Ignoring your mental health can be rough.
Though I'd been exploring videos on mental health and psychology for some time, I really only began to do a deep dive into my own mental environment last November. A really bad experience I had during that time became my call to action: I needed to figure out what exactly causes my distress.
Since then, I've continued with the psych videos, on subjects such as processing emotions, motivation, and dissociation, and they've helped, little by little. I've also participated in online life coaching (Healthy Gamer), which has been amongst the most helpful of choices I made in regards to this. And, of course, writing, writing, WRITING about how I feel and why I feel that way. Spiral notebooks filled with gobbledygook. Writing helps me process; it slows down my mind to really think about what I'm writing and, in the case of my mental health, making sure it's true. I don't remember everything that I wrote about my mental health nor do I remember every discovery I've made about myself, and I don't think that's such a bad thing.
The most important things I've learned about myself:
I dissociate. A lot. And I never realized it until recently.
If I said that I'd been dissociating for years, you might make a puzzled expression. All this time what I thought was me being hyper-focused on my goals and desires turned out to actually be dissociation. Without getting too personal, my mind has learned to trade in my day-to-day, moment-to-moment distressing feelings for thoughts and feelings about the future, when I've accomplished my goals. My particular type of dissociation has learned to focus on the good feelings that come from accomplishing my goals, such as wealth and recognition that comes from becoming a successful author. In focusing on these good feelings, my mind temporarily "checks out" of any present distressful feelings, which thereby makes me "check out" from my present goings-on.
More reasons as to why I never noticed this: I thought my fixation with my goals was a form a motivation (I mean, why wouldn't it be?), and I thought that it wasn't a problem because there were days where I managed to get a lot of creative work done, which seemed to encourage that fixation (and also left me feeling good at the end of the day because I managed to get a lot done).
How I figured out I was doing this was when I stumbled across a recommended video about dissociation that essentially called me out for its 26-minute duration (https://youtu.be/mvHoF0tOsmM?si=vPLB72GCoHDmI8OT). I was very angry when I listened to this video. Because it not only told me, in my mind, that the entire way I go about trying to accomplish my goals is wrong, and because it gave me such a huge thing about myself that I needed to understand and correct. (There's been a pattern over the course of my mental health journey that goes like this: I discover something about myself and think I'm so much closer to finding forward momentum in life and in my career, then I stumble across another thing that hits me like a shovel to the face and feel like I have go back to square one.)
When I started doing this, I don't know. I don't know why it started either. I'm not completely healed from dissociating. But at least now I understand that I do it and can move forward from there, noticing it and learning about it.I expect too much out of myself.
This is amongst the things that cause me distress and has caused me to dissociate. It has its root in comparing myself to others, which is extremely difficult to not do in the digital age. Every day my restless mind would think of all the things I could do in a day, and it would all sound reasonable, but it would cause me so much anxiety (because not only would I stress out about getting all those things done in a day, I would want the things I do to always be done well, and these things (such as writing) would remind me of the future goal (successful author) that I wanted to accomplish and the enormous pressure of whether or not I'd actually achieve that goal). And, guess what?, the distress would cause me to check out mentally and basically move at a snail's pace, which would lead to me inevitably not accomplishing all I wanted to do that day and I'd feel like a failure.
This is not a healthy cycle to fall into and I urge anyone who is in a similar cycle to find a way to take the time to understand oneself and sift through what is going on. Even taking a year or more, even if that involves putting your projects on hold, to figure yourself out is better than spending a lifetime in this self-destructive cycle. This cycle does not make life worth living.I worry about what others think about me.
This is what I've been learning and trying to work on in the past year. It's been difficult to learn these things about myself and in the beginning it feels daunting to think of how I could find my way out of them. But I have hope, so long as I try as I can to remain diligent and notice these things about myself when they occur and keep trying to move forward. Even as I wish that all it took was knowing about them for them to go away, it will take time to heal from these problems.
Not taking the time to understand what was causing my distress over the years caught up with me. My distress didn't really go anywhere over the years, it just kept building up over the years, and now that I've been digging for it, HERE IT ALL IS!!! :') UGH!
Again, I would like to encourage anyone out there to pay attention to yourself, especially if you find yourself stressed out every day. Even if you have to put your projects on hold for even a year or more, it's worth it to know what's going on and why. Knowing what's happening can be the biggest catalyst for finding forward momentum in your life.
Things I think about that have helped me (mileage may vary):
It's ok if people think I'm weird, especially if I believe I'm weird anyway.
I don't have to be perfect in every facet of my life (such as in my career, in my relationships, in my finances, in my creativity, etc.). Some facets are more important to me than others.
I want to practice being ok even if I do nothing for an entire day.
Oh, I'm doing that dissociation thing again. That's not good. Ok, well, let me try to look around me or focus on some work that's right in front of me.
I'm stressed out because I didn't get around to doing this thing or that thing today. Is it ok that I didn't get to them? Yeah, I'm still here. I'm not hurt and nothing is irreversibly ruined. Those things will still be there tomorrow, or even next year.
I need to try something new today. Something different than what I normally default to.
I'm moving forward from right here, right now in the present. Not from the past. Given my present situation, how shall I move forward?
What can I look forward to today? (It helps me get out of the anxiety mindset of having a laundry list of things I want to do).
R. A. W. 10/6/2023
