Blood Letters

The other day I found an interesting post on the art of bloodletters called Hack Yourself. It’s all about changing your life to make it what you want of it, and deciding to give up the pastime of assigning blame to others for what’s wrong in your life. I do firmly believe there’s value trying to figure out the causes of your behavior from your past, but I also believe you need to use that information to move past the events and into a solution. The point of figuring out that you do X because you’re unconsciously copying your parents’ behaviors isn’t so you can blame your parents for the fact that you do X—it’s so that you can become more aware of that behavior, understand that there isn’t a good reason why you’re engaging in it, and work to change it. It’s also so that you can then look at the rest of your behaviors, hold them up next to those of your parents, and figure out what else you’re doing that you don’t like and didn’t realize you were doing, then change that too.

As the author of “Hack Yourself” says,

You don’t exist.

You just think you do.

We’re nothing but the stories we tell ourselves. We know in our hearts what kind of people we are, what we’re capable of, because we’ve told ourselves what kind of people we are. You’re a carefully-rehearsed list of weaknesses and strengths you’ve told yourself you have.

(Self-confidence, for example, is a particularly nebulous quality you can easily talk yourself out of having.)

You owe no allegiance to that self-image if it harms you. If you don’t like the story your life has become — tell yourself a better one.

Think about the person you want to be and do what that person would do. Act the way that person would act.

Amazingly enough, once you start acting like that person, people will start treating you like that person.

And you’ll start to believe it. And then it will be true.

Welcome to your new self.

Go there and read the whole piece; it’s a good one. Then pick something you tend to dwell on and resolve to move forward instead of continuing to worry about blame. Is it easy? No. Is it possible? Yes, and entirely worth doing.

In unrelated news, we’ve moved all of the old website over, and all the redirects are in place! This battlestation is fully operational! Now I just need to go around finding folks who link to us and asking them nicely to update their links. [*falls over exhausted*]

Edited to add: I know I haven’t reviewed much kitchenware lately, but today I reviewed the Rival hot air popcorn popper.