It has been over three weeks since my introductory post. Since then, and before writing that post even, I have written paragraphs and paragraphs of content. Perhaps, too many paragraphs. Yet, I have uploaded nothing. I wrote an entire blog post on change, which kept getting longer and longer, until I decided it wasn’t fit to simply be a blog post, but something much bigger. Then, when I try to write something smaller, I get distracted by countless ‘emergencies’. This, my friends, is a great example of what I call “The Attack.”
The Attack will come whenever you set out to do something great. When I used to attend a Christian church, the concept of spiritual attack would come up. This was described as essentially the forces of the devil, or the evil spirit, trying to stop you from fulfilling God’s plan for your life. This plan being the greatest good you can do for yourself and others using the most and highest parts of yourself, which of course the devil doesn’t want to come to fruition, as he is inherently against all good things, or things of God. Whether or not you believe in God and the devil in the traditional sense, it is hard to ignore the fact that we do experience this phenomena in one way or another.
There is a similar less spiritual, scientific phenomena called entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder, and the 2nd law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of the universe, if viewed as an isolated system, increases over time. Dr. Jordan Peterson, clinical psychologist, professor and author, consistently brings up the idea in his lectures and books that the universe is essentially a battle between chaos and order. You could equate the idea of entropy, or chaos with the Christian idea of the devil. The devil loves chaos. Chaos is the ultimate distraction and opposite to any act of good or creation, because in order for any of us to do something good we need to be organized, thus the justification of the religious rules and order (which I will focus and expand upon in future blog posts).
If the devil is chaos, then God is order. We are constantly under attack by the chaotic nature of the universe. Then when we try to make order and bring God, or the transcendent, or whatever you want to call it, out in this world, we face push back. It is easy to see this push back as a ‘sign’ perhaps that we shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing, that it’s too hard and that it’s not worth it. It was already a long shot to begin with, we think, and so we give up. We give in to the chaos. We increase the entropy of our life and ultimately of the universe.
Yet, if we are able to recognize the entropy, the chaos, the devil for what it is, then we can push back even harder. When I find myself getting overwhelmed by how big my ideas can get, this isn’t a bad thing in fact, but actually an amazing blessing that I’m able to have these thoughts. It can be a daunting task to try to organize and communicate these ideas to people, especially when I’m new to the medium of blogging. Sometimes I might even think that I’m better than blogging, and that instead I should write a book, because that’s more respectable. These are all only lies. What matters is making something. It doesn’t matter how. It just matters that I put words down and share them with people. Because if I don’t, the entropy will eat away at me and paralyze me with false ideas of perfection and legitimacy.
The Attack doesn’t care how it stops you, just that it does. Chaos likes to distract you with itself. All of a sudden, little emergencies will pop up in your life that NEED to be addressed immediately. A lie, once again. The Attack can most easily be recognized anytime you catch yourself thinking that you are either better than something or not good enough for something. Strong emotions will come up, like anxiety or depression. But I see these as mere signs that you are not fulfilling God’s plan, or the ultimate plan for your life. You’re rejecting the thing you need to be doing. You’re not nourishing your mind and soul with things that feed it. You’re distracting yourself with the comparison trap, or with other small but deadly traps.
I will give you some examples of the many traps I fell into after starting my blog, something which took years of building up courage and taking down false beliefs to do. My family moved to a new home in a new area, which I was unfamiliar with and was also sketched out by. My already over-active imagination started coming up with all the ways I was sure I was in danger, and anxiety had its way with me. And so a quality of mine, imagination, that could be used to create order in writing a story, was instead used against me to create chaos and paralyze me from doing anything beneficial and meaningful.
My creativity was used against me in other ways too. Of course, all of this submitting to chaos left me feeling depraved and empty. Deep down, I knew I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be, which only left me feeling more out of control to the supposed ‘messed up’ world, or rather, the messed up world I created for myself. So I filled that hole with lots and lots of online shopping… Which was oh so easy to do in this fast fashion, youtube beauty and fashion vlogger culture where marketers have easy access to our attention and thus, our wallets at all times. I escaped into a world where I thought that if I looked the part I could become all the things I wanted to become. Yet the whole time, this was directly interfering with a long term goal of mine to move out of my mom’s house and move in with my boyfriend. I was depleting all of my resources to ever achieve that goal out of emotion. I felt out of control, thinking that it would never happen anyway, and thus submitted further into the chaos.
I knew on an intellectual level that what I was doing was wrong because of all the books I read and lectures I listened to, but I was so deep in the chaos and all the lies it told me that I didn’t know how to latch on to reality. One weekend, when my boyfriend was over and we were talking about our ideal future and how we want our lives and our family to be, and yet he saw the chaos I actively participated in creating around me, he made a comment to me. He was asking if I wanted to write or continue watching House of Lies (a great show on Showtime, which really displays the dangers of chaos well). This also serves as a reminder that “good” things can be a distraction too, and that it’s important to control our intake of those as well. Of course I said I wanted to watch another episode — it’s a great show! Then he said to me, “Kyra, if we watch another episode, then we are just going to be watching TV at our parents’ house forever.”
The truth of his statement weighed heavy on me. What I was saying I wanted and what I was doing didn’t match up. The Attack had worked on me. It was keeping me stagnant — and not just stagnant, but bringing me way down. If you stay where you are now in five years, it’s actually much worse in five years. When I imagine my ideal future, I want to be able to actually achieve it, and so I must be able to recognize The Attack and its associated lies and fight back with truth and order. And I intend to fight back and create the world I want to live in with each blog post.
Congratulations, you made it to the end of the blog post! Thank you for taking the time to visit my blog and read my thoughts. If you are interested in the topics I touched upon here, I suggest you watch Jordan Peterson’s Psychological Significance of Biblical Stories here:
And visit my boyfriend’s blog for all sorts of techniques on chaos management here: https://chrismukiibi.com
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Gustave Flaubert
Kyra Thoughts 
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