I could call this “Lessons in life learned from being a Moderator”. I have been blessed to have this opportunity where I have had to take all sorts of things coming at me and ignore. If not, I could not do it. When you learn your lessons, you need someone wiser and more mature than you. If not, two people are drowning. The essential fact that one must have a mentor holds true. If not, one cannot grow. Then, once one has a mentor, one must jump in, with abandon. One will make so many mistakes and look terrible. It is true that one cannot save one’s rear end and one’s face, at the same time. If you want to learn lessons, you will learn by humiliation. You will learn from being betrayed and rejected. You will learn if you are willing to cry tears which hurt like fire.
Find some place where you can practice being yourself. We, all, have masks. We need masks. One cannot say and do anything one wants. If one did, one would be psychotic. However, if one’s mask is on so tightly that one cannot escape, one will be depressed. This is the definition of depression, in my opinion. Hence, one must search for a place where one is allowed to be oneself. Many people will not like it. People like you to conform, as that makes them comfortable. So, when you sing your own song, you will get rejection. Dealing with it is part of what will make you strong, so try to welcome it. It is very hard, but the alternative is depression, the squelching of your true self. The latter is much worse than the former.
Find a mentor. You can’t do this without a mentor. No man is an island, even the strongest of men. We need each other. God will send you the right person, if you ask.
The conundrum is that you must be rejected, again and again, to know that it doesn’t mean much. You learn to consider the source. If a person you don’t respect insults you, so what? This has taken me a long time to get. This lesson can never be learned, perfectly. However, a great deal of depression is from not fitting in to some mold. When you can break the mold, you can go free and depression will leave, to a large extent.
I will leave you with a caveat. One can never totally be free. One can never wipe away depressive feelings, completely. One can never be completely confident. Our flawed nature and the failings of the earth, make it impossible to reach anything close to perfection. The search for perfection brings us back to depression, as it is a search destined to fail.
This is good! Feels like death to not be liked, lol. Always has.
Thank you, Lori, for saying that. I had an experience, yesterday. I was so embarrassed. I keep thinking about it, but it is not as bad as it used to be.
Yes yes yes!
Who is your mentor? They must be awesome! I love to see how you’re blossoming, and even as you’re blossoming, you’re being a guide to others! This is a beautiful process, my friend!
And yes, it is crazy-making not to be yourself . . . so key to find a comfortable place to fit in, and people who accept you with your hair down, so to speak! You’re one of those people I feel at home with–and this, I appreciate more than you know!
My mentor is Randall, the head of Linda-Goodman.com. I was thinking about what was so powerful that he did for me. He let me fail, over and over and helped to lift me up. When I was vulnerable, he was kind. He never kicked me when I was down. He was kind when he explained about ego and humility. Mainly, it was because I could lose it, totally, was not not thrown away.
Actually, he is on FB and is a Life Coach. He was made to be a coach. I was just thinking of how hard it is to do this for someone.
The other person is my guitar teacher. He accepted me as I was, too. He is teaching me to sing. It is all about getting naked. The hardest thing is to feel my sexuality. I finally managed to break through and sing in a primal/ sexual way. It was so hard to do but when I did, my writing changed. People have commented on it. I accepted the sexual part of myself, I think.
Thank you so much, EL, for saying I am someone like that, for you. It is all about love and giving to each other. What else matters?
The funniest thing I find, El, is that healing is so much different than anyone ever told me it would be. I don’t know if I can describe it, but it is like seeing life from your own eyes. What you see is very different than what traditional therapy says. There is so much of life that one must learn from one’s own gut. I am so surprised at what I am learning. Actually, it is a re-learning, as I knew it as a preteen, as I was very perceptive. My mother convinced me I saw things wrong. She was so black and white. She told me I was selfish and bad. Actually, I was maturing 😛
I always liked myself a lot and genuinely wanted people to like me for me. But the problem was that even thought I liked myself, they didn’t like my true self. So I would wear a mask, and they’d like me because they could put me inside a box and finally pinpoint me (or at least that’s what they thought), but I never liked the mask… yet I still wanted them to like me.
So I always had a conflict of being myself and enjoying my own personality, or being more liked and put on a facade. I have Sun semisquare Venus (exact orb) so that pretty much explains the pressure and conflict. Nowadays I honestly don’t care what people think and refuse to be someone I’m not for the sake of being liked. I wish I had a mentor.
I always knew being myself was the answer as I’ve always been very wise my whole life, but that doesn’t always translate to emotional maturity and strength. So we can have valuable knowledge at our disposal and still make mistakes that could have been avoided by our own will because of it.
^^ I believe I finally resolved that conflict as a result of eating food that were energetically charged with astrological energies that I created with a machine (chi-generator) I bought and it comes with a software that let’s you do that. I know semisquares are like squares but they are more frustrating because unlike squares they are not as stressful, dynamic and strong to the point that it actually makes you fix the problem. So I used an exact square between Sun In Leo 1’30’ (5th house) Venus In Scorpio 1’30’ (8th house).
That is fascinating, F. I am so glad to have you here! I never heard that about food but all of life, including ourselves, are energy. I would love to see your chart, if you want to put it up in my Forum. You can ask any questions and we can discuss it.
Why thank you! 🙂
Yeah, I believe the same thing, that all life is energy and that’s why keeping a positive attitude attracts positive energy. And I’d love to post my chart but I have no clue how.
Nevermind, just figured that out. 🙂
http://www.astro.com/cgi/showgif.cgi?lang=e&gif=astro_2gw_01_ndndn_djsjdjsd.61283.40641.gif&res=100&va=&cid=gxqfilefhLFKG-u1386113932