Inecurities, Securities

Alright. My lateness got to the point that I figured it'd be wiser to just do these together, rather than stealing the thunder of one of the other girls. AKA I am very lazy.

Insecurities

I think my insecurities are pretty uninterestingly usual. I've got the insecurities about my body and all, but that's so universal it almost doesn't require mentioning.
I am strangely insecure about the impression I give to strangers. I am one of those people who feels the imaginary stares of other shoppers when I'm trying what sort of chocolate I want to buy. I always feel terribly rude when I accidentally walk into someone, and then painfully stiff and strange when I beg their pardon. I don't like having to make quick decision in public. Or making quick decisions in general, to be honest.
I'll be honest, I don't have a huge number of insecurities, I think.
See, now I'm feeling insecure about my apparant lack of insecurities. Maybe I'm just really bad at introspection?
I suppose, as I said in my last post. I'm kind of insecure about my capacity to manage school and stress in general at the moment. Getting better though.

Securities

As for securities, I'm not sure I am going to find this any easier to talk about.
I am quite secure in the genuine affection of my friends, which seems to be unusual in girls my age. I am very confidant that they do actually like me, and I find this gives me a large amount of security, both in reality and hypothetically. It means I don't need to worry about falling out with other people in my year, because I can rely on my friends. It also means that, were I to start receiving anonymous texts or annoying messages on facebook or whatever, I don't think it would bother me overly. I would be very secure in the belief that none of my friends had done it, and, really, I don't care terribly much what the rest of them do.
I guess I'm pretty sure of my intelligence. I don't feel it lends me a whole lots of security of thought or life though. It's not a particularly helpful security to have.

I feel like I didn't really know how to answer these questions.
I suppose I tried.

Feeling a failure,

- Orla
 

TED-Tastic

Hi to all,
Aoife here with Saturday's post on.............what? 


I have no idea what this week's theme is so I guess I'll just have to tell all about the AMAZING event that was on in Dublin this Saturday.

This weekend Dublin played host to it's seventh TEDx talk. With inspirational speakers on a vast array of topics from surfing, to writing, to five story robots, to how to prepare for a zombie invasion (I'm not joking).

Some talks were funny, others innovative but each of them share one common element: Change. Whether on a grand scale or in smaller ways, each speaker had helped change the lives of those around them. A surfer who is changing the lives of Iranian women, an Australian woman who developed an app to make it easier for Autistic people to communicate with others and a man helping inspire the next generation of great Irish writers.It was truly humbling to hear the stories that they had to tell.

Listening to the talks and looking around the crowed theatre, it was easy to see how single ideas can spread and inspire people from all around the world.

For me, the most significant thing about attending the TED talks was looking around and seeing two thousand other people who were as interested in changing the world for the better as I am. The theme of TEDxDublin 2013 was "Big Change" and that is certainly what it caused in me.

For change to happen we have to actively move towards our goals, helping each other along the way. In way that is what TED is about, it's about looking to a better future.
So here's to the future, may it be filled with promise and inspiration.
Hope you find a way to change your world, be it big or small.

See you next week,
Aoife

Mission 007: Crack the Code

Welcome to another rendition of Kate Does Wednesday, here on the COOL PEOPLE OF EVERY AND ANY NATIONALITY blog. This week we continue to reveal to the internet and the entire world how they can manipulate and destroy us. Who's idea was this again?

I'm not completely clear on what this theme means but I'll just go with it because chances are everyone else will forget to put up a blog post. I joke, of course.

I find security in not caring. Which sometimes is a really bad thing. Like if I'm getting majorly stressed out over school work I'll just stop completely and quit studying. I'll do the bare minimum required and hope that it's enough. That's where I am right now but not for the same reason. I've given up because it doesn't make sense to me that I should spend two years killing myself studying when I don't have a primary goal and I can't see what I want to do in the future. I know people say that's why you should work your hardest because maybe next year you'll decide you really want to do medicine and it'll be too late to catch up on the work. That just sounds like bullshit to me.

At the beginning of the year I was all set to spend my every last minute study for the next two years. I had no problem giving up the rest of my life but I hadn't anticipated how exhausting it would be. There is no reason for me to be so tired all the time. I don't need a trillion points because if I'm honest the only reason I was bothered trying to do well was to have bragging rights over my brother. And I know I could do better if I worked hard the next two years but....that would mean working hard the next two years. You see my dilemma? I need to figure out what I want to spend my life doing and until I do that there is no way I will be able to motivate myself to care.

My back to school enthusiasm has faded too quickly and I'm left with the reminder of how cripplingly boring the old school routine is. Early morning, hurried breakfast, locker jams, homework correction, note-taking, lecturing teachers, lunchtime cramming, class, class, class, study, homework, revision and the boredom starts again. Remind me, why did I miss this?

