motivation - Ina Disguise

Sticking out from the Crowd

August 16, 2018 3 Comments

First published September 11th 2015

Today’s entry is on an entirely different subject, although I hope readers of the previous entries have given some thought to moving their money.

I had to do a lot of temporary contract work throughout university and afterwards, not only because I was older than everyone else, having had a previous career, but also because my pesky mother point blank refused to go to the doctor to deal with her heart problem and my father already had dementia by that point. I was a late baby.

I could not help noticing that every office that I worked in seemed to contain a den of bitches, male and female, who seemed to regard me as bit of an alien. Being a loner, this did not upset me as much as it might, however I came to believe after a few different offices that there was something seriously wrong with me, which made me retreat into my shell somewhat after having worked extremely hard to scratch my way to the top of my previous male-dominated career.

Employment agencies presented a range of similar problems. The women who decided whether to put you forward for jobs were completely different animals from me, and could not seem to wrap their heads around the idea that someone who had run their own successful businesses had retrained.

This meant that the education that I had spent time and money on was pretty much meaningless in terms of gaining suitable employment from these people, and so I was scuppered on both counts. Nevertheless, I managed in my obsessive, compulsive way to keep myself in work by spending 7am to 11pm looking for jobs whether I needed them or not. This went on for about 6 years.

My last job was as a banking consultant, a job which paid unusually well but involved working 3pm to midnight, six days a week. Not satisfied with the idea that this was a result, I took on another two jobs, one as a government research interviewer, one as a corporate researcher. I viewed this, after the years of gypsy wandering, as the prudent way to go, so at one point I was making calls over breakfast, visiting people in their homes at lunchtime, feeding my father in the hospice, and then racing across the city to the bank to work until midnight.

Since I had always had quite a lot of control over my lot prior to gaining my additional education, it did not occur to me that there were rules associated with working in banks which had not been in place elsewhere. I had had a couple of problems with large companies previously, when I had taken it upon myself to suggest changes which would save the company money and waste. You are not supposed to do this. You are supposed to be so petrified of losing your job that you say nothing even as several hundred, or in one case thousands of pounds per hour are being squandered right in front of you. It was at one of these companies I was jokingly referred to as ‘the economist who hates money.’ I could explain why, but that would be another lengthy story. I would rather be referred to as ‘the geek that hates waste,’ to be honest.

Anyway, back to the bank. I was in a room alongside probably two hundred people, all earning a fairly vast amount of money, ranging from 1000 to 3000GBP per week and doing fairly basic clerical work. As the deadlines were quite tight, I can confirm that it was fairly hard work, however I have worked as hard for minimum wage, if not harder. The problem arose when one of the printers broke down, and the entire room was left to cope with a vast amount of paperwork and only one functional printer. As you can imagine, the queue for this printer became hot and very unpleasant extremely quickly, and so I took it upon myself to go to the project manager and request another printer.

A few minutes after I had done this, the well dressed and obviously well heeled team that I was working in expressed shock that I had done this. Hadn’t I gone to the supervisor? I was not supposed to talk to the manager. I was also comparatively scruffy and regarded as something of an exotic flower in this team, since I did things other than banking for a living. They were impressively shocked.

I don’t mean to sound quite such a grumpy old lady, but since I have been making this same point since I was quite young, it is not strictly an age issue. What on earth has happened to the world? The 1950s working generation were the most economically successful generation in world history. Nobody is ever going to match the achievements in their lifetime. People like my parents had choices, of where to work and how to work, and got respect for what they did that would be scoffed at now, and yet we are less efficient than ever. We pretend that technology has made all things possible, and everything more efficient, and yet in productive terms, and in progressive terms, we have actually declined in efficiency.

The ‘blame’ and ‘yes sir’ culture is what caused the Bernie Maidoff situation in banking. Guys in suits shaking hands with other guys in suits and not actually examining what they were doing. And why oh why has nobody joined the dots about the banking crisis which immediately followed? They talk about the problems with sub-prime lending but nobody dares mention that this happened at exactly the same time as the Maidoff scandal. Far be it from me to point out that the bankers were following orders, and have been made scapegoats to the alleged crisis, but to me the real issue was the cultural issue, of stupid employing stupid and doing business with crooked.

