Her Highness Meer, a newbie, commented at post 1635 as follows: “I am 22, and am very immature emotionally. but I find it hard to respect most men. I’ve only respected 2 guys before. I’m terrified of life.” My response follows.
Your Highness Meer,
What a huge blessing you have. You know who and what you are. Your worth to yourself and others has been disguised by wrongful beliefs and discouraging habits of thought. Someone in your upbringing loaded you with a fright wig and mask. You can just rip them off, if you muster the courage to think differently and change in response.
Age 22 is fantastic but prone to emotional immaturity. So what? You moved out of adolescence physically, so why not mentally? It requires that you change your habits of thought. Avoid such thinking as “very immature emotionally” and “I find it hard” and “I’m terrified.” Unfortunately you can’t just NOT think about those things. You have to replace them with new and better thoughts, those easier to accept and live with.
First, I suggest you start by following the daily ‘pretty time’ schedule proposed in articles 1440 and 1441 and the articles mention therein. Make ‘pretty time’ the dominant HABIT in your life, the thing with an importance above everything else. If you do it, you will set the stage to decorate your life with the blessings that most women enjoy.
Second, decorate your life with adages and principles that you study each day. Post the following near your mirror and take five minutes immediately after ‘pretty time’ for daily review and consideration. Make them habitual to your daily thoughts:
- Many people prefer the misery of certainty to the uncertainty of change. Do I?
- I can respect no one more than I respect myself. What can I do today to elevate my self-respect?
- God provides me with self-love. Why not claim it myself?
- Dislike of myself can’t be changed, but it can be suppressed and eventually conquered by helping others get what they want out of life.
- At various times and reasons, every woman dislikes herself. (Men too) The good life comes not from avoiding it (impossible) but from finding ways to minimize it.
- When my thoughts turn internally to focus on me, I find a way to externalize. It’s only a habit, and I can change it.
Third, study the articles listed in the CONTENTS page at blog top that begin with these titles: Respect, Respectable, Adolescent, and Adolescence.
Fourth, if you don’t already, dream a lot about what you want out of life. Adopt the ‘dream accomplished’ plan described in the VICTORY page at blog top.
Fifth, don’t worry about not trusting men. Show each of them unconditional respect for who they are and gratitude for what they do. Eventually, a respectable man will rise out of the passing parade, one whom you can trust. (Patience is a blessing that women glorify when they use it.)
Sixth, start and post daily to a journal about all the successes you had that day. Don’t post and forget all the losses, mistakes, and fears you encounter each day.
Being terrified of life is the result of your upbringing. God designed, Nature endows, and hormones energize you with hardheadedness and softheartedness to face the world with countless blessings. You only need to find those blessings. You can start by recognizing the power of self-confidence, self-respect, modesty, dignity, feminine mystery, and many other traits and characteristics that you already have in abundance. You only need to act as if you have them in order to find and appreciate them.
If many more of your blessings don’t soon become obvious, drop us a comment with details.
Guy
Hey Meer!!! If you’re reading this, I am 21 and even though I don’t know you or what you’re going through, we’re probably going through the same phase of life. We’re at such a crazy age. For me, I will be finishing up college next year and while I’ve always known that every choice I make has a consequence, whether its positive or negative, its been sinking in more and more that the choices I make now (getting a job, dating, getting married) have a HUGE impact on my future. When people get a little bit older and have more life experience, they commonly say that they wish they know then what they know now because they would have made a lot better decisions. They have way more life experience that most 21 year olds don’t have. It’s a little scary knowing I am making life changing decisions and don’t necessarily have the experience to back up those decisions.
I’ve been thinking about fear in my life recently and while I like to think I’m not scared of too much, I’ve been wondering how much has fear stopped me from doing things. It’s not even in a way that is an overwhelming fear but it is more of a “oh well I’ll just forget about it because it might not work out”/self doubt type of fear. That can be just as dangerous as a crippling fear because you still have a fear and are not doing anything about it. People tend to excuse that type of fear though and pass it off as being logical or reasonable, but if you have a thought that scares you enough to stop you from doing something, it needs to be addressed.
I was at church Wednesday night and our Pastor was talking about how just like we have to exercise our bodies to keep them strong and healthy, we have to exercise our faith to keep it strong and healthy. Just as you couldn’t expect to run a marathon after never training at all, you can’t really expect to have huge faith in something big if you haven’t first started having faith in smaller things. You have to train your faith, just like you would train your body. Start small and build it up. Try and do something small, if you’re afraid of talking to random people, just say hi to a random person. Maybe even give them a small, but genuine, compliment. The thought of going up to a stranger could be really scary but generally a person will at the very least smile back. If they don’t and they ignore you, that’s okay. We all have our bad days and maybe you caught a person on a bad day, but that’s okay too. Going back to the sports training metaphor, even athletes stumble and get injured but they get right back to it once they heal. Do the same. Get right back out there and try again. It will get easier with time. I don’t know your feelings on faith and religion, but I hope this advice is helpful regardless of your personal feelings on the matter.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I think we all have something that terrifies us. Something that will stop us dead in our tracks if it were ever to happen to us. You are not alone in that. We all have our fears too. Fear is a natural response. It’s the thing that prevents you from doing handstands on the edge of the Grand Canyon or doing backflips on top of a building with no guard rail. Those are extreme examples but hopefully my point is understood. Fear helps keep us alive in certain situations. Unfortunately, because of our upbringing as Guy mentioned and many other things, fear becomes twisted. Instead of fear saving our lives, we fear living. A piece of advice from Guy that I repeat to myself, a lot actually is, “Action cures fear”. There is nothing else to get rid of fear except doing what scares you.
Also, know that being brave doesn’t mean you don’t have fear, and that nothing scares you. Being brave means that you have fear but you look past it and live your life anyway. You are on the right path though, Meer! You admitted you were scared. A lot of people can’t even do that. They live their lives numbed to fear and pain because they can’t admit how scared they truly are. Not only are you are taking such a huge step in admitting your fears, you are taking steps to get over them. You are such a special and wonderful person and you can do this!!! It’s your life, take control, and wonderful things can happen! Best of luck to you, Meer!! I hope you stick around because I, and I’m sure many others, would love to hear your progress.
I recently read a free eBook about overcoming/managing these kinds of gut-reaction type fears. It’s called Flinch by Julien Smith. It’s a quick, and I’d recommend it if only for some of it’s simple but liberating exercises, to build up to really taking control of your life. For example it asks you to take a mug you do not like, walk to a room with hard floors, and drop it. It sounds silly and destructive, but it had a pretty profound effect on me.
Sir Guy and Ladies-
Today I got sick right before a presentation in front of 150 odd people that was being videotape. Mind you I have done presentations before, it’s what I love to do. Yet right before going on mentally I was telling myself I was in the wrong place and wanted to flee. Fear is a powerful thing! I did make the presentation feeling very vulnerable and unsure (and I told them that). Now post presentation I wonder if I really want to do something else or if I was just too afraid, so afraid I would have rather (so I thought) tell myself to be unhappy, selfish, timid, and not follow through. Find yourself by facing your fears and even if you don’t concur it, it will tell you a lot about where you’re going and where you need to be. Life is calling you! Will you answer?
O wow, haha this made me feel special. I was reading some of the posts when I spotted “I’m terrified of life” in the recent posts section and I was like “wait a min…..that’s what III say =O”
^.^ Guy, thank you so much for listening to me and giving me guidance–for actually understanding and responding to the fact that I am in need of help.
And Brittany, thanks to you, too, for sharing your story and tips. I’m not religious, but what you’ve mentioned about faith makes sense. I agree about fear: If something really scares us, it probably means we need to confront it; and fear can be taken to the extreme and be counter-adaptive (just like anything). Recently I’ve been thinking that maybe life is simple and easy, but we make it hard because of fear–we worry about consequences, our abilities, of wasting energy on something, etc. and so it’s kind of like fear is the water we walk through…when instead we should learn to swim and be ok with its existence.
And yes, I am also graduating soon and I regret my past few years and my life is just messed up kind of. Esp. now my motivation to do work has steeply declined and everything seems meaningless. I feel a bit dead and very lazy.
But anyways, about the article itself:
Thank you, Guy, for pretty much devoting an article to me. Your insight is simple, yet correct. I know my thoughts and habits are what have slowly been decelerating me my whole life.
Pretty Time seems like a hassle and waste of time. But I know it has its benefits, so I’ll try it out.
I really like the questions you suggest to ask myself–but I’m unclear about the last one–what do you mean about internalizing thoughts versus externalizing?
With respect to dreams. I no longer have any =( well ok except one or two. But I’m very indecisive to the point that dreaming is stressful and I’m scared of failing–so I just avoid dreaming and it has killed my desire to want things…. But I know that a life vision is crucial (I tried creating one but it wasn’t clear enough)–so I’ll try again when feeling more confident.
I’ll write in my journal and follow your advice. Hopefully I stick to it, because I have trouble doing so–but I should, because this post caused an emotional reaction in me and I feel grateful for the concern (Brittany’s included) and it’s very encouraging. So thanks, guys, and I’ll try to face more fears. <3
Your Highness Catalinarea,
Welcome aboard. It’s a great day when another pretty woman joins us on this cruise to WhatWomenNeverHear.
I’ve responded with today’s article 1686.
Guy
nonono, this is also Meer >.<
That's why i was saying thank you, etc. because I know the article is inresponse to my comment a few days agpo. Sorry for the mixup. I didn't realize I was for some reason already logged in as Catalina Rea.