The Kiel Steel House is part of a new housing development located on what was once a parking lot area in the town center of Kiel, Germany, on the German Baltic coast. The design covers a total ground area of 600 square meters and was completed in 2016. Adjacent to the historic house and town museum Warleberger Hof, the building is completely clad in corten steel, which is also known..
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Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016
The arrival of Frank Bidart’s Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 is one of this year’s major English-language poetry events. At over 700 pages, the monumental Half-light is nearly three times the size of Bidart’s previous career retrospective, 1990’s In the Western Night. Like that volume, Bidart’s invaluable new collection adopts a complex chronological strategy. It begins with poems from the middle of Bidart’s career, which first appeared in In the Western Night, and ends with a group of new poems. The first section of the book then moves chronologically backward from that midpoint, until it reaches Bidart’s debut volume, Golden State (1973); the second and longer section begins with a second set of poems from 1990 (including the long poem “The First Hour of the Night,”) and then moves forward in time, ending with a substantial selection of previously uncollected poems.
A more predictably chronological walk through the decades might have highlighted the way in which Bidart’s work has evolved with experience; this more inventive sequence invites a different sort of insight. It’s true that the poems from the ’60s and ’70s, composed before Bidart found his full voice, are more straightforward, more conventional. Some, like “Herbert White” and the excellent “Ellen West,” are persona poems; others are memoir pieces written under the influence of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. Yet what this ordering makes apparent is the remarkable consistency and unity of Bidart’s work over time. This is partly a matter of the tools and techniques he has discovered and honed over thousands of lines; in particular, his highly expressive and idiosyncratic use of punctuation and capitalization, and, closely related to this, his distinctive way of arranging words on the page. More than this, though, the unity of Bidart’s work is thematic and psychological; it represents the highly crafted outpouring of a troubled consciousness persistently grappling to comprehend and accommodate a difficult and disturbing world, a world that seems inherently hostile not only to being mastered or comprehended, but at times to human life itself. “I’m after something that will make some sense out of the chaos in the world and within us,” as he has said in an interview (included along with two other interviews as appendices to Half-light) with Adam Travis.
The words “within us” gesture toward the subjective interior space in which Bidart’s psychic dramas are forced to play out, a space whose complex topologies are represented by the poet’s precise, intricate orderings of words in and across the white space of the page. As a young man, Bidart fell passionately in love with film and aspired to become a director. That bit of biography makes a great deal of sense in light of certain salient features of the poetry — the pacing of its dramatic narratives, the meticulous attention to the precise timing of sequences of thought as they unfold. And yet it would be quite impossible for film to do what Bidart’s poetry does. The mental dramas that he has taken as his primary subject could not be successfully depicted in a primarily visual medium; they are too private, invisible to the world at large, and too heavily dependent on intellect, logic, (non-visual) metaphor, allusion, and language — language that turns out to be, in a great many cases, the language of self speaking to self.
Moreover, there is nothing in the language of cinema that corresponds to Bidart’s practice, which grows more prominent as his career progresses, of shifting between first-, second-, and third-person perspectives while withholding information about who is speaking to whom (and, at times, of whom). In “The Fourth Hour of the Night,” for instance — a new poem whose primary subject is the life of Genghis Khan — the shift from second to third person, from speaking to Khan to speaking of Khan, alongside a shift from past to present tense, combine to suggest that it is himself Bidart is really addressing. It is as if, in the act of imagining another, the poet cannot help but identify and indeed merge with him:
Because the universe then allowed a creature
stronger, taller, more
ruthless than you
to fasten around your neck a thick wooden wheel
impossible
to throw off.
Because at nine your cunning was not equal
to iron-fastened
immense wood.
Because, stripped of what was his from birth, the slave
at ten
outwitted
the universe, tore the wheel from his neck: —
because your neck
carries it still, Scarcity is the mother of being.
The reader of Bidart’s poetry is frequently held in a state of considerable uncertainty about whether she is being directly addressed or is simply privy to a conversation Bidart is holding with an imagined interlocutor, or with himself. Part of the accomplishment of his work is that this technique ends up generating an odd form of intimacy: rather than feeling excluded, the reader feels complicit in the psychological struggles depicted in the poem, an active participant rather than a mute witness.
