Lost in Processing

The more I begin to accept myself for who I am and not who the world labels me as, the more I find my perspective and outlook on life growing positive. Life has been pretty dark in the closet. I was fine with this while I had other goals to distract my attention. I can honestly say that I have accomplished a great deal with regards to school and my personal life. I have two college degrees, am bilingual, and have made some of the greatest friend anyone could have asked for, but after school ended and I moved back to MD, I had less to focus on. My job was not what I would call a "career," and I always had this looming thought that I would not be able unlock these chains that had bound my true self for so many years. 

But now, this has all changed. I have finally been able to embrace someone who I had buried away so long ago. I have heard some pretty terrible coming out stories. Stories of people who came out to friends and family, and were rejected for being themselves. I have heard of whole towns banning people from having any form of contact with someone who is gay. Bullying has become much worse today. The internet is an extremely powerful tool and, when used by people who have no sense of morality, can be an extremely dangerous tool. Yet, I can honestly say that I have not encountered any negative reactions or criticism for being who I am. My friends have all supported me for being who I am, and often thanked me for being honest with them. The latter part of this always hits home. I think for the majority of the LGBT community, we just want to be accepted for being who we are. We do not want you look at us a being different, because the fact is that most of us have not changed, we are simply allowing you to see who we have been all of our lives.

In these past few weeks, I have felt a positive change in my presence, almost like a glow of change has enveloped me and begun radiating change to others. It is in my opinion that too often people become stuck in the monotony we mistakenly call "life." I see people everyday who have decide to give up and continue living the lives they hate. In doing so, they have not only denied themselves of living their lives to the fullest, but more importantly they have become complacent. You see, the problem with people who become complacent is they lose the passion for living. They see their lives as all that they are going to be, and forget that they once had some spark of passion to live. It's as if they have had life sucked out of them, and now exist as blank shells of a person who once had looked ahead to a bright future, but now only see fog and darkness. They have become submissive to life, and, instead of fighting against the current, they are on a direct path down monotony lane. 

It has been two years since college. Those four years were some of the most memorable years of life. I discovered much about the world and who I was as a person. I was tested both scholastically and morally. My sense of being had changed and I was on a positive path, but after graduation, something changed. I lost my spark of life and was heading down the path I had described in my former thought. I was far away from my friends, and most of the friends I had back home had either moved or I just lost contact with them. My routine was simple: wake up early, get ready, sit in traffic, spend Monday-Friday doing useless, insignificant work, stay late to do said work, sit in more traffic, go to bed, rinse, and repeat. In these two years, I have lost my way in life. I always had planned my life to be perfect and easy: go to college, earn a degree, work at a large company, make a lot of money, live happily ever after, but somewhere, somehow, I lost the path and became disoriented in haze of thick fog.

Although, I am still unclear if my path is as clear cut as it once was, I do know that there is still a path somewhere out there. In my journey, thus far, I have discovered a great deal. I have found the true me that was once buried. I have embraced this being and begun a period of the metamorphosis and catharsis. This true being has lead me to find my resolve, again. Although I had always had goals and objectives and begun building a road that I thought would lead me to my success, I never really followed through with actually completing them. However, the new being that I am becoming is different. I have discovered that life does not always go the way that we had originally planned. Flexibility is the key to surviving. And in the discovery I have found sense of concrete being. Rather than mentally setting goals and objectives and hoping that would motivate me to achieve some greater calling in life, I have put these words down in stone. They are clear and concise with a strict timeline in which they must be completed.

I have learned that saying you are going to do something and actually doing that something is difficult, if not impossible to do. If you merely say you are going to complete something, there is nothing for you to benchmark your success against. However, by writing what I am going to do I am  reminded everyday that I have goals and timelines, and that failure is not an option. They say that the average human only uses about 10% of their brain's capacity. In other words, we only tap into 10% of our true potential, while the other 90% is wasted on nothing. Humans can only remember as much as the mind allows them to. The average human is blasted with 20,000 different mental stimuli on a daily basis. If I were to ask you to name all the different brands, companies, people, smell, sounds, and acts you witnessed today, do you think you would be able to give me accurate account? 

The answer is no. Our minds have mechanisms set in place to filter out all the useless junk that our minds are subjected to, and only allow the most important pieces of information through for memory processing. Our minds are constantly filtering, encoding, storing, retrieving, etc. large quantities of information everyday. Do you really think that your mind is going to allow something that you thought for an instant to enter your memory? For the majority of us, the answer will be no. Those thoughts that we think are important are actually lost in processing. 

However, there are ways to overcome the mind's filters and bypass what the mind allows to enter into its memory. By writing down our goals and objectives, we are able to actually tell the mind that "hey this is important, and I want this saved." The process of forming a memory can be described in three stages: sensory, short-term, and long-term. Sensory memory is all the information the mind has received from all five senses. This part is like a giant fishbowl where all the information that is perceived is dumped and processed instantly. This memory has an extremely shot life span of about 3-7 seconds. If they memory is deemed passable through the filters, then it is sent to short-term memory. Short-term memory is extremely limited, only allowing 4-5 items into its holding tank at one time. These memories, too, have an limited life span of only a few minutes. Again if deemed passable, the memory is sent to long-term where it enters a state of encoding. Unlike short-term and sensory, these memories have an unlimited lifespan and the storage capacity is relatively unlimited. This explains why you should never cram for any sort of test. Short-term memory does not have the capacity or lifespan to allow you to successfully remember everything. The process of encoding is taxing and takes a long time, which is why only select memories are sent to the long-term. The memories held in long-term are much stronger and the access capabilities are much faster. 

By journaling/blogging/writing down your goals and objectives, you are reminded on a daily basis what they are. By doing this you are able to successfully tell the mind that they are quite important and need to be coded to a longer term storage vessel. Thus, the memory stays with you as a guiding light. Although my path is still hazy, I do see that there is some sort of light showing me that a path does exist. It is for this reason that I am able push ahead and achieve my goals, little by little.