MISSION................................................COMPLETED? at least I wrote something I guess, even if it's barely topical.

And The Wall's Come Tumbling Down & Punishment

Hi, Aoife here.
Welcome to Saturday's post - Insecurities.

I would love to say that I don't have any and that I am strong enough to not care what others think of me but alas that is not the case. I am sure that plenty of people out there share some of my fears because after all beneath everything, we all have things that we are to afraid to show.


My biggest insecurity is that people won't accept me for who I am and that in being myself I lose the ones that I care about. I know that people would say that if someone can't accept you for who you are then they aren't real friends and I do accept that. But that does change the fact that it still hurts to lose someone who you consider a friend. I spent a lot of time when I was younger inside my own head and inside the worlds I found in books not because I was afraid of people but because I was afraid of what the thought of me. I have changed a lot since those days and gained confidence that wasn't there before. This change was mainly due to finding people who accepted me as I was and helping draw me out of myself.
School, I find tends to send me back into myself, not completely but enough to change how I view myself. Outside of school, I feel more free to be myself and act myself but in school I don't talk as much or act as impulsively.

Insecurity Number 2: Appearance
When I am talking about appearance, I don't just mean your weight, height and facial features. I mean how you conduct yourself and what you wear also. I mean we live in a consumer world where almost everything we see is influenced by the media, from the way we talk to the clothes we wear. I always feel like there is this invisible pressure to be like everyone else, to go with all the latest trends and buy branded clothes just because everyone else has. I think there is also a lot of emphasis on looking a certain way-skinny, gorgeous and more often than not, tall. I'm not very tall which doesn't bother me that much except when I am surrounded a group of much taller people, which does make me feel like they are looking down on me. I'm not very insecure but looking at rake thin models makes me so frustrated towards the influence that drove them to look like walking skeletons.

I know that I have plenty more to say about insecurities but unfortunately I am exhausted so I'm going to keep it short and sweet.
There are always things that we wish we could change, either in the world or in ourselves. However things don't just fix themselves because you want them to, you have to work for change or learn acceptance of how things are. But you should be proud of who you are because no one else in the 7 billion people on the planet in the same as you. So maybe it's in accepting ourselves as the crazy, misfits that we are that we find the strength to become something more then we were before.

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.” 
― Bernard M. Baruch
(Easy to say but hard to do)

See you next week,
Aoife

P.S: Happy Birthday to our wonderful Orla! :)

P.P.S: Punishment
My punishment for not posting last saturday was to eat a Blenderised Salad and post the pictures of my next post so here they are:

And voila: the Blenderised Salad.
Ingredients:
Half a head of lettuce,
4 tomatoes,
Sweet and Sour Sauce,
Milk (optional)
1 cooked egg

I used sweet and sour sauce because we didn't have any salad dressing and the milk is to tone down the saltiness of the sauce.

Overall Verdict:
Not terrible but I certainly don't want to drink it again.

Mission 006: For once in you life, be honest

Kate. Wednesday. Insecurities.

Danielle, I know I give you a hard time over your height sometimes but if I'm completely honest it has never felt like a big deal to me. When I think I you I don't think 'that small Asian girl'. I think of all the great things about you and of the fun we've had together. Obviously like you said, this is because I've had time to get to know you and your international-basketballer-sized personality. And I don't think I'm being overly optimistic about human kind when I say that I don't think anyone judges people based on their size. Sure, it counts for a first impression but they don't last very long, almost as soon as you learn something of the person's personality you forget their appearance. Or maybe that's just me?
Also I've totally felt the seriousness in classes this year and it's worries me a bit that I won't keep up too. It's so weird how much people have changed their views on school work.

Orla I don't know what to say to you because I can only imagine what that feels like. It think I speak for everyone here however when I say that if you ever need anything you only have to ask. Let Orla hear it guys. And then we all, in a monotone, said, "We're here for you Isaac *cough* I mean Orla."

At the moment I don't think I've ever been in a better place in my life. I have an amazing bunch of friends, I have academic goals that I can see myself achieving and I'm happier than I ever remember myself. I'm also feeling pretty confident in myself for a change, though I don't expect that will last. But this is how I've felt for most of my life:

I grew up living on the edge of things, never feeling a part of anything. I never fitted in with my 'friends' and we never had the real kind of connection that defines friendship. But never having an experience of anything else I didn't know that at the time. I didn't even realise I was unhappy with my situation until I got out of it and found something better. I tried so hard to fit in because I thought if I became like everyone else life would be much better. But it scared me. It scared me so much that I might never improve and never become 'better', that life would never become desirable and one day it would all be too much for me to bear.

