Failing at Normal
I am succeeding, and it feels uncomfortable.
Today is valentines day, “The day of love”. Usually, I would try to heed my Life Coach’s advice that I should focus my writing on other people, and not myself. However, I plead with you, my dearest gentle reader, to indulge me today, and let me speak as I would to myself in a journal.
See, I am writing this on Valentines day 2024. I am sitting in my little section in our office, and for some reason, today I’m just having a harder time focusing. My stomach is in disarray, flashes of anxiety going up and down my gut. It is as if I have real anxiety, and yet I have no reasonable cause for anxiety. There is just discomfort in my internal self, which self I usually feel us located somewhere in my upper gut.
See, today marks the thirtieth day since I ‘started’ 2024. I know you may be wondering what I mean by started 2024, but worry not, I’ll fill you in.
See, whenever I have written, my soul is as invested as can ever be. It is as if I finally become one with myself, and one with an outer audience, and I am finally in balance.
One of the things I’ve been most passionate to write about is the issue of feelings. The place of our internal emotional state to the larger conversation of personal growth. I write more about correcting negative internal emotional states, to building kinder, more supportive internal states, as the best foundation for change and growth.
I do not write on these issues because I am an expert, no. Rather, I write about them because I have paid the price of a destructive emotional state.
I have years I could call ‘lost’, because they were times when I truly wanted the best for myself, but I simply could not out perform the negative beliefs I held of myself. They are years where I struggled so severely to outgrow myself, but each time it just felt as if I was tethered to a rope or anchor within my soul, that limited me to a certain radius. That each time I crossed ‘past the radius’, I found myself sabotaging my own progress so badly, that I ended right back within this ‘circle’ of stagnation.
It is humbling to acknowledge this, but I had a mentor who observed this cycle of self sabotage first hand, that in frustration she just admitted to my face, “Risper, I simply don’t understand you. It is as if you make three good steps forward, and then take 200 hundred steps back. Your final state ends up worse than you started.”
Eventually, I did leave this particular work place, not because of the honest feedback I got, but for the sake of my mental health, that is, my internal emotional state. “Mental health” not because that work place destroyed me, but because, now I realize, my “mental health” was already bad before I joined that work place. The pressure therein only exposed what I had inside. I had been living on a thin internal foundation, I had just not seen it sooner. [Mental Health is in quotes because really what it refers to is my internal emotional state]
As I reflect now, I see how this negative, low-self esteem internal emotional state anchored me in self destruction, that there wasn’t a place I could thrive. I have sabotaged myself in almost every work place I joined especially after graduating campus, it is a miracle that I am still working in one of those work places currently. Thank God for His love. I think His love is the only grace that covered me long enough for my current employer to still see value in me.
Thus, when you see me write about how negative beliefs about ourselves can keep us in a cycle of self-destruction, when you see me write articles that almost seem to repeat the same message, trust me, it is because I have have lived it. When you see me write articles suggesting that we may need more than our will or self determination to change, it is because I have seen my determination fail me first hand.
I am not saying that determination does not work. No. I am saying though, that attempts at determination to do better, in an internal emotional state running on self-destructive chemicals and hormones won’t work. I got so used to feeling unaccepted and unloved; got so used to feeling like I were a failure, perhaps even accepted that I was ‘just a failure’; that the entire make up of my soul started living only to confirm this bias against me.
This is why I am passionate about the concept of internal emotional states. People don’t have ‘mental health’ issues, they have heart issues. People don’t have this mythical ‘depression’ word we like to throw about, people are hopeless against their own internal states. Unable to overcome what we think we are -half of which we are not even aware we believe - we struggle to rise up against our own internal negative anchors, the only thing we know being, ‘I just feel horrible and can’t seem to overcome it”.
This is why I am on a journey to Course Correct. Perhaps, if I were to be most honest with myself, I would admit that Course Correct is simply a journey to overcoming self sabotage. First, my own, then may be for others when I have built enough stamina to take others with me and not fall back into old ways.
As I said at the start, this is more a reflection for me that it could serve others … so I hope you do not find my self-focus too narcissistic.
I also did say at the beginning that I have been succeeding and if feels unusual. Perhaps I should have just said that my former chaotic and negative state -because it is still not out of the system-is feeling uncomfortable. Perhaps I should have just said that this former internal state is fighting to get some airtime, because I have been ‘too’ peaceful. My former internal state thrived on chaos- I am up and then I am so so down.
Perhaps I should have just said that by succeeding, I meant that my efforts are building up on each other. That I have not been in a state of building then tearing down all over again. Perhaps I should have clarifies that what I meant by success is that I can see continuity in myself: it is not the former dysfunctional cycle of fits and starts, building with one hand and tearing down with the other.
However I shall now conclude this reflection here. I said it is my thirtieth day in the year 2024 because even after a very successful December period, and a powerful new year shift, I spent the first fourteen or so days of 2024 self sabotaging in weed, binge-watching and neglecting all the many ‘goals and dreams’ I had for the year.
So perhaps this is just a post of appreciation to God: That Heavenly Father, I have stood, and it is only by your help that I have.
This is a prayer: That Heavenly Father, even the next thirty days I give to you. Help me stand, now more than ever before, I need you.
So cheers to the next thirty days my loves, you will see me stand. And I shall stand. But make no mistake; It shall not be by power nor by might, but by the Spirit of the Lord.
Shalom.
