Be the change you want to see.

Just shower thoughts... I was thinking today just looking around the items in the shower, that there are a lot of things that I experience what you've been cultivated to make me feel guilt there are a lot of things that I live with because I feel guilt and one of the issues that I want to try and nail down, is the degree to which us the people, we the people or whatever, have been encouraged to feel guilty about more or less neutral actions, actually serve corporate interests.

Item the first: When I feel guilty about not recycling my plastic, or not doing it right. Like, feeling bad about my shower scrubby shredding and letting little pieces of plastic into the waterways. That's a little thing right? Like, a little thing to feel guilty about. And yet so many of us do.

The thing about feeling guilty about doing something, is that then we generally don't call somebody else out for the thing that we feel guilty about right? So if I'm feeling guilty about the fact that I'm not recycling enough, I'm not going to believe maybe, or pay attention to the fact that giant corporations, manufacturers, fishing industry, etc are way more at faults for the massive amounts of plastic junk in the ocean, on the land, and in landfills. As somebody once said it's not the fact that you didn't rinse your yogurt carton well enough and then put it in the recycling, that made China stop taking our recycling from the United States, nor is it why they refer to our dirty recycling.

We should be calling out the corporations.

I feel guilty about not performing femininity correctly, or enough. Because I like to wear what I like to wear, and I wear flat shoes all the time secure not always pretty shoes, I wear doc martens and I wear sandals. I wear blue jeans and t-shirts. I refuse to wear makeup, and I rarely even wear jewelry or do my hair.

When I still felt guilty about not performing femininity correctly, or enough, one of the ways that I tried to make myself feel better was by buying s***. Buying more clothes buying cute feminine shoes buying makeup that I knew I was never going to wear outside of Halloween or whatever. They make us feel guilty so that we buy their s*** It's like psychological warfare.

I used to feel guilty about being fat. If we lived by ourselves out in the wilderness, I don't know sheepherding or something, there's no reason to feel bad for being any kind of shape skinny or fat, whichever. Body functioning trumps shape whenever you don't care what you look like to outsiders. Advertisers play on our insecurities, plant seeds of doubt that we will be excluded or shunned, but nobody will love us if we don't look in a certain way. And the diet industry, profits, because people want to look a certain way. And then what happens is you have people who are hungry all the time which means you can't think well. And then what happens is if you have people hyper focusing on the size and shape of their body, which any of us can only do so much to change, genetics being what it is. And everybody is spending so much time and energy on weight loss and the size or shape of their body, that they can't look around and see that they're being duped, they're being played, they're being fleeced. ( that goes for doctors too )

If we just loved ourselves, if we knew we were safe, if we didn't live in fear. We wouldn't need to do all of these things.

Propaganda is real, friends, and it's everywhere. Between advertisements, and news that's actually a sponsored advertisement, billboards, pop-ups on your computer screen... Junk mail!

I don't have a solution, not exactly. For me I turned off the television. I stopped listening to a constant bombardment of television advertising, when I left my first husband in 2003. I don't need other people telling me what to think in that way. I need to make my own decisions about what's important to me. And for me a media fast did a remarkably good job at helping me start to clear my head.

Guilt and shame do nothing good for mental health. Figuring out how to uproot them and get them out of your life, however you do it, is one road towards peace, even contentment.

Be well. I love you.