The Storm Before The Calm   3/14/18

In my life it has always seemed that just when I make up my mind to master a personal change, as they say more “shit” hits the fan.  I chose a difficult career and occupation at least for about four months of each year.  The rest of my year, work is not too bad, but from February through May it’s a bear.  I am a tax accountant and it’s a job where a tsunami of work arrives with a deadline and lots of rules and regulations that change at the last minute or when you don’t know it or have the time to learn it.  A job that deals with people’s monies and potential penalties, a job where people of course want to pay the lowest amount of tax and agencies trying to squeeze every penny out of their constituents.  It’s a job with a lot of pressure, when you have to be focused, very accurate and you have to get a lot done in a little bit of time.  You get tired, things slip through the cracks and sometimes you make mistakes and screw up and there’s the stress of that, especially when people have to pay more money and there’s penalties.  At that time, I hate my job.  I beat myself up, how did I screw up.  It’s what I call “tax season hell”.

So last year I had six months or so of being successful with my healthy eating diet and losing a fair amount of weight.  I thought I had locked in my new habits of eating enough to withstand tax season stress and my usual go to relieve stress of alcohol and sweets.  Wrong, a lifetime of that kind of go to doesn’t change with six months of a good diet.  And so I’m not only beating myself up for things that go wrong during my work day, I’m beating myself up for failing on my eating plan and starting to gain some weight again.

I had realized a month ago that I had not dealt with my negative emotions when I had done my diet and I had started on a personal development plan to change and help me manage my stress levels better. But it’s kind of hard to change horses in mid-stream as they say.  In the middle of tax season, it seems hard to start a personal development change plan, but maybe that’s exactly when it should start.  I fail but I see what’s happening.  So right now it seems things have gotten worse and the only positive is the awareness I have developed of my internal dialogue and  over reacting to events that happen.  I guess that’s a positive and maybe when my stress calms down in a month or so I can work the rest of this year on my negative emotions and get back on the healthy eating plan.   And I will get tested again and again, maybe next year I will handle things better.

My husband says I’m way better than when I was younger and more unaware as my bad moods back then went on for weeks and months.  It’s hard for me to remember exactly how I used to be, but I vaguely do.  Now many times I catch myself being in a bad mood but not wanting to bring that to my family and I don’t.  I also see myself sometimes starting to worry about a disease and I’m able to stop it and I say to myself you know you usually over react. 

I was reading on the Personal Development site, neprov.com, that many times the struggle intensifies as the change starts happening.  I am seeing things more clearly than ever.  Sometimes now when I start being a hypochondriac, I maybe don’t even really care so much about a disease or death.  I think, oh well maybe it’s not so bad to be out of here I wouldn’t be dealing with this or that anymore.  I also see some negative things I used to want to do and now I don’t enjoy it anymore.  I think tonight I would like to watch the news and I turn it on and then everyone starts yelling and being negative and I turn it off.  Or, I go on Facebook and I see nobody’s really doing much of anything interesting or productive.  They just post silly comments or pictures of ordinary lives, nothing intellectual or spectacular or that interesting.  I used to like to see what the belly dance community was doing as that seems like a lot of fun.  I will see a video of a belly dancer in a restaurant and she’s dancing away and hardly anyone is watching.  The dance and her costume may be pretty but gets boring and monotonous very quickly.  Then I listen to music people have created or lyrics they have written, again a few good ones but mostly fairly amateur.  But maybe all this is just a reflection of my mind and now at a different space and level than your every day Jane.

I read about Buddha yesterday, very interesting a person who had everything in this world.  Wealth, fame, the best food, clothing, he wanted for nothing and was in line to be the next Emperor.  At a certain age I believe he was in his twenties he saw the suffering in the world and realized even he wasn’t happy with everything he had.  The material things and even people you have or acquire in this world does not make you happy.  We see this so many times when musicians or Hollywood people become rich and famous and they slowly kill themselves with alcohol and drugs.  They have finally made it and they have everything, but they are miserable.  The external world does not make you happy.

So what makes you have a happy, peaceful, contented life?  The internal work has to be done, you have to deal with your deficiencies and negative emotions.  Unhappiness comes from our reactions within, not from what happens outside ourselves.  It’s not easy, it’s a lot of work but it has to be done or things remain the same.  We were not born to be the way we are and we are not locked in our personalities.  It’s not because we are a virgo that we act the way we do. 

I can see that changes are starting to happen from things that were seeped in negativity that I no longer enjoy doing (watching the evening news).  I can see things about my own internal negative reactions that must change.  It’s starting to happen, but right now it seems worse because I see it more clearly.

I’m in the storm before the calm.