My Love Story

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Man, I am so in love. It is amazing how someone can be right before your very eyes, yet you don’t notice them.

This kind of love is new to me. It is uncompromising but kind. It is strict and demanding but encouraging. It holds me to a higher standard of accountability and acceptance. It is protective, comforting, and unyielding.

It was so hard to accept. I turned away from it many times, ignoring it for the love of another. Sadly, I could not accept and give love when I didn’t have it for myself. 

Loving myself led me back to school. Loving myself got me out of a toxic friendship and living situation. Loving myself finally let me accept I needed more help to be healthy; therefore, the gastric sleeve. It is this love, which has me walking around my apartment because it is cold outside. 

This love also doesn’t allow me excuses when I fall into bad eating habits. This love doesn’t care how many times I have to start over. This love pushes me to take care of myself first and foremost. 

It is true; I have neglected my friends. I was too busy exploring this love. This care. This new state of being. I’ve never felt love like this before.

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My Love Today

A year ago today, I wrote this letter and posted it on Facebook. For the first time, I could see the love I had for myself.  My love wasn’t this abstract concept I was trying to force myself to believe.  I was truly smitten with myself.  There was no shame or conceit in this self-admiration.  Today, I still feel the same.

Never feel ashamed to love yourself out loud.  Love yourself, how you want someone else to love you.  Count the flaws, imperfections, and quirks, then add them to the list of items that make you unique.  Acknowledge areas of improvement and change while realizing there is enough self-love inside of you to make progress in those areas.  Love your humanity because, as a human, you will make mistakes.  Hone your patience because it takes time to grow.  Keep pressing forward, and you will get there.

Self-Love Despite Struggles

2020 has been an unforgettable year for a variety of reasons. For many of us worldwide, this has been a time of confusion, stress, and unprecedented uncertainty. Globally, we feel the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic as it continues to rage on for over nine months. Personally, this time has taken a toll on my mental health as both my college and my work went virtual.

In my life, segmentation plays a significant role. I function better when I have separate places for schooling, working, and home life. Having all three of these combined for such a long time took an unexpected toll on my life. I continue to be grateful to have a job still. Working from home allowed me to do my job in a compacity, which I feel benefited the students. However, the move to online-only schooling posed some difficulties that I was unable to overcome. Sadly, as spring, summer, and fall semesters ticked by, I saw my GPA drop. In fact, I had to take an incomplete in most of my fall classes.

All this stress, combined with uncertainty, threw my mental health for a loop. I had more manic episodes than I ever had in my life. While mania feels good, I could not sit down and concentrate enough to do my homework. Hours would be wasted on repeatedly reading the same page because I could not comprehend what I was reading. My level of frustration grew to the point of wanting to quit school. Luckily, the staff at my school was able to work with me as I went through two medication changes and two tweaks to the time I took my medicine.

I am very confident that self-love got me through these challenges. It was that love that sought out care to fix my crumbling mental state.  It was the desire to better myself, born from self-love, which pushed me to try to work out some type of agreement with my professors.  If I was not so smitten with myself, I could have easily given up out of shame or embarrassment.  Please realize, I understand how hard it can be to admit to others that you are struggling with mental health issues. However, I am worth the effort to get myself closer to the place I want to be. 

Moving Forward

Now that I am more stable, I will be spending my break catching up on about four weeks of assignments. I feel confident I can get this done before the start of the spring semester. Consequently, that means my posting schedule may become even more erratic during that time. I want to thank you in advance for having patience with me. I look forward to coming back soon!

Personal Experiences are posts that speak directly to my journey with mental health.  My goal with sharing these experiences is to show how the concepts I write about look in practice. 

If you want to hear more of my personal experiences, please click here!

Being Aware

It is my hope, sharing my journey will provide some insight into your own journey.  Before trying anything, I mentioned, as always, check with medical professionals.  Please check out my medical disclaimer link.

