Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Beholder, So Behold Yourself

Introduction

Aha yes yes. I am here to explain a little story about me. It is what they call, beauty on a stick. Extra easy and utilitist in nature, and aesthetically pleasing to all. This story is about my heart.

What we value

Anger is the only socially acceptable way to achieve vulnerability. It is the only way a man will be able to express himself to the world, otherwise he must do what he must, in spite of whether he is able to or not, or if it is considered best for his health. Anger is the outlet of choice for those that are insecure about their strength and their dominance. It is buttered up to appear as though it was strength. It is also dumb and idiotic. My heart became like this because of how my grandfather treated my father, and how we have neglected mental health in our family. How my mental health is deteriorating as I write this, how my father didn't know how to handle his without force awhile ago, how I have had no emotional wealth whatsoever growing up, how narcissism was lauded, and how my views of the world gained traction from misunderstandings of my intentions and my situation are the reasons and the sole reasons I had wished to be evil for quite some time. 

Things change as you grow up. When you witness things for what they are, it can become a humbling experience. What quite a few parents don't realize is that shielding your child from truth is one way to create resentment. When you find that some things you've been told are demonstrably untrue, you tend to think all of what you are told is untrue. Unfortunately, this can create radicalism, and ideological submission for those that think in absolutes, which unsurprisingly most do. Life is a game of for and against, it's quite the annoying one too as most people will use this to decide what others should do through political policy. This is where emotional detachment comes in for most. If they have a learned behavior of disregarding their emotions, which is not an uncommon methodology parents use, there will be obvious things in their mind that they find to be evil. There will be ultra conservation of oneself and what someone believes to be a threat will become greater and greater in numbers. This is the parsimonious paradox, which is caused by emotional frugality. It is what caused me and my soul to be disconnected, and is still what haunts me to this day.

My heart begins with disenfranchisement, over long periods of time it was withdrawn. It was withdrawn so much that it sought to withdraw others, and succeeded in doing so. There was a multitude of occasions in which something heavy on my heart destroyed those around it. It destroyed myself, and my mind. My mind was simply abused for its utility. It had become a discipline to focus for others, to prove I was as intelligent as they thought I was. My intelligence was beaten into submission so much so, that I could no longer keep up. It was a charade, I withdrew from school, I withdrew from myself, looking only to those things which appeared to make me smarter. They were all a show, and it was a show for me as well. I wasn't and am not as smart as I was forced to be, and I will never be. I cannot focus on a single topic for too long, I am impulsive and distraught, I drink too much, I fight, I argue against everyone. I was taught that being aggressive would make things true, and so I became aggressive. My heart was never in a vulnerable state, and it was caught on three things at once. It was caught on lust, it was caught on ideology, and it was caught on anger. Although anger has its downsides, it has one addicting factor for abusers, it is empowering and feels amazing. Anger is a shut down tool for discussion, it is meant for physical confrontation, but is now used copiously for any sort of disagreeing discussion. Perhaps this is why we find ourselves so divided, in fact I'm willing to wager that we find ourselves so divided because of the parsimonious paradox. Depression plagues those that are forced into a rut. They are forced into that rut because they experience the parsimonious paradox, they are forced into disregarding their mental health because of the parsimonious paradox, they live and breathe the parsimonious paradox, and it is truly and dreadfully getting worse because it is yet a paradox we can break in large numbers. Self help seeks to solve its problems, and yet the parsimonious paradox beats any help into submission because there are few that have broken it before, making self help an introverted overdrive to productivity and that's it.

Yet, there they are, that is the bootstraps of the nation. They are just waiting to be pulled up, and here we are, stuck in a loop of lack of worth. Our emotional resilience is quite astounding, but there will be less and less emotionally intelligent people over time. And because of our biology, we will not adapt to being alone. The parsimonious paradox is already making many commit suicide, and seek for acceptance in unhealthy ways. It is the evil destroyer of our civilization, and it is also one of the reasons we cannot unblock our creativity to solve horrible issues, like climate change, that are staring us right in the face. We tend to ignore this side of ourselves in support of a system of ultimate productivity. It's a good thing we do this some of the time, as we have created quite a lot of wealth from it, however, there's the point in which it is too much and we have crossed that line. The parsimonious paradox brings us all into negative emotions, it crushes our spirits, and there's very few ways out of it. When we think of our defensive emotions to receiving new information, we can thank the flourishment of cognitive dissonance, which has kept us inside our boxes all along. This is indeed a factor from the parsimonious paradox which rewards self deflecting behavior. It's the behavior that those who are afraid of change represent. We as a society tend to think without much of an analysis on ourselves in the process. The problem with this is that knowing oneself can actually lead to better overall knowledge of the world. The world is a complex thing, ironing out your own needs makes it easier to take in. 

