AN OPEN INVITATION: SHARE YOUR STORY, THOUGHTS, OPINIONS...

The Writer by Richard Baumgart

UPDATE

As I am no longer updating my blog, I will no longer be posting stories.  Thanks so much for your past submissions.

I regularly receive many thought-provoking comments and stories from many of my readers, so I've decided to open up my blog and share some of them with you.

If you have a story or opinion you'd like to share, or issue you'd like to raise, about eating disorders, depression, pro ana, etc., please forward it to me, granting me permission to post it.

If you have a picture or photo that's meaningful to you that you'd like posted with your story, please send it along to me. It can be a photo (or photos) of yourself or, if you're uncomfortable with that, just a picture that you like (an inspirational photo, etc.).

My e-mail address is ...

I can't promise I'll post every submission as I receive hundreds of e-mails weekly. I hope you'll understand.


To start things off, below is a comment I received today from Keka - Surfer Girl:

"Hi, i wanted to post the next comment on your blog about aimee moore, but it is too long. Maybe you can do something about it... maybe it can help someone. Regards xxx

This is not a problem of someone in particular. This is a problem with the whole human society. You don't need to be an engineer to look around and see what's happening around you. Society is going crazy, nearly everybody is under medication for different levels of depression and other mental disorders. Such people usually have feelings of sadness, anxiety, desperation, low self-esteem.

I know it is not easy to understand this people. But nowadays people are so blinded. Blinded by materialism and keeping up appearances. They are too busy giving an image to the world that most of time they forget who they really are and eventually they become the character they're trying to show. They tell themselves so much their own lie that eventually they believe it. But unconsciuosly our real one is still there, fighting to reach the surface, and we keep pushing it down to hide it, as if we are ashamed of our own self. From this internal and unconcious fight come the most of the problems. The ones that think they are completely sure of who they are, are the most blinded. Nobody can escape of what society has taught us, most of it unconciously, since we are a part of it we have a part of it within ourselves.

All natural things inseparable from our human nature are seen as evil. The necessities of our own body as expelling out the gas and waste substances after digestion, sex, and stuff like that look ‘ugly’ and ‘low-class’ to the eyes of others and everybody tries to pretend that that kind of things never happen to them. Disguising our own nature and pretending to be who we are not is what our society cares about. When you trying to negate what is in your nature and fight against it, you create a disorder.

In our society, you have to behave and look and be in a specific way to have success and to be accepted by other people that are getting as sick as you. We have even created ROLES that you must play depending on your sexuality. But there is not such a thing as a boy or girl behavior, you are who you are and that’s all. The problem is that our education is based on this long-held beliefs that it seems impossible to think they can be in any other way.

Society nowadays got stuck in the surface and together with it, the old great values are fading away. We are a lot more of what we can just see with our eyes. And not only us, the whole universe contains elements invisible to us. If we and our world are much more than what can be seen, why society focuses just and only on the surface of things? Because it is easier.

In the same way we have created this material-based society, we can create a different one, based on what actually matters.

What will you do when your beauty fades away? It means that when people get old must be left aside because they don’t fit anymore in the created pattern of perfection? And what is perfection? What may be the perfect landscape for you, can be not that beautiful for other people. Perfection is based on our own taste and points of view. And what we see beautiful can be ugly or indifferent to another one. Perfection does not exist as a fixed pattern, but some smart-ass has imposed it to us, together with the rule that if you don’t fit in it, you are useless. As so, we allow ourselves to make fun of those who are left outside, thinking that they are not that much worthy and feeding our own surface-based ego.