The dramas that animate the poems are no less dramatic for the fact that so many of them unfold entirely within the mind. In Bidart’s world, the nature of a person’s cosmos can undergo radical change within the space of seconds. The desperation the reader feels radiating from Bidart’s desire for a solution to our impossible situation is entirely matched by the intensity of the poet’s conviction that the problem is insoluble and the desire unsatisfiable, that the chaos that afflicts us will never resolve into comprehensibility but will remain chaos to the end. This dilemma, which lies at the heart of what Bidart has to say about human existence, forces its way into poem after poem. Its most succinct and perhaps most memorable articulation arrives at the end of “Confessional,” a long, brutal, harrowing poem about Bidart’s mother, with whom he had a complicated and painful codependent relationship. “Man needs a metaphysics,” the poem concludes; “he cannot have one.”
“Confessional” reads for much of its length like an intense therapy session, with an italicized voice asking the poet questions about his mother and the life they shared. As the piece progresses, though, it becomes apparent both that the interrogation is a self-interrogation — both voices, as is so often the case in Bidart’s work, represent the poet — and that the title has two other functions as well. First, it places the poem firmly in the mode of confessional poetry and asserts its claim on that space against those real or imagined critics who might have been tempted to complain that by 1983 the entire genre of confessional poetry had run its course. And second, it gestures toward the panoply of confessions (and potential and suppressed confessions) that occupied the anxious space between the poem’s speaker and his mother; in particular, Bidart’s homosexuality, his need for far more distance from his mother than she was willing to let him have, and his realization at the age of twenty
that what had made his life
possible, what he found so deeply
inside him, had its hands around his neck
strangling him: —
and that therefore, if he were
to survive,
he must in turn strangle, murder,
kill it inside him . . .
TO SURVIVE, I HAD TO KILL HER INSIDE ME.
One might of course view this as nothing more than a particularly troubled example of the standard Freudian drama everyone must undergo at a certain point in their lives — that to find the space and build the world in which one can live as an independent adult, one must betray, reject, and indeed metaphorically murder one’s parents — complicated, to some degree, by Bidart’s particular intellectual, artistic, and sexual inclinations. What is uncommon is not the story but the telling, the poem’s ability to expose the passionate pain that accompanies all such private events, and to connect these struggles to larger themes about human nature and its place in the world. For Bidart such things as being attached to a particular family, being gay, and wanting a life other than the life one has been born into are specific instances of a universal human predicament, the predicament of having a particular body possessed of particular limitations and desires, none of which one had the opportunity to choose. It is what he refers to elsewhere as “the radical given,” a notion he links explicitly to tragedy:
Tragedy begins with a radical given — your uncle has murdered your father and married your mother. Before your birth a prophecy that you will kill your father and marry your mother leads your father to decree your murder. The radical given — irremediable, inescapable — lays bare the war that it our birthright. (“Ulanova at Forty-Six At Last Dances before a Camera Giselle”)
Of course, we aren’t all Hamlet or Oedipus. But Bidart’s frequent invocations of myth, literature, and legend have the effect of reminding us that we contemporary humans still live lives that are permeated by divine and tragic themes, that being gay, being anorexic, being an intellectual — being anything — is its own trial, its own tragic fate. In Bidart’s view, having any particular body is its own tragic fate; the body itself is always the radical given. That we exist as physical creatures — that we are embodied, that each body takes a highly specific form and that that form determines our desires and thus, the determines the particular ways in which the world will fail to satisfy us — is, for Bidart, one of the fundamental facts of our existence. It is a fact, as it turns out, around which one can construct an entire life’s body of work:
. . . When, after a reading, you are asked
to describe your aesthetics,
you reply, An aesthetics of embodiment. (“As You Crave Soul”)
His obsessive focus on embodiment helps explain why, in “Confessional” and elsewhere, Bidart uses bodily possession and exorcism as key images for spiritual stasis, decay, and growth. In a late prose poem, “Writing ‘Ellen West,’ ” the composition of an earlier poem, “Ellen West” — a persona poem based on a case study of a woman whose anorexia ended up killing her — is explicitly linked with his struggle, as a young man, to achieve an existence independent of his mother and to survive her death. Writing that poem, he writes, constituted an “exorcism”: “Exorcism of that thing within Frank that wanted, after his mother’s death, to die.” “Unlike Ellen,” he writes,
he was never anorexic but like Ellen he was obsessed with eating and the arbitrariness of gender and having to have a body.
