Past it

Sooner or later, we learn to throw the past away

                    'History Will Teach Us Nothing' - Sting

Interpretation is everything. - E. H. Carr

I'm torn at the moment between blogging and lying out in the sun in the hope the sunshine will nuke the germs out of my fluey body. Yet feel I am on the verge of articulating something cool, so blogging it is.  I may of course be feverish, so if I wind up spouting a crock of crap you can blame it on that.

No self hypno yesterday (smack botbot). I would say does thinking about it count but this may land me in the poo with hypno-dude when I go back and see him this Saturday. No excuses, no surrender!!! The kindest man in the world has said both last night and this morning that he thinks I'm doing well and has noticed I'm not shitting on myself from a great height anywhere near as often.  Also thinks the process is allowing me to 'reprocess things and put them in another basket'. I'm not sure what basket yet or where I should put it or if I should just throw it out. I'm sure this will become clearer as time goes on. 

Have been thinking about the process and premise of the hypno and how it allows you to reinterpret things in ways that make you not want to shit on yourself from a great height.  The thing that sold me on hypno was the simple concept that the unconscious mind doesn't know the difference between fact and fiction.  This kind of blew me away when I heard it, because suddenly me being desperate to change, willing to work on change and yet being seemingly unable to change made perfect sense. All the shite my unconscious mind had sucked up from others and me about being useless, unloveabale and dumb as a bucket of rocks was still lurking even though intellectually I know none of those are true. Mostly. No, I do. Mostly.

When I was at uni I studied historiography, or the study of the ways history is written and for what reasons.  I realise history isn't a popular subject these days, mainly because Gen Y think nothing existed before them and the internet but I'm into it, mainly modern sociopolitical stuff (ooooo, get me) and have always been fascinated by different interpretations of why things happened and continue to happen.  Because regardless of whether you like history or not, things happen due to cause and effect. There are reasons the world is the way it is and there are reasons I've spent a large part of my life feeling useless, unloveable and dumb as a bucket of rocks. 

Historiography will tell you that facts exist, but interpretation of those facts comes purely from you, your experiences, your background, your slant on things.  Does your interpretation make the facts wrong or right? No. Does your interpretation of the facts shape your view on the world? Yes.  The Vietnamese call the Vietnam War the American War. Australian Aborigines call the British colonisation of Australia invasion. Are they wrong?

Dwelling on the past is fucking pointless and I don't want to do it or suggest that anybody else does but I am more than happy (well not happy, but still) to hold my hands up to the knowledge that my interpretation of my past is basically what's fucked me up and by that I mean yes shit things did indeed happen and they can't be regarded as anything other than shit.  But it was me who chose to believe on some level that those things actually made ME shit.

Fact, people who start a sentence with the word 'fact' are really annoying but we really are responsible for hauling our own arses into gear and becoming happy, productive people who can contribute something to the world rather than sooky la-la's wallowing in our own puddles of self-induced loathing. And ok, some of us have to haul their arses further and longer to reach this enlightened state. Suck it up, princesses.