myth's Belated DMSI 3.1 Journal

[myth]

Since I wasn't really around other people during the past week and since I won't be until this weekend, I'll mention the only potentially DMSI-related anecdotes that I have for the past week:

• Got a ~$12 discount on Saturday night's take-out because the staff there like me.
  
• The drugstore employee who usually chats with me for at least 10 minutes happened to be working when I had to run an errand yesterday. Not only did she immediately start up a conversation with me, but a female co-worker of hers joined in.
  

The only other semi-relevant thought that's crossed my mind is that, lately, several forum members (on various subs) have seemed focused on seeking and responding to the "cause" of their issues, dedicating blame, frustration, and worry toward that perceived cause instead of seeing those reactions as a form of resistance against change. As I see it, if you decide (accurately or not) that X is why you're Y, congratulations! You've effectively identified an excuse to stay Y and never have to become Z. When Z is exactly what you want to become. X is now a fully-formed excuse not to change. Or, as something that I see as almost as detrimental, X is something to rage against, under the guise of change, still limiting yourself to the binary options of submit (surrender/prove X wrong by failure) or rebel (anger/prove X wrong by success), ignoring the freedom to choose from all available options and also letting X continue to control you, even in rebellion. If my goal is to become Z, I want to become Z, not Q, even if Q is the opposite of Y and still qualifies as change. I see freedom of choice (and -- by extension -- of past, present, and future) in liberating myself from X, not in restricting my options relative to X. Whether X is a person, a group, my past self, a psychological/physical trait, an -ism, an unproven theory, a proverb, an expectation, a prediction, etc.

Not sure if hearing that point of view helps anyone, but it seemed worth saying. Of course, people often see this as my own excuse not to do what "everyone does" and offer me their own "good reasons" for doing whatever it is that everyone's expected to do -- reasons that rarely apply to my own life. Excuses tend to be in the eye of the critic, either way, so it's worth taking my opinion with a few truckloads of salt.