If, like me, you stick out from the crowd. If, like me, you don’t like waste and you don’t believe that your level of oiliness should determine success above your level of actual talent, then do not be ashamed of it. You may never be rich in today’s cultural climate, but perhaps you are made for better things.

creativity, motivation

Reflection is over-rated

October 13, 2017 No Comments

Today I had to wait in a lot for various phone calls. I have edited a few stories, which rather alarmed me as I thought I had caught all my spare commas. The cats have been patted, the errands have been run, and I have reflected far too much.

The last few months have been rather eventful. I have lost 60lb, gone to see somebody I was trying to avoid, been through a mammoth battle for my mother’s health, which is still apparently ongoing, and had to suffer the invasion of my home by allegedly well-meaning infiltrators who want to tell me how to live my life. You would never guess that I have a brain at all. I have also had to tell my last remaining offline friend not to return, partially because of the now perpetual drama and interference, which could conceivably kill him with stress, (he was already hospitalised once with the effects, and I was not going to allow this to happen again) and partially because the friendship, whilst good for him, was very bad for me.

Any one of these things would take their toll on a person, never mind all of them, but I have responded reasonably well I think. The trick now is to avoid reflection.

I don’t want to think about the years since my father died. I want to move on, create some great work, write a beautiful book or three, and ensure that my mother has as peaceful a life as possible. Thanks to her unconventional diet, she is stable. The NHS hate this, but apparently they will have to learn to live with it. I dread to think how fast she will die in the event that she has to go anywhere else, however, as even the three days that I was effectively absent from caring for her caused a dip.

My friend from the Gambia is trying to worm his way back in to chatting with me every night. I have no idea what benefit he thinks he will derive from achieving his aim. I assume he thinks that I am rich. It certainly isn’t because he wants to do any work. We have already established this. Why I am to sit and wait for his next crisis and provide I do not know. I have no beanstalk in my garden, and alas no magic beans.

In a week or so I am hoping that I will be able to release the first pieces in the Boris Johnson collection. They are looking rather nice, but there is still a lot of work to do as my studio is rather small for furniture. I have some lining work to do, which I hate, and about seven days of sewing on the carpet for it. In the meantime, I am in a writing mood, so I think I will make a start on the book for the Boris collection. There will also have to be some short stories, and a new series will commence for the release of these.

I am also planning to do some further releases on Amazon. I notice that somebody has pirated some work of mine on there already, so I have to go through their rather cumbersome copyright process. I was ignoring it because whoever-it-is is presumably publicising my books, and I thought I would just let them.

All in all, I don’t think I should waste any more time than I have already wasted on reflection. I don’t particularly envy anyone, and I think things happen for good reasons. You cannot underestimate your own significance, however. I am feeling rather more inclined to be noisier than I used to be, which can only be a good thing given the very large task ahead.

motivation

In 48 hours time

October 5, 2017 54 Comments

In 48 hours time it will all be over, and I will probably be on my way back here, having been ignored again.

In 48 hours time I will have been reminded, yet again, how insignificant I am and be berating myself for having bothered to try and change anything.

In 48 hours time I will hate myself for having spent money I do not have on something I should not have felt the need to do.

In 48 hours time I will be trying to figure out how I can modify my existing work to remove anything that might cause me problems later.

In 48 hours time I will feel very guilty about trying to change anything.

Hopefully I will not try and throw out my work again, because I obviously want to do it. Why I need anyone’s approval I do not know. I just know I feel very sad already, and the worst has not even happened yet.

There is a simple solution to all of this, and that is to modify everything to remove all traces of Wolfe, and do the work on the basis that nobody will be interested in it anyway.

I have to say, for an author who has amassed 30,000 readers in four years, I am feeling rather down on myself. I do not feel I have achieved anything of note, my work is mainly scribbling, and I see no evidence of anybody sufficiently enthusiastic to be waiting for the next thing to come along. Therefore Ina is still a nothing, despite some effort. I would not claim that it is a lot of effort, as I have witnessed people who put in a lot of effort, and I neither have the time nor apparently the drive to put sufficient into the project.