This all arose from my biggest insecurity and it made me so strongly aware that there was something wrong with me that I needed to change. I've always had trouble speaking to people especially those I don't know. And yes no-one finds this easy but most people don't spend the best part of their life stressing over how they will end up alone because they are unable to talk to a single human being. Even now it terrifies me more than I can convey. I wish so badly I could find it easy to hold a conversation, even to get one sentence out with a stranger. It freaks me out so badly. It's as though there is a part of my brain that never developed and prevents me from living a normal life.

I'm not even a clingy person. I like being alone a good amount of the time and I don't need to be constantly surrounded by people. But at the mere idea of complete lonesomeness I feel sick in the pit of my stomach and my mind starts to stress out drastically.
It's more than basic shyness, it's a physical sick feeling whenever faced with social interaction of any kind. My palms get sweaty and my heart beats alarmingly. It has taken me years to gather together enough courage to even answer a teacher's question or ask my own. No matter how much I might want to talk to you sometimes my mind just can't function that way and all possible conversation freezes over in my brain.

I constantly worry that I will leave school and never make another friend. That I'll be forced to seclude myself from society to avoid a mental breakdown anytime someone speaks to me. It makes it worse when I try to understand how I made the friends I have today. You guys are the funniest, most interesting and intelligent group of people I know but I don't honestly know what I did to get you as friends. I don't suppose that there is a set method to making friends but it would be a help to at least know how it happened the first time round.

Even people in my year who I've known for the past four years of my life and seen them every school day of that time, it still takes an inhuman amount of effort to get a short conversation out. But I've lived my whole life like this so I've gotten ever so slightly better at it. I find that it's easier to talk to other people when I have friends around me and I don't know if this is because they give me more confidence which would suggest it's a psychological problem which was my opinion anyway. I don't know where it has stemmed from however because it has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. It's definitely improving though which gives me hope for the future. 

I surround myself with an air of indifference to try and convince myself that every moment of my life is not a struggle of anxiety behind my mask. To a certain extent it works, I've managed to successfully believe that I don't care about a lot of things but talking to people is not one of them. I'm constantly trying to analyse peoples actions, deciding what they think of me, do they like me, are they real or are they fake. I think I need to know how a person really sees me to feel comfortable talking to them. Which would be another factor to why it takes me a painfully long time before I can consider someone my friend. I have a lot of problems.

If the world was a wish granting factory the first and possibly only thing I would wish for myself would be to have the ability to talk freely to people. To have the liberty to decide who I want to talk to without the fear of looking like an imbecile who can't say more than two words.

MISSION...........................................................COMPLETED

Insecurities

Hello everyone it's Danielle Tuesday with your host Danielle frantic because it's 9pm and she hasn't done the rest of her homework yet because she got distracted by the internet once again. Thank feck for Study. *cheesy 90s opening sequence*

Housekeeping

Aoife and Orla, your punishments by the end of this week, yes? Failure to comply will result to another punishment. :D Try your best to document it! It should be super interesting.

I hope you're all doing okay in the first week of school. It has been quite draining for me but it totally pays off because I'm currently on top with both learning and homework and it feels good not to be panicking when there's a surpise test or when the teacher decides to ask questions around in class. Well, until tonight anyway. I gotta hurry up!

So I pretty much agree with everything that was said about last week's theme, but I totally resonated the most with Orla's post, but maybe in a different way than she inteneded? I get what you mean with worrying that you'll miss school and are going to have like 3835 years' worth of work to catch up to. I mentioned this in one of my posts in my personal blog but I really felt like something changed this year. Maybe it's just myself, that I'm more focused with my work because I have something that I want to achieve in the end of sixth year. But I also feel it in the atmosphere in the classes I'm in, and in the seriousness of people when they're inside the classroom. Is it just me? Maybe. But I think that's what's causing me to become anxious and worried in the mornings before I go to school. It's the thought of everyone upping their game and I feel like I will get left behind.

And that is a great segué for this week's theme.

Theme of the Week: Insecurities

I'm short. This isn't a secret. I've spent most of my life so far literally looking up to people to be able to hold a conversation with them. But the thing about being insecure about your height is that you can't do anything about it, which gives you equal amounts of frustration and acceptance in most days. In some days,which happens quite a lot recently I've noticed, you see and exagerrate the bad things about being short more.

So I've mentioned feeling anxious and worried because everyone is a lot more serious this year, and part of the reason why I feel sick in the mornings before I go to school is the fact that I worry that I will lose the immediate start-of-school adrenaline (the idealism stage) that I'm feeling in this first week and then totally screw everything up after like two months and then I'll have nothing to show for myself and no job and no education and a disappointment. This feeling I think gives me a taste of what college is going to be like, when everyone would probably be too smart for me too handle and no one would notice me because I'm short and insignificant and I would just, like, disappear.

