maybe gray - blog

Never forget that you were wired for struggle. Never forget the lineage before you, the suffering of our ancestors. Never forget that nothing good in life comes easy. I feel awe at the terror of facing all my pain and recovering from what I can. I feel like it hurts too much and I look to something outside myself to help: reassurance from partners, new meds, more research on my diagnoses, a tourniquet of any kind. Nothing works, because it's supposed to hurt. I worry about myself. I worry I will hide from the pain and it will haunt me forever and I will never get better. But that's just a choice that I could make that I won't. Because I'm wired for struggle and I was born to get better. Bring on the hurt.

Don't demand professional diagnosis. Professional diagnoses are fallible and often inaccessible. Demanding them in order to believe mentally ill people are valid gives the voice of the mentally ill to the mental health system and leaves us all silenced. Self-diagnosis can be a powerful tool, just like a professional diagnosis. Even when our diagnoses are mistaken, they can provide stepping stones to more accurate lenses through which to view our recoveries. We are not our diagnoses. We are friends in recovery. Have compassion and view others who suffer with charity. Why be a gatekeeper for your community when you can be a greeter?

I just can't do anything lately. A few off days and a fight with my lover and somehow my brain has just gone offline. Retreating to books and many naps. Learning to read tarot cards. Biding my time until I can move again.

So I have an Ask about Self-care for this Mental Health Month- how can I be self-motivated to improve my behaviours without triggering learned feelings of shame and anger?

Today I took more than I was proud of to soothe the feelings of shame. I skipped the jog I was planning and had a nap. I hunted food and gathered it from a drive through window to survive. I would have loved to have had a schedule but I just would have had to fill it with uncontrollable crying, and that's not much of a schedule then, anyway. I am not neurotypical. I am not emotionally typical. I am not behaviourally typical. I do not have a typical personality or a typical soul, and typically, I would probably be labelled 'dysfunctional'. But maybe I'm just diff-functional, like I work different than most people do (not less, not worse). Maybe I'm diss-functional like there is some sort of beautiful, physical logic, to the way my body manifested my dissociative symptoms to cope with trauma in a way it thought it could protect me. Maybe I'm this-functional like this is how functional I am today, on this step of my recovery, and it is not permanent and it does not define me. Thank you so much to all the neurodivergent people living loudly who help me have the courage to accept myself for however functional I am.

I miss you.

Compassionate communication. I have always been keenly empathetic and eloquent and enjoyed those qualities about myself.

by Eric Maisel A book I'm reading (read: nerding out on). It was a fourth anniversary gift from my then-boyfriend, a Masters student in Mechanical Engineering. I am reading it now for therapy. The introduction has Chapter Questions 1. What are your first thoughts about the challenges I've identified and how they do or do not apply to you? Maisel talks a lot about the challenges facing different types of gifted children. I fit the stereotype of the gifted child of a gifted family who was identified/labeled immediately. I also relate to his hypothesis that my comorbid mental illnesses could be more simply described as an acute meaning crisis or a feeling of hyperawareness of unbelonging in the universe. 2. Do you agree that a smart person is at a greater risk for meaning crises? I find this to be a difficult question. A meaning crisis is how Maisel describes emotional disease caused by a lack of the subjective experience of meaning and/or the belief that culture/nature is not designed to meet needs for meaningfulness. Therefore, the most charitable I would be with the assertion in question would be to concede that a more intelligent person would be much more likely to recognize a meaning crisis for what it is rather than externalizing the problem or developing physical manifestations due to repression. 3. How do you interpret the phrase "value-based meaning-making"? Making meaning is contrasted to seeking meaning; it represents a paradigm shift from believing that meaning needs to be found to believing that meaning needs to be recognized or created. My preferred description of values draws on Jungian psychology. Jung would suggest that in infancy we create the labels "good" and "bad" to conform to and navigate the world. Values are our highest personal goods (our aversions representing our most loathed personal ills). Therefore value-based meaning-making describes the practices of cultivating meaningful experiences in accordance with your highest personal goods. 4. Since meaning is primarily a subjective experience, what do you suppose you can do to create more of it for yourself? I have found that reconnecting with my body and being mindful of physical sensations helps me to identify activities that authentically accord with my values. I find this to be more effective than the top-down method of introspection. 5. How might the very idea of meaning that you create help you deal with meaning crises? I have found it very comforting to revise my concept of meaning to be much more fluid. I understand meaning more as an aspect of well-being to be experienced rather than some objective truth to be discovered or understood.

I will try to let my mind rest as the one who laughs. I will try to see this aching as being funny and fleeting just like the happiness was. I will try to be here fully for myself while my subconscious tries to hurt me in its bizarre attempt to keep me safe. Love you, my weird self. Feel better xoxo

The last couple of days have been terrifyingly happy. Happiness is pretty foreign territory to me. I would say that during my childhood I found myself disconnected from the things that made me feel happy because they were not "good". Being "good" was more important than being happy, because I needed my parents to love me to keep me alive and being happy was dangerous if it was "misbehaviour" which risked their affections. In platonic and romantic relationships throughout my life, from severely unhealthy to relatively (if not exceptionally) healthy, I have repeated this pattern. I have confused praise and acceptance for happiness and self-worth. My earliest memories of being happy, by the way, were moments where I was full of pride in my ideas, my emotions, myself. I remember being called "stuck up", "bossy", "obsessive" and "naive" and thus developed fear of having self esteem, being assertive, having passions and trying new things. My earliest memories of self-love trigger my earliest memories of judgement and abandonment. Especially as I became an adolescent and a young adult, pleasure was replaced by the anticipation of pain. Pain, in comparison, felt stable. Safe and familiar and functional and low. I suffered an extreme fear of emotional heights. I imagine it's unsurprising that developing a resistance to positive sensations on top of our evolutionary aversion to negative sensations created an exhausting, distressing and ultimately suicidal downward spiral. I have endured many treatments and continue to focus my life pretty entirely on a number of therapies. One of which has specifically addressed and challenged the tendency I share with many others to resist emotions, even those that are "positive". I have been studying a spiritual transformation program by a Swiss pick up artist. Yeah, sounds like a bad idea. Even worse when I mention that it's Julien Blanc, whose career exploded in a sexist media scandal. But Jesus Christ, the son of God, was just a man too, and Julien Blanc puts out his content in videos using millennial slang so I don't have to navigate a respectable spiritual text. I digress. It is very common due to the trauma inherent to childhood that many of us harbour a subconscious sort of shame. A limiting self-concept that whispers "you don't deserve what you want." So, although consciously you may allow yourself to set goals and progress towards them, there may appear to be a sort of spiritual asymptote. A level of well-being you will approach without accepting that you will sabotage if it gets too near. Blanc describes his as the "struggling artist" who needs to be lost and miserable to be relevant. I dreamed since I was a little girl of being the "damsel in distress" who needs to be saved by some outside force because she is helpless to change her own lot in life. In order to break our dependence on these self-concepts, we need to embark on a journey of radical self-acceptance so we can endure a greater level of well-being without feelings of shame or guilt. Today I got to model. I had my hair and makeup done and I posed naked and in lingerie and felt beautiful and amazing and safe and passionate. I was collaborating as an artist. I'm an amateur, so I haven't gotten paid yet, but it's worth it just to open up more opportunities. My partner is seeing a trauma therapist while I sit and write this in the coffee shop next door. He goes there as a caregiver because he loves me, and they teach him how to help me with my recovery. He is an incredible listener, an incredible learner, and we have a deeply meaningful spiritual connection. We have a relationship that is committed and loving and deliberate, yet still respects our polyamorous sexualities and my bisexual orientation. It excites me to be in a place in my life where I have so many things I never let myself hope for and the possibilities for adventure and passion and growth in my future seem to stretch out endlessly. And I am so happy. I am so happy about who I am and what I am doing with my life right now and the courage I have found in myself. I am in love with my partner and I am giddy about new connections I am making in this new life he and I share together. I am so happy to be young and undergoing a spiritual awakening and remembering and openness and humbleness about myself with which I can face this adversity with more grace. I am so excited to be seeing myself more clearly, even if I don't always look better for it. It wasn't that uncomfortable to write that. I remember a time when it would have been. A time when any self-affirmation felt forced and the idea of liking myself from a place that was authentic seemed impossible. So I see that I have grown. But there's a strange nagging feeling now when I am being photographed in perfect lighting in a hand-bra or when my DMs are unanimous that I'm a "total babe" or when I'm feeling Iike maybe things are going to be more than ok, more like amazing. When reality starts to double down on my newfound self-esteem it makes me woozy. The nagging feeling says "you can't maintain this", "you didn't earn this", "they will see through you and they will take the love away", "you will lose something and without it, you will not be enough." And so even as I am so extra-terrestrially happy, I am worried about how I am taking time off to do trauma therapy instead of getting a job right out of leaving university. I am worried about if maybe my diet has been not great and I'm not so active since it's been winter and what if maybe I gain weight soon. I am worried about what I smoke and what I drink and what I buy and what I do today and what I plan for later. I am worried when I'm tired. I'm worried when I'm horny. I'm worried when I'm not. I am looking to make myself wrong. I am looking for the pin that will pop my happy balloon this time. Because there has always been a pin, and I have always tried to find it. And of course there is a pin coming. I am not experiencing anything at 23 years old that is going to be so enlightening and transformative that I land myself in a state of permanent transcendental bliss. Thank god, because it would make me totally not relatable. I am going to be happy for a while because I am breaking patterns that held me back and I am seeing new heights and I am daring to experience them as fully as I can. I am daring to let the worries go as quickly as they come and return to my childish, giddy, arrogant, joy. I am daring to know there is a pin and not look out to brace myself for it. Happiness takes balls, friends. Be brave with me.

It seems like there’s no other way out, or frankly, I’d take it.