In Heaven, All The Interesting People Are Missing.

05/28/2021

Fear and excitement.

Greatest oxymoron to have ever lived inside of me.

There is such a lack of balance in my soul,emotions seem to be extending their roots further and further in that which is my tangible existence.

A grandiose future awaits me,every cell in my body and every sliver of my being seems to be propelling themselves so as to reach the right spot in time.

It feels preternatural,as if what life made me go through is not anywhere near describable as pain,it is no more than the path i had to go down to in order to achieve my current standing.

I am no more than myself,thus I am all there is to live.

Why do humans need companionship?

Why can't be satisfied by being alone with ourselves?

Humans are known to be social beings,and no matter how much we may love our alone-time,we will always choose,with such alacrity even,to spend some of our time with someone whom we deem worthy of being around us.

It is an inexorable truth,which no matter how strongly you are opposed to,will show itself to you some time or another.

It is surely up to you whether to understand it or not,but there will come a time when your good intentions aimed at protecting yourself will backlash.

At that point in time there will be no one to turn to,all your choices will pour down on you and you will see no path ahead of you.

After realizing what companionship means to you,everything will become undeniably stressful.

Is it because of fear?Do you just not know how human interactions unravel anymore?Or what is it?

Usually it would be wise to let go of such feelings by interrupting the friendship causing them,however that is not the case in such a context.

At this point in time you only have one option:try not putting this companionship ahead of everything else,instead just hold it dear to you.Hopefully everything will be set in motion once again.

— I'm glad your sickness, Marina Tsvetaeva (translated from the Russian by Elaine Feinstein)

Since that fateful day in 1492, Columbus has been seen as a hero in the eyes of Americans. Recently, the horrible crimes that he committed have been the topic of a national conversation. Columbus Day is certainly a hot-button issue, but there is only one morally sound decision: America must abolish Columbus Day and replace it with a day to honor his Native American victims.

As his explorations have become a staple of U.S. history, Columbus has been molded into a symbol, not a real person. Many supporters of Columbus call him a “symbol of American success”, but he was more than a symbol. He was a complex human being, and idolizing him lets us ignore his flaws. Columbus has come to represent heroism and exploration. These are important values, so why should we taint them with Columbus’s name?

Columbus does not deserve to be honored for making a navigation mistake. On his expedition, Columbus was attempting to sail to India, not to the Americas. He ended up landing in Caribbean Islands through no effort of his own. This mistake resulted in Native Americans being called Indians for centuries, an inaccurate label. 

Columbus is often credited with discovering America. However, he didn’t discover America, because the Native Americans were already there. It’s impossible to discover a region that’s already occupied with millions of people. Furthermore, Native Americans were extremely knowledgeable about the climate and ecosystem of the Americas, and deserve honor much more for their contributions to our understanding of geography. 

Columbus enslaved the Native Americans, seeing them only as a means to profit. This wasn’t his first time trading slaves, though. Before his expedition, Columbus made a living selling African slaves in Portugal. Through his ventures in Native American slave trading, he created the Transatlantic slave trade, setting in motion our country’s most shameful and horrific piece of history.

Columbus was responsible for Native American genocide. He committed the first mass genocide of Native Americans, a massacre of 8,000,000 people. Within one generation of Columbus’s arrival, about 15,000,000 Native Americans were killed. By time Columbus left, only 100,000 Native Americans were left, and by 1542, there were only 200.

Columbus day isn’t just not “politically correct”. It’s a holiday that celebrates one of the most evil, genocidal, and racist people in history. His kill count is on par with everyone killed in World War I, and yet America still idolizes him. It’s the responsibility of legislators to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day.

Journal Prompts

All the following questions were found from PsychCentral in the article 64 Journaling Prompts for Self-Discovery. I’m going to be using them in my next following posts

Who do you trust most? Why?

What are your strengths in relationships?

How do you draw strength from loved ones?

What do you value most in relationships?

What three important things have you learned from previous relationships?

What five traits do you value most in partners?

How do you show compassion to others? How can you extend that same compassion to yourself?

What are three things that work well in your current relationship? What are three things that could be better?

