Mind of Snaps - Positivity Podcast | Ep. 22 - "Reflection"

Welcome to "Reflection" - the 22nd Episode of the Mind of Snaps Positivity Podcast!

This is a special podcast series that is separate from the regular Mind of Snaps Podcast, with a new release (typically) posted every Thursday for Patreon supporters!

It is my goal to create as much positive & encouraging content as I can during these intense, uncertain times we're faced with. 2020 has been so much more than anyone expected it to be, and nobody should have to take it on alone. The only way I can continue to do so, is with your help. Become a patron, subscribe to me on Twitch, you can send a tip which I'll turn into an investment... or you can simply share my content on social media. Every little bit helps me be able to continue to create the podcasts and other mindfulness & positivity based content in the future.

The format of these podcasts are forever evolving to reflect current events from personal to global, so I hope you are enjoying them. Please reach out to me if you have any suggestions!

Hang in there, friends... we're all in this together.

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You can find new Positivity Podcasts on Patreon every Monday, and as of September 2020 - every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, & Stitcher!

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Jessy (Mind Of Snaps / SheSnaps)

www.MindofSnaps.com

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Transcript

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Good morning, friends.

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Happy Monday.

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I am so excited knowing that there are a few more of you have the ability to listen to these podcasts now, because I so enjoy making them. Thank you to all of the new patrons who joined us because of the ridiculous photo and story option. It has been mega fun,

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creating all

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of the nonsense art and making up outrageous stories to go along with them. So,

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for real, thank you. And

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thanks as always to everyone who chooses to support this Patreon or the stream in any way. Y'all are a blessing in my life for real. Today, I want to talk about the power of purposeful reflection. I'm finding more and more lately that taking time to look back for the sake of comparison, has been helping to give me some wonderful perspective that's helped me to continue to do the work. I know I need to do on myself. I'm sure some of y'all listening are already feeling a bit worried because your mind may be stuck regularly in a backwards direction.

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And that can be exhausting.

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When our egos are in control,

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which is the default for every one of us until we change it, hint hint, wink wink. We are basically locked in this pattern of bouncing between ruminating on the past and stressing about the future. It pulls us away from our present moment, which can be a major contributing factor in things like depression and anxiety. Because of this, I imagine the idea of purposefully visiting your past does not sound appealing, but hear me out. This isn't for you to look back and think of all the things you should have done, but rather This is looking back at things briefly as they were, and then looking again to your present moment to compare the differences. Now, this is an important part. It's not all about comparing the differences in your surroundings or your external life, but rather your reactions to your circumstances, surroundings and external life. It's not a time to go through past events and beat yourself up over them. You cannot change the past unless you've somehow turned into a mystical time wizard overnight. If that happened dope. So except that whatever has happened has happened. And hopefully you've learned some lessons. So the same mistake won't get made again in the future. The way I see it, this is one of the few positive ways that you can reflect on your past without being painful or making you feel like poop. look backwards and ask yourself, What lesson Can I make it a point to learn here? How can I ensure that this doesn't happen again? or How can I do my best to protect myself from the possibility of this happening? There's a lovely Buddhist mantra that I think I reference every single day now, but I just I just love it. This very moment is the perfect teacher. Whichever moment you're reflecting on, it is the perfect teacher you deserve. Look for ways to open yourself up to the lessons that it's trying to teach you

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just try.

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Another positive way to reflect on your past, in my opinion, is one that seems to be best for folks who are already in the process of working on themselves. If you're regularly checking in on yourself, you're doing your best to check your impulses, you're leading with compassion, and taking good care of your body and mind. It's almost impossible to imagine that you won't have achieved some form of progress over whatever period of time you've been putting in the work. Naturally, we know that this work doesn't mean everything is now fixed and will be easy forever. We know we're doing our best to build new patterns in our mind, and build the resilience that comes from a strong mindset. This takes time, but incremental changes can be

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beautiful. To

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the next time you find yourself in a frustrating position, you can try to jump backwards in time briefly, to consider how the old you

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so to speak, might have

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handled the exact same circumstances.

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At times, this can be a really beautiful reminder of just how far you've actually come. If it's not a reminder that you've kicked all kinds of major ass, it's likely still something you can notice a slight difference in, and that progress is a great sign for your future. This concept was on my mind a lot over the weekend. So I was really looking forward to doing this this positivity podcast today. The idea of reflecting on your past to bring some awareness to your progress was really just bouncing around in my brain a lot. Mostly because of a snapchat memory that popped up on Saturday. The Snapchat memory was from three years ago that day, and man it was a trip down memory lane for me. Started out with a photo of a large hole in the wall of my office, a foot sized hole, followed by a smaller, fist sized hole. And then a photo of me looking frustrated with the caption, one of those days today streaming now though, with an upset on smiley face, the memory of that day came vividly flashing back into my mind. That day is the last day. I can remember being angry and lashing out over it. Well, I mean, technically, there was another day where I felt angry and reacted quickly to something. But that was in defense of my boundaries, and I didn't react aggressively or with violence, so I don't quite count that one. I just told someone to leave me the fuck alone. And I think that's perfectly reasonable, but I digress. Anyway, let me set the scene for this day three years ago, I was still heavily invested in destiny. PvP that's player versus player, and I was considering putting in a lot of time and effort into doing more competitive play. At the time I was in a competitive well known clan and destiny with a great reputation. I was streaming crazy long hours, which I no longer advocate for at all.

