Born this way? maybe not.

One of the buzz statements of our generation is the phrase "born this way". Though it can be a valid viewpoint in some ways, the statement does not get the full consideration it deserves. On a daily basis this phrase is slaughtered by people who are using it as an excuse. What they seem to usually be saying is more on the lines of, you are judging me and I don't care because I am going to live my life this way regardless. Saying that a person was "born this way" implies a much larger conversation than they intended.

The conversation that arises when someone makes the statement "born this way", is the conversation of nature vs nurture. Nature vs nurture is a classic conversation in the world of psychology.

In my opinion, everything we do in life is from a "nurture" point of view. I believe that if two identical twins were raised exactly the same, with ALL of the exact same external inputs, they would turn out making almost exactly the same life decisions. Yet, this never happens. Every single person faces different external situations at some point in their lives leading them to having different internal reflection which eventually leads them back to having different external responses in life.

Needless to say, if we recognize this patter we can pretty heavily influence the output of our lives. We are no longer trapped responding to life the way we were raised. Now, if we recognize our life response and we wish, or know, a better way to respond to a situation we can slowly adapt into that response. The biggest hurdle we face is breaking our old habits. Our trained responses are the deepest and hardest habits to break in our life. This is what most people would consider their "personality" to be made up of. Our personality is the internal response we have to our external situation without much though. Yet, when we think about our response we begin to mold and shape a better response. This is a good process if you can recognize the "best way you see fit" to responding to a situation. This is a bad process if you don't know how you would like to best respond.

An example of this would be eating fast food. At first instinct I would like to eat fast food. You could argue that eating fast food has become part of my personality. Yet, after more consideration I realize that eating fast food is not the healthiest choice I can make for my life. If I truly want to eat healthier and remove fast food from my life, I will push myself into denying fast food so often that it becomes habit to not want fast food (and hopefully I develop the habit of eating healthy in it's place). This ability to cognitively alter our internal processes is why I believe fully in a "nurture" world view.

Nurture brings power and control for everyone to have ownership of their lives. To fully embrace this lifestyle you must take responsibility for everything. If you like fast food, own the fact that you like fast food. Living a life believing that we were simply just born into any form of thinking happens to people far too often. Not learning to deal with your emotions is a stumbling block that too many young adults deal with. Adopting at least a partial nurture point of view will help to better ground ones self for the rest of their lives. 

My dating life -_-

I go to a weird school where the dating scene seems very flawed. Indiana Wesleyan University is a christian university. The idea is that we live is a Christ centered university that puts God at the center of everything. If this be the case, then why do I feel judged every single day for not being holy enough? Maybe it is because I cast judgement on myself. Maybe it is because I lack confidence in my faith. Maybe it is because my faith is not strong enough. Yet, I feel deep rooted in my faith and confident that I am doing well with God. My conclusion is that our school has developed a culture that passes judgement on people who do not look and act holy enough for their school, despite how well they are actually doing.

Why has a culture like this been created? I'm going to just report on a few aspects of our school that I believe may play into such a problem. Many say that the school has a four to one girl to guy ratio. Students are forced to attend chapel three days a week. Chapel is a very mainstream contemporary christian worship service, which may not be suited for all. The school is primarily made up of medical students, and ministry students.

All of these aspects could completely control the culture, or they could have absolutly nothing to do with it. I do know one thing for sure, the culture is a direct mirror of the dating culture that Indiana Wesleyan University offers. The goals of dating at this school, as a pretty known general consensus by the students, is that all the students find partners and get married as soon as possible. From my personal observations, this strong rooted belief by the students lead many to feeling a form of worthlessness and self doubt. When you are dating with the only goal being marriage, you become overly sensitive to small flaws in the individuals around you. Everyone seems to be looking for another person who is perfect. along with that, the bar tends to be held to such a high degree that dating becomes unbearable and painful. Dating is supposed to be a time in everyones life where they are focused on building self confidence and having fun. Those aspect are completely lost at our school and leave any student who is single feeling less than perfect.

After setting the stage, lets talk about my love life. Chances are that everything I just said is simply based on my crooked view of the campus because I am one of the ones who has ended up single. Regardless, I think it would be funny to type out all the girls in my life and be brutally honest about the whole thing. I spend to much time tiptoeing around my relationships with woman because I am so afraid of being judged and outcast and loosing the chances with a woman who one day may be my wife.

