallow in our own pain, to let our sadness wash over us without even attempting to stop it.

And while that’s not a bad thing in a situation like the death of a loved one or the end of a relationship, where it’s necessary to embrace the pain and work through our sadness, it is a bad thing if that’s our normal, everyday life.

Because frankly, those thoughts are not life giving.

They are absolutely the opposite, and they will steal, kill, and destroy any attempt at living a healthy, happy, productive life.

You don’t have to settle for destruction.

You have the power to change your world by changing your thoughts.

Don’t be afraid to say something to someone around you.

It’s time to change the channel.

Me, Too

Me, too.

By now, you’ve probably seen this post.

And if you haven’t, you may live under a rock.

Normally, I don’t do copy and paste statuses.

But this is important.

We have many huge issues plaguing our society.

I won’t claim this to be the biggest, but it certainly isn’t small.

And like some of the other huge issues, it’s simply displaying a symptom of a much larger, underlying problem.

Me, too.

I don’t know a single woman this doesn’t affect.

And I can be damned certain that it affects a far larger percentage of males than any of us want to believe.

Growing up in this country as a woman is tough.

Some of my youngest memories involve being deprecated because I was too fat, therefore, leaving me undesirable.

The direct result of a father figure calling me a “fat ass” as a three, four, and five year old was a deeply rooted eating disorder spanning nearly 17 years.

I also distinctly remember my mother starving herself, working out incessantly, and taking sometimes hours to primp to look “presentable” for this same man.

But that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it ladies?

To stand still, look pretty, and serve our man?

I thought the 1960’s died.

This same man drunkenly showed up naked in my bed on a number of occasions.

I have clear memories of standing in a bathroom being forced to touch a man’s penis as a three and four year old, but to this day, I’ve blocked out the face of that man.

And to this day, I wonder if it was him.

I wish I could say these were the only instances of sexual discriminations I’ve faced.

But that would be far from true.

From the ages of five until nine, I was molested by a young girl just a little older than I was.

She threatened that if I didn’t comply with her demands, she would go home and tell her parents that I was doing worse things to her.

She was my only friend for years, and I couldn’t stand the idea of being alone.

I was also absolutely terrified of getting into trouble because that man I mentioned earlier wasn’t very forgiving.

This resulted in years of self-hatred, some very early use of pornography, a clear distaste for women, and buckets upon buckets of shame.

Flash forward.

I’m twenty years old, and all I want is to be loved.

I’ve lived a life being told I wasn’t beautiful like I needed to be, and I had finally lost some weight, which I wrongly equated to being more beautiful.

I had hoped it was enough to be loved.

So I willingly stepped into an abusive relationship that was sexually aggressive and divisive.

I didn’t know I deserved more than someone who used all my money, regularly talked down to me, used me to please him, and slept with other women.

He moved in with another woman while we were together.

I still brought him a parting gift because I wanted him to know I wasn’t mad at him.

As you might imagine, my time after that relationship wasn’t the easiest.

I couldn’t handle being alone after my entire identity for a whole year was wrapped up in pleasing someone else.

I had a short-lived period where I was involved with the local group of sexual deviants.

(If you thought 50 Shades was scandalous, you never met these people.)

I figured, I was already characterized as a whore in my mind, why not continue to allow people to do whatever they wished with me.

The level of shame I harbored continued to grow, as I allowed men to do whatever it is they wanted, so long as I wasn’t alone.

Even when those things were painful, disrespectful, and often left me lonelier than when I arrived.

A few years after I decided to walk out of that life, I still had my struggles, but I was on an upswing.

Then I went to a small house party.

And I drank too much.

And I fell asleep early in a dark room as the party swirled around me.

I woke up hours later to a man inside of me.

He quickly stopped once he realized I was awake, but those few minutes of extreme confusion seemed eternal.

He slid out of me and attempted to pull my pants up.

Then he left.

And I laid there, my world spinning.

I blamed myself for that night.

After all, I’m the one who went somewhere when I felt like I shouldn’t.

I’m the one who put myself in that position by drinking more than I should have.

And at least it happened to me, not someone else.

Because I could handle being used.

I had handled it my whole life.

And I was a whore, anyway, wasn't I?

This problem is deeply pervasive.

And we live in a land where even the majority of the church tells us as women that “modest is hottest,” and we as females are responsible for covering our ankles and midriffs, lest we “make” a man stumble because our top was a little too short or our pants were a little too tight.

As if it is my responsibility to wrangle another’s out of control desires.

Cat calls are innumerable.

There are many places I simply avoid going because the fear of being outnumbered and assaulted by more than just words is very real.

And I don’t ever want to be put in a position of physical assault again, one where I’ll again believe the lie that it’s my fault.

Guys, I didn’t want to share this.

But it is important to know that these problems are, for better or worse, so commonplace in our world that we often walk around never having shared our stories.

And never sharing means never breaking a sick cycle.

I hope that even one person is given hope by reading this.

Hope that they can finally let out that haunting ghost that’s been screaming in their head.

So that they can step into the incredibly abundant freedom that’s waiting on the other side of turning the light on and clearing the dead bones out of the closet.

This is a problem.

Turning on the light is the first step.

Being the solution is next.

And remember: your standards are what you allow to happen in your presence.

Boundaries

Boundaries

Lines. Borders. Fences.

By definition, a boundary is a dividing line; something that creates a border, separates one thing from another.

And that sounds incredibly limiting.

But what if I told you it wasn't?

What if I told you boundaries are a good thing?

What if I told you they could bring about the most freedom your life has seen, to date?

I'm 26.

Still learning. Still testing limits.

Still accidentally obliterating lines I should leave lie and missing the hurdles for the fences I should clear.

But something that's profoundly settled in my soul recently is that boundaries are purposeful.

They aren't intersections of segregation, separating the free from the imprisoned.

They aren't here to steal, kill, and destroy.

On the contrary, they're actually tasked with the civic duty to uphold the maximum amount of freedom we can experience as humans.

Because the truth is, boundaries aren't as confining as we choose to believe.

Maybe, if we stopped doing our best to run from boundaries, under the assumption they're restrictive, we'll finally learn to embrace them. And to rest in knowing that those boundaries are what allow us to live the freest life possible.