What boundaries could you set in your relationships to safeguard your own well-being? (*****This is particularly going to be a challenging one for me. I’ll get into that later.)

What do you most want your children to learn from you?

How can you better support and appreciate your loved ones?

What does love mean to you? How do you recognize it in a relationship?

List three things you’d like to tell a friend, family member, or partner?

What values do you consider most important in life? How to do your actions align with those values?

What three changes can you make to live according to your personal values?

Describe yourself using the first 10 words that come to mind. Then list 10 words that you’d like to use to describe yourself. List a few ways to transform those descriptions into reality.

What do you appreciate most about your personality? What aspects do you find harder to accept?

Explore an opinion or two that you held in the past but have since questioned or changed. What led you to change that opinion? 

List three personal beliefs that you’re willing to reconsider or further explore.

Finish this sentence: “my life would be incomplete without….”

Describe one or two significant life events that helped shape you into who you are today.

When do you trust yourself most? When do you find it hard to have faith in your instincts? (***Interesting. See to post 1).

What three things would you most like others to know about you?

What difficult thoughts or emotions come up most frequently for you?

Which emotions do you find hardest to accept? How do you handle these emotions?

Describe a choice you regret. What did you learn from it? (***)

What parts of daily life cause stress, frustration, or sadness? What can you do to change those experiences?

What are three things that can instantly disrupt a good mood and bring you down? What strategies do you use to counter these effects?

What are three self-defeating thoughts that show up in your self-talk? How can you reframe them to encourage yourself instead?

What go-to coping strategies help you get through moments of emotional or physical pain?

Who do you trust with your most painful and upsetting feelings? How can you connect with them when feelings low?

What do you fear most? Have your fears changed throughout life?

Describe your favorite thing to do when feeling low.

What three ordinary things bring you the most joy?

List three strategies that help you stay present in your daily routines. Then, list three strategies to help boost mindfulness in your life.

How do you prioritize self-care?

Describe two or three things you do to relax.

What aspects of your life are you most grateful for?

How do you show yourself kindness and compassion each day?

Write a short love letter to some object or place that makes you happy.

What place makes you feel most peaceful? Describe that place using all five senses.

List 10 things that inspire or motivate you.

What are your favorite hobbies? Why?

What parts of life surprised you most? What turned out the way you expected it would?

What three things would you share with your teenage self? What three questions would you want to ask an older version of yourself?

List three important goals. How do they match up to your goals from 5 years ago?

Do your goals truly reflect your desires? Or do they reflect what someone else (a parent, partner, friend, etc.) wants for you?

What helps you stay focused and motivated when you feel discouraged?

What do you look forward to most in the future?

Identify one area where you’d like to improve. Then, list three specific actions you can take to create that change.

How do you make time for yourself each day?

What do you most want to accomplish in life?

List three obstacles lying in the way of your contentment or happiness. Then, list two potential solutions to begin overcoming each obstacle.

Obviously there are not 64 questions listed here. I’ve eliminated any regarding work. Just not the topic of conversation that I’m wanting to have right now.

I find myself opposed to the view of knowledge as a passive copy of reality.

- Jean Piaget 1896-1980

How do we learn things? The answers to this age-old question have been examined and analysed by many scientists. There are plenty of prominent theories explaining cognitive development and helping us to understand the foundation of knowledge.

One of the most prominent answers to the question has come from a Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget.

The legacy of Jean Piaget to the world of early childhood education is that he fundamentally altered the view of how a child learns. And a teacher, he believed, was more than a transmitter of knowledge she was also an essential observer and guide to helping children build their own knowledge.

As a university graduate, Swiss-born Piaget got a routine job in Paris standardising Binet-Simon IQ tests, where the emphasis was on children getting the right answers. Piaget observed that many children of the same ages gave the same kinds of incorrect answers. What could be learned from this?

Piaget interviewed many hundreds of children and concluded that children who are allowed to make mistakes often go on to discover their errors and correct them, or find new solutions. In this process, children build their own way of learning. From children’s errors, teachers can obtain insights into the child’s view of the world and can tell where guidance is needed. They can provide appropriate materials, ask encouraging questions, and allow the child to construct his own knowledge.