It has not helped that I have spent the last four years with two people who are more concerned with themselves than anything progressive or external, and that I was too sad/unmotivated to do anything about it. I am shocked when I see myself four years ago, at the damage this has done to me.

Maybe this dip is self-protective. If I do not expect anything, then I will not be so gutted when I fail.

I wish the ending of this story was not so inevitable.

motivation

As time goes by (yet another David Wolfe post)

September 28, 2017 6 Comments

It honestly feels like months since my last post, but it was actually only five days ago.

I am going to the Wolfe event after all. This may seem very odd, but it is time I did something selfish for the sake of my sanity. I felt that it was unlikely that I would be able to do it for a few years so it was now or never.

There are several options as to how this will go down:

1. He hates me, and will do something horrible like suddenly realise who I am and prevent me from attending once I have gone to all the trouble of actually getting there.

2. He plays a horrible practical joke on me, which I would probably deserve after all these years.

3. He does not know that I exist at all. (I doubt it, since he gives online stuff about him an Assange level of attention, which means he spends a great deal of time on that smartphone looking himself up)

4. He chooses to ignore me entirely, which I would again probably deserve.

5. He actually felt exactly as I did and is as similar to me as I thought he was, in which case he will be cautiously pleased to see me, with caveats.

6. He liked me more than I thought he did, in which case it will be a very strange experience indeed.

All I want to do is discuss my book and the game, both of which are designed to benefit him. The book because I would like to ensure that he reads it at the very least, and the game because it has business implications. Anything beyond that would be unexpected, and frankly it will be a miracle if I get that far.

In the meantime the preparation going into this is astonishing, and I haven’t even started on going through the research material yet. In the last three days I have walked about 50km from sheer nerves.

I am still a little fat lady, albeit with bizarrely good skin, so I am hoping that I do not find myself feeling like an alien at an event which promoted itself as being full of hippy fanchicks and pale bodybuilder types. I assume that this is not strictly the audience, although I note from the material sent to me so far that more than the first 80 tickets have apparently sold, so I may just melt into the crowd.

For the sake of reassurance, I am not attending this event as Ina Disguise the entity, but as my shy and retiring self, so I do not forsee too much in the way of drama coming from me.

Considering that I am still unable to watch any of his videos, I am not sure how I will react to this, but I am hoping that watching the audience will be as fascinating as I think it will be.

I am now going to go and read ‘Rhetoric of Economics’ to put myself in more of a ‘me’ mood.

health, motivation

In memory of my father

September 12, 2017 3 Comments

David Wolfe post in memory of my father

Ten years ago, nearly to the day, my father’s life was ended in an NHS hospital. The hospital in question used to exist to terminate elderly and terminally ill patients, so that the statistics were all at the same location. Whilst it was a superficially nice place, it was the equivalent of taking your pet to the vet for the last time.

My father had vascular dementia, which I knew very little about at the time. Nevertheless, I made sure that he was able to stay at home for as long as possible. My mother, not the most proficient of carers, would not have lasted as long as she did had she not had someone there. She still lied about the help I was providing until she was not listened to by the rest of the family anyway.

A lifelong socialist and pacifist, my father rebelled by marrying my mother, whom he met on the shores of Lake Geneva, despite both being from Glasgow. His family were very well known communist/extreme trade unionists in Glasgow. My great grandfather was behind the revolution that had tanks in George Square.

A large proportion of my father’s family rejected him when he bought this house and married a militarist Conservative, although my mother was not the most thoughtful of political thinkers. He never told her, she was quite shocked when I broke it to her a couple of years ago.

During WW2, he and his friends were conscientious objectors. One was jailed for it, but later had a very respectable life and did quite well. This would not happen now, of course. My father was sent to work in the forests as he had defended himself in court and it was established that he had rather obscure religious reasons for his communitarian beliefs and seven single widowed aunts from WW1 to support.

His interest in natural health was so obsessive that it cost quite an astonishing amount even when I was growing up in the 70s. We had a dehydrator going and sprouts along the window sills.