Ellen lived out the war between the mind and the body, lived out in her body each stage of the war, its journey and progress, in which compromise, reconciliation, is attempted then rejected then mourned, till she reached, at last, in an ecstasy costing not less than everything, death.
Thus it is that “Ellen West” itself has Ellen thinking,
. . . The ideal of being thin
conceals the ideal
not to have a body — ;
which is NOT trivial . . . (“Ellen West”)
But as she recognizes soon after: “without a body who can / know himself at all?” Essential to Bidart’s vision is the assumption that every human, indeed every living thing, is in some way living out this “war between the mind and the body.” Both the title of “Metaphysical Dog” (the title poem of Bidart’s most recent individual collection, from 2013) and its subject, a dog that likes to have its teeth cleaned with dental floss, might suggest to the uninitiated a Billy Collins−style piece of light entertainment, an amusing canine anecdote with a little jokey philosophy mixed in. But Bidart takes the poem to a very different place, reading into the dog’s behavior a deep rage at the conditions of its existence:
How dare being
give him this body.
Held up to a mirror, he writhed. (“Metaphysical Dog”)
Living near and with humans, the dog has enough awareness to be furious and frustrated that it was forced to live in this body, to endure a canine rather than a human life. But this body is what we are all stuck with, one way or another; we may accept it and try to master it, or rebel against it — both of these alternatives are dramatized at various points in Bidart’s oeuvre — but the option of choosing to be something other than we are is not one we are presented with. At the same time, Bidart realizes that even to desire this option, or to regard it as if it were coherent enough to be capable of being desired, will from a certain vantage appear ridiculous: to rebel angrily against unchosen aspects of oneself is still to rebel against oneself. In “The Arc,” Bidart writes of a mental patient encountered “on my mother’s ward,” who refused to wear clothes:
she is assuring me
she wears nothing under the robe,
that to wear anything
would limit her, that he doctors tell her
to have an “identity”
she must wear something —
“But I don’t want an identity!
This way I’m free… “
“Ellen West” represents perhaps the most extreme case (though far from the only one in Bidart’s work) of the body rebelling against the mind, against the person, against existence itself. In other poems the body is mastered, not fully or permanently but temporarily and provisionally; the “war between the mind and the body” is subject to a makeshift truce. When this happens the body itself, and the body’s movements, attain the condition of art. It is, perhaps, what sex aspires to (and Bidart’s poems about sex are brilliant and incisive, if not infrequently depressing). It is not surprising, in this light, that Bidart has a particular interest in dance as an art form, and some of his poems about dance — “Ulanova at Forty-Six,” for instance, or the astonishing “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky” — are among his finest.
If for no other reason — and I hope it is clear, by now, that there are many other reasons — Half-light would be a valuable and indeed necessary volume simply for its gathering between a single set of covers of the four long poems that have thus far appeared in his sequence, “The Hours of the Night.” (“The Fourth Hour of the Night” was published in Poetry in 2015, but this is its first appearance in book form.) It would be quite impossible in the space of a brief review to capture the sublime, dreamlike weirdness of these majestic, magisterial poems. Drawing on history, philosophy, and myth, these poems treat the themes that animate Bidart’s poetry everywhere (freedom and bondage, creation and the role of art, embodiment, the radical given, and the nature of desire) while featuring stories and personages including Hector Berlioz, the Orphic myth of Myrrha and Cynrias, Benvenuto Cellini, and Temüjin (a.k.a. Genghis Khan). In his interview with Adam Travis, Bidart explains that the sequence is inspired by a myth from the ancient Egyptian Book of Gates, according to which “Each night during the twelve hours of the night the sun must pass through twelve territories of the underworld before it can rise again at dawn. Each hour is marked by a new gate, the threshold to a new territory.”
These rich and hypnotic poems are, to my knowledge, not much like anything else in contemporary American poetry. Bidart has said that he regards “The Twelve Hours of the Night” as essentially unfinishable, that he does not think he could possibly write all twelve hours. “I like the idea,” he has remarked, “that I’m involved in a project that can’t be completed: the project corresponds to how things are.” Someone else, perhaps, will have to provide us with the poetic gates to the eight remaining territories. Or perhaps we simply cannot have them all, any more than we can have the metaphysics we so badly need and long for; perhaps we are going to simply have to learn, somehow, to live with that.
