Propensity to Self-Subversion: A Secret to Everlasting Youth

Beauty products guaranteed to make you look as young as you were when you were only twenty are populating the market nowadays in various forms such as creams, lotions, oils, astringents, toners, etcetera, and etcetera. Plastic surgeons have also become in demand ever since plastic surgery has become accepted in the modern world at large. Television advertisements have become abound for various ways to make you look younger than your real age. And admit it, the older you become, the more you develop a predilection for these self-proclaimed ‘miracle’ products.

However, what is youth, really? Does it depend on your appearance? Does the emergence of wrinkles and age spots really measure your age? Does acquiring gout and rheumatism make you less of who you were when you were fifteen? Is youth really equivalent to your vitality as a teenager? Is menopause really the signifying end of your youth? Or is youth something much more than just that?

Well, it should be. Youth should be something more than just façade. It should not be measured by one’s state of skin or hair or wellness of the joints. Youth should be one’s state of mind and mentality. Youth, just like beauty, should not be merely skin-deep. The secret of eternal youth is not a mythical spring or fountain or any other stuff from children’s literature. One of the real secrets of everlasting youth is self-subversion. To be young, one must constantly renew and refresh himself/herself. The moment you let yourself and your mind stagnate is the moment you decide to become old and let go of your precious youth. The world evolves and people must evolve along with it, otherwise they will be left behind by its blinding spin.

Youth is a state of mind. And one’s beliefs must be regularly reexamined. To be able to remain young and sharp, you should always challenge your value and ideals. Not doing so might be detrimental since long periods of lack of self-examination might mean stagnation and afterwards, despair. In one’s latter years, to be able to achieve generatively acceptable to the younger generation at one time and ego integrity much later still, one should always reexamine himself/herself.  Not challenging yourself about your stands during long periods of time may mean your state of mind may be already outdated and not suited to that current generation. Constantly affirming in what you consider true, constantly thinking and rethinking your set of values, constantly examining yourself without holding back – these are the ways to avoid stagnation. Avoiding stagnation is commensurate with being young.

For the older generation to remain young, one must first accept being old. Only this way will a person allow himself/herself, introspection. Examine your person inside out. Do not be afraid to admit your faults and embrace them for those are the only way to come to terms with yourself. When you have readjusted your state of mind to fit the present age, when the younger people of the generation claim they can understand where you are coming from, the you would know you have achieved proverbial eternal youth.

Start self-examination today and do not be afraid of change. If you wish to be young forever, you must start from the inside and everything will into place. It is not bad to take care of your appearance and it is not out of the ordinary for women to become depressed when they reach the menopausal stage. However, remember that your façade will fade faster than your mentality. Do not be afraid of celebrating your birthdays - embrace your age for it is just a number. What really matters is what is inside your brain and person. We must find ways to overcome self-sabotage. 

Writing Is a Way of Propensity to Self-Subversion

In the present media-driven world where writers have the potentials to become billionaires, more and more people are becoming interested in the art of writing. Writing entails more than just throwing an amalgamation of arbitrary words in one big pot to form a roughly made hodge-podge piece. It is an art and should be treated as one. Each person has his/her own writing style and technique different and distinct from others, like thumb marks which not the same are for any two people in this earth.

One’s style and technique however is not static. It is dynamic – it evolves as a person grows in experience. It is tantamount to a person’s development. Writers should always contest themselves, challenge themselves to do better, be better all the time or else risk an undesired growth stunt. Challenging oneself, giving way to self-subversion and questioning one’s own ideas and mentality – these are all necessary to grow, not only as a writer, but as a person. Doing this ensures maturity, which is much needed to become an effective storyteller.

There are times when changes in ones writing style come to a person without his/her conscious knowledge and if that is so, it might be hard for the change to become immediately accepted. If ever that happens to you, orientate yourself to accept these changes because they happened due to your unnoticed development. Though it might take some time to do so, when it happens, you will be able to reach to terms with yourself more and you will come to realize how much more you understand your own psyche.