Coming into college I was dating a young woman named Jordan Whitson who was one year younger than I was. We had been dating for roughly a year. My freshman year I struggled to make friends. I put on the classic freshman fifteen (that is fifteen pounds heavier my freshman year). Social anxiety really ate me alive, even though I appeared to be making friends and being good relationships. Me and Jordan ended up breaking up second semester my freshman year. During the summer, while we were broken up, Jordan decided to come to the school I was attending.... I ask my self WHY IN GODS HOLY NAME SHE WOULD EVER MAKE SUCH A STUPID DECISION TO DEAL WITH OUR AWKWARD BREAKUP FOR THE NEXT 3 YEARS.... I digress. When she got to IWU that next year we became friends and ended up getting back together because there were no other romantic prospects in my life. We dated for a year, through my sophomore year into my junior year. We broke up again in October for very basic reasons. My families views, actions, and opinions often offended her radical uneducated liberal views. Since then she has learned more and is significantly less educated. Yet, at the time it caused significant issues in our relationship. She did not like my friends, and many of my close friends didn't like her. Particularly my room mate of three years and her would fight all the time. Her spiritual life became dead weight for my spiritual life. I asked to go to church and I tried to be positive and joyful. Jordan denied my invitation to attend church together and on a regular basis had a toxic negative attitude towards everything.  We broke up in October and we have been dealing with how awkward it all is for the last year now.

Since me and Jordan broke up, Meghin Paul showed up in my life. Meghin was one of my closest female friends Junior year. Due to us always joking with her she never took the idea of dating me, or my best friend Caleb Harper, seriously. She also was one of those girls who was looking for a trophy husband. As pretty as I am, Meghin wanted a brain dead pretty boy. After spending the year trying to find Mr. perfect she left IWU and went home for the summer. When she finally left the messed up IWU culture she met, what seems to be, and awesome guy who she had been dating for roughly six months now. I am very excited for their relationship and hope that he treats her well. Yes, I always had a crush on Meghin and thought she was beautiful. But, I am happy that she found someone and that she is happy.

Before me and Jordan broke up my friendship with Leanne Krick began to develop. Leanne was always asking for a little guidance in the area of accounting, which is my major. Me and leanne spent a handful of times working on accounting and we seemed to be hitting it off really well. The idea that a girl, as beautiful and nice as leanne, could walk into my life with such ease was like comfort food when making the decision about me and Jordan breaking up. After the break up Leanne and I became close in a playful brother sister type of manor. Me and my best friend harper would also joke around with leanne about her dating us, so she too would not take a relationship seriously. There were a handful of other prospects my junior year, but none as appealing emotionally as Meghin and Leanne were.

Senior year, where I am now, a handful of different relationships developed. Let's begin with me and leanne's relationship. I currently am rooming with a guy named Mark Kram. Mark is the type of guy that tends to take jokes just a little bit too far. Mark began spending time with Caleb Harper, me, Leanne, and Leanne's best friend Kaylie Young (who is now engaged to an amazing guy named Andrew). We had our little group of friends that was fun, but Mark took our "You should date me joke" and took it too far. Mark ended up buying a ring pop and got on one knee and awkwardly asked leanne to marry him in-front of everyone. If harper or I would have done something like that, it would have been funny. Yet, we could all see that Mark actually liked leanne and he made the whole thing a little awkward. This made me reevaluate my constant jokes with leanne, and I stopped doing them. I stopped making jokes about me and leanne dating. This brought an unexpected serious tone to our friendship. I'm not secretly in love with leanne or anything, but she is an amazing woman. There are many aspects that would make our relationship very successful. The first and foremost being that, we have a tight knit group of friends (Leanne, Harper, me, and kaylie) that don't intend to let die after college. Maybe one day something happens, maybe not. Either way we are all still going to keep hanging out and having the time of our lives together. This is the extend of Leanne as a prospect.

Next up we have a girl name Anja. I was hoping Anja would just be a semester fling. At the start of the semester I began laying the moves on Anja pretty thick. The classic stuff like never breaking eye contact, making an effort to hang out a lot, and always asking questions about her life and what not. As the semester developed a different girl came into my life named Rachel, stay tuned. This made me want to figure out what would happen between me and Anja. One night I invited Anja over, and nothing happen. So I texted her the next day and put it all on the table and asked her intentions. Nothing happened. Since then me and Anja have not texted at all and we only see each other in passing.