Awareness at the Start

At the beginning of my mental health journey, I thought being aware was the entire battle. My Virgo mind assumed knowing my behavior was unacceptable, toxic, and wrong would be enough to counteract it. Sadly, it was not. It was like watching the same movie over and over but still being frustrated at the ending. Being aware of my feelings of rage, hopelessness, despair, and more did not change my reactions or actions. In fact, at the start, I felt being aware was doing more harm than good.  Seeing myself fall into the same patterns with full awareness was frustrating. At the time, I questioned myself as a human being since I continued being so awful.  These were some of the darkest times in my journey.

Soon it was clear, I could no longer trust my emotions and feelings.  They were coming from a place I did not know much about or understand. I needed to decipher what was genuine and what was not. For this post, please note the word genuine is different than real (actual) or valid (legitimate). Genuine in this context is closer to the meaning of true when considered against the triggering event. For example, I find myself upset at a friend who sits in my regular spot at Starbucks. Is that feeling genuine? In truth, taking the seat triggered an emotion because of past experiences. Therefore, the feelings are not genuinely linked to the action of my friend sitting in my seat.

Turning to Logic

Consequently, I turned to using logic to pick through my mental state to help control my emotional wellbeing. This is a skill I picked up at several programs.  To perform putting logic over emotion, the use of a thought record was employed. Over several months, I completed at least one every day. It got to the point where I could run through the process in my head; yet, doing one on paper still has its benefits.

Thought records basically force a person to evaluate their thoughts surrounding a particular feeling or emotion via a series of questions. The goal is to help someone to realign their thinking about a particular emotion or feeling. This process was key to helping me sharpen my awareness.  

Moving Deeper into Being Aware

I discovered there was another component to awareness that I had overlooked. In my case, I needed to be conscious of the root of these feelings.  Where did these feelings originate? What are the triggers? Desperately, I would search for answers and understanding.  There were times I was able to find what I was seeking.  While other times, I could not, and I became fixated on trying to find the missing pieces.  Sadly, this obsession pulled me away from recovery and refocused my attention on something which was not obtainable. In other words, I was spinning my wheels.

Making Peace Without Answers

After a time, I realized I would not get some of the answers I wanted. Honestly, this was a tough pill to swallow.  Of all the concepts I have practiced, making peace without answers was the hardest to put into action.  I felt I could not move forward without those remedies.  I was angry and hurt that someone did these things to me and would not give me what I needed to fix myself.

Often, I wanted to know why I was chosen for abuse.  How could a parent do those things to their child? Why didn’t my abuser seek help for her own mental health issues? However, my abuser died before I started asking these questions during my journey.  When they were alive, they did not acknowledge any wrongdoing, often blaming me for their actions.

So how do you move forward without answers?  The answer for me was making peace with not understanding.  Furthermore, I had to come to the realization that even if I knew the answers, it would not change anything. There are no magic words that could have been uttered to excuse anything which happened to me. At this point, I had to ask myself, why do I continue to let myself stand still in my recovery?

Beyond Awareness

At some point, I had an epiphany. My recovery involved me and me alone.   I could not hang my progress over the neck of someone else.  Everything was in my own hands. It is about my relationship with my thoughts, feelings, actions, and emotions. While understanding the reason for their genesis could be helpful, it was not required in the least. Being aware that another’s actions triggered reactions (aimed at helping me cope) is all I need to understand.  The desire to understand what caused the other party to act in such a way was a burden, and I needed to put it down. 

The Other Side of Being Aware

The downside of sharpening my awareness is noticing my mood changes when I am heading into an episode.  Of course, this sounds fantastic, but the phenomenon is duel sided.  On the one hand, it is fantastic to have what amounts to an early detection system.  If my mood starts to tank, I can get in there earlier to help head off a full episode. In opposition, when a problem is outside the realm of control with coping skills (needing my medication adjusted), it can be frustrating to notice changes and feel unable to make any significant moves to reverse the emotional and mental collapse.

That being said, I would not give up being aware.  This is another item that I need to learn to manage better.  As I cover more ground on this journey, I come to realize recovery is like building blocks.  As skills and knowledge are added, they interlink, stack, or combine with information I already own.  However, this process is not automatic, and it can take some time to completely fold in a new skill.

If you are interested in other posts about my personal experiences, please feel free to click here.