Kicking Up Dust
It’s bound to happen. As one sprints and leaps happily toward self-awareness and self-improvement, it’s hard to remember that there will be missteps along the way. The intoxication of new patterns emerging that begin to point the way toward having some semblance of contentment with one’s life disallow for perspective, and create the conditions for a severe underestimation of the importance of setbacks and how and why they occur. This can leave one blind to the inevitability of falling hopelessly back to the place they started, or perhaps further back than they began. Maybe even way back. It’s a maddening process that one would only assume would wane due to the sheer amount of times relapses occur, triggers allowing the mind to readily follow more well-established schema leading to panic or the ‘flip of the lid’, a euphemistic description the moderator of my anxiety class uses to demonstrate what is happening when your prefrontal cortex takes a back seat to the primitive amygdala.
Further along the path toward a more tolerable existence, one finds a great deal of external and internal praise given to strides forward, but what about properly accounting for setbacks, allowing for them to be seen as a necessary and integral part of the process? It’s taken me a while to realize that the honeymoon phase accompanied with endeavoring to accomplish something as ambitious as improving one’s life experience is also a part of the process, but accepting the deep dives back into the mental abyss has been a much harder pill to swallow.
Being okay with overwhelm, following so easily the well-trodden path in my mind to self-loathing and self-pity when it occurs is only something that I’m just now circling the outskirts of considering being alright. It has the potential of being considered okay for me only because I’m doing the work. The journaling, the therapy, the mindfulness classes combined all help to put a run of the mill freak-out into perspective.
Though it can be daunting and obnoxious to even consider having an ‘attitude of gratitude’, once committed to the task, most find themselves melting rather quickly and easily into a sincere feeling of appreciation. Checking in and having support systems become key. Learning to detach more from what one feels becomes a lifeline, and seeing anxiety as something you experience rather than a character flaw becomes a revelation. Because that is how we see ourselves: the cracked and broken, as inherently flawed.
Putting systems in place to truly deal with trauma makes all the difference, as does seeing that the journey to achieve this is not the same for any of us. The path to becoming isn’t a clear one, and can be easily disrupted by days, weeks, months and years of non-compliance. For me, I finally see that this process is ongoing. I thought just like a broken cup, I could either be fixed and be of use again, or thrown out and discarded if repairs could not be made. It’s taken a while to see that I have more purpose than an object of utility, which a healthy mind has no trouble in seeing. But, for the traumatized there is a level of self-compassion required for admittance to the ride of a life worth living that is difficult to conjure. It takes practice.
So as not to fall into a pit, spiraling out into nothingness, I’ll follow the turning gyre into the next phase, understanding that whatever has happened, has and will have an effect on what happens next. I must keep reminding myself that so long as I’m staying the course, I’ll be alright. I’ll learn to accept things as they are, but for now I’d like to not choke quite so easily the next time I find myself kicking up dust.