Things can be solved

Why does this paradox have to plague us and why can't we get over it? What's important to recognize is just how emotionally intelligent we can be. It doesn't make much sense when we think about the long term. We think about how entropy operates and how chaos will never be outdone by order. It's all going to go away at some point right? What matters, though is that this is a closed system. We're not stuck in a constantly flowing river, we have a closed system which we can operate ourselves. In spite of what you see on the news, in spite of how we look at our mental stability, there are still those outliers that have gained emotional wellbeing over the past years, and who have also gained some mental strength. They are quite few and far between, but what we mostly don't recognize is that the parsimonious paradox plagues all of their minds. They're stuck in the same rut as you and I, and yet, they somehow manage to find a route to get out. 

A lot of the time this has to do with self help, but really there are some methods of thinking we can adopt right now. Our past can have great impact on our future, however it is important to note that there are ways we can embolden our past, and how we can overcome what it says to us. I have been watching myself quite a lot recently, debating what it meant to have gone through what I did. I didn't know if I regretted it, or if I wanted it to be the same throughout and I still don't know. When I look at myself, I see a man who wants to overcome his fears. I find this to be the most important aspect of your being. You are the person that wants to fix their issue, you are the person with will. Quite often, it doesn't matter what else there is on the table, that will can overcome the greatest of struggles. Self help has this trope taught almost universally, and it is usually framed in the network of doing productive things (a lot of the time in the form of exercise.) But what most self help gurus don't say is that this is great for your mental well being. It refocuses your mind from the lack of positive reinforcement you get through the parsimonious paradox, and instead focuses on your own potential. Your potential, in essence is your spirit. Your spirit to continue forward and your spirit to bring positivity to others is the most important aspect of what your level of fulfillment is. In a societal sense, this is what I think is meant to be taught when we say "get over it." "Get over it," in essence usually means focus on your positive mindset, focus on your willpower, and focus on your ability to overtake a problem and solve it. However, it can be read another way, of which is probably the most harmful method of approach to solving trauma and abuse, which is ignore it and continue forward. When we ignore things, we embolden our lack of emotional intelligence. It is the thing that is taught in cults, ignore the obvious fact that you are upset, or that something doesn't make sense. A lot of the time, our emotions don't seem to have a logical backing in accordance with what we want, but we also tend to ignore important details about ourselves in the process, again because of the parsimonious paradox. Whatever the reason may be, there's still a reason, and simply ignoring the reason will make it manifest in unhealthy and unproductive ways for yourself. Your emotional stability takes a huge toll from thinking like this, and it's necessary to allow yourself to feel in order to know yourself. 

Things can feel insane. I think it's safe to say that the world as we know it is an insane place with very insane people. It's a scary time to live in, it's a scary time to find love, there are very few things we can do to push ourselves forward, and tons of things we can do to pull ourselves back. It really makes you wonder what exactly our goal is on this planet. It also makes you wonder whether what you've done goes along with what your goal is. There's something to recognize from this though, it's that our emotional well-being is important for helping us recognize what our goals are in the first place. Our judgements can get warped when we don't know what we want, which is why it's so important to believe you're a good person before you actually become a good one. Sometimes the tiniest bit of recognition and reevaluation can remove you from your necessarily bad goal to a more accurate and wonderful one.

