Michón Neal's Blog, page 38

Writing Saved My Life

My stories are…unique. They read like dreams and cover vastly divergent topics. Yet somehow, there are strong core threads that link many of them together, weaving one through another like twining branches on the tree of my artistic ability. The first series I ever wrote is called The Black Tree and it has become a symbol of the entirety of my writing and my life in general. I was barely a teenager and bored in the classroom (I was ahead of the curve). I had so much turmoil burning me from the inside out, so much pain and no outlet.

One day, while journaling for class, I started a story about a girl who discovered she was an alien and set off into space to help her parents end an intergalactic war. Over the years, I poured the entirety of my overactive imagination, my pain and my hopes, and my questions about life into the pages I wrote. The trunk of the Black Tree series bloomed into branches and leaves and the roots burrowed deeper into my soul. Slowly, as I created safe worlds for me to fall into and explore I began to heal.

I learned who I was, and I no longer wanted to die. Though it is raw, I decided that other people out there who were struggling needed a voice. When I learned I could self-publish it was like sunlight shining through my leaves. My stories were rather unusual and I doubted a traditional publisher would take on the challenge of making it available. Now my tree has been planted in a fertile soil and I hope and wish that others will water it and watch it grow with me.

My author page (with information on all of the places you can find my books) is on Goodreads:

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4539313.Mich_n_Neal

I don't want a cheaper and weaker iPhone!

Reblogged from Globalization & Capitalism:

I read today’s article”A Low-Priced iPhone Awaits” in the Wall Street Journal with disappointment.  For some reason, it has become widespread for people to think that “successful products = low price” and that “happy costumers = low price“.

While those affirmations are truth I consider them to be only partially truth.

I want to bring into consideration the fact that it is not only “

Read more… 411 more words

An interesting look at consumer products and lazy companies. This is one very real example of veneer culture. The thinking is that as long as something looks good and is "affordable"then it has worth. If you want something to last, it takes work, effort, and a cost. My partner and I have this saying: "cheap now just means you finish paying for it later." It's true of relationships, it's true of art, and it's true of goods and services.

Heard and Understood

The fear of death is basically fear of life, because only life can die. If you are afraid of death, you will be afraid of life. If you are afraid of falling down, you will be afraid of rising up, because only a wave that rises falls back. If you are afraid of being rejected you will become afraid, afraid to approach any body. If you are afraid of being rejected, you will become incapable of love. Afraid of death, you become incapable of life. Then you live just for the name’s sake, and only miseries, darkness, and night surround you.”

- Osho

We’ve all had disagreements. We’ve all had times where we’ve just needed to talk and for someone to just listen. We’ve all had times where we’ve let the conversation be about us instead of the problem. Sometimes people just become so frustrated and discussion becomes highly unproductive. In fact, in many relationships arguing and impasses appear to be a normal occurrence. Many help articles and advice operate by talking about “when this happens” instead of if. It may surprise you then, that my partner and I have rarely ever fought.

There was only one time where I raised my voice to my partner. There was only one time where I felt moved to the point of violence. However, the rest of the time we simply manage to talk everything through in even tones. Perhaps this is because we are both naturally quiet folk. Maybe it’s because we’ve been sure to carve out our own well-defined corners. A lot of it is because a few weeks into our relationship we both decided that all communication would resolve around two things: being heard and understood.

Heard and understood is just what it sounds like yet it results in such wonderful outcomes. Focusing on hearing and understanding lets the focus center on the problem, issue, or topic without having conversation devolve into bickering and personal attacks. The fear of speaking up melts away because you are engaging and living instead of hiding and worrying. Communication becomes the process that it is instead of a battle to send out as many words as possible.

It is all about the give and take. Heard and understood is an active process. It requires you to be aware, to be open, and to be realistic. Often, being self-conscious means that seek to spare ourselves or others. We end up making judgments that aren’t accurate. But really, you learn just how resilient you can be. The world doesn’t end, there isn’t a grand tragedy if you disagree, and actual understanding takes place.

Do you have your own form of heard and understood? What fears creep into your conversations with others? What ideas about sex and gender play into the way you communicate with men, women, and the rest of us? Who do you know that communicates clearly and listens well? What do they do to make the process smooth? Who do you know who argues all of the tinge and rarely gets anything done? In what ways can you exemplify a kinder way to communicate?

