Introduction
The past couple of posts have been raw and emotional, and very vulnerable. My first instinct is to open up VS Code and start developing a simple website. However, I have responsibilities I have to take care of first this evening. I am relieved that my brain is defaulting to trying to use that habit already.
Building these habits successfully are a key component of moving forward emotionally to a healthy place. Since I can’t use my preferred coping mechanism, I am currently using the calming audio to try and calm my mind, until I get home and resting.
Today’s post is a reflection of the fears that are driving my fears of doing this process to face my mental health struggles. I have several fears that I am afraid of. I can’t move forward in this journey if I don’t verbalize, externalize, and confront the fears.
The Fears That Hold Me Back from Being Successful
I have a core fear that is driving me in this process. I am going to be a bit vulnerable about my fear, with is going to be difficult and raw, but I need to verbalize it. I have a few mental health conditions, the primary issues I struggle with are Autism, Bipolar II, and ADHD.
The only people I had in my life as a child on how to handle bipolar disorder handled it poorly. Their life all had a common theme. The same theme every time. Their life was jumping from one job to the next, one relationship to the next, one town to the next.
There was no stability, they drove person after person away. They were charming and lovable, but behind closed doors, when they got close emotionally to a person, the walls went up and they drove people who cared about them away repeatedly. The people close to them had to walk away to protect themselves.
They never overcame the struggles that caused their instability and kept driving people who loved and cared away. Those men were not the husband, father, or friend that I want to be. I see the patterns playing out in my own life. I understand why their behavior was the way it was.
I understand why they were so unstable and why they kept driving people away. However, what I don’t understand is why after going through this pain repeatedly, they were never able to fix their behavior. I am worried that part of being bipolar is that I am predisposed to that life.
I am afraid that no matter what I try, I will end up here over and over and never be able to fix this. I don’t want to be the man that those men were. I want the patterns of behavior that have driven my family and my girlfriend away to stop and start moving towards a healthier version of myself.
However, even though I am making progress, these fears are still weighing on my mind. I am not going to let these fears hold me back. I want to take control of my life, and I want to change the course of my direction.
Fears Do Not Define Me (I hope)
As long as I am report to my fears and they take charge of my life, I won’t ever be able to fully overcome the challenges I face. There was a lot of traumas in my early childhood, somewhere between 2 and 4 years old. And as I got older, the traumas shifted from physical and emotional abuse by an authority figure (a step-father at the time) to emotional neglect.
It wasn’t that my parents (mom and the stepfather who raised me. The man was more of a father than the other guys ever were. He is my dad) didn’t pay attention to me. It was that my parents were focused on making sure my medical conditions did not take my life, but in the process my emotional needs were not met. In fact, they weren’t even noticed.
As a child, I would be excited about a new arts and craft I made, or a new “invention” I came up with and would run in my mom’s office excited to share. The last thing I would tell her was often my medical, and her response would be “You came in to show me all of this unimportant stuff and never told me your medical.”
As a kid that taught me that my emotional needs didn’t matter. I don’t think my parents intended to do that by any means, but it taught me as a child that my emotional needs weren’t going to be met. It taught me that uncertainty was to be feared, because the fear drove me to protect myself from harmful people or things, whether real or perceived.
Because of this I had an extreme fear of being alone. I could not self-sooth. As a child, I wasn’t taught the tools to define, externalize, and healthily process my emotions. And, even as an adult I wasn’t taught how to do that. I launched into the real world and had no clue, or emotional maturity for that matter, to handle and process my emotions like an adult.
It wasn’t until my ex-girlfriend invested all the time she could manage to teach me how to cope, that I was really equipped with the tools I needed to start facing this. I have finally started to get things sorted, and am starting to make progress in the right direction.
The progress I am making know is something that I always had hoped she would be by my side for us to celebrate together, but I spent far more time dealing with “what if’s” rather than dealing with “what is”. And that one is on me.
Small, Consistent, and Measurable Progress
I have been debating back and forth with myself on what is the best way to measure the progress I am making. I am a terrible liar, but I am an expert at lying to myself. When someone poses the question, “How do I know you have really made the progress you said you have, and this isn’t another embellishment with a hidden agenda?”, I want to be able to clearly and concisely explain exactly how they will know that I actually made the progress. I want them to know I am all action (measurable results) and not just talk.
