Life Path

So what should I direct the affirmations to now? I didn’t know. I had money, I was thin. I was still a troubled person, though. When I was younger, I always thought I was going to do something special. I always pictured myself working in the United States, doing something important. Being someone important. I was so smart, almost a genius at high school, when my hope faded, that got lost somehow. That feeling that I had to use my intelligence to build something in this world turned into search for survival, and any elevated plans I had for myself vanished.

I knew I wanted to make something of my life, but I didn’t know what. I started to have this feeling that I had a path, but I couldn’t figure out what the heck that path was. What exactly did I want to do? No idea.

So because of my complete lack of purpose, I asked to find my life path again. I wrote that down 15 times a day, every day. I read somewhere affirmations are supposed to be specific, but I didn’t have anything specific to ask, and I just knew I was in the wrong path.

You can see something changed there. I believed in a path, a purpose. That for me was unconceivable a few months back. I was really changing. And I realized most people would ridicule my beliefs, and my ideas and the new person I was becoming. But I was happier. And more hopeful and less worried, and more fun. Isn’t that what everybody wants? What was so wrong with that, after all? And plus, as long as I kept quiet, nobody would know about the affirmations and life path beliefs, so I would be safe from being ridiculed.

I even bought a special book to write down my affirmations. I started keeping track of what I wrote, just to have fun watching when I would get them. I put some effort to write in a nice handwriting. I kept writing, 15 times a day, “I, Affirmagal, will find my life path”, for a few weeks.

***

And that is when my husband asked for divorce. Only four months after our wedding. He was my boyfriend for six years, and soon I discovered he was having a flame with a work colleague.

I didn’t know what to do. I was beyond angry. I can’t even remember how insanely mad I was at that time. I really don’t like to remember.

After one week crying, felling too weak to do anything about it, I remembered my affirmations. I saw two choices in front of me at that time. I could ask for my marriage back. I knew I would get it. I was starting to believe. I could have my marriage back. Or I could let it go.

So was that the right path I was asking for? A lone path? Maybe my path and his should never have crossed. Thinking about it, if during college my life started to lose meaning, then all the time that I knew my husband I was a sad person. He loved a sad, needy, looser person. Now I was happy. That’s not the person he married. That’s definitely not the person he lived with for six years. And I - I wanted success now! I wanted the people who surrounded me to want success. I wanted an entrepreneur, well educated, generous, successful person. That’s not what he wanted to work for, and I was trying to force him to be a person he didn’t want to be. That’s definitely not fair.

I was happy and feeling powerful, I was making more money than he was, three times more, I was thin and pretty. Before all the cheating drama, I told him about the affirmations, which he tried for two days and gave up. He said they didn’t work.

Think back, think back. He screwed up every single big chance he ever had, like I did, by the way. He was a looser, like I was. But there was a big difference between us – he was happy with that life, I wasn’t. I was struggling to find myself a better life. I’ve always been struggling. That’s why I tried affirmations in the first place. Because I was desperate to find a solution to my crappy life. Maybe I got to a point that if someone I trusted told me magnetic bracelets could help, I would believe. I don’t know. I was unhappy, and uncomfortable, and that discomfort was the same thing that made me experiment something I was completely and totally against.

I thought about this. I also thought about, how recently, I had had so little patience with him. He didn’t read much, we couldn’t discuss books, literature or science, my favorite topics. He watched a lot of TV and local news, things I wasn’t very interested in. He saw cinema as an art, and he liked really deep European movies which spoke great truths and made a point on showing a lot of human misery. I was getting into a phase where I was questioning my truths, and I really didn’t want to cultivate misery. I wanted to watch comedies. I wanted to laugh. He started playing volleyball with some friends, and he didn’t want me to go. They were his friends, he said. He needed space, whatever. He got himself a freelance job that he didn’t have the competence to finish. I had to finish it for him, and you can imagine how emasculating that must be for a guy who was used to take care of me. Sorry, I didn’t need anyone to take care of me anymore, I didn’t need his help. I could do things myself. We could either walk together, or walk alone, but I didn’t need him to carry me around anymore.

