I have to be honest with you, memes like this drive me insane. Especially with that stupid name tagged at the bottom of it.
Let me tell you a story about positive thinking, and how complicated it gets.
If you particularly want the background to this story, I am sure there are plenty previous posts on it, but to cut the preamble very short:
Seven years ago I was huge, even bigger than I am now. I was extremely ill and I have an old video somewhere of my sounding rather drunk, although I had stopped drinking several years before. That is how damaged my liver was.
One of the old boyfriends, that I had been very fond of at 16 or so when he went off with someone else, randomly decided that he wanted to see me. I panicked, as he had posted a picture of himself at 18 online and I assumed that like me, he looked pretty much the same apart from weight.
So, I decided to create a database of health options for losing weight and solving the health problem, still undefined, that was causing me to be exhausted, covered in psoriasis, enormous and basically struggling with my workload, which at the time, since it was just after my father, best friend, and uncle’s deaths, was considerable.
I had created an exhibit for Patrick McGoohan online, and his family had been kind enough to acknowledge it, which was basically all I had going for me at the time.
In the course of researching my database, I came across Wolfe, and as I worked on my exhibit, laughed over several of his videos. The database then transformed into an academic treatise on how obesity became desirable to Western economies, how much you are manipulated emotionally into following standard behavioural pathways, and how to rebel with a view to a more ecologically friendly version of capitalism. Naturally I assumed that Wolfe would be interested in this.
When I went to his facebook page, I was surprised to find him actually on it. Over the next several weeks I was warily cheered up somewhat (I won’t go into it, but he can be very entertaining in his own way) It got me through an extremely stressful situation when my family was stabbing me repeatedly in the face for looking after my mother. Apparently if they are selfish, everyone has to be selfish. Having been told to give up any idea of a family or future to take care of her and my father, I do not know why they then decided they wanted me dead or destroyed for actually doing it. That is the reason for Ina Disguise. If I had done anything under my own name it would have been destroyed by now.
Stupidly, I put together a film offering quite an extensive critique of him and Durianriders, using the footage of my transformation thus far, with three months of research into 801010 and the superfood approach thrown in. Unlike Harley, I am well aware why different people have different nutritional requirements, and unlike Wolfe, I just do it for a laugh.
He blocked me, and the rest is history. I was broken hearted, although I did not quite understand why at the time, and it was probably three years later before another ex came to visit bearing cake.
I am still of the opinion that if there was a person I should have been with it would have been Wolfe. I staked my remaining six boyfriends on it, and it is not a source of regret. Too bad, how sad.
The reason I am writing all this down is because of this notion of ‘positive thinking.’ I was sufficiently positive to take care of myself briefly, because I thought that I deserved better from life. I did not. When I determined that I did not, there followed a titanic struggle to decide if I really wanted to be healthy and extremely lonely on a permanent basis.
It isn’t as if anything in my life went the way I wanted it to. I was obsessed with work, and my parents’ illness, alongside the economy and my inability to appear mouldable enough for your average (very average) employer, rendered that a non-starter after my education. I wanted children, and I failed to meet anyone because I have not had a social life since 2003. I wanted to use my education to write a great book, and in the course of my musings on Wolfe, I determined that nobody would be at all interested in reading it unless I had an established name, or offered sufficient entertainment.
So, the struggle became a case of – if I think positively, I am stupidly in love with someone I never really want to meet and I stay healthy on that basis but nothing actually changes. If I allow myself to be broken by this, I do a lot of sewing, give up writing anything weighty and either way I carry on taking care of my mother. I was running out of time to have children anyway, and I never see anyone, so it was not as if anything was likely to change.
However, being in love is not useful. It uses up a lot of capacity which is more helpful for doing other things. If you allow it to run its normal course, there should be a period of hatred, and I was not at all interested in hatred. I blow hot and cold as a matter of course, and that course has not altered.
Anyway, as you can see by the website I took option 2 and developed Ina. Apparently she is fairly stylish. Nothing that I wanted to happen is going to happen in my life, and this is regardless of meeting anyone or changing my perception of anything. All that remains is the small things, and perhaps that is just as well.
I am sure that some people would say I have achieved a lot over the last four years in terms of self-development, and I am sure that is the case. My friends would tell you that I have always had a masterplan of some sort that I am working towards. I get side tracked a lot (an example being the computers to Gambia project) but I always finish things eventually. Is it useful? Probably not. The book I would have written when I met Wolfe would have been, but considering that it was a labour of love, it would have been a waste of my time as even the one person I wanted to read and use it would not have done so. Had I been thinking positively, I would have wasted years of my time on maintaining my health in order to have a longer period of extreme poverty in later life, and for what? Trying to impress yet another unimpressable boy? What on earth is useful about that?
So, I have to say, I am not a fan of endless positivity. Had I taken the positive route I may well have been beautiful by now, but there would have been nobody here to look at it, and I don’t spend a lot of time looking in the mirror. I would also have been stark raving bonkers to remain in love with somebody that repeatedly blocked me even for asking a question about his charity. As it was I pursued that line of thought for far too long, although Wolfe has had some small benefit out of that.
I am unusually clued up about why people respond to him the way they do. I took a variety of lines of investigation into the emotional triggers they are experiencing. Apart from the fact he has made a niche subject extremely entertaining and courted as much controversy as possible to attract more attention to it, which personally I regard as a stroke of genius, some of his speaking techniques have led to considerable leakage in his commercial catchment, besides the errors that everyone makes on a similar trajectory.
So, although nobody is interested in this knowledge apart from me, I have got to the end of that line of enquiry. I am left wondering why I would spend 8 or 9 years bothering to sort this mystery out. I am still rather entranced by the methodology, but I didn’t have the time for this really. It gave me something to think about apart from the horror of finding out my family were quite so vicious, and it got me through a difficult time because of the sheer distraction of weeping about something else.
In terms of myself, I still don’t rate myself highly enough, and thinking positively is not something that is likely to help. Positivity involves hope, and hope is not useful when it has already gone.