At the start of the semester I began spending a lot of time with a young man named Drew Mogg. Drew is a fellow accounting major who started dating a fun and beautiful young woman named Alisa, or the name we know her by, Alisaronie. Her best friend is a gorgeous girl named Rachel Harding. Me and Rachel immediately hit it off. We both have a passion for worship. We both have well rounded faith. We both love to be goofy and laugh. Most importantly ;), she also fell in love with the game of racquetball the same as I did freshman year. Racquetball is the bomb. When we first all started hanging out I was fairly confident that Rachel like me, but I was not ready. I had a bunch of crap going on in my life over the summer and I was making a handful of bad life decisions at the start of this semester. When she found out some of the stuff I had been doing, she had this look in her eye. This was an awesome chick that I had a shot with. That shot was ruined, and I saw it on her face. This made me want to kick my habits that much more. So, I began working on my morals and on my decision making skills. My relationships with God got a lot stronger and I felt as if deep down I was actually the kind of man that could make me and Rachel work. The problem is that, by the time I was ready to ask her out, she no longer seemed interested. Along with not seeming interested anymore, she also spend a lot of her time with a guy named Josh who usually gives me bad vibes. They say that they don't like each other and that nothing is happening, but everyone on campus things they are dating. Maybe one day I will be lucky enough to take Rachel on a date and explain more about my history in hopes that she will actually reconsider something between her and I. At the current moment, nothing is happening between us but we are still good friends.

The last girl to talk about is my beloved Kayleigh Yahne. Kayleigh has earned herself the title house babe. She is really attractive. When we first became friends I could see Kayleigh and me dating. Me and Kayleigh had the right parts of our personalities in common. Yet, as the semester developed instead of finding a romantic relationships we found an awesome friendship. Now I have my best guy friend Harper, and my best chick friend Kayleigh Yahne. Maybe one day me and Kayleigh will see each other romantically, but in order for that to happen we both have maturing that we would have to do in certain areas of our lives to make it work. I spend many lazy Saturdays with Kayleigh and do homework with Kayleigh all the time. She is my main girl and I love her to death ahaha.

This concludes my inner thinkings about woman. I cannot say that I have any secret crushes, and I cannot say that any of these girls are looking for me. When the time comes around I will fight my heart out for my girl. If I am lucky it may even be one of these beautiful woman. Yet, for now I am just waiting for a crazy awesome spark to change my life.
Thanks Yall,
Baker


Little update: I've talked about the friend zone with a handful of people this last week. I'm done being friendzoned. I, from here on out, plan to be honest and direct with woman. The worst thing that can happen is I make a girl uncomfortable. Yet, having a guy friend who likes you is far worse than having a stranger like you. No more being a baby. I'm going to grow up and reach for what I want without any shame.
-peace out

Being transparent?

Everyday we are bombarded with opinions, ideas, images, words, feelings, thoughts, and a countless number of other things. Trying to speak your mind and find peace and clarity through all of that can be the most challenging obstacles a person faces in their life. As a college student I face a whirlwind of peoples ideas mixed with their emotions on a daily basis. Learning to navigate through this stage in our lives where we "define" ourselves seems nearly impossible.

Tonight in the shower I was pondering the idea of being transparent. How many people can actually be transparent? is being transparent actually a good thing? what would being transparent feel like and look like? Then I began wondering about ways in which a person can be transparent. As I thought about this, the idea of journaling came to mind. The only problem with journaling is that is takes significantly longer to write out complex ideas by hand. I also wanted a way in which I could keep a time and date on everything I typed in order to keep my thoughts organized over time. That lead me to the idea of journaling to try and help clarify the interworking of my mind, and even possibly give a glimpse into my soul. 

I really want to share my entire life experience as a pre-text for my blog. But, I'm not quite sure if I want all that on the internet. Which is exactly the problem I was thinking about in the shower. Finding a place where I can comfortably share everything about myself can be a really hard thing to find. As I live my life, and as I write this blog, I hope to accomplish transparency from this point forward in what I have to say and find a place where I can overcome being trapped in my own head.