Isn’t that the point of help after all? Helping people to be able to do things on their own? I thought maybe he was trying to keep me needy and weak. Cheating on me definitely made me feel like this again. I’m truly happy and hopeful for the first time in my life, and his first act is to make me fall apart again. Maybe he was trying to keep me weak so he could feel like the stronger in comparison. Maybe he was one of the bad turns I took that put me in the wrong path.

He didn’t throw me out of the house, and I was too weak and devastated to leave. We kept living together a while more.

It was obvious that we were drifting apart. If people love each other, that’s something we can overcome. But he didn’t love me. He said that to my face. I couldn’t understand. You love and respect someone else for six years. This person naturally becomes part of your family. You love your family. I could understand he wasn’t in love with me anymore, but what I could not get was how he could not love me anymore. I sure loved him, despite everything. The “in love” thing… not so sure anymore. I was trying to think what I have done, when did he started feeling nauseated by my presence like that. Can it happen only in four months? Or did it start before? If it started before, why the heck did he ask me to marry him?

He started to humiliate me in every occasion possible. In front of his friends, in front of my parents, in front of his work colleagues. He verbally insulted me in front of other people, something I consider unforgivable. Once, we were walking on the street and he found a girl friend he met somewhere. The girl was with her mother. He and the girl hugged so hard and sexually that her mother and I didn’t know where to look. It was the weirdest and most embarrassing situation.

I thought about my life path… what were becoming my life expectations, and what were his. Maybe, to move forward, I should let him go. He sure was making that very easy to me. I wanted to work hard to get my career back on track. He worked six hours a day in a public department, came back home by 3 pm and complained I was out until eight. I was never there, I was not fun, I was bitter, etc.

But I believe in the sanctity of the marriage, not in a religious way, but in a moral way. I believe in families and I always wanted to have one. I couldn’t simply let my marriage slide like that.

But one day, he simply crossed the line and I left. It was the funniest thing. After all that I suffered, I had no doubt now that my path was not with him. I was devastated, but not a single moment I regretted or doubted myself. I knew. I just knew! It’s a weird feeling, when you are suffering like hell, but you are completely and absolutely sure that you’ll be better off like that. Believe me, it doesn’t make it easier to bare. But you curiously spy on the next curve of your future, thinking ”what’s in there for me?” because you know, something is awaiting you. Something really, really good. And I was dying to find out what it was.

Weight problem

Let me explain my problem with weight. I’ve always been thin and pretty. At some point, for no apparent reason, I started gaining weight like crazy. I put on 29 pounds in a year. I started eating less, because I thought I was getting older, maybe my metabolism wasn’t the same anymore. And I kept gaining weight. And I ate less. And gained weight. I went to several doctors, and followed their instructions religiously, and still gained weight. Eventually, I got to a point where I ate so little, that I stopped gaining weight. My calorie consumption was 1200 a day, divided into 6 small portions. I heard you can’t be too long without eating because it lowers your metabolism. So I made sure to have 3 “meals”, or whatever you call a portion of 300 calories. I ate maybe 10 grams of fat a day. Before you ask, I did exercise. I wasled the equivaled of 10 miles a week, plus gym. I didn’t have any soda, specially diet, because I heard that aspartame can give you a boost of insulin and prevent you from losing weight.

There was a time I tried to eat 800, and actually lost some weight. I had to stop that, because I was starting to feel dizzy during my gym classes. Weird thing is that I didn’t feel hungry. I ate 1200 calories a day just to keep my weight as it was and just enough so I wouldn’t faint on the street and get hit by a car.

I went to three different doctors during this period. I always think you have to stay with the same doctor for a few months, because otherwise you don’t have time to see any treatment results. All three of them gave me diets that I followed religiously. I drink the exact number of glasses of water they recommended, and measured the food in a little kitchen scale I bought. But I kept gaining weight.

One of the doctors said that it was impossible that I was gaining weight while following his diet. I should be eating without noticing. He said maybe I was putting too much oil in the rice, too much butter in the meat, eating the wrong bread, etc. But I don’t cook rice with oil, and I cook meat in the oven only, with no butter. I actually didn’t have any oil or butter in my house. My bread was light. It should be something else I was “eating without noticing”.