I won’t ever be able to really know if I have changed until I put myself in situations where my anxiety is triggered. Anxiety, “fear of the unknown”, was the prime mover that drove my behaviors that harmed the people that cared about me. If I have that in check, there is a very real possibility that my bipolar will go into sustained remission, and I will stop alienating the people that care about me. Which hurts them as much as it hurts me.
So, to document the progress over time, I have to put myself in positions that trigger extreme anxiety. Nothing dangerous or irresponsible, but I need to trigger the anxiety to trigger the coping habits. I essentially need to stress test my new strategies to evaluate how well they work, and what changes I need to make to bring more stability.
How to Handle My Anxiety in Review
I discussed the measure of success for this process in the previous paragraph. While reaching the goal of mental stability is considered “success”, I am also starting to realize that moving towards health is a process that never truly ends.
Life has ups and downs. It moves forward. As we get older, we transition from one life phase to another, each with its own set of challenges. “Black Swan” events happen, we lose people we love, we lose everything we worked to build, there are no guarantees in life except death and that no one makes it out without scars.
Life fights, it bruises, it burns, it breaks and shatters. Life has a 100% success rate in this endeavor. However, by understanding the ephemeral nature of life, that everything is temporary, we understand that “This too shall pass”.
You have success? “This too shall pass”. You have failed in every meaningful life area to you? “This too shall pass”. Life? “This too shall pass”. None of us make it out alive, and we can’t take anything with us.
So, realizing that this is not the end of the journey, rather the beginning, I am going to document my slowly clarifying plan for building towards emotional maturity and mental stability.
The Habits
As documented in previous posts, I have acknowledged that I personally cannot rely of sheer willpower alone. It is not a fault, everyone is different. But it does mean that I have to find alternative paths to my destination.
I mentioned that habits are my strategy. I know, regardless of what I try, I will eventually run into situations where I cannot consciously cope. My strategy to accommodate this is to build consistent habits over time, so that my brain defaults to these healthy coping skills, rather than the previous unhealthy ones.
My brain is already starting to default to some of these behaviors. According to my emotional app that helps me assign names to my emotions, I have been feeling forlorn, ashamed, scared, sad, lonely, and lost. My brain has been stressed trying to cope with the consequences of my actions.
Earlier, I caught my brain being stressed, and the first instinct was “let’s develop a simple webpage with pretty colors”. That may not seem significant but let me tell you why it is EXTREMELY significant. That thought was not a thought that I consciously decided to think. It was automatic.
It is the first seed, however small, that shows my brain starting to successfully form habits that are healthy coping mechanisms. I.e., my strategy is starting to work. It is equivalent to in principle to the biblical story of Elijah. He saw a cloud as small as a man’s hand form after prayer. He ran miles to the city and told them that the drought was finally coming to an end.
By the time the cloud that was “small as a man’s hand” reached the city, it was a torrential downpour that brought a relief that the people desperately needed.
It is said it takes 21 days to fully form a habit and 90 days to build a lifestyle. I am almost 14 days in, so it may take a bit longer for me to fully form those habits, but they are forming. And with consistent effort they will continue to take hold.
Over the next few weeks, I will dust off my old copy of “Atomic Habits” by James Clear and begin studying to form a structured plan to encourage the growth of these habits. A lesson I could have desperately used as a child was that improving your mental health/improving your life, should take as much research and studying as it would to get a Ph.D., if not more.
Obviously, this isn’t going to happen overnight, so I feel that I would likely need a full 30 days before I can fully evaluate the progress I have been making.
In addition to these habits, I am successfully building habits for self-care. Will I change my life? Will I break the mold? Will I change the path that drove my family away? Will I change the habits that made my life unstable? Will the people that walked away still believe in me enough to want to be a part of my life again? Have I pushed everyone who cared and loved me so far that I have to rebuild everything from scratch? Will I be able to rebuild the life I desperately wanted and was on track for? I don’t know.
I honestly have no answers regarding that. I don’t know if my family will invite me back. I don’t know if the people who walked away in the past 5 months will ever believe in me again. I have no clue if I have been written off, and I have lost people who cared about me permanently. The only thing I know is that I am slowly moving in the right direction. Even if it is too little and too late, and I am sitting here alone at the last stop on the elevator, I am finally making the progress to make that floor a little less lonely, and a little more bearable.
I just have to stick with it, keep improving, and hopefully, someday the people that left over the past 5 or 6 months, the friends and family that wanted nothing but the best for me will see that that compassionate guy, the one that loved without conditions, the one that gave just to give, is slowly coming back.
Until next time.
– Noah