So my short story about Isis is going well. Everybody liked it. Of course, everybody likes everybody's stories. John-Paul, I sometimes sit next to him, he likes my stuff. Last time when I read my poem he said it was brilliant repeatedly and he was very enthusiastic about it and then again when I read my short story today he said it was his favorite out of all the other stories, which he could easily say because mine was the last to be read. He's a bit odd but I like him. I like his receptiveness and even though we are nothing alike, I feel like as a writer we're probably closest. Not in our style, but in our method of approaching writing.

So Loren is pretty annoying to me. He acts like a big brother. But that gets old very quickly. And considering we have good, mature conversations sometimes, and no fights or anything to make him hate me, I don't understand why he has to revert back to that big brother/little sister mode. He doesn't do it with Amelia. He's nice to her. I keep telling him that it's because he cares about me but he doesn't know how to show it. But, in theory, if that were true, his transparency would be gone, and since that's the point, avoiding blatant affection in the first place, wouldn't he stop teasing me if his motivation was unmasked? Or maybe he does it all the more because he now knows that I know what he's really trying to say.

Otherwise, I really can't figure out what he's doing. It's not like he dislikes me. We get along fine. He just feels the need to make fun of me or tease me or whatnot and like I said, it gets old quick.

But he says he's going to North Carolina where a friend of his is going to get him a job. And then he may come back in a month. So maybe I won't have to deal with that problem very much anymore.

I think I want to connect again. Like in the moment that I was reading the story out loud, I want to savor that. Perhaps savor an audience. Savor the attention, someone listening, trying to understand, appreciating my perspective. Or rather, Isis's perspective.

I get extremely nervous. I shake and I sweat. I thought it was about energy and the sweat I assumed to be nervousness. But now I realize just how nervous it all is. I shake violently. When I read my poems, I told myself in my head that Tim, next to me, probably thought me to be a drug addict or something because I was just uncontrollably shaking. And that was AFTER I'd read the poem and we'd moved on.

So I was thinking about it in the car. I was thinking about what it means. It means fear. How can I be that afraid? THAT afraid. Of course, the idea is that I'm not feeling the fear in this life. I'm not really afraid. But my subconscious feels fear and the nervous symptoms express that. Why does my subconscious feel afraid? Probably something it remembers that I don't.

Probably something from a past life. And that makes me sad. It makes me sad that I'm trembling in fear because I was condemned in a past life. Like, how traumatized could I have been? So I decided that I wouldn't shake today. Nor would I sweat, cause I mean, who really wants to ever do that?

So as I read the other stories, and it got closer to my time, I wasn't apprehensive, but my body started reacting. In fact, I was eager to share my story, but my body told me I was nervous. But I told myself over and over in my head, every time I began shaking or sweating or something, that I wouldn't be condemned. I told myself that I had nothing to worry about, that I had nothing to fear, that I would seriously not be condemned.

Because I'm not. I know that. My class is small and really supportive. People are really friendly and receptive to others because they, themselves, are being exposed to judgment and they don't want it either. And even so, I mean, I've been judged all my life and I've gotten over it. I don't feel crappy about myself just because of some nonsense judgment someone gives me.

I know that I am extremely, quickly defensive. I still jump to the conclusion that I'm being condemned. I don't shake and sweat because I fight in a heartbeat. Which reminds me that it worked. I didn't sweat or shake, at least not after I told myself not to worry. I just calmly decided that I had nothing to fear and I wasn't going to allow myself to be afraid of what simply wasn't going to happen. And it worked.

But my heart beat really fast while I read my story. Perhaps just another nervous symptom. I was reading sort of messy at first cause my voice was weak and crappy since I had been recently choking on my Dr. Pepper. I couldn't articulate very well, or at least, I didn't bother to try, I just let myself stumble. But then I remember how good my story was, so as I read more and more I began to want to articulate because that's just what the story deserved.

And that's when my heart began to speed up. I know that people were laughing at the funny parts. Maybe as they began to react, the fear that their reactions would suddenly turn to extreme condemnation came back. I've never pitied myself so much. I'm not extremely emotional about it, I honestly don't remember how I was condemned, nor do I really care because I've learned to live without the attachment to what people think. I do things for myself, and if people can enjoy what I do, so much the better for them. And if they don't, it's not like I'm begging for their attention, so they can move on and ignore what they don't like.

Truthfully, I know they probably won't. I think that people become fixated on the mistakes of others, instead of ignoring it all, because they're displacing their own earnest eagerness to fix flaws, their own flaws really. But they don't realize that. And they're not concentrating on their own flaws so they obsess over somebody else's flaws.

Yeah, I still do it too. I'm better than I used to be but I still bitch about people. It's usually out of defensiveness. To cope with them not liking something about me I put them down. But the trick is to love them. To concentrate on their positive aspects and adore them for it. Because you're only really worried about what they think because you don't have enough of your own security. We depend on other people because we feel that they can complete us in where we lack. So if our security is faulty, we want them to complete it, so that we can feel whole.

And then we do a number of things, we try to control them so that our reality is what we want it to be, as I did with Mike. Or our ups and downs coincide with what they do for us, positive or negative. So we are putting our fate in other people's hands.

The point is, if you have your own stable security, it can't be destabilized by someone else's opinion. Because realities and perceptions are individual. It doesn't matter how someone sees you or something you do unless you feel that your perceptions are connected in a dependent relationship. Unless you feel that they need to agree with each other to be right or whole.

If you see them as separate views and you accept it, you'll allow people their own view and you'll mostly definitely know that you have your own view, and the disagreement between the two doesn't matter. There isn't one solid, correct reality, so we can all see things in a different light and let it be.

So if you accept this, you won't care that someone has a problem with you. When you love them, you're saying to yourself, this is what I do in this kind of situation. I accept differences. And then you won't feel insecure when you find that you have differences with other people, you won't be paranoid that you might be wrong because you'll accept that your "rightness" isn't dependent on agreement between someone else's view. They can be completely different and still be right themselves, as well as you still being right yourself.

Was that a tangent? I liked it. Back to me telling myself that they can move on. As I've just explained, when they don't, they're really only beating themselves up. The positive choice would be to move on. Fixing me will never satisfy themselves, it will never complete them. We try to control others because we want to control ourselves, we want to make decisions for ourselves. I'm not to be who someone else decides. So they can struggle all they want trying to make me be who they want me to be but it's only going to make them more and more dissatisfied, more and more angry. They'll probably hate me more, but so be it. It wouldn't benefit either of us to give in and change myself for them.

It would only temporarily please them, if even that.

So why was my heart beating? I don't know. I mean I do know. But I won't let it happen again. This fear is nonsensical. There's no reason for it, not in this life. Perhaps in another life I was condemned. But things have changed. And I'm not afraid to be who I am or see things the way I do, or do the things I do. Someone can disagree with it all they want and life goes on.

I just feel like the trauma was physical. Like I was burned at the stake or hanged or guillotined or just severely beaten over and over again for being who I am or perhaps believing what I believed. That's why I get fearful when I'm expressing myself, pretty much just with large groups. Just like it would have been if I'd publicly been killed. The only time I feel safe is when I'm within a fight. Actually, I still sweat and shake when I fight. So I don't feel safe.

I should say that, in this life, I can emotionally feel nervous for expressing myself to a large group. But, in this life, I sometimes feel safer in the midst of a fight, because I've learned that fighting can protect myself. I can't always get what I want, but this is, simply put, my defense. I seem not to have defended myself in a past life and I came into this life, especially, kicking and screaming, way before there was anything to kick and scream about.

Nobody likes it, my harshness, my defensiveness, my loud yelling, the way I come on too strong all the time. But this is my habit. It shouldn't go on like this, it doesn't need to. But to move on I need to understand why I wanted to fight so damn hard in the first place. Why did I feel that I needed to fight?

Well, we know already, I just told you. I'm still aggressive but I'm only really sensitive to my mom. Because she's always condemned me. She says that she has only ever condemned that which wasn't God in me. I'll give her that. I believe her. But I'm still attached to what wasn't God in me because I'm defensive of the choice that the God in me made. It's not that all the choices were good, but they were productive, in essence. I wanted to make progress, I wanted to grow, change, learn.

My mom offends me by assuming that this evil essence took me over and made me do a bunch of terrible things. That's not how it happened. I was always making decisions. And I have to defend my decisions. I don't want her to think that I'm a mess of mistakes. I'm not. I'm not a faulty product. There are unsound choices that resonate to this day, but that's what my progress is all about. Moving on from these unsound choices, moving on to sound choices, good choices. God choices.

Maybe this stuff with my mom is already resolved inside. But I'm still in the pattern, the habit. I'm still doing what I did yesterday, merely because I did it yesterday. That's what we do. On the first day we make a decision to brush our teeth each morning and night. Once we remind ourselves a few times we learn to accept that this is the way things go. Each new day, we don't ask ourselves why we brush our teeth, we don't ask ourselves IF we should brush our teeth. Because that's what a habit strives to avoid.

It's like spell check, when it thinks you've spelled something wrong and you say "ignore all" or something. To "ignore once" is to say, I've got good reason to do this once but tomorrow I'll have to ask myself again if I've got good reason. But to ignore that process, we can get into the unconscious automatic mode of doing something without the process, because we know that we'll always have the same outcome. We know that tomorrow if we ask and the next day and the next, we'll come up with the same answer, Do it, it's reasonable.

Sometimes bad habits are put into play and suddenly we're on "ignore all" and this bad action keeps repeating over and over again.

I know it's unreasonable, I just have to get out of the unconscious automatic mode and act the way I feel.