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It used to be much harder to send a selfie. In the 1860s, riders…
It used to be much harder to send a selfie. In the 1860s, riders carried the mail from Missouri to California – covering 1,800 miles in 10 days. Today, visitors can explore sections of this famous mail route along the Pony Express National Historic Trail and learn about the challenges faced by the young men who kept the coasts connected. It might have been dangerous work, but you couldn’t beat the views. Photo from a section of the trail in Utah by Bob Wick, Bureau of Land Management (@mypubliclands).
Office Space Designed by Usual Studio + Ten-Arch in the QSW Culture Center in Shanghai, China
This stunningly unique office space is located in the QSW Culture Center in Shanghai, China, and was designed in 2016. Usual Studio + ten-arch, the architectural firm in charge, created this space while perfectly meeting their client’s needs – creating a low-budget space that was still innovative and that would inspire creativity and productivity. The walls, made up of curtain-like strips of rope, turn into the ceiling in an almost..
Design & Creative Associates designs an Office in Tahara City, Japan
Village Foods Co. is a food and beverage corporation located in Tahara City, Aichi, Japan, and they recently had this office designed for them by Design & Creative Associates. It covers a total ground area of 3,230 square feet, and was completed in 2017. Village Foods Co. is an international corporation, as it has many restaurants which are located not only the nearby area, but also in other places in..
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How To Overcome Obstacles: 5 Ways On How To Be A Conquerer
To stress you out beyond your normal limits with extreme mental and physical challenges to make you worthy of serving with the world’s most elite fighting force. This is the simple principle of the US Navy SEALS.
But, don’t confuse simple with easy. In order to be one the greatest warriors on the planet, you must conquer the obstacles in front of you. If you only endure, you will become just another failed statistic.
During BUD/S training, the most iconic and demanding event is Hell Week. Candidates are put through extremely rigorous exercises for 5 days straight with less than a few total hours of sleep. Activities will include running, swimming, paddling, push-ups, sit-ups, rolling in the sand and log PT.
Out of approximately 40,000 Navy recruits a year, only 250 (or less than 1%) actually possess the mental and physical toughness necessary to make it through Hell week and become a SEAL.
How To Overcome Obstacles
It isn’t always the largest and strongest men or the fastest swimmers or runners that complete the training. It’s most often those who have the strongest will and a burning desire to not give up. Champions know that the only way to the finish line isn’t going around the obstacle but through it.
And the same goes in the real world.
Obstacles, struggles, and sufferings are inescapable and are very real in the human experience. The simulated harsh conditions of Navy SEAL training parallel the authentic harsh episodes of real life. Successful Navy SEAL candidates feed off of the intensity, employ mental toughness, resist the seeds of doubt and are relentless about finishing.
And like the SEALS, in order to navigate through a real chapter of suffering, you must use obstacles as leverage instead of shackles holding you from success.
In the depth of suffering, it is often the difference between conquering and enduring that determines the outcome of either breakthrough or breakdown. Enduring is passive, indifferent, weak and unintentional. Conquering is meticulous, purposeful and intentional. A champion’s mindset is all about conquering obstacles rather than simply enduring in hopes of making it through.
So, how do you become a warrior? Here are 5 ways to be a conquerer and not an endurer.
Be happy during the bad times as you would the good times
In a speech for the PGA Tour rookies, Tom Kite recapped the idea of “loving what you do all the time” perfectly. From the book, How Champions Think by Bob Rotella, we get a snapshot of what Tom said:
“If you’re going to play on the Tour, you have to love golf all the time,” he said. “It’s not going to work if you can only love it when everything’s going your way, every putt’s going in the hole, and every carom is bouncing into the fairway instead of out of bounds. It’s not going to work if you practice every day and only love it when the ball is going where you’re looking. You’ve got to love it when you practice day after day and you can’t find it. You’ve got to love it when every putt looks like it’s going in and then lips out. That’s what it’s about.” (How Champions Think, Bob Rotella).
When you land your dream job, you have to appreciate the bad days as much as the good days. When you find the greatest person on earth and want to spend the rest of your life with them, you take them in their most pristine condition and weather the storm with them when times get rough.
Know what you can control and what you cannot
In the early hours of December 10th, 1914, an explosion shook the city of West Orange, NJ. Thomas Edison’s factory was immediately engulfed in flames. Despite the joint effort of several fire departments, the blaze was too powerful and decades of work was destroyed in a fiery instant.
