Saturday, November 26, 2016

On Rejection

I keep meaning to write in this blog, but I keep putting it off because of the time and focus commitment.  I'm thinking I should go back to video blogs, which were much easier to make because all I had to do was ramble in front of a camera for however long.  Just need to free up a lot of the storage on my phone.

Rejection is a subject that has risen to the top of the lists this year especially, and has been the key challenge I have faced especially when it comes to meeting and dating women.  This hasn't just been the case with pickup, but this has been the case across the board.

To put it bluntly, I don't deal with rejection very well - at least not with women.  I don't think I ever handled it well.  Even as a kid, I hated the idea of going over to a friends' house and knocking on the door to ask if so-and-so is there, fearing that said friend wasn't there or couldn't come out to play, etc. and have the door slammed on my face or feel embarrassed for some reason.  I even feared going up to the counter at a store to ask for something as simple as a refill on a drink (this was back when most places you had to ask for a refill at the counter and only a handful had the self-serve fountain drinks).  Maybe it was because I was told no one time harshly or because I was afraid of people who worked somewhere because I was a little kid, or whatever.  I remember having to get my mom, dad or sister to come up to the counter with me whenever I wanted something.

Now obviously I don't have these sort of anxiety issues today, but with women it's still a major issue.  I think it's an issue for this reason - women reject guys, and guys who put themselves out there risk the chance of getting shot down hard.  When I was in elementary and middle school, I never asked any girl out.  I really wasn't in any position to date anyways, but I thought the ridicule would have been too great if I got shot down and I wouldn't have been able to live with the embarrassment.  What I would do was obsess over one girl every year, thinking it would be nice to go out with that girl but not doing so - not because of the fear of rejection but because of what ridicule I would face if I did get involved.  News travels fast, and I wasn't exactly the most popular kid in school.  In high school, things did get a tad bit better, but it was still more of the same obsessing over one girl a year.  In fact, this whole obsessing over one girl a year didn't stop until just five years ago, when I started learning pickup.  I learned how bad oneitis is, and I will give pickup credit for helping me rid myself of that.  However, I think one of the reasons why I had the oneitis in the first place was because I thought the girl was the best match at the time and yet I still didn't want to screw things up.

Pickup didn't make my fear of rejection go away.  It may have subdued it a little.  It may have allowed me to take more risks.  But the truth of the matter is it in some ways made things worse.  See when it comes to rejection, pickup companies are not clear on what they want to teach men and many times just outright contradict their own advice.  I would say just about all of them have no problems giving a long ass speech about how guys should not fear rejection but should embrace it, take it on, just get as many rejections as possible because that's how you learn not to care, etc.  However, once that speech is over, then they'll get into tactics, strategies, gimmicks, etc. on what body language you should convey, what you should be doing while you're out, what you should say to a girl when you approach her, how you should go about asking for the number, etc. and the more mainstream pickup groups will even go as far as telling you that you can switch on attraction triggers with any girl and if you don't then you executed step 2-B wrong or some bullshit like that.  I know it's all to sell overpriced ebooks and videos and even more overpriced bootcamps, because if you just tell guys to be themselves and stop looking to women for approval and screen girls out, they wouldn't be in business.  This idea of "ploughing through" has never worked.  Sure, maybe a girl might not be agreeable at first, but if she flat out doesn't like you, there really isn't any super technique you can do to change that.  It's better to be your real self instead of putting on a front as a means to avoid rejection and get what I call fake success.  I mean, if you're an accountant for example, and you have to make up some story about how you are a professional assassin because some pickup guru told you to say that because she would think you're boring otherwise, isn't that not only being inauthentic but downright missing the point?  It also made meeting women into a spectator sport.

I think I need to stop at this for now.  There's so much more I want to say on it, but I'm running a marathon tomorrow.  If I survive, I will speak more of this later.

Thursday, November 24, 2016

What I have accomplished in 2016

2016 is a year that I feel overall has been a huge struggle, much like 2004, 2008 and 2011.  The problem is I never focus on the good things that happen in these years, and in this past year and those three years I mentioned, I have accomplished quite a bit.  Now I will take some time to discuss what I have accomplished this year:

1) I moved to South Tampa, something I was trying to do for the last 4 years or so.

2) I became more active and was more focused on exercise this year than in years past.

3) I finally got the chance to visit St. Augustine

4) I finally got to take a trip up to the mountains of North Carolina after not being able to do so in the past due to financial reasons

5) I got to visit New York again, this time on my own terms

6) I helped Donald Trump get elected president, making it the first time in 20 years that the person I wanted to win the presidential election actually won.  

7) I became a concealed carry gun owner

8) I picked up fencing again, this time in the form of historical european martial arts

9) I didn't struggle financially nearly as much as I have in years past

10) I got promoted to supervisor at work

11) I signed up for my first marathon, which I will be running this weekend

So why do I think 2016 has been a huge struggle?  As I have written before, it's because of the social aspect.  I went into the year thinking it was going to finally be the year where I get over my problem with meeting/attracting/dating women by starting off the year pretty strong and thinking I was going to springboard myself after the week-long RSD bootcamp in Miami this past February.  What happened was the exact opposite.  What happened instead was that I gave up pickup altogether, I stopped going out to the venues I was practicing pickup except on rare occasion, and when I did go I did little to no approaching of women.  I felt like instead of getting better I got worse, and I felt like I lost any source of motivation that I had as well as any form of parachute.  To make matters worse it I have a roommate who won't shut up about things like "sarging" and obsesses over pickup, even though he's just mocking it.  I get extremely irritated when he asks me if I went out sarging or some stupid shit like that.

So with that said, will I finally climb out of this rut?  Hopefully now that I'm focused on it, things can turn for the better.  After all, I'm pinpointing what my biggest issues are, and the biggest one I have is I don't handle rejection well at all.  

I will write more about this later, but I just wanted to share these thoughts, and I want to blog more often.