He was a very quiet, humorous individual, who you did not get to know unless you showed some interest. Therefore I was told the family secrets even my mother did not get to hear. I have to say, since his death I have become more and more like him. My attitude to Wolfe has been much like my father’s love affair with this house. When he failed to secure it on the first attempt, he shuffled around muttering “that was my house” until the person who had bought it changed his mind and sold it to him.

If anyone deserved to be saved by my persistent interest in natural health, it was my father. I did try to extract him from the clutches of the NHS, but to no avail as my mother had just had a stroke and was considered ‘a handful,’ although there was no question of my having any support at the time. I was just expected to manage, regardless of anything going on in my life.

What really gets me annoyed is the fact that within two days of being in that hellhole he was drugged because he was considered difficult. When I challenged this, I was flatly told that he was suddenly in pain. He was still capable of speech and eating normally prior to this. Within three months he was less than half the weight and we were told that he must not even drink anything.

The figures for Alzheimer’s deaths in Scotland indicate that this is deliberate policy. I can see that the NHS regard aging as an unacceptable burden, and that they are trying to take quality of life into account, what I do not understand is why the alternatives are so frightening to them. I am still suffering from an invasion of nurses who appear to think I should be burnt as a witch because my mother is still alive, despite their best efforts.

I am, rather helpfully, very angry about what happened to my father, and about the continuous bitching and battling I have to do to protect my mother. Anger is a useful energy. I daresay it is considered negative in some circles. Personally I think it is the best fuel ever.

health, motivation

What happened to the last decade?

September 3, 2017 No Comments

Over the last decade, I went from being a Senior Banking Consultant, government researcher and corporate researcher to now being a fledgling author and artist. During all of this time I was renovating and maintaining a mansion which will never belong to me and taking care of my parents.

At the beginning of this period, I had around six ex-boyfriends who used to come and visit, thankfully missing each other in the process and helping out if they felt like it. None of them were particularly keen to get me out of my shell, they kind of delivered themselves like pizzas as and when they were not busy.

Overall, the crucial years from the age of 25, a long time ago now, were taken up with my parents and family. I had previously been a successful chef, and was out-earning the rest of the family when I was told that I was to take care of things as nobody else would do it. I could have ignored this, but it turned out to be a statement of fact.

I only really realised that my life was over at around 33 or so, when it proved impossible to get decent employment locally, and I could not leave my mother to take care of my father alone as she was not a natural carer by any means.

So, from being absolutely work-obsessed, driven and very keen on pretty poor quality relationships with equally lazy boys, I have become a loner, who slowly moves towards a life of self-expression, for good or ill.

My friend from Slovenia, who I got to know when building the island in Second Life, is now married and is contemplating, at 40, having a child. I am contemplating the fact I will never have a child as I do not leave the house and have no prospect of forming any new relationships. The old ones were curtailed as a result of my overwhelming feelings for Wolfe. I do not regret this at all. In many ways he was an excuse to move on from a rather stagnant life. Nor do I genuinely envy anybody. I just feel rather despondent at the moment and am struggling a bit with the idea of moving on with no goal in mind.

As it is evident that I will never trust anyone enough to have a child with them now, I am inclined to focus on my appearance as a major project that I can spend a lot of time thinking about. I also need to resolve some of the issues that caused my current problem set in the first place – the fact that I never felt that I looked good enough, the fact that I have insufficient real emotional support to let things go easily, (my reaction to Wolfe was most uncharacteristic) the fact that I have failed to get any of the things I wanted – life in a rural location, career, children etc. A major worry is that I have no real way of building a pension.

I always have at least half a dozen plans, which I usually carry out within five years or so. A former friend recently commented that it was always worth dropping in on me every ten years or so because it is never boring and there is always a masterplan. This is not the problem. The problem is that my heart really isn’t in it at the moment, and I feel as if I have been swimming around the same bowl for the last decade. I can handle being wrong, I have been wrong countless times. I just don’t know quite how to break out of the cycle of being wrong over and over again.