And how did Edison respond to this?
According to a Reader’s Digest article, Edison walked over to his son, Charles and said “Go get your mother and all her friends. They’ll never see a fire like this again.”
Even though Edison was almost 70 years old and a lifetime of work was destroyed in minutes, he told a New York Times reporter that he would start rebuilding the very next day…and that’s exactly what he did. He realized he had no control over the situation and chose to work with the given circumstance and not fight against it.
It’s all about perspective. Edison’s perspective on the situation grounded him in the reality that there was absolutely nothing he could do at this time other than to rebuild. The damage was already done.
See Also: 7 Amazing Success Lessons from Thomas Edison
“It’s impossible to be angry and in a state of gratefulness at the same time.” -A Defined Life
How many times have you been in a situation, where a relatively-speaking, contextual thought should alter how you respond?
If your internet is slow on your phone, at least you have a phone equipped with up-to-date 21st-century technology. If your clothes are wrinkled in the morning, at least you have nice clothes to wear, let alone a job to go to. And if you are late to work and behind a really slow driver, at least you won’t get cited for speeding.
Viewing obstacles and struggles through the proverbial “could be worse” lens allows you to see the situation relative to someone who does not have your luxuries. It also sheds a sobering light on your life by grounding you in gratitude. It’s impossible to be angry and in a state of gratefulness at the same time.
See Also: One Awesome Tip On How To Shift Perspective
Focus on the little things
When the burden seems overwhelming or insurmountable, it is easy to give into the temptation of giving up. But the paralyzing situation you are in is almost, all the time, reducible to smaller parts. When you focus on tackling the fundamental elements of the situation, you can carve out a path to ultimate victory.
Henry Clay, a famous American orator and lawyer, was once approached by an illiterate man after giving a rousing speech. The admiring gentleman admitted to Clay that he could not read, but desperately wanted to be like him. Clay grabbed the young man and pointed to an “A” in his name on a poster and said, “That’s an A. Now you’ve only got 25 more letters to go.”
Defeating the obstacle in front of you is always manageable if you just start somewhere and focus on one thing at a time. Today it may be the letter “A” and only the letter “A”. Tomorrow or even next week, it may be the letter “B”.
We all want it to be over. But, saturating yourself in wishful thinking will cause you to never start the conquest or, even worse, cause you to fail to chisel your character and strengthen your essence. Every micro conflict of the whole is a teachable moment for you to learn and sharpen other areas of your life.
Know there is always a way out. Be an overcomer.
If your relationship is your identity, when it’s gone, so are you. If your job is your identity, when it’s gone, so are you. And if your identity or self-worth is wrapped up in something outside of your own existence or purpose, then you too will perish when those things fail.
Suffering is non-discriminant that it does not care how you came to meet it. There isn’t a more conservative version of suffering. If you want to win the war on suffering, you must first see yourself as an ascendant being with an independent meaning, where everything in your life is your responsibility.
If you approach your suffering knowing that you are an overcomer, you will overcome. It’s all about winning in your mind first and then taking action. As you fight, never forget who you are…an overcomer and nothing less than that.
Here is a way to illustrate the point.
With boiling water, you can create steam. With pressurized steam, you can power engines and turbines through mechanical work. This was part of a composite of revolutionary ideas that literally changed the landscape of our human experience. But, in order for water to turn to steam, it has to reach the exact temperature of 212 degrees. If 212 degrees is not achieved, then there is no high-pressurized steam, no mechanical work, no engine or turbine turning. In essence, there’ll be no Transcontinental Railroad or electricity to power millions of homes. 211 degrees, a simple 1-degree cooler, is really hot, but it won’t bring water to a boil.
The same is true of your identity. If you identify as an overcomer and nothing less, then you are an overcomer. This must be nonnegotiable. You must be relentless in this identity. Any moments of weakness will result in you crumbling and submitting to the obstacle in your life. The overcomer never taps out because they know there is always a way out.
Find meaning in your suffering
What if this thing that keeps you up at night affects how you interact with people, sustains your stress level and negatively influences your self-worth, is actually critical in strengthening you?
When meaning and purpose is found in one’s suffering, the conditions in which the struggle occurs are mutated in your favor. Instead of being held hostage by this ominous scenario, you ransom the situation for a net gain of self-betterment. You’re already suffering, you might as well get something out of it.
Nobody illustrates the need to find meaning in suffering better than Viktor Frankl. As a Holocaust survivor and world-renowned psychiatrist, it was a defined purpose and meaning-through-suffering that literally kept him alive among the prisoners around him who surrendered to the call of death.
For Frankl, the thought of seeing his wife again and finishing his lifework as a psychiatrist motivated and armored him for the battles he would go through each day. Thus, he found meaning in suffering in one of the worst events someone could possibly experience. As the conditions of the camp worsened and those around him gave up, his determination to survive intensified, simply because “the human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have meaning.” (Frankl)
“Despair is suffering without meaning.” -Viktor Frankl
Conclusion
This is the most important part of the message. If you don’t get anything out of this post, at least marinate on this thought.
You must not lose hope or courage. Fight through the struggle like somebody else’s life depends on it. Somewhere, a spouse, child, relative or someone you don’t personally know is counting on you. It’s not enough to endure the situation; some very important people in your life depend on you conquering it. That’s where you start learning how to overcome obstacles.
Just like the mission of the US Navy SEALS who are responsible for carrying out the most dangerous operations for the welfare of others, you are responsible for sustaining and providing positive living conditions for others, too.
Failure is not an option.
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How To Create Success Despite the Hardships of Life
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I’ve always been passionate about financial freedom, creating my own wealth and living debt free. Ever since I was a teenager, I had big dreams to buy my first house, (in cash) 2 years after finishing university, and pay off all my student loans within the first year of graduating. Life was going to be great! I was determined to become a surgeon, make good money but still make my own hours so that I could be home with my future family and children. Which reminds me, somewhere in along the way I would attend medical school, complete a residency of sorts, get married and have children, all while living debt free…
As you can imagine, that didn’t happen. My well thought out plans completely fell apart after my first year of university while I was struggling just to pass all my courses. Needless to say, I began to rethink the “becoming a surgeon” part of my plan, and since I was consistently paying rent late and borrowing money from family members to make ends meet, that “debt free” part wasn’t looking too hot either. School quickly became overwhelming, and as I transitioned from an A+ student to a “Thank God I passed that class” student.
I couldn’t tell if I was rethinking medical school because I truly didn’t want to do it anymore, or simply because I wasn’t doing well in school. The worst part about it was that for years I had proudly proclaimed my intentions and determination to become a surgeon to family and friends, to the point where everyone knew that I was a going be a doctor.
I may as well have already had the white coat. So now I’m finished first year, passed all my classes (Praise God) still rethinking medical school, decided to change my program to psychology of all things, and incurred the full wrath, I mean love, of family and friends. Utterly confused, they were asking why I changed my program, who is distracting me, why I’m not doing well, and on and on the questioning continued.
I didn’t have the answers. I didn’t know exactly where I was headed anymore, nor when I would arrive, nor how profitable my new career would be. Because let’s face it, when you study psychology, everyone’s question is “what are you going to do with that?”, and truth be told I had no idea.
To make matters worse, and I began to put on weight, and my energy began to deteriorate. I figured living on a student budget and exercising less plus the stress of school was the cause of the weight gain, I had no idea at the time that they were early signs of depression and anxiety. Fast forward a couple years, another program change, marriage, another program change, starting an online business, and about 5 major breakdowns later, I realized that what I was feeling was probably more than just the stress of school.
I kept waiting for the overwhelming feeling of exhaustion to lift. I couldn’t understand why it was so hard for me to exercise, or cook, or even just meet up with friends. I kept thinking to myself “Ruth-Joy what’s wrong with you, just do the assignment, or just call her back or just do the laundry”. But I couldn’t. I was handing in assignments late or not at all, showing up to events late, avoiding people’s calls, and constantly eating fast food because I didn’t have the energy to cook.
I used to be the person who got things done. I’m all about the action, so if you had a plan or a goal or a dream, I was the go to person to help you get from an idea to reality, but not anymore. I could barely do the basics for myself, let alone help others. I eventually sought help and realized that my breakdowns were symptoms of anxiety and panic attacks and my exhaustion was a symptom of depression.
But I didn’t want to be someone who had depression, I didn’t even want to say it out loud. I figured, I’ll finish school, and the stress will go away and everything will go back to normal – I’ll go back to normal. But that didn’t happen. The semester ended and I still couldn’t shake the exhaustion. I didn’t want to accept that I was struggling with mental health because I felt like that’s how people would see me. It made me feel like I would never have the motivation to lose the weight, or successfully run my business, or even be able to cook for myself as often as I once did, and that felt like defeat to me.
I wasn’t ready to give in, but at the same time I needed to realize that I was struggling with something real and that in order not to be defeated by it, I needed to accept the reality of my current situation. I began to put some tactics into place that would help me accomplish a little every day. I gave myself permission to only exercise for 15 minute a day, and if I didn’t want to continue after that, it was okay. I told myself, I only needed to do one thing for my business a day, even if it was as small as a 5 minute task. I permitted myself to only schedule 1 hang-out with a friend a week, and limit the time if necessary. The point is, I slowed down… a lot, but I was determined not to stop.
I’ve had to redefine motivation and teach myself discipline. Motivation was only enough to get me started, but wouldn’t sustain me when I got to the point that I wanted to give up – that’s where discipline kicked in. For me discipline is doing what you should do even when you don’t want to, and I can tell you I often didn’t want to.
I put systems into place that made it easier for me to succeed, like wearing my exercise clothes all day if necessary, all so I could do 15 minutes of exercise. I learned to recognize and appreciate small victories like doing laundry, or cooking a meal, and I learned to be forgiving with myself. This whole experience has taught me how to keep moving forward, even when I feel like I have nothing to give, or when it looks like I’m not making any progress, or when the goal seems overwhelming.
I’ve learned and continue to learn how to break down tasks to be more manageable so that I can take a few steps forward every day, getting one step closer to my goals with each task.Everyone in life faces challenges.
Yours may not be depression or anxiety, it may be the loss of a loved one, it could be financial, you may feel crippled by the weight of your dreams or by the expectation of others or even yourself, but I am proof and hope that you can make it. I myself am still learning, and still taking small steps each day, but I’m moving forward and so can you! Life may slow you down – it may take you from sprinting, to jogging, to walking, and maybe even slow you to a crawl.
That’s okay, but never let it stop you. No matter how small that step is towards your goal, take it; keep moving forward no matter how slow. I’m 4 courses away from finishing my 2nd university degree, no easy journey as you can tell, but I’m still closer today than I was yesterday. I believe all things are possible, not all at once, but definitely with time. You can accomplish anything you put your mind to, so dream big, someone is counting on your struggle to inspire them. I hope this encourages you to take a step today.
Until next time, I’ve been Ruth-Joy Connell.
Salutations, Ruth-Joy Connell here and I am a problem solver. I love to create solutions to problems, and I’m passionate about helping people accomplish their dreams. I believe that anybody can live their dream life, and I’m passionate about helping entrepreneurs set and reach their goals. I’m a university student completing my second degree in neuroscience and mental health. I’m married, I love to travel and I would not have made it to where I am today without Jesus. You can connect with me, via my website at http://ift.tt/2xD2MVa and you can grab a free gift here Free Goals Guide!
You’ve read How To Create Success Despite the Hardships of Life, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Inhale by Szpilka
Beloved & Condemned: A Cartoonist in Nazi Germany
The carefree world of Father and Son gives little hint of the fate that would be suffered by its creator, E. O. Plauen, who had become world-famous for his comic strips and was driven to take his own life. He was tall, heavy-set, and hard of hearing. Those close to him described him as humorous, awkward, curmudgeonly. The author Hans Fallada speaks of “an elephant who could walk a tightrope.”
The 2017 National Book Award Longlists: Nonfiction
All through this week, the National Book Foundation is announcing the “Longlist” nominees for its 2017 National Book Awards in the categories of Young Peoples’ Literature, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction. Today, the ten nominees for the National Book Award in Nonfiction are announced. And stay tuned — the finalists will be named on October 4, and the award winners named at a ceremony on November 15, 2017.
In alphabetical order by author, here are the books named to the Longlist for Nonfiction:
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (Atria/37 INK/Simon & Schuster)
Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Simon & Schuster)
James Forman, Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / Macmillan Publishers)
Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Riverhead Books /Penguin Random House)
David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Doubleday /Penguin Random House)
Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (Haymarket Books)
Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking /Penguin Random House)
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Liveright /W. W. Norton & Company)
Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till (Simon & Schuster)
Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press)
The post The 2017 National Book Award Longlists: Nonfiction appeared first on The Barnes & Noble Review.
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