It's not that I see my classmates as competition. It's not that at all. I've analysed myself and I've come to the conclusion that the reason why I have a "big" personality and I try and maintain good grades (apart from the fact that my parents would murder me if I don't) is because I'm trying to compensate for my height.

Hahahahahahaha. That sounds ridiculous, I know.

But it makes sense in my head. That maybe if I'm good at what I do no one would notice that I'm half a feet shorter than they are. It's a great motivation, actually. But it's also sad, especially when meeting people for the first time. You may have noticed that I'm a lot quieter around people I don't know and I think that's because I'm a lot more aware of how short I am and they don't know me yet so they can't look over the height and see the loud mouth yet. You know? Probably not.

And that's why I'm scared of college.

I guess all of this boils down to "not being good enough." I have a problem with wanting to be the good if not the best at everything and I guess that's what made me a Slytherin, but I have standards set for myself, and whenever I fail to reach those standards, I take the blow so hard that I feel a sick feeling in my stomach and I curl myself into a ball and cry because in my mind, without the things that I'm good at, I'm nothing. I realise that this is mentality is wrong. I know that. But that doesn't stop me from thinking it. Because when I'm in that hole of insecurity, no quotes or words from other people or compliments would get me out of it. I just gotta stay there until I'm not there anymore. 

You guys my father is now knocking at my there and I don't have time to proofread or change this anymore so some things may come across as not what I meant, but I'll try and correct it all next week.

-Danielle

Back to School - A Three Stage Process

There are generally three stages to my back to school experience:

1. Idealism
2. Loathing
3. Realism

Idealism is the stage immediately before school starts that continues for the first week or so (it's over for me now). The end of the first weekend usually brings it to a close. This stage is characterised by ambitious goals and resolutions, general optimism and a miss-placed belief that "School isn't so Bad". It is. School is Bad.

Loathing is where I crash too after the high of idealism. The realities of school hit me, perhaps a little too hard and I gain a deep seated belief that "I hate School". Interestingly enough, my standard of work never really drops perceptibly between these stages, which may tell you something about where my motivation comes from. This stage is characterised by complaints and bad-humour, general despair and a miss-placed belief that "School is Bad from Top to Bottom, Devoid of Good." It isn't. It had good points.

Realism is the stage I have not yet reached this year, the stage I spend most of most school years in (4th year was a bad year. I reverted back to Loathing pretty quickly and stayed there. Not fun). In this stage, I am aware of the good and bad points of school and am able to look at them more or less objectively and reach a conclusion that "School is Manageable". Which it is. This stage is characterised by complaints and realistic goals, a level enough mind-set and the realistic (I think) belief that "School is Manageable" and it's going to be fine.

Anyway, on a less joke-y note, (WARNING: this gets kind of dark and serious) the thing that's worrying me most about this year isn't the school work. I generally find that easy enough, if time consuming. It isn't the people. I've got enough friends to be able to not care about everyone else. It isn't the exams. I find those easy too, and they're ages away.
No. What's worrying me is myself. I used to have a whole awful lot of faith in myself and in my ability to deal with the everyday grind of life, and school, and silly teachers and homework and all the rest. Sure, why wouldn't I? I'm a Good Student. I get good grades. Of course I can manage everything about school. All the time.
Then 4th year happened. And shit hit the fan. And all sorts of Not Fun things were going on and I couldn't deal.
And how I'm worried. It worries me every morning.
You can miss days and miss work and space out in class in TY and no one really notices or cares, especially if you're a Good Student who can bluff pretty well. But not in 5th year. If I miss a day this year, I'm going to know all about it. Not just from my parents, but it'd be a lot of work catching up. I can't afford to let it happen again.
But knowing what I know, I know it's not a choice. People don't choose to quietly fall apart inside their heads, completely ignorant of how to put themselves back together. That's not a choice. And I don't know what choices would lead to that happening again.
So here I am, trying to avoid something bad happening. But I don't know what causes it, except in broad strokes. And I sure as hell don't know how to avoid it happening again.
It's like living your life bare-foot. Having a bare-foot mind. You have to step carefully and slowly all the time in case you step on something sharp and awful and Not Good. I have to step carefully in my mind when I'm trying to get something done. I have to think about it enough that it'll get done, but not so much that it'll stress me about and make me feel sick and won't get done.
It's a tricky business. 

So, yeah, school. I'm really hoping this year is going to be okay. I'm hoping Loathing won't last too long, because I'm not sure I'll be able to stick it for much longer.