I keep religious track of what I ate for a while more. Still gaining weight. Something was wrong. What was I eating without noticing? I cried almost every day.

So I decided to get drastic. I woke up in the morning, and put everything I could eat on top of the kitchen table. I counted the quantities and calories and wrote them down. And that’s all I ate during the day. Not a crumble more. And I kept gaining weight.

I thought… if I’m not eating without noticing when I’m awake… I can be eating without noticing while sleeping! Maybe I was sleep walking, and eating by night. Now that would explain everything, and you can see how desperate I was at the time. Can you believe a sane person can actually make herself believe that she is sleep walking to the kitchen and emptying the cookie jar? Today I look back and I don’t recognize that person.

But that seemed like the only explanation possible. So before I went to bed, I took a picture of my fridge and pans, and in the morning I checked to see if I touched anything during the night. “Without noticing”, you know. My husband liked to eat cookies, so we always had a little supply. I opened the cookie jars and counted how many cookies were there before I sleep, then counted again in the morning. They were all there. And I kept gaining weight.

So I decided to give affirmations a try on this one. There was clearly something wrong with my metabolism. The doctors didn’t believe me. They did not believe it was impossible for me to be eating something “without noticing”, because I was borderline crazy of so much watching and noting and picture and counting. Even so, one of them actually made exams to check if my thyroid and hormones were ok, and everything was fine. So it wasn’t a hormone problem, it wasn’t a food quantity problem. What was it? Why, why, why was I gaining weight like a pig? Now that’s a challenge to affirmations.

I started writing every day, 15 times a day, “I, Affirmagal, will weigh 120 pounds.” I wrote that for about 3 months. Nothing really happened, other than one or two fat free recipes with almost zero calories reaching my hands. They were quite yummy, but didn't solve the problem. I was disappointed.

One day, a little bell ringed. “Change your birth control pills”.

About 1 and a half years before, I changed birth control pills because my face was full of spots and supposedly this new pill would make my skin better. I didn’t have the skin like a peach, but it actually made me look less like a 15 years old teenager. I told about the pill change to the doctors and they were all unanimous that “no way” my birth control pills could make me gain weight like that. There was nothing in that brand that could remotely make me gain weight. No way, it’s my diet.

But the bell kept ringing: “Change your birth control pills”. And I did. And in 3 months, I was 29 pounds lighter, reaching 120. It took a couple of weeks after I stopped the pill to actually start losing weight, but after that it was so fast I had to actually start eating more! Of course, I was eating so little for so long. After I stopped that shitty pill, I became a normal person. A normal person actually loses a lot of weight when eating 1200 calories a day!

So I had to increase my calorie count to 1500, and as I was still losing more than 4 pounds a week, I had to raise it to 1800. I always made a lot of physical exercise, so I guess 1800 was ok – losing 2 pounds a week and counting. When I reached 120, my weight naturally stabilized, and I could maintain a diet with about 2200 calories a day.

You have to imagine the joy of eating again! Imagine yourself in a time wasting diet that lasts for 1 year! Imagine you, believing that that’s all you’ll be able to eat for the rest of your life, or else you might become an elephant. Worse, you already are an elephant. Now imagine that, suddenly, you can eat an ice cream again, every once in a while! You can eat some meat, or a piece of birthday cake, like a normal person. Imagine how it tastes like! Imagine my joy! I was beautiful, and normal. I couldn’t eat everything I wanted, of course – you eat too much, you gain weight. But I was normal. I could eat like a normal person!

I remember the joy of ordering a dessert and knowing that, even if I gained a little weight, I’ll be able to compensate the other day with a little more exercise, or a little less food. And that was ok! I wasn’t cursed anymore. I was pretty, I was feeling pretty. Can you imagine how it is like? It’s beautiful. That was the best feeling of my life. Food is great, food is delicious, and I love to eat. I started playing with flavors, and experimenting a lot of stuff I never tried before. How delicious that time of re-discovery of food was for me.

