Category: Words To Live By

Has your self-worth and self-esteem ever gone so low that you resorted to buying your friends?

Sadly, I can answer yes to this question, but I learned a very valuable lesson in being this way for years. Anyone who allows themself to be bought time and time again, were really never a friend to start with.

The image I like to paint most often of this is of the barfly who has money to spend every night they go out on the town. Week in and week out they frequent some establishment buying round after round of drinks for various people. They become quite popular with the other patrons so much so that the stools around them are rapidly occupied each time they are there. There never seems to be a dull moment in their life at any of the places they go out for a drink and conversations always appear to be plentiful to them. But one day when their money runs out, they head out to one of those bars only to find once there, that they’re sitting alone and completely friendless.

I remember those days when I’d regularly say “The drinks are on me!” and I was instantly surrounded with loads of people who wanted to spend time with me. Unfortunately, I never got to learn the lesson that barfly learned during my own days of drinking, as I never ran out of money like they did. When I became clean and sober, my self-esteem and self-worth were so low that I honestly believed I didn’t have much to offer someone to want to be my friend. Much of that related all the way back to me being the nerd that no one ever wanted to be around in my early grammar school years. Regrettably, I’d go on for a very long time after this finding innumerous ways to buying my friends.

Whether it was constantly paying for someone’s dinners or movies, or taking someone on an all-expense paid vacation, or giving frequent gifts to someone, or loaning money to someone who I knew was never going to pay me back, or having sex with someone I really didn’t even like in that way, it became a habit to buy my friendships in ways just like these, all because I had such an incredibly low self-esteem and self-worth. And when each of my parents died and left me some inheritance money, this habit only grew worse.

I’m not exactly sure when it was that I fully woke up to the fact that many of the “friendships” I thought I had were actually not friends at all. If I had to guess, it was probably during the time I was hanging out with this Harley-Davidson biker guy. During that period, my mental and emotional health deteriorated greatly and the only things I received from this friend while that was happening were either criticisms of my state of health, demands for free meals, or requests for money to borrow. When I refused to offer anything except my company, he was consistently nowhere to be found.

Thankfully all of that led me to finally work on my low self-esteem and low self-worth enough to the point where I learned how to unconditionally love myself. Because of that, I now enjoy spending time alone and don’t feel the need to do things anymore such as buying my friends. While I may not have too many of them in my life at the present time, I believe the few who are there treasure my soul and my company more so than anything.

So if you happen to be someone like I once was, who is regularly buying your friends, you may want to take a moment, breathe, and start working on improving your self-esteem and self-worth. As the more you do, the more you will find yourself unconditionally loving that which you see in the mirror every single day. And the more that continues to happen, the more you’ll find friends coming into your life, not because you’re buying their friendship, but because your heart and soul is that amazing they are drawn to that and that alone.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Have you ever prayed about a difficult situation that either you or someone else was going through and asked for a specific outcome to happen with it all? I used to do that quite regularly in almost every one of my prayers, until I began to understand that maybe those difficult things that were happening were actually meant to help whoever was going through them spiritually grow.

There are quite a number of examples I could provide in my own life of difficult things I’ve gone through where I really tried to tell my Higher Power how they should be resolved. From the loss of intimate relationships, close friendships, jobs, and a business I owned, to the decline of my physical health, many of the prayers I’ve said for these things have ended up going in exact opposite direction of what my ego had wanted. But in the long run, I’ve consistently seen that it’s been for the better because I’ve learned very valuable lessons with the outcomes I received.

Take the loss of my bed and breakfast for example. As it headed towards financial ruin in its last few years of operation under my ownership, I prayed day in and day out for a buyer to come in and at least purchase it for a price that would pay me back the $600,000 I had personally invested into it. Eventually when it sold as a short-sale with me losing everything but the shirt on my back, I became quite angry with God for that outcome. But through my 12 Step recovery work, I ultimately saw how it brought me more humility in life by totally losing that investment. That loss actually taught me how much money had been ruling my life. Now I live a much humbler existence that isn’t being controlled by money like it used to be. I fully believe that if my original prayer had been answered in the way I wanted, I’d probably still have money controlling my life more than not.

