Parents

We strive to be nothing like our parents. 



Every child who has grown into an adult and turned into a parents drives this mantra into their head while they grow up. There are some parts to our parents' parenting that we believe are efficient and enjoyable and in turn we decide to do what they did. The other the other 80% of the time - we hate how we were raised. 

There are always things we don't agree with - mainly because it didn't work well on us with whatever method of parenting they were trying to use. Parents parent how their parents parented. It's evolutionary - it's a cycle. It takes quite a negative experience to want to stop the angry cycle. Maybe yelling and negative praise were used as a way of motivating you do to something. Maybe your parents were too nice and lenient and you think they don't care for you as much as they should. 

Everywhere we go, and almost every day, we meet people that we wish were our parents. We see other families and their interactions between their children and their parents and we feel a small pang of sorrow because we feel slightly deprived of a chance - childhood we should have or could have had. 

My parents feel that yelling and using negative feedback are a good way of getting through to me. If I had gotten an A- on a paper, they would go, "Good job, but you can do better. A- aren't enough". If I had gotten a C on anything, they told me I was a failure, and that I was irresponsible and neglectful. If I had broken something in the house, I was again, irresponsible, non-caring, disrespectful, and ungrateful. I was- excuse me, still yelled at. Even at the age of 20. After a small amount of talking to a therapist, I had come to a realization that my existence was the result of a checklist - if you will. Many a times I've heard my dad say to others that, "I've checked off my list! I grew up, I got a good job, I bought a home, I raised a child and put it through school, and now I want to retire and explore the world". 

It. He's put it through school. I don't know if my parents love each other the way I see other adults like one another. Often I feel that they married because it was just the next time in life and then they said, "what's next? Oh right, kids". 

My existence is the result of the next step in two people's lives. 

I've forced myself to be nothing like my parents. I refuse to yell and be so overbearingly opinionated, I'm more accepting and less judgmental. I don't yell because a glass of milk was spilled. I don't grumble, growl, and become stiff and edgy because of a car hitting mine. I refuse to be angry at life's random incidents and accidents. What happens is what happens and there's no use aging angrily because of it. 


Truthfully I detest the way I was raised. Don't get me wrong - I've learned some very valuable skills and lessons from my parents. However, there a lot of things that I won't carry on to my own children. My whole life has been an uphill battle against anyone who has ever told me that I couldn't do something or that I was wrong. I spend a great deal of my time educating myself so that I'm entirely self sufficient. Possibly something I learned from my own two parents. 

None of us agree with the ways we grew up. We always wish our parents were different. We wish that we were with another family, we spend hour muddling over, "if only my parents had done this, or my dad had done that, maybe if my mom cared more..etc etc."

My point to this is simply this: if you don't agree with your upbringing, if you don't agree with your family, change it. Make active choices to change. At some point you're going to grow older and have to see your family at certain times of the year, and if you don't try to make changes now while you have them around - those two or three times a year you see them won't be as cherished. My parents don't listen. It wasn't until recently when I told my father that he continued to speak to me the way he does now that I would shut him out and stop listening, or simply leave the room or the house until I felt it was right to come back. His "raised tone of voice" or yelling, as I take it is barbaric. I'm 20 years old and refuse to be spoken to like a five year old child. I'm all too quickly approaching a stage where I find it comfortable to not come home for a long time. I'm comfortable with not coming home when I'm at school for a whole year. There are a lot of times that when I come home, I find as many ways as I can to stay away from home and only go back to sleep. 

Do I feel guilty when my parents ask to go out to dinner with them and spend some time with them..? Yes. Unfortunately I still feel some raw and small care for them. When I do spend time, it ends badly. It ends up with them talking to me about my future, or the economy, my life, future plans, the welfare of the people, the news, you name it. It's never meaningless chat or banter. It's never the "how are you", "what's been going on?", "hows your friends or boyfriend..?", "what did you think of that new movie?". Any question that starts off simple ends with a discussion about my future financial security or my life insurance policy that I have to start addressing in six short years. 

I have never agreed with my parents and I never will. But I know I have to establish some sort of connection with them on some level. 

Parents are supposed to guide you through your life. They're supposed to teach you things and give you everything they never had. How they do so is entirely up to them and it can affect us in a bad way or a good. 

But we have to remember that we, ourselves will eventually shape our rest of our lives and make our own choices and we'll be under our own scrutiny and punishment. Parents have such a short amount of time to shape our lives, and then we have to spend our own time shaping and mending the rest. The goal is to grow and learn, and to look forward to the positive experiences yet to lie. We cannot and should not forget our parents and what they do and have done, but we have to grown with what we were given and that, that alone, is how we become such diverse people. 

Living Your Life to The "Fullest"

Time. Time is such a big deal and people make it out to be such a big deal. 

I mean yeah, time isn't endless and seconds tick away and hours and months go by and time is something you can't get back once you spend it. Bottom line, it's a limited resource. 

I somewhat agree to things like, "treat every second like it's your last", "time is valuable so make the most of your life", "spend every minute of your life doing what you love doing". 

Blah blah blah. 

Let me give a run through about my life. I'm busy. I'm busy as all hell. I don't even know how I have the time to be writing this right now, but I guess I have a few minutes to catch my breath. 