After that miraculous recovery, I started warning about that birth control pill to every woman I knew. Let’s call the pill Femala, because I don’t want to disclose the real pill name and get sued. And while talking to a lot of women about Femala, it’s surprising how many of them said to me: “You took Femala? Are you crazy? That pill makes you put on a lot of weight!!”. My beloved sister in law told me that when she was a teenager, Femala made her gain 12 pounds, and that she lost them as soon as she stopped. A friend of my mom’s said “Put one pill of Femala in a flower vase and see how well it will grow”. Right, that’s why I gained weight. I was prescribed fertilizer.

So, apparently the female community knew about Femala pills. Apparently just the male doctors I went didn’t know about it. If I had close friends or family back then, I might have been able to talk to them about the pill and figuring that out myself. But I was friendless, and I trusted doctors and their medicine degrees. Apparently, there was no known hormones on that pill that would make me get fat. Well, maybe doctors should start considering things they didn’t know. Maybe I should start thinking about things I didn’t know.

But you see, at the end… was it really the affirmations that helped me? Wasn’t it something I saw on TV that gave the hint? Or maybe I unconsciously realized that the pill was the only thing I didn’t try before.

I classified the experiment as inconclusive. I was starting to believe in affirmations, of course. Plus, I felt better when I did them, so no harm on that. And two hits in a row. But both of them had a reasonable explanation. First, my fixation on the number 4000 made me have the guts to ask for 4000 dollars when the opportunity came. Second, my fixation in losing weight might have helped me remember (unconsciously) that I have never tried to change the pill.

I didn’t know if there was anything magic there… but seemed like affirmations were helping me do the right choice. I was even a little afraid of asking for something and regretting later, and get too focus on the wrong thing. I started to think better before asking for stuff.

My first affirmation

My top number one concern was my financial situation. I made too little money to be able to do anything at all. The depression was more or less under control, since I was already under medication that cost me almost 100 bucks, plus the doctor, I was spending most of my salary to keep my mental sanity. There is a point when you are so poor, that money actually brings happiness.

The book I read said affirmations should be something you think it’s very unlikely to get, but that you still think possible. So I asked for $4000 dollars. I thought becoming a millionaire was impossible. I honestly though $4000 was just too much, but the book also said to try something unlikely. I thought, the way things are developing for me right now, I’ll never make $4000 a month. But this is what I think I deserve, after working and studying so hard. So that’s what I was going to ask for.

My first affirmation was “I, Affirmagal, will make 4000 dollars a month.”

I wrote 15 times a day, like the book said. The book also said to do visualizations, which I didn’t. But somehow, just writing the affirmations made me feel a little better. Maybe that’s the concept of prayers. You don’t need to get what you want, but thinking about it already makes you feel happier. So I kept on going. I thought to myself, even if I don’t get $4000 a month, I’m starting to believe I can. I’m starting to have hope.

About 3 months later, I saw a job ad in a random website on the net. They were looking for web programmers, with great experience in some areas that I was actually an expert at. The ad said it was supposed to be remote work, and that I should say how much I expected to make. I applied, and said I wanted to make $4000 a month.

I thought “ha-ha”, he probably wants to hire someone from a third world country for 25 bucks. But we closed the deal. Three months after I started the affirmations, I was making the 4000 dollars I asked for.

***

I was a very rational person. I though… I asked to make 4000 a month for 3 months… I thought of it every day. Of course, when the opportunity appeared, I asked for 4000 dollars. It’s nothing to do with affirmations! I just wouldn’t have the guts to even ask for 4000 dollars if I wasn’t writing that down every day. So there wasn’t any coincidence there. Of course, there was the ad, but that’s hardly a coincidence. People post job ads every day.

I thought to myself that affirmations aren’t anything supernatural, they just give you hope. And when you have hope, when you believe things can actually go right for a change, they sometimes do. I took a chance, I got lucky. Maybe I had to learn to take risks, and maybe affirmations were simply a way to help me do that.

How it all started

It all started with a very unhappy childhood and teenage years. I don’t want to talk about it, not only because I don’t like to remember it, but because it’s not important to the story I want to tell. But when I look back, I saw that until I enter college, I was unhappy, but still hopeful. I always thought things were going to improve after… something happened. After the Summer was over. After we move to a new home. After school was out. After I enter college.

