About other worlds

A comment I’ve left there.

My first time here, and I’ve only read two posts. One of them was automatically linked to one of mine. I’m a career counselor. Finding out who you want to be is a journey. It doesn’t have to have a turning point. It’s built day by day. Not everyone is that type of someone who’ll be just one thing for the rest of life, so it’s difficult to make a decision, “the” decision. Think of where you want to be next year or in the next couple of years. What kind of place, with which kind of people. What kind of tasks really please you, what kind of problems you like to solve, which ones you solve well. What do you expect from work in terms of reward. How much you’d like to offer. Perhaps going further, how you’d like to help the world. Take some time to describe it. Picture this image, this movie, as vividly as you can, and then try to find out positions and occupations that would suit it. It’s not a receipt and it’s not magical, but it’s a start and it may help. Cheers

We make choices everyday. Choices shouldn’t be a prison. Life is a journey. We’re here to learn. We don’t need to know everything in advance. We don’t always have to be right. In fact, we learn a lot more from our mistakes, and that’s part of our growth, too.

Why dilemmas?

“Dilemmas is the post

everyone reads the most”

I wonder why…

Back(stage)

I’m back for quite a while now, finishing my career counselling sessions for this year. I’ve been having some positive surprises and feedback, but what is still to be done is to diminish the distance between school and work, that is, to provide opportunities for the students to acquire some self-efficacy beliefs that will be useful when choosing a career. Many of them will only start doing things their own when they enter university/college. Besides, there seems to be a lack of thinking on the world of work, like what the sense of work is, why people work, how necessary it is for them to work etc. It may seem odd, but some teenagers have no idea where the money comes from. They don’t know how easy/difficult it can be to make money and they know nothing about the cost of living.

What is the fiction of your life?

Let’s write a story about yourself.

What’s its introduction? Where does your story take place?

How can you, as a character, be revealed? How does one get to know you? By your physical appearance? By what you say, think, feel, dream, do and don’t do? Or by what others say about you? Describe it.

What kind of conflicts have you faced/are you facing? A struggle against external forces, or against your own self? A struggle against another person, against circumstances, ideas, or against your choices, against your feelings or limitations? Elaborate.

How will the turning point be? Will the conflict be resolved or not? What do you think? Do you want it to be resolved?

How do you expect the untangling of the events to be?

Self-help may sometimes help

An aunt of mine told me that, when she feels someone is willing to cause her damage, she imagines a glass cage around her: all the evil will hit the cage and go back to the person who sent it. Is it true? Well, maybe not, or maybe yes, for those who believe in the propagation of all kinds of energy; what is true is that it makes her feel stronger and better. Good for her, and I myself wouldn´t mind trying, too. Trying to imagine the cage, not sending her evil thoughts to see if they would come back to me.

Such things don´t need the evidence of science… if it works for you, who cares what the evidences are?

The right decision

“I wanna be certain, I don’t wanna regret,” he says.

We just gather enough information so as to make the best decision. How can one ever be certain?

Some words from Ginger

“It’s very painful to realize that your life has never belonged to yourself and that you were loved only as a promise of what you could become. It’s hard to recover faith in humanity when that happens. All your dreams, all your beliefs, they were never yours. You thought you were not alone, but you were. As alone as you are, now. In the past, you only had the illusion of companionship. When someone’s world ruins like that, it’s very hard to go on. It’s very hard to find strength and references. You look for references and can’t find them. They’re not where they used to be. I search, reach out, but they’re not there. I sometimes dream they’ll be there again, but they won’t. I have to find new references.”

It may still take some time, but she’s been having some useful insights and I believe she‘ll make it.

The switch

At one time, I worked as if on a switch. On. If a friend crossed me, my feelings flipped, almost immediately and without any notice. Off. Appeals were frustrating and completely useless. If you wronged me in a serious way, stole a boyfriend, humiliated me, showed a lack of respect, you were dead to me and without reprieve.