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I felt a great deal of pressure to play

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my absolute best on all days I streamed which was every single fucking day,

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because I was one of a small group of women in the

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clan and in the competitive scene in general, every time I lose the game, or I wouldn't win one v one, I'd get a barrage of men in my chat, telling me this is exactly why women don't game and then of course, because they're so fucking creative, demanding that I returned to the kitchen where I belong. Every game I loaded into that meant anything. I'd see countless folks telling me to choke or making comments again about my gender or my skill

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without knowing me at all. I felt

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confident in my skills, but really only sometimes Most days, I was riddled with self doubt and self loathing, and I struggled to contain my anger when I'd miss shots or lose matches. I spent most of my days tilted as fuck, just building towards eventual explosive bursts of frustration or anger towards myself or others who dared to say stupid shit around me. It did not feel good. Let me tell you that like it really does not feel good to be an angry person. I was one of the folks who would punch my own thigh repeatedly and hard. If I missed shot I felt I shouldn't have. I had a spare controller on my desk that I could slam onto the desk over and over and over again when I was angry. So I wouldn't break the things I actually needed because I had made that mistake too many times and couldn't afford it. I rage quit stream several times and had many choice words for anyone who came into my stream to gloat over victories. Needless to say, I was a ticking time bomb most days. And in many cases, I think I was subconsciously hoping something would go wrong, or that someone would fucking Try me so I could feel justified in my outbursts. On this particular day, I had been invited to participate in one v one tournament in destiny for charity. I sadly don't remember the details of the tournament or the charity. But I do remember everything that happened beforehand, as things tend to go. My younger sister Jasmine, and my younger brother Joe, were living with me at the time. I had just gotten Enzo as a puppy months before and he was a terror. My siblings, both teenagers at the time, weren't always the best at keeping a close eye on them on him, which in fairness really should never have been their responsibility, and so was a destructive monster at times. And when it was time for me to stream my work, you know, my siblings basically had to puppy sit in the other room. So I'd woken up that day. Frustrated already, which was very common back then to wake up angry. Because Enzo could make it really hard to sleep at times and I had been battling insomnia for so long, like I just did not sleep well. I think I also found a nice little duty from him that morning right next to the door. So frustration levels were really high. Before I even went into my office, my mind was riddled with thoughts of how the tournament would go. And rather than taking that time to build myself up at all, which is what I would do now, I was basically just reminding myself I was a piece of shit and telling myself I better not fuck this up and embarrass myself and of course all women with my gameplay that day. I went into my office to grab something quickly. In my little sister followed me into look for something that she needed in my office. I left the room to finish my makeup and when I went back into my office, I realized my sister had left my office door open without realizing it, and Enzo had made it into my office. I was immediately upset because everyone was reminded regular leads to closed doors to protect our shit from the demon Panther bear. I looked around to assess any potential damage, and I saw what I believed at the time to be the worst case scenario had happened. Enzo had somehow knocked my only scuf controller on the ground. And when he did, the back battery panel was missing, which meant I no longer had any paddles on my controller. So for those of you who don't know how scuf controllers work, they basically have extra paddle buttons on the back of the controller that allow you to access certain buttons via those paddles instead of having to move your thumbs from the joysticks. For FPS gamers. It can be a real game changer. The issue is when you first get the paddles, it can take a while to get comfortable. And once you have there is no going back. It feels so different and even like much slower to not have them anymore. So here I was. Looking at one of my prized possessions my first custom controller ever missing the most valuable piece?

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I panicked

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and I looked around the floor trying to find it and didn't see it anywhere. My brain without giving me a chance to figure out how to handle it immediately jumped to the worst conclusion. Conclusions really. Enzo he had eaten the piece it was lost forever. I was going to have to do this one v one tournament with a controller that was no longer able to be used as intended. I was gonna fuck up my buttons, a bunch missed a ton of shots, lose all my games, everyone would see I suck everyone would see me angry I lose all supporters get called an egirl and trash stream would die I'd have to go back to working a corporate job again and

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basically my life was over.

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All of this happened within a split second and the next thing I knew I was roaring out the word Bach and then I chucked the controller kicked a hole in one of my walls and then punched a hole in another. As soon as that happened, another flood of thoughts happened. Ah, Bach, I'm such a loser who the fuck punches walls. This is the room Tanya painted with her own hands. And now I'm going to have to fix the walls and repaint it and it will never be the same again. I'm so embarrassed. I'm such a piece of shit. For the record, Tanya is my older sister if you weren't aware of this, who passed away almost 12 years ago, and if you weren't aware, I my office right now is in her old bedroom. So it meant a lot to me to be in a room that she had painted herself and I was there while she did it.