Piaget’s continued interactions with young children became part of his life-long research. After reading about a child who thought that the sun and moon followed him wherever he went, Piaget wanted to find out if all young children had a similar belief. He found that many did indeed believe this. Piaget went on to explore children’s countless “why” questions, such as, “Why is the sun round?” or “Why is grass green?” He concluded that children do not think like adults. Their thought processes have their own distinct order and special logic. Children are not “empty vessels to be filled with knowledge” (as traditional pedagogical theory had it). They are “active builders of knowledge-little scientists who construct their own theories of the world.”

Piaget’s Four Stages of Development

Sensorimotor Stage: Approximately 0 - 2 Infants gain their earliest understanding of the immediate world through their senses and through their own actions, beginning with simple reflexes, such as sucking and grasping.

Preoperational Stage: Approximately 2 - 6 Young children can use symbols for objects, such as numbers to express quantity and words such as mama, doggie, hat and ball to represent real people and objects.

Concrete Operations: Approximately 6 - 11 School-age children can perform concrete mental operations with symbols-using numbers to add or subtract and organizing objects by their qualities, such as size or color.

Formal Operations: Approximately 11 - adult Normally developing early adolescents are able to think and reason abstractly, to solve theoretical problems, and answer hypothetical questions.

Albert Einstein once called Piaget’s discoveries of cognitive development as, “so simple only a genius could have thought of it”. As the above shows, Piaget’s theory was born out of observations of children, especially as they were conducting play. When he was analysing the results of the intelligence test, he noticed that young children provide qualitatively different answers to older children.

This suggested to Piaget that younger children are not dumber, since this would be a quantitative position – an older child is smarter with more experience. Instead, the children simply answered differently because they thought of things differently.

At the heart of Piaget’s theory then is the idea that children are born with a basic mental structure, which provides the structure for future learning and knowledge. He saw development as a progressive reorganisation of these mental processes. This came about due to biological maturation, as well as environmental experience.

We are essentially constructing a world around us in which we try to align things that we already know and what we suddenly discover. Through the process, a child develops knowledge and intelligence, which helps him or her to reason and think independently.

For Piaget his work was never just for a closeted coterie of scholars and researcher but had real world application. Piaget was able to put his work in a wider context of importance. He said, “only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual”. Piaget’s theory centres on the idea that children, as little scientists, need to explore, interact with, and experiment in order to gain the information they need to understand their world.

Do you know what I mean when I say that sometimes I don’t have any feelings or emotions? I’m not in a good mood, or a bad mood. I just sit there, by myself, and think. I over think sometimes. I think about what has happened, what will happen, and what could have happened. I think about you, I think about what’s wrong in my life, I think about how I can get myself out of this stage, I think about why I got here in the first place. I think about everything and anything.

i am tired and uninspired

i am used batteries

i am talent-less i am stale

i am a book thats been read and now sits on the shelf

i am a broken guitar string

i am useless

i am invisible

everyday i feel like i’m at war with the world

some days i feel like im standing on the tallest mountain,

screaming at the top of my lungs

”look at me, please, look at me“

if loneliness ever needed a defention,

it‘d be me

i see countless faces everyday

but do they see me? NO!

i am alone

i am invisible

all i wanna do is help other people like me

i wanna hold you and kiss your scars

and say ”i swear to god it‘ll be okay“

not today, but one day

one day, you‘ll wake up and smile for no damn reason

but today, we can cry

today we can be invisible.

invisible by dandelion hands

Like a candle

set aside in wait;

Etiolated,

no more than ornamental.

Its life comes to a stand still.

No purpose,

yet—

hopeful.

The true flames

erase time.

They engulf the deepest of feelings

one can conceive.

Defying common laws,

negativity

turns into bright flames.

Scorching hot...

...happiness?

Blinded by reason

follow the heat

slowly abating in corners of your body.

There,

lies truth.

There,

lie your answers.

Happiness is not far away.

“It’s always dark. The sky if not grey, is black. The snow thigh high slowly grows waist deep. But the tall woman, her dark shawl pulled taut, walks on anyway. The tall woman walks alone, deeper into the woods among a crowd of trees she finds her place”

— Sujata Bhatt, from “She Finds Her Place”, Collected Poems