There is Enough Space for Respect In This World..

What happened to a world full of correspondence of letter, a world full of individualisation of your handwriting and the magazine drawings of the acceptably unachievable perfect woman?

We seem to live in a world now where technology has taken over us. I look around me and I'm surrounded, just like many of us could agree. An instant buzz of the mobile and the ding of an email, the  too familiar black and white text and those in speech bubbles, recreating a real life conversation. We have become so virtual. Yes, the basics have become useful, but not an unhealthy dependency we have all be guilty to admit too.

Children, touching iPads and iPhones, putting together virtual puzzles and forgetting the tangibility of those misshaped cardboard pieces. I realise now that this is what my photography lectures have been talking about with their film cameras and how we have changed that dramatically, shooting acceptably good quality on our phones. I hadn't seen it that way, but there is always two sides to every argument.

Sometimes when you walk away from technology, you really experience a pure version of yourself. I never gaze hour after hour on Facebook at the other girls deeming themselves hot, in competition with their female friends and surrounding males. I don't stare at online magazine sites trying to keep in touch with the fashion of 'right now'. All this and what makes the world perfect, to say the least in a girls eye, is forever changing, the whole world is forever changing. We need to find ourselves and respect ourselves. This is what has gone wrong and we don't seem to know our place in this world. Our politeness and respect as flopped. All this crime, drug usage and lusty sex is a distraction, a quick route to get us to our happy place, but does it really? Of course not. We want so much more than that. We want love and we want respect and how are we supposed to get it? Not by those ways. By respecting and loving yourself. If you can't love yourself first, then you will find it harder to love others around you. Everyone is deserving of someone.

We have become so troubled as world, so confused and full of angst and misunderstanding. But what we need to understand is that we are all in this together. We all started off with a fresh innocent face, crying for air on our day of birth. The world was at our oyster and no means superficial in our eyes. We had no idea what insecurity meant, just that we knew that pain could make us cry.

We get lost, we all lose our confidence somehow along the path of life. It's our job to react to it in the right way and gather it all up. We have to look within ourselves and find peace. Find calm, a natural euphoria that we can escape to drug and alcohol free. It's possible and it takes practice.

Just sit. Remove yourself from that buzz of technology. Feel the guilt but do it anyway. You deserve time for yourself. You deserve to heal and each day brings a new opportunity for that.

Smile. Smile to yourself in the mirror, feel the overwhelming embarrassment, stare into those eyes and soften that gaze. Hold your head up high, take in your flaws and smother them with acceptance, wear them with pride.

We should pass others, no matter who they are, with a knowledge that they hold pride within themselves. A knowledge that they may have problems too and realise that things in your life may not be as bad as it seems, even if may feel like it now.

We need to be open to change. Pride ourselves, the country we belong to and the world we share and live in.

The world shouldn't seem such a scary place. The only thing we need to change, is ourselves.

Overcoming vulnerable moments of suffering...

"Discovering the light of hope"

Vulnerability is when you are exposed to your fears. This may not be a direct exposure, but there is that possible chance that your fears could get in your way at these given moments.These fears can span from just a small scale, such as social phobia’s or large scale fears of ill health or death. As people we fear many things and no matter how big or small they are, they can seem the size of mountains. We want to appear strong in the eyes of our peers, families and friends. We don’t want to be weak.

Even if we disgust the fears that we have, they can still eat up us away if we let them. It is only our minds that can tell us how we feel and what we do and we can change our approaches if life can seem unbearable, particularly if we are fed up of suffering.  We suffer in different ways. We may have had a hard childhood, been bullied and stripped of self confidence or suffer from invisible conditions such as depression or anxiety. We may be trying to overcome losing weight or give up smoking.

I’ve been an anxiety sufferer; It can take a certain event to swallow you up into this dark hole. And though sometimes it has become unclear about what triggered this dark cloud, I know that my life was much more brighter when it wasn’t around. You could over think until you find an answer but even that can just make the problem worse and even contribute to a general over thinking problem.I’m a fighter but it let it bother me, because I was trying to so hard to make it right. Sometimes you have to do the opposite.

I have taken up knitting and I have felt more at peace with myself then I have ever have. My mind has been freed, unlocking my thoughts and peeling apart meanings that I have never understood. 

When we at our lowest, we have to believe that things will get better, even if that light of hope in the distance is the size of a pin prick. One positive thought is enough to get your started, even that is just a smile that feels fake on the sadness of your face. We think that we are the ones that are suffering. We feel that someone is out to get us, who has chosen us to suffer, but isn’t that really a gift, we have chosen to make a unwanted burden? If you hadn’t suffered, then you wouldn’t be that stronger person you are today.

My metaphor is: Life is like knitting. It can unravel or get knotted up at the most unexpected times and lead you to a dead end. If you pick up the wool and start from again, you may achieve the harmony in your life that you may not have had if you hadn’t stumbled. 

So not matter what you are suffering from, find something that you enjoy enough to distract you from your problem. You will realise that you are not alone and your problem is probably smaller than you think it is, because you can most likely do something about it. 

Take your fears and problems and split them into two categories:

1)   I can do something about this problem

2)   I can’t do anything about it, I just need to accept it and move on.

I know that a lot of people would want to choose the latter even they could do something to change it, because it is the easiest, but if you think about it,wouldn’t you achieve more if you take some patience and work for that harder number 1 solution?

Take those vulnerable idle moments and turn them around. Embrace these moments as an extra push to help improve and eventually you find where you want to go.

It's the constant effort that gets you through.