Now, I do my best to pray for my Higher Power’s will in every difficult situation I go through. Currently, it’s my physical health issues that are definitely the most challenging thing I’m facing. All I ask in my prayers these days in dealing with them is for the strength to get through each 24 hours and for “Thy will, not mine” to be done. While my ego may not like the physical uncomfortableness I go through on on most days, I’ve become a lot more more compassionate, selfless, and humble having endured it as long as I have. That’s why I continue to ask for Thy will and not my own because maybe this is just part of some higher purpose that will become even more clear at a later date.

When it comes to everyone and everything else that I pray for nowadays, I also ask for God’s will and not for any particular outcome as well. Take for example a friend of mine who recently has been very fearful about becoming homeless due to his landlord ending his rental agreement. While I want to pray for my Higher Power to quickly fix his situation and find him an easy resolution, there may be some wonderful spiritual work manifesting within my friend’s life by going through this. Thus the only thing I’m praying for is God’s will in the whole matter.

The reality is that I’ve continued to observe over time in both others, and in myself, leaps in spiritual growth by going through any arduous time in life. While the ego may want to pray for a specific outcome time and time again when they’re occurring, I’ve found that in asking for Thy will and not mine, that the end result is far better than anything the ego could ever have imagined.

So if you happen to be facing something very difficult right now in life, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and ask for your Higher Power’s will, and not your own. I truly believe that you will grow exponentially on a spiritual level in doing so. But even better, there’s a good chance you’ll also end up with an outcome that will make you much happier in the long run, than anything your ego might have ever conceived of in the first place…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

What do you think happens after you die?

This is a question I have pondered so many times throughout my life and my answer has definitely ranged from one extreme to another.

The first belief I ever had about what happens after I die was definitely taught to me by the United Methodist Church I attended as a kid. There, I was told that if I believed enough in Jesus Christ and confessed all my sins to his Father that I would go to Heaven and be able to enter its pearly white gates.

For years I strived to serve Jesus, as it was imparted upon me at this church and in the Bible I read. I also did my best to live this “sin free” life because I wanted that reward of going to a great resting place that would last for eternity. But somewhere along the lines I stopped believing in this and started going in the exact opposite direction. If I were to pinpoint where that most likely started to happen, it was probably when a revival church I had joined told me that I wouldn’t go to Heaven if I continued to live a life of homosexuality.

It was hard for me to believe that all gay men and women were sinners and that God would send every homosexual to some place other than Heaven when they died. That revival church told me it was Hell I would go to if I didn’t repent and stop living my “lifestyle”. But frankly me trying to accept what they told me was putting me there already. That’s most likely why I didn’t think twice when I went to more of a hedonistic way of living for a number of years after that.

Addictions would become the thing that mostly consumed me during those hedonistic years. While they did, I floated to the opposite extreme in what I believed would happen to me after I die. I began to assume that this was the only life I had and that I needed to make the best of it. What that translated into for me was living selfishly more than not. Unfortunately, that only led me to having a lot of anxiety, depression, and other health issues. And in all honestly, all of that only grew worse as I continued to believe there was nothing beyond this life. That’s only because that belief gave me a serious lack of hope and without that quality, which I think is essential for each of us, all I wanted to do was numb myself with addictions. Thankfully the pain of me living this way long enough eventually lead me to my discovery of meditation and it was through meditation that my belief in some type of an afterlife returned, along with renewed hope.

My meditations revealed to me the possibility of reincarnation and having lived multiple lives. I proceeded to read more and more on this subject until I became convinced that there must be something more than just this single blip on the radar of life. In recent years, this feeling has only continued to intensify and nowadays what I believe will happen after I die is a combination of Christian and Buddhist philosophies.

So do I still believe that I’m going to become a pile of bones or ashes in a grave one day? Or do I still believe that I will spend the rest of my life in some eternal place of ecstasy?

The answer is no to both.

What I actually believe now will happen after I die is that my energy (or my soul if you wish) will go to some temporary place of rest where I can reflect upon the lessons I learned, and didn’t learn, in this life. And when that period of reflection is over, I also believe I’ll have the ability to come back and live another life with different conditions, so that I may learn new lessons, or even master any old ones I hadn’t fully grasped yet.

Who knows, maybe I’m way off from what truly happens after I die. Regardless, I’m just glad I still have hope that there’s at least something beyond this life, because without that, I know my life would be quite miserable. Thank God I don’t feel that way anymore…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson