No, this is not about my foray into Shifter Romance/Erotica (That'll happen later)
Honourable mention to this delightful meme:
Which is not precisely what I'm talking about, but find it fun. ANYWAY.
I've had so many delays recently, and my original intention was to put out consolation blog posts when they happened. (This blogging, in my mind, is all still for me anyway.) But the nature of the delays meant I was too busy to even try. So now I'm planning on putting a few of these out inbetween my weekly chapter releases - because why not? I love a good ramble. So without further ado:
The One You Feed
What I'm referring to is the story, possibly of Native American origin - although it seems murky enough that I'm not going to get into that particular topic - that inspired this silly meme format. Honestly, the story itself still really resonates with me, despite how its became a bit goofy by association. There's just something about it that really rings true to me.
I'm going to spin up my own version here - because why not? Everyone else is doing it. Anyway, the gist is that inside you there are two (hopefully metaphorical) wolves engaged in a great battle. One wolf represents your baser emotions - Hate, Despair, Cruelty - and the other represents your greater ones - Love, Hope, Kindness. You hopefully want the good Wolf to win.
The little boy in the story (who I didn't bother introducing, but roll with me here) breathlessly asks his grandfather, who is relaying the tale, who exactly the victor will be.
To which the grandfather responds: "The one you feed."
If you think that's corny - ugh, fine, whatever. It means something to me.
Because I'm not a nice person. Or, rather, I'm not a naturally nice person. For the longest time, people had me convinced that because I have an underlying attitude of sarcasm and some cold analytical thoughts, any attempts on my part to be nice - to show kindness, to be encouraging, to refrain from tearing someone down - constituted 'fakeness' on my part.
But can you imagine what kind of person that leads to? Where my every attempt to be genuine was, at best, unpleasant, and at worst, fucking intolerable. Because I don't think anyone likes someone who has nothing to offer but sarcasm and cold, offensive logic - but even if they do, what I came to realise was that I didn't like that person.
I wanted to be warm and loving, uplifting and fun, sweet and charming. But I didn't know how. Given their dark, problematic insides, Disney is a weird place to look for niceness, but in Bambi there is a little rabbit named thumper, and he has a rule: If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.
That's an excellent start. So many people find it IMPOSSIBLE to keep quiet - I'd blame the internet and social media, but I honestly think the only thing that's changed there is their level of access. In a world full of people who can not help but say anything that comes into their mind, throwing your mean thoughts away IS kindness.
It's not like they fester and turn into anything serious - our attention spans are so short, if you don't say the mean thing, it simply ceases to exist. Whereas if you put it out there - and wound a person with it - your evil persists in the world. So I don't want to do that anymore. Therefore - the Thumper rule.
To keep from being entirely silent, however, I tried to focus on the positive - find nice things to say to people. Keep conversations going, and all that. And I'm not going to lie - some people make it very hard. I am occasionally rendered silent by the Thumper rule and the limits of my own creativity - because sometimes it's hard to find something nice to say for EVERYTHING.
What I've noticed, however, is that it gets easier and easier. The more I'm nice to people, the more I want to be nice to people. The more I focus on the positive, the more I'm able to quickly see the silver lining in any situation. I feel like by changing how I've interacted with the world, to be a better person on the outside, I've become - almost accidentally - a better person on the inside.
Because if I'm being honest - and I usually am (honest or quiet, has always been my motto) - I did set out on this path very cynically. I wanted an end to my self-isolation, that happened slowly as my masters dragged on and all my friends scattered across the globe. I wanted a sense of community during the pandemic, because everything else was out of my reach.
I'd like to flatter myself that it was never as fake as I thought it was, and maybe that's the case - maybe I was just in a darker place by the end of my masters, and I'd been trained to dislike my own character. But even if it started out as a complete fake-out - even if I was a rotten person underneath, at the time -, I don't think it's the case anymore. The façade has become the foundation - and I'm incredibly happy with that.
I'm not writing this to preach - the nice thing about this new me is that he also doesn't particularly want to tell people how to run their own lives. But I just want to put the thought out there - that kindness is something that one can practise, and get better at.
I do think I'll keep at it.
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