When writers incorporate ideas of self-subversion into their writing, the pieces come out to be either parodies or pastiches. Sometimes it is necessary for writers to write parodies of themselves and their persona in order to see in third person perspective what they really are. People all see each other differently and in order for someone to see himself/herself in full view, one must look at a mirror, which might be exactly what a parody is. Pastiches, however, are necessary to a writer’s ego. They build a writer’s confidence, hence fueling him/her to write more.

When you have started, to writer either parodies or pastiches of your earlier self, then you would know you have already outgrown yourself. Do not be scared if you realize that it already happened to you because it is a fundamental component of the process of evolution. Every good writer should undergo this fruition sometime or another. It is essential to constantly refresh and renew one’s ideas because they become stale at some point in a writer’s career. Differing one’s point of view might be the only way for a writer to thrive thru the ages.

However, if you think you have not undergone self-subversion, do not fret. It is not advisable to rush things because self-subversion should be taken at one’s own pace. Do not give up just because you have been trying for a long time to further your writing style and technique, it will come to you in due time. Forced evolution might not feel natural and hence might be detrimental to you instead of constructive. Just take your time to examine yourself and write what you want to. Re-read your earlier works and if you have time, rewrite them again and see the difference between the you from before and the you from now. You do not have to read a lot if you do not want to or do not have the time. Sometimes, to be able to write good pieces, you just have to attack it and not be hesitant. The rawness gives a good feel to your writings at times. You will know that you have already undergone the desired change when you can finally laugh at your former self and say that you are much better now. Discover the secrets to everlasting youth. 

Changing the Way We Think in Propensity to Self-Reliance

Self-subversion is a conscious effort to understand our minds. We can make a determined effort to know the way we think. This can be done by drawing inferences from past experience.

We can know why we have a fear for a particular activity or object by delving deep into the way we reacted to that fear or object. This will give us a better insight into our inner-minds. Once we understand the basic cause of the fear, we can take steps to overcome it.

Do you remember your first day at school? Were you afraid to leave your mom and dad to go to a new place? After a while, you enjoyed going to school. How was this possible? By analyzing and understanding, the way you overcame this fear can help you to conquer any other fear that you have.

Our behavior is highly influenced by external forces. These forces could include the various events that happen around us like violence, racism, poverty, crime, abuse and much more. They are mostly negative than positive. Like our past experience, we can also draw inference from these events. We can analyze our reaction to a particular event and then analyze the cause-effect relationship. By determining the cause and by understanding the effect, we can make a premeditated decision to overcome any negative effect of that event.

Understanding our fear and taking steps to overcome them will go a long way in making us self-reliant. Our dependence on external factors and our fear or reluctance to do a certain activity will be greatly reduced. This will give us the self-confidence to achieve whatever we want.

 To achieve self-reliance and self-confidence, we must fundamentally believe that we can change the way we think and act. We must move from a negative-centric world to a positive-centric world. We must make a conscious decision to close our mind to anything negative. At the outset, we must comprehend the fact that there are some things in us that have to be changed for us to become better individuals. Every thing in this world has a cause-effect relationship.

Fundamentally, we must analyze and understand the cause of a particular behavior or action. After understanding the reason for a particular behavior or action, we can take determined steps to change that.

For example, you are drastically affected by war and other killings and because of this, you are paranoid about travelling. This paranoia can be conquered. The first step is to accept the fact that you are paranoid about travelling due to the fear of being killed. After that, you can dig deep into your mind to understand why war and killings affect you so much. It could be because of some murder that you saw when you were young or it could due to some show on the television or it could be due to a book you read or a movie that you watched. Now that you have understood the cause, you must take steps to address it. You can decide to close yourself to any kind of negative event like killing and war. When you keep making determined effort over a period of time, you will realize that your paranoia has decreased. It cannot happen over-night. It will happen over a period of time and this period is very subjective. But remember, that you should believe that you can change all through the way.

A self-reliant person radiates with confidence and motivation. He/she can be a guiding light for others. Self-reliant people can motivate themselves and others to achieve a target or to accomplish a mission. They can instill confidence in others propelling them to become better individuals.

When every person becomes self-reliant and motivated, we can annihilate the evils existing today to give an improved world for the future generations. Writing is the way to healing.