Problems vs. Perception ♥

There are problems: accidentally sleeping through your alarm clock on a work day; locking yourself outside of the house; destroying your Ipod by placing an open bottle of water into your handbag (ahem); and drinking from an open bottle of sesame oil (cough) while hurriedly cooking instead of your uh, actual, nearby pineapple juice, because they just so happened to be located so unfortunately close to one another! Not that I would know anything about any of these at all. (And ESPECIALLY not the last two!) No. Of course not! Now where would you conjure up an idea like that from?!

Anyway!  Moving along from blatant lying, there are problems and then there are "problems", and the primary difference between the two is that while the first kind are often entirely out of our control (sesame oil swilling aside), there's a whole other breed of occurences which are usually self-manufactured, and despite the fact that they resemble the truth as much as I say, resemble a floorboard (for the record - I don't!), we choose to believe them. And oh, do we suffer because of it!

When was the last time that you felt overweight, underweight, or just generally, well, blah towards your physical appearance? (And, now that we mention it, didn't you say that you were REALLY going to stop doing that?! Especially because you did that for years and upon flicking through old photographs of yourself now, you realise that a) you were gorgeous; and b) that it was really just a gigantic waste of time?!) When was the last time that you felt as though you were less intelligent, less creative, less talented, or less beautiful than somebody else in the room? Or as though you're not good enough? Not achieving enough? Not ticking-the-same-boxes-that-everybody-else-is-enough? Now, after examining these thoughts, consider this: how many of these perceptions are actually true? And how many, really, derive from our own self-perceptions?

Next time, before you decide that your weight is a problem, or find yourself comparing your life to somebody else's and deciding that theirs is hurling along at a more progressive pace than yours, ask yourself: why? Why do you feel that way? Contemplate what it is that makes you believe that, and question whether or not there's any evidence to support the way that you feel: if you asked your partner, best friend or parent about the issue, how would THEY respond? Do they believe that you're not interesting, eloquent, capable or pretty enough, or is it just you that has decided that you're not?

Don't succumb to believing negative, torturous and completely absurd ''truths'' about yourself. And if you do hear the chimes of the Inferiority Bells? Ask yourself whether the message that's contained within their sound is truly a ''problem'', or merely a perception.

♥

xoxo

(Image thanks to la music excentrique.)