The Changing of Allison Dutch

I am in the process of reprinting my first two books and printing the last book (in this series, not period) for the first time. If you don’t know, I am the author of the Allison Dutch series. The first book is called The Changing of Allison Dutch and follows the start of Allie’s dark adventure into the vampire world. I can guarantee it’s like nothing you’ve read before. It’s random, it’s deep, and I think it’s rather funny. Most of all, it’s crazy and a lot of the characters are insane. It also ties into another series I will be making available this year called The Black Tree series. Anyway, the link to the reprint of The Changing of Allison Dutch is below. All of my books tend to deal with heavy issues, so please use discretion. If you appreciate dark, humorous, fantastical tales of growth, healing, and humor then you might like it. Ok, official plugging done. https://www.createspace.com/4103959?ref=1147694&utm_id=6026

Non-primary partners tell: How to treat us well

Reblogged from SoloPoly:

Recently a poly friend observed, “There are no secondary people. Be careful how you treat everyone in relationships.”

…Fine, but how do you actually pull that off? Where’s the list of what to do?

I decided to take on this challenge, with help from SoloPoly readers and many others in the poly/open community. Here’s why:

Read more… 4,635 more words

I'm posting this for my friend, Seattlepolychick and for myself and others who could could use this information. Many of my characters are poly and I can only wish that they behaved so well as outlined here. I hope my stories show both the light and dark sides of relationships in general and poly ones as well. This is just such solid advice, whether or not one is poly. People are human. :)

Can You Measure an Education? Can You Define Life’s Meaning? | The Creativity Post

The educational divide. I always detested the idea that children are empty shells to be filled with unintegrated facts. I was a high achiever academically but it meant next to nothing to me because my actual life sucked so bad. I drew into myself and began learning on my own. I find my own meaning and only then felt a true sense of accomplishment and worth. All of life is an opportunity to learn and that attitude has done more for me than rote learning. Perhaps one day my dream for a Life Academy will come true. This article is a good one to foster critical discussion of the role of education and possible changes for it. http://www.creativitypost.com/education/can_you_measure_an_education_can_you_define_lifes_meaning

Rage Quitting and Digging Deeper

If any of you are gamers or there, you may be familiar with the term “rage quitting.” For those of you who don’t know, this is done when a person quits a match (in a video game) because they are losing. They get angry and they quit. When they are playing online against other people, it can result in everyone being kicked off the hosting console. They then have to start all over again, hopefully with different players. There are many videos mocking the rage quitter on Youtube and the like. There is one place, however, where rage quitters exist and not many seem to mind.

This is real life, and many people rage quit every day. Whenever something doesn’t go their way they give up. At the first sign of a challenge they retreat. The most common depiction of success is that gained by fortune, by fate, by God, by anything other than human agency. The problem with this is that good things in life become random, we are left coveting what another has and hoping that they lose it so we can gain it, and fulfilling work becomes arduous. The biggest tragedy is that those that push forward, those who understand that true success is a process, those who acknowledge that agency is what leads to fulfillment are usually the ones who find gold.

See, that second group of people are the ones willing to dig into the dirt and grime. They are willing to look at the dust inside of their mind and explore until they find diamonds and gold. The mind reflects the outer world; it has caves, earth, oceans, and more. It has buried metals, treasures, and beauty. Yet the mind is one of the most widely ignored assets in this culture. We are told all the time to look outside at the expense of the inside which results in materialism at the expense of value, objectivication instead of self-worth, and mere existence instead of quality of life.

The rage-quitters are the ones sounding the loudest voice in our culture. They pervade tv shows, books, songs, and media attention. The rage-quitter encourages us to give up as well, to waste life waiting for everything to fall in place, to never dig deep enough into our own mind to uncover the riches within.

Those who manage to break off this habit are free to find treasures. The mind may be covered in the dust of everyday thoughts yet underneath the surface there are ancient temples of creativity. There are sinkholes and avalanches of negative emotions and bad memories yet just around the curve of the mountain there are caves of love and rivers of healing. How do I know this? It’s what I found.

I dug through the layers of my mind. I dug through the hungering topsoil. I dug through the clay of painful memories. I fell into the underground mama chamber of self-defeating thoughts. I uncovered an ocean of unending love. I dug out pure diamond caves of creative ideas. I found a sky full of stars that lit my path to healing.