I know it sounds silly, but even though I was never happy, I still had hope that someday I would be. And that’s what kept me going. Having unrealistic hope is better than no hope at all.

I remember exactly when everything started to change for the worst. I’ve been all my life putting happiness a couple of years ahead, saying the reason I wasn’t happy was because I didn’t have that. After I had that, I’d be happy. And the last that for me was my first job.

We always had huge money problems in my home, and everything (I thought) I always wanted was to have my own money and be independent. I got my first job, just after I enter college, and it was a complete disaster. My boss morally abused me, and the company was almost bankrupt. The Director started a self destructive path to blame all employees for his administrative failure.

I quit after a few months. I actually should have quit earlier. But whatever happened, the experience made me realize there was no something coming. There was no that. That was it. That was life. I was waiting for things to improve since I was five years old. Nothing changed, things were still a mess, I was still unhappy, and honestly, I couldn’t believe anymore that after that was over they’d be better. The hope that kept me alive had completely faded, and only the unhappiness remained.

I kept on dragging myself through life. A few years later, I started a depression treatment. The treatment helped me to feel happier, but didn’t take care of the hope part. I was a moderately happy person who still didn’t have any hope. I learned how to cope with my life disgraces without thinking of them all the time. I learned to see them for their real size and allow myself to enjoy some of the little pleasures life brings us every day. But I saw no room for improvement. I was maybe the most negative person ever. I was a true member of my family, wanting to live, but with no perspective whatsoever.

I made barely 800 bucks a month. In Brazil, the country I was born, that’s the salary of a poor person, not a miserable person. My relationship with my family was destroyed. My marriage was in bad shape. I was gaining weight for apparently no reason. I had a crappy job, no friends, and believed the world was a hazardous place. I saw no way out for my financial catastrophe.

One day, I bought the book “Dilbert the Future” by Scott Adams. I hardly had money to buy anything, but I don’t know why, I decided to give myself that treat. I was still doing my depression treatment, paying half my salary for the psychiatrist, and that’s only because she was doing me a favor. I think I was her charity case.
I really loved Dilbert because I had a disgraceful professional life, so I really related to the character. But I was actually a little disappointed. I didn’t really enjoy the book. It wasn’t funny, at least for my Brazilian humor standards. Nothing personal, I still think Scott Adams is a total genius. But I think I just read it through the end because I paid 20 bucks for the book, and I was really too broke to admit that I threw away money on something I didn’t like.
Then I read the last chapter.

If you are not familiar with the last chapter of Dilbert the Future, Scott Adams shuts down the funny mode and explains his personal experience with affirmations. He talks about how our perceptions of reality can be wrong, if we look at things in a different manner. He throws in a couple of information on physics there that are just wrong, but the overall “perception exercise” was the most mind blowing thing I’ve ever read.

He said affirmations helped him to get a degree, achieve several personal goals and even become a cartoonist. He said affirmations don’t only help you just focus on your objectives, they also make coincidences happen. I remember I though… yeah, right!

The man have guts, I can tell you that. I could almost see fans leaving him ashamed, and critics insanely crying for justice. I think my mental image for his courage was a mountain of books on fire. And I could not believe a famous writer like him would take such a huge risk. '

At first, I didn’t know what to think. The content shook me off. Was he lying? Did it actually happen? Or was he telling the truth?

If Scott Addams was lying, the only explanation I could find was that he was trying to con gullible people to make more money. For some reason, he believed he could turn himself from a cartoonist to a Self Improvement God.

But on the other hand, he already has a lot of money. His comic strips were turned into a TV cartoon, for Christ’s sake. They’re published in more than 100 languages. I believe only one or two Self Improvement gods make as much money as he does. Does it compensate, to risk an extremely successful career to make a couple more bucks?
I thought he was smarter than that. Which made me conclude he wasn’t lying. He was telling the truth, at least from his point of view. He believed that the affirmation crap actually helped him. And he was exposing himself because… he wanted to help? Or maybe create buzz around his name? I couldn’t figure out which one.

One thing that called my attention was that, at the end of the book, he explains how to write affirmations, adding that “they work even if you don’t believe. ” That’s actually cool, because I didn’t believe. He said I could distrust affirmations as much as I wanted. They would work anyway.

