Live Like No One's Watching

I have made no secret of the fact that I found the years leading up to now to be both difficult, testing and all the while glowing in glorious technicolour. The time period before this one has played a central role in the development of the freer and much calmer person that I have become. Consecutive rainy days no longer see the onset of an inner turmoil, a relationship over before its time isn't cause for total devastation and my binge eating days in moments of stress don't occur anymore. Why has this happened?

This has happened because I fell down more times than I can count, but I got back up again. I allowed other people in and I listened to their words, I began to accept view points other than my own and by taking in advice that I perhaps would have otherwise ignored I was able to open my eyes much wider than they had been in a long time and by doing this I discovered that the answers were all around me. The answers lay in opening the back door and looking out at the blossoming garden while the kettle boiled for the first time at the start of each new day, in purchasing a yoga mat and giving myself 40 minutes to exercise my body and to allow my mind to run free, in accepting that bad things happen sometimes and Baz Lurhman was very right when he stated that the 'real worries in our life blind side us on some idle Tuesday', confidence is key to healthy social relationships, a healthy relationship with food relies on a healthy relationship with ourselves and all of these things together will allow strength of mind and physicality. The most important thing I learned is that we are responsible for ourselves and the actions of other person are beside the point, I'll talk more about this later.

It has taken me at least five years to really get my head together on all of this and two of them were spent in self imposed isolation in Spain, I think that these two years were perhaps the most vigorous in terms of my personal journey of self development. I learned how to do something useful for myself, like going to get the weekly shop, when I didn't want to and I would have preferred to put it off until tomorrow. It dawned on me at some point that doing things when we don't want to do them are the actions which lead to greater pride in ourselves and we're more likely to stop putting things off and as a result of this new thought process we're more capable of breaking other habits - along the lines of binge eating and drinking. I was quite the binge drinker in my day and it was something that stopped with the aid of a very effective Cognitive Behavioural Therapist. My CBT lady helped me to see the benefits of making long term goals and using mantras to stay within the limits I needed to set myself to achieve those goals. Learning that it's absolutely fine to get things wrong sometimes was a wondrous day as well, learning not to give myself a really hard time over it was similarly fantastic.

I've been thinking a lot about my own 'journey', - how I loathe the newly coined usage for the word 'journey', whilst watching snippets of the 2015 Celebrity Big Brother. I try to avoid CBB as much as possible but it can be really rather difficult when your mother is permanently fascinated by the antics of the housemates. The snippets of CBB I've seen seem to focus heavily on the musings of the individuals' involved feelings about themselves. They regularly talk about their 'journey' and all of the 'mother f***ing s**t' they've been through and then happily use their own personal experiences to justify the rather disgusting way in which they choose to interact with other people. I want to reach through the TV and tell them to just walk out of the house, forget about their fee and make friends with their personal demons away from the manipulative machine that is CBB. I cannot abide this kind of TV and I struggle to abide the people who make their way through the door in order to use their own personal selves as entertainment. The whole thing appears to be mass manipulation to me, the housemates try to manipulate the public by presenting a reality TV friendly persona, Big Brother manipulates the housemates by giving them various inane tasks and engineering situations which they know will cause trouble - all the while seeking to tickle the funny bone of the general public, Big Brother then manipulates the public by showing heavily edited hour long versions of each day and when it's all over one person walks out of a house alone, smiles, waves, shouts 'I Love You' and says it's all good and they had a great 'journey' whilst a large swell of people boo and shout very intelligent things like 'sl*t' at the person who is standing alone in the middle of it all. This person may have been irritating, they may have been mean and they probably displayed some disgraceful behaviour in order to be on the receiving end of such an unpleasant reception, but I think it would be very decent if the audience were to practise what they preach about being 'nice' and not adopt the woolpack mentality that seems to have become acceptably mainstream in modern day media. Aside from that rant, I want to make a point about accepting responsibility for ourselves, focussing on healthy attitudes and forging a mind set which can allow other people room for getting things wrong, lowering our judgementalometre and ultimately saying 'well this is what they are doing, I don't agree with it but they aren't living by my set of standards, they are living by their own standards and we don't agree about this, so I will dust myself off, put out the fire raging in my head about it and do something calming and relaxing.'

I decided some time ago to give myself a moral code which I would use to live by, but I had to accept that other people would live by a different one and sometimes I would feel like I was being taken for granted or under appreciated. I came to the conclusion that it didn't matter because feeling calm, listening without interrupting (never saying 'let me stop you there'), allowing someone else to have the last word and living my life with a river of integrity and acceptance running through it was far superfluous to getting one over on someone else by doing something sneaky or holding a grudge. I'm sure you've heard it said before but life really isn’t a rehearsal it is the big performance and it's more priceless than anything we could ever own or look at it in a shop window and it needs to be nourished to survive so give your life every colour of the rainbow, embrace every moment as a learning opportunity and don't waste your time on grudges. People will come and they will go, each one is special, each one will show you one or two of their many faces, each one will get something wrong at some point - it might be on your watch, it mightn't be, but try not to get too caught up in it. You'll wake up with yourself each morning regardless of how other people behave, so what will you do to ensure you get out of bed with a spring in your step and something to look forward to?