I discovered blueprints for the tools I needed to change the landscape. I became more productive. I became more compassionate. I sharpened my ability to reason. I opened up the chest of my self-worth and found it boundless. The urge to rage-quit, the automatic desire to take the “easy way out”, the mind-numbing action of shutting down just wasn’t there. I felt light as wings took me to the heights of my creativity, I knew freedom from the burden of memory and other’s opinions, I grew roots in reality, I rounded out my rough edges as I learned and loved myself.

This is the same thing that happened to the greats, to those who quietly and simply make their lives grand, to those whose effects stretch across time. I can only dream about making even a fraction as much difference. I can hope and do my best to help others in their own process. Please don’t rage quit. Dig deeper. Buried beneath the ugliest, most dangerous parts of yourself I bet there is a much larger world that is pure and open and fantastic. Evan Sanders said that “the brighter the light the darker the shadow”. There’s a reason that those who’ve been through the hardest end up finding or creating the best.

The darkness doesn’t necessarily have to be personal or painful or damaging. Sometimes darkness can mean the work you put in, the many times you fail, or the time you miss doing fun things. Darkness isn’t a bad negative, rather it’s the cost of whatever it is you want to do. I’ll go more into that in another entry.

When you see rage-quitting either in yourself or another find out if you need to dig deeper. Pick at it until it is just rubble. Find the nugget of gold that lies hidden: a truth, an asset, a different thought.

Transformation

“I believe there’s a common ground in what all gifted writers write. It has to do with their wish to turn darkness into light.”

~ Mandy Patinkin -Entertainer

I was given a little nugget of wisdom by a friend years ago that life must always be equal, and that when the sun comes up, it also must go down. I feel like many struggle with this idea and expect it to be sunny all the time. However, once you can start grasping onto the idea that there is a natural up and down of life…you can start looking deeper into how do we continue moving forward even during the dark times. We must learn to steer our ship by the stars. Because the stars are there for a reason. No matter how dark the night, the stars give you the ability to stay on course.-repost from Evan Sander’s entry (The Stars)

The first quote just affirmed a very literal process I have my characters go through. In “The Legacy of Allison Dutch” my character Queen Aeryn does the opposite: she turns the beautiful light into darkness. This is significant because in a book (series) that will be out later she’ll be contrasted with a main character that seeks to turn darkness into light (hint: it’s me).

Next year I plan on publishing my very first series. As in the one I wrote first, the one I started way back when I was 12. It’s pretty rough, missing a few installments, and I’m fixing up what I can but that’s not the point I want to make here. The point is that I have to publish it. In many ways that series is my literal journey into my own mind.

My life was fairly rough back then (I won’t elucidate further in this entry, perhaps another day I will) and writing was my escape and eventually my salvation. It was my philosophical playground, my safe space to all questions, play with the universe, and come to new conclusions. It details my journey from darkness into light. That theme would come to permeate all of my works.

Evan Sanders posted the first quote in the same entry that I linked to above. I have been absolutely nervous about publishing this particular series because it is so personal, so revealing, and so painful. I’ve been extremely tempted not to go through with it. However, due to a dear friend of mine and those two quotes above, I know that I must do it.

It is my honest truth about my journey and I wrote it in the hopes that at least one other person could see a reflection of their own life and know that it was not over. In a previous post I came out in as many ways as I could stand (The Loudest Voice). I am such a minority in so many ways. I wanted to write to others who found no representation in the mainstream. People like me, whom others found a reason to hate seemingly no matter what.

Next year is a big year for me. First I have to let go of this fear Dune-style and just get it done. It gets a little easier every day. It also gets easier to know I am not the only one.

P.S. A strange synchronicity just occurred while I was writing this. No More Drama by Mary J. Blige just came on. That was one of my power songs when I felt alone. It was my anthem when I first started to change my life around. It means a lot to me and yet I haven’t listened to it in years. The strange coincidence that it would be playing now of all times I will take as a sign to follow the path I’m on.

Helpful Illusions

Our minds are constantly tricking us. They are filled with lies and distortions. Our memories are faulty, optical illusions fool us, and our vision (and other senses) can actually change depending on our beliefs. However, there is hope. In fact, many illusions are crucial to our ability to function.

What if I told you there was no such thing as color? Or that as more time passes, your memory becomes more distorted? Or that you can alter your body temperature through hypnotism or meditation?