Individualism is one of the most convoluted ideas of our lifetimes. When we judge what's right, we also relate it to what's right to us. Sometimes we only care about what's right for us. It makes our judgements of morality skewed from one another, making our emotional attachment and empathy for each other another huge problem for us to solve. It's where I believe I found myself a few years back, and it's also where I believe most teenagers end up. It consumes a lot of your life, and a lot of people will judge you quite harshly for having not known. I don't quite know why this disconnect has to happen, and I also find individualism to be one of the more intriguing ideas that also has the effect of splitting us apart. It must be predicated on the assumption that our minds are so narcissistic to know what is best for us. I think this is the true reason behind our want for individualism. I also find is necessarily at odds with how we want society to operate, and how we have been taught to make things operate. We are told to forcefully stand up for the goodness of things, and to be uncompromising. It feels as though this is just something we tell ourselves to make us feel good for thinking we're good. I believe humility to be a huge factor missing from my childhood, and something a lot of childhoods lack. It's the self awareness that also plays into humility and the parsimonious paradox. Quite often we need emotional attachment to really understand ourselves, making it one of the harder things to really get a grasp on. Our views of ourselves are so heavily distorted by what we've been told by everyone around us, and even worse from what we tell ourselves. It's not that individualism is a bad idea for ourselves, it's that the idea of the self is so fundamentally changed all of the time, and we tend to stagnate in our understanding of the world after a certain period. In fact, individualism is more than likely the only correct universal approach to finding a way to live a happy fulfilling life, but we must take matters into our own hands and do what's right for ourselves, like admitting our faults.

Sadness is beautiful

I always had the emotionality of being sad. I was plagued with an immune disorder growing up, making it incredibly hard for me to be energetic. It was quite possibly the most upsetting moments of my life, and when I look back on it, I can never find me receiving consolidation from my mom. I loved my mom, she worked hard and believed in our family, even if my father was reckless and downright abusive in some circumstances. But I never received what I wanted, which was to be held and told things would be okay. I had abandonment issues growing up because of how my dad acted at home. Sometimes I wonder if I'd ever gotten hit, and I really cannot remember. I've always had severe social anxiety since then, and I rarely admit it too, and the reason I don't admit it was because of the ideas I was taught when my mom would leave me at daycare and not say it's okay. When she would just leave me there and not try to console me. How was I going to trust those around me if I couldn't even live in my own home without being scared? It's not hard to see how you could very much find your sadness in things as time continued forward, but I ignored that feeling completely until I moved out pretty much. What's beautiful about my family is that we recognize our will, my father quit drinking, making him lash out less, and my mother slowly became more empathetic overtime, and I recognize just how hard it is to rebuke old habits. But things never settle in your mind if you don't let them. Clouds block your vision for a better tomorrow if you don't let them rain. Sadness is that one thing we cannot talk about though. It's the thing we think isn't good, and by all means it's hard to be a sad person when you've been abused. But vulnerability helps us understand why we can't say things, and why we're doing things we don't like.

I started seeing myself fall into some of the habits my dad had fallen victim to, like having crazy emotional outbursts and even destroying things around me. When we hear of things like this, we never want to understand the backstory behind what happened, and a lot of the time we want the bad person to be punished. This is what I consider to be the final nail in the coffin of hypocrisy from the parsimonious paradox. Every instance in which there's a want for justification is because people do not believe themselves to be fully recovered. Revenge is very often disguised by justice, and taken a new form, one in which most people have fallen victim to believing as right. But we know this isn't the case, our incarceration rate for reoffenders is 80%. That means 80% of those who've been to prison get sent back to prison again! Our punishment is far from a slap on the wrist in most cases. I believe this to be the case because we don't allow ourselves to be sad about problems, and we unrightfully view it as a vulnerability making us angry at those who've wronged us. And it makes sense why we're so angry, but this anger transfers onto those that get punished, and now they become angry at others around them. Now they do the same thing before, and nothing is solved. Those that are being locked up need to be taught that it's okay to be sad, and to have negative emotions that they need to deal with. It could sincerely solve a lot of our issues.

Being sad makes us stronger people too. Sadness is inherently hard to deal with,  and the amount of tenacity required to take it on is something we should be proud of, and most of us are proud of when we actually take the challenge on. It relieves us of being at fault, and it makes us recognize what we are in more ways than one, making us more empathetic to not only those who use sadness as a crutch, but to also those who never express vulnerability. 

And this is where I say, knowing yourself is harder than it looks, making it easier to judge others for not having done so than to do so ourselves.