One good thing about the Wolfe era was that it forced me to give up a lot of things that were holding me back, and it forced me into a situation in which I had to express myself publicly since there was no way of doing it privately. For this I am strangely grateful. Every step I take at the moment, however, is tempered with a feeling of impending doom. I am sure that this will pass, but at the moment it is rather sad.

None of the people that I have left behind over the last few years did anything unusually wrong. There was more of a generalised wrongness that meant that I was constantly feeling suppressed or undervalued. Wolfe was very much the last straw in that lengthy period. I was insulted, under-valued and not listened to, not directly by him, but by his associated entourage, and after the experience of my family stabbing me over and over again in the hope of gaining money from my parents, enough was enough.

So, although I am numb, lonelier than ever and again forced into a situation in which I have to come out of my shell or perish, you will not catch me genuinely hating Wolfe or his crappy idea of business practice. I have learned and observed a lot that I would never otherwise have noticed, and I am overall better off as a result. despite my almost total destruction in the course of my latest metamorphosis.

creativity, motivation

On shyness as narcissism

August 31, 2017 262 Comments

In an effort to cure my crippling shyness and move on from the recent past, I have today been researching narcissism. I found some interesting stuff on shyness as a narcissistic trait. The theory being that shyness is narcissistic because it indicates that you imagine your presence is important.

I have not always been shy. I originally worked with the public. Whilst this was a strain because I am so used to having quite so much alone time, I managed it without too much fuss and was a fairly big personality. Likewise when I became a head chef, I had no problem learning how to work a room full of male chefs to get the best out of my staff. I also have little problem trying new things, so evidently I have a form of confidence. I just don’t particularly like interacting with lots of people.

I am trying to get over this, as I work on the Ina Disguise Entity project, as I think I will call it. I have been back on my old youtube channel and re-released some old stuff. I made a couple of videos today. I still find I am worrying constantly about whether anybody wants to see it, whether it makes sense, whether I should be bothering to try. I should not be worrying about this.

I made quite a few videos for my friend in London years ago when I first went raw, and found the minute the view count hit 40 I just wanted to take them all back down again. The thought of people looking at me horrified me.

For the purposes of inventing Ina Disguise as a person I need to start getting over this as quickly as possible, therefore it is important that I work on it. Making a youtube video should not be a source of quite so much anxiety, especially when you have a very small channel with few viewers. Nevertheless I have already made and taken down about seven, regardless of the fact they only had one or two viewers. This is not perfectionism, as anyone who has listened to the Ina Disguise channel can testify, but social anxiety.

In the spirit of making the best use of this anxiety, I am kind of using it as fuel to make me work harder on my appearance. If I know people will see me, I take a lot more care than if I never see anyone, so it is quite helpful for that. Having said this, in the event I ever do have to make public presentations, freaking out and going over every word I say over and over again is less than helpful. I need to lose the hang-ups, basically. It has become far worse since the family disaster and events of the last decade, so it is something I need to persist in working on.

In the spirit of self-acceptance, it would be nice to forget about it and do back-room types of work, but it does not look as if this is how life is going to work out, so I am going to persist with it. At least it will force me to regard myself as an artwork, which is probably a good thing. It has, however, created something of a crisis of confidence about my artwork. I kind of want to make a bonfire with quite a bit of it at the moment.

Shyness as a form of narcissism is a similar concept to caring as a form of self-abuse. You hand over your life to care for someone else to show what a nice person you are, at your own expense. It is a very damaging way of expressing yourself, especially when you have at least one real narcissist in your family waiting to criticise your efforts at every opportunity. It is up to yourself how strong you are in terms of rationalising and taking action to avoid becoming a victim of these things. I certainly never thought my life would ever end up like this. It was not what I worked towards at all.

So, the Wolfe-era journey has now led me into very unfamiliar and terrifying terrain. A lot of self-evaluation and development is still necessary, despite my exploring having gone relatively well so far. The problem with such self-evaluation is that it opens up many cans of worms you don’t really feel like opening, or necessarily really need to open. I don’t write worrying terribly much about the attitudes of other people, for example, so why would my physical appearance and voice be so different?