And so, we are getting the society we are looking for: a group of sick people trying to fit desperately in our pattern of perfection and beauty, with no brain that can think by itself but a brain that follows the rules imposed by society and that has unconsciously lost its ability of deciding anything outside that no-sense rules, even the ones related your own tastes and free will, because that rules are all you have learnt since you were born and it is easier to follow what you already know than teach your brain to start to think by itself. A society formed by a bunch of blinded people, unable to see beyond the skin, looking for happiness in the wrong direction and creating a fake feeling of happiness to fill the emptiness they feel. And happiness is not on money, or being popular, or fashion shoes. It is bigger than all that, and simpler at the same time. If we can look younger, and more beautiful and we are richer as the years go by, why people is more and more unhappy? Don’t you think we are doing something wrong? And can it be that we are looking for happiness on the wrong direction and placing it in other people hands instead of looking for it inside of ourselves?

A sick society as the one we are living in is creating the most of the problems that humanity is suffering in an individual or global way. Society has taught us that the more you have the happier you will be, and so you can find sick-minded people that can never have enough, people all confused and lost, looking for happiness in the wrong places, drowning in drugs and materialism and completely unable to realize that they are following a rule printed on their brains that, by their own experience, it is not a correct rule since it is not leading them to happiness. But instead of start their own ideas and become conscious of the actual situation, they keep on sticking stubbornly to their old imposed beliefs. Society has taught us that you must look beautiful to be successful and loved and so, we get a lot of surface-beauty based marriages that failed once the beauty starts to fade away with the years. Society is also bringing a new sick-minded generation starving themselves, desperate to look ‘perfect’ and get an admission ticket. Sex-obsessed people, rapists and so on are mind disorders created, most of the time, by the negation of our nature and seeing as bad and evil something that is innate to us and to every living form in the earth: sex. And this, together with the focusing on the surface, we have also forgotten that sex is more than just physical pleasure but a way to show love. What are we expecting if we have even dared to play in the name of love…

Some centuries ago no men liked skinny and sun-tanned women. They never put their eyes on them because they didn't look pretty like that. Before the wedding, women spent several days at home, so their skin got white and soft and they could put on a little weight with the lack of exercise. Nobody like this today…what has changed in people’s mind? Is there any change in men’s brains? Not at all. Nothing has change. It’s only that we move with the trends that somebody dictates. Someone tell us what things we must like now and we all follow like a herd, without even noticing they are manipulating us.

Nobody is guilty. Actually we are all victims of our own society and it is ONLY in our own hands to change it. But the first step is to realize what is going on and accept that we are behaving in this way.

Why do you think people don’t understand mental problems? Because they cannot see them with their eyes. But the problems are ACTUALLY there, aren’t they? Everybody can understand you cannot run because you have a broken leg, but just a few can understand how much yourself hurts that you need to harm your body, because nobody can see that you have a ‘broken leg’ within your mind.

I don’t want to be part of a society in which someone else dares to tell me how I have to FEEL, and to BE, and to LOOK. I don’t want to be a part of the herd because I have a brain that can think by itself. I don’t want to have to hide my nature when I walk on the streets. I just want to be happy now that I understood certain things and I could find my way back to sanity. Sanity that is criticized by lots of people in their struggle to put me down to feed their ego. I don’t blame them. I wish they knew how to fill their emptiness with love and respect for everything, since real love is key. I don’t hurt myself anymore and I accept that I can have moments of sadness as everybody else and there is nothing wrong with it. I stopped filling my emptiness with alcohol and learnt how to feel connected to the rest of the universe instead. I enjoy eating healthy because my body feels good, and also I enjoy eating my chocolate or a cake whenever I fancy it. And because it is not forbidden for me, I don’t fancy it all the time. I love to feel the sun on my face and feed the birds in my window. I don’t go out to fashion night clubs that much, only when I fancy a dance. I exercise everyday and read a lot. My dream is not anymore to become a Hollywood star. I just want a small wooden house by the sea, with a vegetables garden on the back. I want to stay close to Nature because Nature is what we all are.

This goes to everyone that got lost along the way. I really hope you find yourselves.

charlie_angel_sarah@hotmail.com Use my email if you think I can help you.

Love for everyone. Keka"

Thoughts?