The Only Advice I’m Ever Comfortable Giving

I’ve talked about all sorts of things, whether on my blog or in person, or in chats with people or hell even to myself when no one else listens. And over the course of my short life, I’ve given a lot of advice. Some of it I was certainly not the appropriate person to give it, and some of it I was the only person who could give it. Regardless, a lot of people have followed that advice, whatever it may be, and it hasn’t always gone well.

In fact, one of the reasons I tend to avoid giving writing advice despite being a writer with like a novel, is because of the concept of advice. Probably not what you were expecting me to say, unless you’ve read some of my other posts where I talk a lot about concepts of stuff.

You see, I am a person, someone who has gone through some points of life, and enough to create a series of biases. The biases aren’t necessarily bad, they are just biases that help me sort through shit loads of information, like a filter. These biases or ‘experiences’ that I’ve encountered and the wisdom of gained about myself and knowledge I gained about others are all things that are, no matter what, particular to my universe.

My universe is the way I perceive the world, everyone has a different one, and in essence your universe is these biases that you create from your experiences. So it’s certainly clear that no matter who you are, you will not experience everything there is in the world within your short lifespan. That’s not a bad thing, it’s the very reason that makes us unique. It’s why I’ve lauded that immortal beings would be incredibly boring unless they had some kind of ‘experience wipe’ frequently because they would all be the same. But, because you won’t experience everything out there, you might have one or two experiences that are KINDA the same as others, like at the most general level.

Like you have eaten ice cream. Someone else has eaten ice cream (not me). You both had that general experience, but the act of eating the ice cream is only a piece of the experience that has forever placed a bias in your brain. You could have eaten your ice cream with your uncle who had sexually assaulted you when you were younger and ever since you managed to confront that massive ordeal you have always hated ice cream, but before then you loved ice cream because you internalized that was something good your uncle had done for you. Another person could be completely indifferent to ice cream because they never had it as a ‘reward’ as a kid, it was just another food to eat.

That’s just adding in one other factor besides ice cream and it’s already complicated as hell, imagine how each one of the unique experiences you go through completely shapes your unique bias. Then imagine coming up with something to say to someone in the form of advice that will manage to overlap with every other person in the world.

There is none.

Well, almost. There are a couple actually and there is one in particular that comes from my immense bias and it is in fact the only advice I am ever comfortable actually giving someone despite the fact that it is the advice I have given the least.

Find the stuff in your life that brings you down

Then overcome it, while reaping the benefits.

That’s it. And that piece of advice is the most general I could ever get with it. And I’ve rattled around with what words to use and what I should say about it. But when it comes down to it. Through the course of my life, if there was ever one lesson I had nailed into my head repeatedly by ME it was this.

I feel like I do need to put some perspective to this though.

I’ve had asthma my whole life. MY WHOLE LIFE. I was on a respirator since I was a baby and had never been good at breathing. You could say I was born without rhythm in my body, the rhythm that comes from a steady beat of breathing. For the first twelve years of my life, I believed I just couldn’t do that much physically because I couldn’t breathe well. That I shouldn’t exercise, that I shouldn’t play games, that I needed to stay away from cats that made things worse.

Until I took a choir class. I couldn’t read a note to save a cat’s life, but I had one thing, I had an awesome Soprano voice. Which is odd, since a higher voice actually uses up more air. But it started with singing, I started learning to control my breathing with singing. And before long I was holding those high notes and doing what was largely impossible considering everyone thought I was a boy, a boy in a school with all the other boys who had at least started puberty.

Eventually I completely lost my singing voice when my voice eventually did drop, and practically over night. But the thing I didn’t lose… my breathing control. In fact when my singing voice died out, the first thing I did was started running track. Yeah, a person with a serious case of asthma running track. This was when I started to realize though that asthma wasn’t bringing me down. It never had brought me down. Asthma was a way of training me. You see, even before the singing having asthma you sometimes LITERALLY have to fight for every breath you can get. By having asthma I learned to use my oxygen in the most optimal way that I could, because I was taking in significantly less than others around me. I HAD to learn.

But it wasn’t until singing, and then track and eventually cat ownership exposure, that I realized I had this super power. That by having this asthma which I was always blaming before, I actually had a finer degree of breath control than most professional singers had. The only thing I had to learn was that my asthma wasn’t the problem. It was me that was the problem. I had just given up and accepted that I couldn’t do things because of the asthma when really I could do things BETTER. It just took WORK.

And this isn’t the only thing too. I suffered through the same thing with a reading disorder and now I review books. This was my dyslexia, which you can still see in the books and pieces I write because when I write I say the words out loud in my head, which makes me write like I would talk, and because of dyslexia I have a tendency of using a word that sounds very similar to another word AS that word. That doesn’t stop me from writing though, and even better, it lets me see words in an entirely new light. Because of my phonological dysfunction I don’t take words at face value, I make new ones and give old ones new definitions and because of this I’m not grounded by what a word MUST be. I’m only grounded by what the language offers me.

This phenomenon is not something only I’ve been through. I’ve run across many others that have battled through something everyone else called a serious ‘disease’ or ‘dysfunction’ when it’s really just a super power masked as a hardship. A hardship that has to be DESTROYED before that super power shines through.

And it doesn’t stop at just illnesses or cognitive functions. Anything in your life that is bringing you down can be destroyed so that the super power, the benefit, can shine through. But it can only be done with work, it will be tough to overcome it and it will require work, so much of it, but there is nothing more satisfying than running a god damn 5k when you could barely walk a mile without passing out a few years ago.

It WILL be tough. And overcoming it will take so much strength, strength you never thought you had. And even more time, time you DEFINITELY have. But here’s the thing. Even if you don’t have some disorder, or there’s no one in your way, and you can reach everything you are going for… you need to overcome one thing. Because everyone needs to overcome this one thing.

Yourself.

YOU are the greatest thing in your life that is bringing you down. And only you can change that. Only you can overcome it. And when you learn to overcome yourself, you will learn that the only limitations on you and your life, are the ones you make.

So stop making them.