blissmorgan

 

I am trying to do what a very wise friend suggested, which is to treat myself the way I would treat a friend. This is not an easy thing to do - I have always been self-critical, and perpetual self-dissatisfaction is one (very rocky) path through change and growth. But I do not need to be making things difficult for me if all it’s doing is...making things difficult for me.

 

Part of this doing requires a self-awareness of my own thought processes. In a sense, paying attention to my first thoughts, second thoughts and, as Pratchett would have it, third thoughts.

 

“First thought, best thought” is a saying that I have heard and even obeyed at least a little, in letting it help me make some decisions and choices for myself. However, I also recall a Tumblr post where someone pointed out that first thoughts are usually the automatic reactions we have been trained into (by ourselves, by others, by the society and culture in which we grew up, et cetera), whereas our second thoughts are more the thoughts we want to be, the ones that we feel are the right, even if they aren’t our trained-in reactive thoughts. This is useful especially when examining and working to surmount one’s own bigotry. Have an automatic reaction or assumption to/about someone? Your second thoughts are counter to that, and maybe you feel guilty about the first thoughts? The second thoughts are you processing logically and more kindly.

 

And then there’s third thoughts, and I probably could have done away with the entire above paragraph in favor of Pratchett’s quotation about thoughts but it felt important to work through my own, heh, thought process on thoughts first.

 

“First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.”

 

So, mostly this process is Second Thought tier stuff, I guess - thinking about how I think, and working to alter and tweak it through slow and regular deliberation. This morning’s very deliberate Second Thought stuff happened while I was taking the selfie, and I was getting very critical about it - my pose, the roundness of my cheeks, how dry and messy my hair looks, the wrinkling of the flesh on my wrist, it was all displeasing to me and I was getting very sour. But then <user name=johncomic> popped into my head, and I resolved to take the picture and look at it as I would if I were a friend of me, rather than me myself.

 

Honestly? If I were a friend of me instead of me? I would totally have a crush on me. My skin looks so good in this light, and taking my hair for what it is rather than comparing it to how I wish it would look, there’s good volume and color to it and the curls are all touseled and interesting as all heck.My eyebrows, I know another friend who has always envied that they curve like that and require no shaping nor plucking. And those lips! Holy crap. It is perhaps one of the great tragedies of my world that I shall never get to kiss me.

 

So now I like the selfie and am thinking good things and having good feels about me, rather than the previous unhappy alternative.

 

 

Coffee’s ready, and I need to go put up the Nightmare Fuel prompt for the October writing project. I also need to start considering what to write about for NaNoWriMo: I am open to suggestions. Something (sub)urban fantasy, maybe? I would love to get that Protective Bird God of which cipheramnesia​ conceived onto some pages. And I’d also like to write something in which a regular modern American girl gets to go to the kind of fancy masquerade ball that doesn’t seem to exist except, perhaps, for the MET Ball. Also, there should be witches. Oooh, and I need to find that short I wrote with the man who falls up through a koi pond from the otherword that was only fog and water and the eternal bridge that he dove from because Terrance was pissed that his writer hadn’t yet written him into something else already and yes I do owe him some page time. Also also, some witches.

 

I need a central line of throughput to wrap this messy world and plot around, though, so anything y’all wanna suggest in that vein LMK.

 

Hello, Blisstopia.<3