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So then I

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look over and I see another thing that just

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sucker punched me right in the gut and made me feel even more worthless. My little sister, one of the sweetest people in the entire world, and my very best friend was crying and seemed to be on the verge of a panic attack. Jasmine and I have been super close ever since she entered my life we've we've never even had a fight Not once. The knowledge that I had made her cry through my stupid angry outburst just killed me. It made me hate myself even more than I already did. I sunk to the floor next to my desk and just screamed fuck a few more times before crying a bit myself. And then I want to console my sister and apologize. We eventually found the piece my controller undamaged, of course, which did not help my guilt in the slightest. Every day from that day until the day I fixed and repainted my office, I had to walk into this room to work and see these stupid gaping holes in the wall and be reminded all over again that I fucked everything up with my anger. It fucking sucked. So that was the last time I can remember feeling angry and out of control the last time I began the hard work on myself last January. And since then, I have had so many moments Where I catch myself responding to things and being like, Whoa, in the past this would have upset me so much. I would have had a terrible day over this one small mishap or tiny issue. It was so encouraging. This weekend I had another example of that. The same day I saw my snapchat memory of me going on an office rampage three years ago, something went wrong and didn't faze me. I was filling up an air mattress for Alex's sister who's staying with us. And I had just explained how much I liked this air mattress because it was relatively new, and it had the pump and the cord built into the bed. So you didn't need any extra pieces. You just pop open this little door thinking where the cord is

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yank the cord

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out, plug it in, and then switch it on. It fills up with air quickly and it's just so easy and it's a super comfortable mattress two. So I was inflating it and Enzo, the fucking devil himself. woke up from his nap and I the bed with some serious excitement. He loves it

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when the bed is set up because

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he tries to sneak on to it non stop to take little puppy naps. I didn't have any sheets or anything on it yet and I didn't want him to jump up on it. So I told him to stay in his spot. Well, I finished inflating the bed turned my back for a second and in that amount of time, Enzo decided to jump his ass up on the freshly inflated bed. Okay, no problem. He's done it before. Just tell him to get down right? Nope. This time I told him to get down and he jumped like I had startled him in launched off the bed so awkwardly. As you can imagine the punk ass poked holes in the bed with his awkward as fuck dismount. So there I was staring at a few holes in a basically new air mattress that I was in the process of setting up for gust Wilde talking about how much I like this thing. And do you know what I did? I laughed. I laughed and said, Oh, well, I guess I should have seen that coming. And that was it. Like that's like, that was it for real it. I wasn't even mad in the slightest It was just an air mattress. Like it sucks to lose the money that was spent on it. But me getting mad would not have changed that at all. It wouldn't have refunded my money or unpopped the fucking bed. So I just started the process of folding it up so I could throw it away when it hit me. I didn't even register the slightest emotional reaction to Enzo breaking more of my shit

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progress.

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I stood still for a second and reflected on the photos I had just seen that morning. I felt so insanely proud. This same exact situation if it had happened three years ago or two years ago, would have caused a chain reaction of anger that could have

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lasted days or even longer.

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Seriously, like the smallest things used to throw me right into these horrible cyclical patterns. have anger, angry outbursts, being angry at my angry at myself for having the angry outbursts. being angry at myself for being angry and on and on and on. This Moment of Reflection filled me with pride, and it empowered me to continue putting in the hard work on myself. Some days, it is so easy to think we haven't gotten anywhere in our lives, simply because our external circumstances haven't changed. But it's days like that, but I like to consider my internal circumstances. How are those doing? How have my thought processes changed? What are my reactions to challenges or frustrations like these days? What are yours? If looking back in your past and comparing it to your future doesn't lead you to feeling empowered, as I've just described, then what will you do to change that? beating yourself up over lack of progress will not motivate you into action. If you notice Lack of forward momentum in your mentality or your life. Take this as a sign that it is time to change. It's time for you to start putting in that hard work. Because the way it will change your day to day life can be fucking incredible. Imagine a version of yourself not driven by impulses. Imagine having bad things happen to you and being able to take a second to consider how you'd like to respond before you do it automatically. Being able to choose how you react to things takes time, but damn, it is fucking satisfying.

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On this lovely Monday, take that time for yourself.

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Try reflecting back on past moments of frustration or despair. And consider how you're handling similar situations these days. I'd be willing to bet you have more reasons to be proud of yourself than you may think.

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If you don't,

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then do what we've been talking about. For I think three weeks now in these podcasts and make a choice, how will you change your life? So your reactions change? How will you change your life? So your mindset changes. How will you change yourself so you can have the life you want. You are capable of so much. Choose to place your focus in the right places today, and find ways to empower yourself with words thoughts and actions. You got this? kick some ass today and manifest dope shit. ie