All this, I do for a person who will never speak to me again. I am still being an idiot. At least I will be a better educated idiot, I suppose.

health, motivation

On being kind to others (obesity)

August 29, 2017 4 Comments

In the course of a relatively short life, I have been everything from 98lb to 311lb. (150lb is probably about right given my build) In my case, any attempt at a normal diet after the age of about 9 or so ended up with continuous weight gain. (following glandular fever) I do not eat entire packets of biscuits or fries and now have an extremely high level of nutritional knowledge. I just cannot eat ‘normal’ food or engage in social eating of any kind.

It has taken, for a variety of reasons, decades to accept this and put myself first. Even when I found the answer, something came along to cause me to ignore it.

As you can probably tell by the website, my second love is men. Food is more of an obsession. I was a Michelin level chef for a few years, and following my education became very interested in food politics.

Causes of self-neglect have varied. From avoiding men, to being upset by men, to trying not to be assaulted by men, to ignoring my own needs for either gender, I am guilty of having put myself last at every opportunity. I used to think that this was a virtue. I have now, finally, thanks to the Wolfe era, accepted that it is my biggest failing. With the exception of my mother, who is 90, I will no longer be doing that.

So, one of my theories about why people like me put on so much weight is that they have the following issues:

lack of self-confidence caused by bullying because they have forgotten how to assert themselves
lack of awareness about gut health – eating badly causes you to eat even more badly
poor ability to prioritise themselves over other people in order to survive
crippling social anxiety caused by reactions to their appearance

To be fair, in my case, the issue was complicated by a lengthy battle with my love of smoking, which, being orally fixated, helped for a while, however the real basic problem is the repulsive comments made to me at an early age by my sisters. For those who do not understand the effects of bullying at an early age – all those nasty comments you make stay with the person forever. Be very careful what you say to people. I will probably never choose to spend time with women because of this, because I am always looking for the next negative comment to cling to. That is my problem, not theirs, but it is a fact.

So, in the spirit of empowering a few people who hide in their homes as I do, please remember the following:

If anyone tells you that you don’t matter – run.
Sometimes people are just horrible – it isn’t you its them – it took me until I was 39 to accept that.
No problem ever got better because you got fatter.
Walking is a better way of dealing with emotion than stuffing it down along with some food.
Everything you put into your mouth affects your health. Everything.
You deserve to feel good, no matter what you imagine you have done or failed to do.
Repairing the damage starts from losing the guilt and putting yourself first.

Being a kind person is very nice, but it may well be killing you. Having been put through a lot, you may regard your kindness as your best feature, but in terms of your own health, it may not be. Learn to make space for yourself, and avoid anyone that will not let you do that.

If you have any questions, feel free to use the comments.

health, motivation

RIP Raw Food Culture and Motivation

August 26, 2017 3 Comments

As I am dealing with rather a lot of change at the moment, physically and mentally, I decided to take a quick look around the raw foodies on youtube today.

The last time I bothered to look was some years ago, around the time that Patenaude and Gianni were telling everyone that none of the ‘leaders’ were actually raw. This was when FullyRawChristina (apologies if the name is wrong) seemed to be becoming immensely popular.

I stopped looking at any raw food material around 2012 or so, due to my failure to communicate with Wolfe about the original book. It was just too depressing. Now I am looking at videos that are even more depressing, for a different reason. Fresh faced young things complaining that they were ‘sold’ an impossible lifestyle, that they expected all their problems to be solved with positive thinking, that they felt guilty about having feelings at all, that their periods stopped etc etc.

Even Freelea is punting a non-raw diet. Who decided that it all had to be so defined?

Liferegenerator seems to have moved from his stance on 801010 to more of a Monarch-style rawness. He also seems to be making some rather Wolfe like videos on keeping his hair, whilst losing it.

If I was a nastier person, I would laugh at this, but really I have never seen so many people cut off their noses at once.

From the standpoint of somebody who had always had problems with food and positivity generally (see previous post on positive thinking) a few things were obvious the minute I even considered being raw.

an attitude of gratitude and feeling positive every day ain’t gonna happen. This is a sales pitch mentality, originally created before any of us were born by a vitamin salesman who trained Jim Rohn. Being healthy does not solve all or even any of your other problems. It did not help that Mr Charisma, David Wolfe, did not like emotional confrontation, and a lot of people got suckered into that, including me very briefly. After that moment, I confronted until I was blue in the face, to no avail.
100% raw, whilst I gave it a damn good try, was not sustainable long term because you spend most of your day thinking about, preparing or finding the correct food. It was also quite expensive in some cases.
Ignoring your B12 requirement is insanity. (801010)
Inserting the word vegan into anything makes it a niche product, and cuts your audience by about 80%.

The strengths of the raw ‘culture’ on the other hand were as follows:

adopting a fairly anti-social lifestyle in terms of food altered adoptee’s personal relationships, in terms of prioritising themselves over whatever their former friends were doing.
feeling better meant making slightly better decisions short term.
looking good is always nice.
learning to take partial advice is supposed to make you more capable of leadership and less inclined to follow ‘leaders’ in the first place. It is not supposed to turn you into a Patenaude-like whiner.

As I said many years ago about the 801010 Wolfe-haters back then (who were far less embittered than the more recent ones that contacted me) You take up the information that you need and you explore further. You do not cling to every mistake and bit of bad behaviour in order to discredit both them and yourself for listening in the first place. It is a bit like considering suicide. Utterly pointless and self-defeating.

As the scene seems to have kind of imploded, perhaps now is the time for some sense to enter the world of raw food. The fact is that 100% was never going to work for everyone. On a macrobiotic basis alone, expecting people from all over the world to eat the same thing made no sense at all. Cold countries tend to have been meat eating, and tropical countries less so for a start. There are ways around this if you are really determined, but the learning curve was too high for most people. Arguing over which diet was best did not help. I believe I mentioned this several years ago.

From a personal perspective, my hop, skip and jump into raw food has not only saved my life, but also my 90 year old mother’s, simply because it is a very clean way of setting a base for natural medicine. My learning curve was not as unassailable as most people’s, because of my father and my intense scrutiny of anything I do, but even I double check everything. I certainly don’t fall hook, line and sinker behind any so called leader, no matter what my personal feelings may or may not be. We are not vegan or even vegetarian, but the fact is that raw foodism comprises 90% of our diet for very good health reasons.

If anyone in the raw food line of work had any sense, they would restart their thinking process along the lines of actual nutrition. The WHO say that 9-15 portions of fruit and vegetables should be the basis for anyone’s diet, not five as people are told. If you start from there, you can create a much more stable basis for your raw foodism argument. Why arsing about is necessary instead of actually helping people I do not know. Nobody cares if Freelee hates Durianriders. Nobody. Get your acts together.

https://youtu.be/fQWkitvfncc

motivation

Why I despise endless positivity

August 24, 2017 4 Comments

This was posted on facebook by an author on my friends list today. He is probably quite well known, I find quite a lot of the authors on my timeline are fairly successful. I objected to it, despite several of his followers applauding it.

Why? I have never experienced it, so I have no idea how that would work. I can tell you what gives you drive as an artist, and it isn’t comfort or happiness. It is constantly questioning what you are doing and why. It is abandoning things you spent weeks on, wasting time in order to get things right. Sometimes it is waiting for months to move things on by an inch, particularly if there is no prior model to work from.

The food and home part, yes that is Malthusian. The lovely people part, no. Lovely people are less likely to challenge you, and challenge is essential for the best possible results.

He asked me to explain myself.

“Well I could tell you a story, but it would probably involve drama, conflict and negativity.” My idea being that any decent story involves drama, conflict and negativity, therefore as an author he should know that comfort is REALLY BORING. Which writer improves? The one that is told how marvellous he is by a compliant and doting companion, or the one that is challenged and stimulated?

Academics invite each other to argue against their hypotheses all the time. It is done in order to strengthen the argument. Artists are also keen on discussing their methods, if they are any good. Why then, are we spreading this complacency via crap like this?

Aging should not mean sinking into a chair being reassured that everything we do is fine. That sounds like a swift death to me.

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