Context is everything. Our brains operate by developing stories about our environment. Our brains are all about relationships. Color is the experience of the relationship between the amount and direction of light to an object in the environment. Optical illusions are mostly about the distance and shape of objects, the object’s relation to your body in space. You’re body temperature is a measurement of the relationship between the speed of your molecules to those of the air around you.

Every experience, ever memory, every sensation is illusory. It doesn’t actually happen. Instead most illusions are just stories. Experience is a process of relation. It is rooted in the context we develop through experimentation, learning, and thinking.

As I’ve said before, nothing exists in a complete vacuum. The human brain cannot conceive of anything in true isolation. This is why we have random thoughts, it’s why quanta are so difficult to measure in more than one way at once, it’s why even silence has a sound.

We are creatures that can learn by relation. We compare, contrast, puzzle, break apart, reassemble, analyze, solve, and do much more. All of these abilities require context. Context is the relationship of one or more objects, ideas, or persons to one another. It is a pull on the web of the universe. It has a connection to everything else, no matter how tenuous. Luckily, we can ignore the effect of context after a certain point.

Please let me know if this makes sense and if I need to explain more clearly. Think about the context of your life and all of the illusions it creates. Which illusions do your find useful and which are more tenuous? Think of people with different sense levels: do you feel like dead or bound people are missing out because their ways of twisting to the world are different? What about people with other modes of experience: the bullied, the praised, the abused, the joyful, etc? Do you feel better about your mind or worse?

Real vs Familiar

 

 

American culture appears to be largely a culture of nostalgia. There is talk of idolized “good ole days”, a return to “traditional values”, and some warped desire to gain one’s childhood back. Yet the people that truly change the world, the ones who make a difference and are the most productive deal mostly in what is real. They give familiarity merely a passing glance as they study reality as it is and not as what they wish it to be.

Nostalgia becomes damaging when it begins to overshadow the world as it is. A longing for the past or to change the past amounts to a denial of it and an inability to make use of the present. The past is gone and so can only be reinterpreted, but only with the information you gain in the present! Your brain cannot tell the difference between what it remembers and what it presently sees so if all you see is regret or some idealized version of what happened before then you will find it very difficult to effect useful change or growth. The other funny thing about memory is that it doesn’t remain the same, no matter how hard we try. It always warps slightly to fit in with whatever we believe. History at large neglects the deeper narratives. It presents only whichever voices were not erased, or suppressed, or utterly destroyed. There is no such thing as the “good ole days”. Each point in time has its own share of problems, ignorance, and dreams.

We can only ever really change our feelings about the past; we can not as of yet change it (unless backward time travel is figured out). The only moment we have in which to act is now. We build meaning into our futures by beginning with plans that start right at this moment. When the past or the future cease to have a meaningful connection with the present, it is easy to become lost in quagmires of illusion. What ought to have been or what ought to be cease to have a ground in reality because the present is not acknowledged. The most efficient and well-rounded people pay the most attention to the current moment, which is nothing more than taking account of reality as it is. Any dream you have, any goal that you set for yourself, any feelings that need healing or development need some tie to that which is.

Many people seem to run into brick walls of their own making. They cannot move past something that happened, they can’t get over someone they loved, they cannot move forward with new ideas because the past has become a monolith. It doesn’t even matter if the memory is good or bad; it still has the potential to mess with creativity, innovation, growth. Even kind and good folk fall into the trap of the familiar. It is a choice to be made. The familiar is what is remembered and known, the real is what is discovered and planned. These two modes of living produce very different results. Science and art is often rooted in the latter, in the real. Hollywood movies (and television, popular music) and politics are rooted in the former, in the familiar.

Each of these living modes logically produces in kind. If you choose the familiar you will likely usually find more of the same, find it harder to try new things, and your fears will hold you back. If you choose the real you will usually discover something new, create something deep, and your fears are noted and surpassed. It is not evil to only live with the familiar. It just takes a much longer time to work through any problem. The familiar becomes a distraction in a lot of cases instead of merely being information or experience to draw on. It creates an impossibility when it is no longer tied to reality or current circumstances. When the image becomes louder than actuality (or eventuality) the only purpose it can result in is distortion.

Think about what is familiar to you? How is it holding you back? How is it informing your decisions? Why are you attached to a certain memory or a certain time? Why do you think that in the present or future you won’t feel the same or differently? Who do you admire? Do they make decisions based on the real or the familiar? How is that working for them? How is it working for you? In what ways can you balance the familiar with the real?