Gail Medija
@mushbrain
Gail Medija
how do I “de-influence” myself without changing who I am at my core? I feel like every piece of personality from every person comes from something.
“we delude ourselves & deny our pain, even in the face of warm even in the face of death, people will not admit they’re being abused, they will not look it in the face. There is a certain type of strength in that, sure. But there is also a certain type of cowardlyness, an inability to call out an injustice because it might make you look weak.
You can’t just collect information. To feel creatively and intellectually alive, you also need a purpose. It can be achieving mastery of a domain, collecting raw material for a project, curating something for someone as an act of generosity, or collecting inspiration for an essay you’ve been wanting to write.
Attend to your influences.
I suppose this is the ur-message - to be more aware of what’s influencing you and how. Acknowledge just how much of what you think, feel and do is picked up from others, consciously and unconsciously, and try to become more conscious of more of them. Artists pay attention to this because they love their influences, while a
how do I turn my random (seemingly useless) encyclopedia of facts into something i can use to discuss and connect with other people?
We imagine all sorts of things to be true about ourselves or the world, not because we’ve seen evidence for it, but because it’s the only thing that keeps us from collapsing back into fear. Sometimes we’d rather blindfold ourselves than take a cold, hard look at the world exactly as it is.
Mark Manson • Will
Once you see yourself as merely a junction point for a whole set of influences, from your parents to your teachers to the feeds you follow and the articles and books you read, you can relax about being ‘you’. You can focus, instead, on making your influence-set as unique, layered and rich as possible. Nobody else will be at your junction point.
Ian Leslie • How To Be Influenced