From here.

We all probably have switches like that. Some may work well, others not. In real life, it’s probably more useful to have a malfunctioning switch, and we sometimes don’t get it. I don’t, at least. Life asks us to do our best: we learn to speak, we’d better speak well, or we won’t be understood; we learn to write, we’d better write well, or we don’t get good grades. We’d better make sense. Follow the rules. Then we meet someone who, as she says, wrongs us, humiliates us, steals our boyfriend, shows a lack of respect or so. What to do? Punish? “Go learn how to be a friend,” we say, with madness, anger or indifference. Sadly, many people will never learn what we want to teach them. Even us, our own heroes wannabes, we often haven’t learned many lessons, either because we didn’t want to, or because we didn’t realize it, or because we weren’t prepared to. That’s why I’ve forgiven. Not forgiving wasn’t being useful: it was only serving me up bitter pills as time went by.

But it hasn’t solved all my problems. Forgiving seems to work only for close friends. People you know well enough to compare 99% of ons to 1% of offs, or something like that. You have a huge universe of events that leads that 99% to make a big difference, too. What if you’ve just met a person and had to switch off a couple of times? What will you think of that person? Will you ever give him/her a chance to offer you a huge universe of events so as to really test if he/she was an “on” or an “off”? Not likely.

Yes, there’s probability, I know. But there’s also hazard. Then, what to do? Perhaps the solution is not ignoring the switch, but setting it to a higher threshold. It’s not easy, I know. But I’m willing to give it a try. I haven’t had much success so far, if I may confess.

Forgiving

A definition of to forgive is, according to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, to cease to feel resentment against (an offender). People usually say great things about forgiveness. The truth is Even if you change, the other person may not. Each person has free will, what makes forgiveness also an act of free will.

We usually think a lot about forgiveness before something that demands our forgiveness really happens. At least, that was my case. In theory, it seems easy and perfect. Then, one day, someone you love very much does something humiliating to another one you love very much. You’re not there at the moment, so there was nothing you could do. In your head, a hammer: “How could he do that? How could he ever do something like that to her?”

In theory, you should sit beside him and talk. Ask why, tell how you feel. But you decide you’d better not. It’s their business, not yours. What if the humiliated person feels even worse when she finds out you broke the secret and looked for, how to say, the humiliator? What if the humiliator gets mad at the person who told you the story? There’s no way. You’d better leave it like that. It doesn’t sound right, but when it comes to strategy and pragmatism, letting it be may count as an option. You understand the humiliator’s reasons and you believe he’ll not behave that way again. You understand but you do not agree. There comes resentment. You will never be able to look at that person the way you used to look. In your head and heart, outrageous thoughts and feelings persist: “How could he do that? How?”

He keeps emailing you regularly; after all, he doesn’t even know you were informed of that fact. His .pps files of friendship, love and faith are deliberately ignored. “It’ll never be the same”, you regret. He keeps greeting you effusively as you meet. Keeps recalling stories of your childhood, of a time he was like an older brother, like a second father to you. The nicknames you made up for each other, the trips to the beach and to the mountains… and all you do is curse him mentally: “You broke it all up.” Now you only have room to criticize his opinions, his political views, his way of life. You even wonder how you could ever like him.

One night, without noticing, you don’t delete one of his emails. Distracted, you catch yourself thinking of him the way you used to: as a dear friend, as a close relative, as someone important to your story, to your life. The memory of that incident comes to your mind, but you wipe it away. “No one is perfect,” you admit. And, even if you’re far from agreeing with what he did, you feel it’s time to forgiveness.

It’s a silent act, as silent as the breakup. You feel lighter and happier. It’s like meeting an old friend that traveled miles away years ago and whom you didn’t expect to come back. You realize that resentment is a punishment that did not bring any benefits. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is a gift you give to no one but yourself. And it feels easy and perfect. This time, not only in theory.