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I realized something

Discussion in 'General Support and Advice' started by rebelAssassin, Jan 26, 2017.

  1. rebelAssassin

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    Right off the bat, this is more of a rant than needing advice. If you're someone who desperately needs to know things can work out, I may be able to help.


    I was reading a fanfiction earlier (I won't say the ship) and it had a happy ending. I was in the bathroom crying (Happy endings make me cry harder than sad ones) when I realized something:


    I don't need other people's opinions of me to be happy. Sure, they're nice when they're positive, but I don't need any negativity in my life. I don't have to put up with it. I know that I could have grown up a lot better, but I could be worse. I know that I'm never going to be as attractive as the celebrities; I've made my peace with that. But I'm not ugly, either, and I'm slowly starting to come to terms with that. Of course I'm not perfect; no one can expect me to be. I'm human. I've made mistakes, and I've helped people. That's part of being human. And if that means I was born into the wrong body, so be it. I'll accept it, and work to correct it or live with it. Moving past your flaws, learning to see yourself as someone unique and amazing, that's life-changing. If it takes transitioning to love yourself, do it. Don't let anyone stop you. If you feel you have to come out at work or school or to your family, do it. If there are negative reprecussions, you didn't need them in your life anyway. I know it's hard, but we can do it.
     
  2. Monraffe

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    This is a great subject and I like where your head is at. :slight_smile: While on the subject of acceptance (the next rung up from tolerance on the social climbing ladder) I think it is worth exploring why people's opinions, and the negativity that often comes with them, exist in the first place.

    When scientists decoded human DNA one of the amazing things they discovered is how similar we all are. We have clearly been around long enough as a species to have more variation in our DNA so the theory for a long time was there must have been some tragic event that occurred 75,000 years ago that left the earth only 1,000 human mating couples. But the evidence does not support this theory.

    Then a very clever group of scientists calculated that the same DNA effect could have come about if hundreds of thousands of people lived in isolated tribes of between 30 to 300 people per tribe. This argument made a lot more sense.

    So, assuming this new theory is true, what does it say about how we interact with one another socially today? Well, for one thing, if the tribes were truly "isolated" it means that something must have prevented its members from moving freely between tribes. That "something" was likely a deadly force of some kind. What this means is that unless you had remarkable survival skills, you probably could not have survived outside of your tribe.

    So, let's think about this a minute. What if you looked a bit odd or maybe you said or did something that certain key members of your tribe didn't like. What kind of characteristics would you have evolved to prevent you from being kicked out of your tribe? Keep in mind that natural selection would favor you doing something to stay in the tribe because leaving it would mean your death.

    Well, for one thing you would probably feel very bad about being disliked by others in your tribe. This negative feeling would be unpleasant to experience and it would drive you to take action to correct it. Or it may cause you to feel depressed and in your depression you would stop expressing the negative behavior. In either case your chances of surviving go up.

    On the flip side, behavior which is thought of as positive by the key members of your tribe, will result in causing you to feel good about yourself and you will be motivated to continue to express these positivist behaviors. Loneliness, therefore, is a feeling that comes from the desire to improve standing in your tribe.

    But we no longer live in small tribes and moving around the world and being ourselves is no longer a death sentence. But that doesn't mean that those old tribal feelings aren't still the dominant controlling force in our lives. Maybe one day we will evolve away form them but for now we are still operating under our old tubal instincts in search of social acceptance even though we no longer need it to survive.

    As you so well point out, learning to accept feeling the way we do and leaning to cope with those feelings can take us a long way toward accepting ourselves and being content to be who we are.