I'm a resident assistant, I'm a teachers assistant, I'm a tutor and I tutor three students. I'm a biology major at college. I'm taking organic chem, physics, ecology, and some bullshit philosophy class that I thought would be a nice blow off class but it turns out it's not. Between running in between classes, never having time to eat more than a meal and a half a day, yelling at 30 freshman to shut up in the middle of the night so I can sleep, and having a boyfriend (we're almost at our one year anniversary - yay!) I barely find enough time to see other people I care about. 

This year at college has turned out to be one of my loneliest. I'm around people 24/7 and I must interact with over 30+ people a day - yet I'm pretty alone. I have about two friends that I consider my life long friends that I found, got to know, and now will have for the rest of my life and unfortunately I barely get to see them. 

It sucks.

They have their own busy life and I have mine and our schedules clash so hard and I'm lucky to catch them walking from class to class. 

So back to time and all that nonsense. 

How the hell am I supposed to make the every moment when I spend most of my days too busy to even think? Believe me, I would LOVE to be one of those people that find the best in everything, and I do try to be that person! If something bad happens I try to see the best in the situation. But how am I "supposed to live every second" likes its my last when I spend about 9+ hours a day working? 

Maybe there will be a time when I'll work a 9-5 every day at a job I love and I'll have a wonderful husband and kids to go home to and those are the days where I can try to soak in every wonderful second of life. Maybe not - i'll probably be busy then. 

I definitely think it's good to step back sometimes and look at the life you have and the life you've been given and the life you live. I think everyone should appreciate what they have and the opportunities that are presented to them - big and small. I think it's good to hike a mountain and to not take a picture of the view or the people your with. I think it's good to just sit back and appreciate where you are and what you just did (lots of people can't hike). 

Don't get me confused though, I'm not that hippie person that's like "phones are destroying civilization and people skins maaaan". I know plenty of people that have their phones and use it avidly and still stay attached to civilization. I put my phone away at dinners and when I'm around family or in meetings and things like that and I'll actually not be on my phone when I'm waiting for something - I like people watching, it's kinda funny. 

Anyway, even in my daily, hectic life, I still find time to take a step back and take a deep breath in. I made time to do yoga to ground myself and take time to just breath (I swear I'm not a hippie, earth loving freak) and it's really helpful to no focus on anything and to leave all of my troubles, worries, and frustration outside of my mat. 


Sometimes taking a deep breath every couple times a day is what people need. It's good for you. You enrich blood cells with oxygen, you have a split second to clear your head and you have a moment just for you. 

Sure, time is irreplaceable and we're only given so much, but I don't think you have to spend every second trying to live it to the fullest, I think you just have to spend a crucial couple seconds a day and to just try to smile and be happy with who you are and where you are and what you're doing. As long as you're happy, with no matter how hectic your life may be, everything you're doing is worth it in the end. 

You just have to go through a lot of shit to get to where you want to go. But once you get there, oh man. 

It's a whole new world. 

Word Vomit

Word vomit. We've all been there. 

I mean it happens to everyone. Whether we're caught up in the moment, or we say things out of anger, or because we're nervous and we don't know what to say - it happens and it's never pretty. 

Picture this: there's two people in an argument and one person get's so angry that they blurt something out that they shouldn't. The anatomic particles that are flying through the sound barrier that make up that attack are on a split second travel through the air on their way to break the sound barrier that, subsequently, silences the whole bubble that is the argument. 

When you word vomit, it's like you want time to come to a dead halt. Picture whatever you said coming out of your mouth and let's slow down time. So those anatomic particles are flying through the air and at the same time you knew you shouldn't have said what you did while you were saying it. It's like you want to extend your arms out and shove every last anatomic particle that came out of your mouth and shove it back down your throat and pretend you never said it. You want to wasp it away from the distance between you and that other person and hope that you swiped it away fast enough so that the other person never heard it and it doesn't hang in the air like heavy fog. 

Why do we "word vomit"? Do we blurt things out because we feel like it's the punchline to end all arguments? Do we feel stronger and feel like winners because we just delivered the knock out punch to silence the other person? Simply because we knew it was going to do such? 

Why do we do it when we're nervous? Why do we word vomit when someone's pressuring someone else? Don't you think we ought to take our time and think for ourselves instead of someone getting in our face? If someone demanded an answer from me and I blurted the truth out, wouldn't it still be the truth if I took a second to think about how I was going to say something? I mean, why do people automatically think we're trying to think up a lie to tell the person if we're taking our time? Well of course I'm nervous and bound to word vomit when someone's demanding answers with their face two feet from mine - and people also flinch when someone claps in their face because it's a natural reaction - not because they're afraid. 

I don't think word vomit is something that should be taken so seriously sometimes. It's word vomit for a reason. It's those words and phrases you say without thinking or that you even mean - yet people think so highly of it because "it's the first thing you said, so of course you meant it because you didn't have time to think up a lie". Think about it, mom's word vomit all the time because that deviant little child of theirs won't stop asking their incessant questioning asking and suddenly, when the child asks something again, the mom snaps. Word vomit. 


We all word vomit for a ton of different reasons, but think about it: did you ever truly mean what you vomited? 

Till the next thought