I didn’t believe in God back then. I didn’t believe in affirmations, motivations, brain power or whatever crap those so called Self Improvement experts try to sell to gullible people – and usually for a substantial amount of money. I do see them as vampires who try to feed on people’s desperation, and then blamed their own disgrace on the fact that they “were not thinking positive”, or they “didn’t believe hard enough”. I never could and never will stand those blood suckers, and I had no patience for whoever tried to say otherwise. I believed in cause and effect, I believed only what science could prove. I always hated the guts of those mediums who said they could not materialize a spirit when “people who don’t believe are around”. Believe first, the reward will come later, they said. For me, that means pay first, and hope we can deliver your order.

So you see, I did not believe a word he said. I did believe he believed in that. But he wasn’t asking me to believe. It was actually the first person who was offering to show me something amazing without asking me to believe. And I wouldn’t until I could see it for myself.

Even thinking Scott Adams was wrong, I was really impressed by his courage - whatever his motivation was. So I decided to try. My life was miserable, and from my point of view I didn’t have anything better to do. At first I was ashamed I was trying one of those hideous techniques the Self Improvement gods talked about. But the book cost me 20 bucks. When you have nothing to lose, your sense of ridiculousness changes.

I wrote my goals 15 times a day, like he said, and it worked. And it worked again. And again. There was always a reasonable explanation for how that success could have been a coincidence, how that could have been my own talent, but the point is that I was experiencing failure since I was five. When you start having success so many times in a row, and precisely after you start doing affirmations against your own beliefs, you start wondering.

Today I can tell you, Scott Adams was the person who helped me put my life to a start. Amazing how just a little courage can save someone else like that. That’s what motivated me to write this book. I know bookstores will put this under the “Self Improvement” section, along with those people I despise. And the fact that it will be under a Self Improvement session will be execrated by skeptics. It’s ok. All I can say is, if this was a book saying nice things about Christianism or some other religion, no skeptics would comment. Since it’s a book saying nice things about a belief outside religion, it’s automatically highly “execratable”.

As Scott Adams said in his book (and I also didn’t believe him then), I’ll say I’m a skeptic myself. I’m a fan of the scientific method, for more surprising that it may sound. I know you get sick, you go to the doctor. I know praying or affirmations can't save you from any disease. But many of the same skeptics that will flood me with bad comments about this sentence may also believe in God, or practice a religion. They do that because belief is completely apart from science or reason. Human beings can practice science and believe in something unproven. If nature and physics can handle this paradox in a way that tour brains won’t explode, I’m fine with that.

This is a blog about affirmations and how they helped to change my life. Substitute “affirmations” for “prayers”, change “motivation” for your own religion’s names – you’ll still understand, and won’t offend anyone’s beliefs. Or disbeliefs.

First post - Welcome!

Sorry, but I won’t say who I am.

The reason is, I can write much more freely if I remain anonymous. If you ever tried to talk about affirmations to other people, you know how they give you that “you’re crazy” or “you’re stupid” look. Or even worse, the “you’re weak” look. But at the same time, I’m so grateful for the happiness that affirmations brought me, that I find it a little selfish not to share it with the world. I’m hoping that my writings can help other people. Maybe in the future, when people are not so fast in judging other people’s beliefs, I might be able to post my name here.

I personally don’t see much difference between praying and affirmations. When you pray, you thank and you ask for stuff. When you do affirmations, you thank and you ask for stuff. The only thing is that in one case you pray for God, and in the other case you pray for… the universe? I don’t know, I still think of God when I do affirmations. But I guess it doesn’t matter. It works for me, either way. I used not to believe in God.

Well, the point is. This is alike a religion. I believe it works for me. Maybe it works for you too. Who knows? Give it a try. You don’t have anything to loose, and I’m not asking for your money. I’m really not even asking for your time. Feel free to close the browser window right now. The information is here, I hope you enjoy it, and I’m really looking forward hearing from other people’s experience with affirmations. Good or bad :)

Enjoy the site, and please contact me for anything. I’d love to hear from you.