Come on, give me the chills

Thoughts about changing, life, and whatever comes to mind.

Author: Andrea Grassi

  • getting your life back after a trauma

    There’s a friend of mine. She became quite sad lately because she got hit by life itself in its full majesty.

    There’s no denying it that in situations like this it’s easy to fall behind. To lose the way, to get lost.

    But how do you save yourself?
    How do you avoid the trap?

    Years ago I might’ve said: Willpower.
    And that would be only part of the truth.

    Today I’d say: Faith.
    Not blind faith, but hope and faith. Faith in something that you can’t define nor expect.
    Faith in the future, faith in the fact that there’s something to be done and this is only a part of the price you have to pay to achieve it.

    You might not even know what’s the goal, but having faith is a good step forward.
    A trauma will always leave scars, it will leave you speechless and powerless, and that’s why only faith can help you.

    Willpower isn’t enough because in those moments it is willpower that’s missing.
    Therefore you need something that doesn’t play in the same league and by the same rules.
    Something extraordinary, something out of the context.
    Faith.

  • if it ain’t hard, you’re not working on yourself

    Improving yourself means starting to question your behaviour and improve it.
    If it’s easy, then you’re not really making a deep change but mostly a superficial change that might not last at all.

    If it’s hard, really hard, then you’re hitting the right points. It’s hard because you’re questioning the behaviour, your willpower, your interests.

    Modern world has taught us that there are sooo many nice things to have, but how many of them are really a necessity? We’re flooded by things we buy and keep in our closed.
    Flooded by messages to be who we really are (and we don’t really know who, truth to be told).

    It’s hard to balance all this, to give up on the “normal” way.
    We think most things are expensive, but some are not, yet we ignore them anyway.

    The way you live, the way it’s yours.
    It’s hard, and it should be, to give up on the old behaviour. Its yours, it feels like you.
    So denying it is like refusing to be yourself.

    But that is not yourself. That which you see is the result of many years of conditioning and it doesn’t mean that you’re a totally different person (well… who knows). It means that there’s a lot to be done and that working on you requires time and discipline, requires understanding the real needs and priorities, requires giving up on the surplus, on the useless that we think we need.

    Give up on trash. Live more, own less.

  • june 2016 monthly checkup

    June was a strange month, seriously.
    I got to be very unstable and forgot many days to write, sometimes I felt almost powerless and without any will.

    It was bad, honestly, but from all of this I learned a lot. I learned about patience and tenacity, I learned that even in the worst case scenario we can do something good and I learned that stable relationships are the key to well-being.

    That said, I wrote something, and the things I liked the most were

    Re-reading what I wrote made me realize a few things.

    1. Even though I didn’t write much, I expected less quality, but somewhat got again some decent writing.
    2. I was pretty stressed

    These monthly checkups are the perfect moment to pause and reflect and it amaze me how much useful they are.
    I am on the way to the 500 posts and find that this has helped me a lot in many ways, both human and technical.

  • the big crash

    Today I got hit. Not by a real crash, but from a situation I couldn’t in any way foresee.

    One of the worst situation.

    Now, in these cases you don’t have that much left. You wonder what will be left of you, what happens and what chances do you have to fix it.

    Shit happens, it always will.
    My idea about this is to make the best we can do and take deep breaths so that you keep treating everyone in the same way as you used to.

  • the things you forget and leave behind

    There are memories that you forget, that you leave behind. Memories that after a while become “a thing of the past”.

    They are no more relevant, of no interest.
    You changed, and they are part of something that doesn’t belong to you.

    Ex’s are a great example of that. There is a time when you feel you can’t get past your broken love story, but then you do, and you go forward.
    And if you have the chance to notice how much did you forget you realize that this whole thing became part of your past, not your present.

    On the other side there are things that linger. I can’t say it differently.
    Things that stays with you in the night, like horror movies, things that pull out the worst of you even if you don’t know.
    Like broken walls in a house, like creeps in your heart.
    The less you have, the better.

    If they stays with you, then it’s time for you to think about why you’re letting them.
    I have a dear friend who still thinks about a relationship of a long time ago. Too much time to justify this lingering.

    He didn’t move on, at least from my perspective, and it’s blocked into a story when he can’t win because he let this feeling stay with him.

    Don’t linger. Move.