Tag: habit

Autobiography · Mental Health

Grit

Ruby Pipes18 Comments
"Gravel 2" © Stig Morten Waage, 2008. CC BY-NC 2.0.
“Gravel 2” © Stig Morten Waage, 2008. CC BY-NC 2.0.

I track my footsteps, my water, my food. I have running plans and diet rules and a sleep schedule. Medications to take every morning and night. A handful of vitamins for after breakfast. My whole life is a self-imposed tightrope walk.

Often I try to tell myself that I don’t have a choice in any of this. That I simply have to do everything I do for my health, my mental wellbeing, my sanity. But lately I’ve been reminding myself that every day is a decision. There are rocks beneath me, yes. But laying down on gravel is never beyond the scope of possibility. Deciding to be resilient, deciding to fight back was not the only option I had. That’s the thing I have to remember.

But it’s hard to continue. When every day involves just a little more fight. Just a little bit more commitment. When I want nothing more than to turn off the alarm and stay in bed. It just comes down to a matter of grit. Of deciding to rally the energy and get going, even when I don’t think I can do it. Because there are going to be days when I can’t.

There are going to be days when the depression closes in too tight. When I will have no choice but to cancel the plans and draw the blinds. There will be days I will have to dissolve into the bed sheets. So I must seize any day that is not one of those days. I must close down tight around it and do everything I possibly can. I must continue to remind myself that I am not so fortunate as to have all my days be capable ones.

Even now, when the medication seems to be working and the days are dark, but not desperate, I have to remember that it’s not always going to be like this. Not dwell with the weight of the hopeless days standing over my shoulder, but remember how easy it is to slip back down that hole. Yes, it often comes without warning, but sometimes there are things I can do to avoid it.

Sometimes I can fight it off just a little longer. Sometimes I can say, “No,” and get up and put my running shoes on. Sometimes I can climb into my raincoat and take a walk. Sometimes I can go hug someone I love or take a nap. Sometimes I can fight just a little harder.

And sometimes I can’t. Sometimes there is nothing I can do. Relapses can happen for no reason in particular. Suddenly I just can’t seem to keep my feet under me anymore. And that’s something I have to learn to be okay with, too. I have to remember what I learned last time. Go back and read old journal entries. Think about how much better acquainted I became with myself through that darkness. When there was nothing in the world but me and my own brain sparing.

When I felt completely disconnected from everything outside my own head, what did I learn?

Autobiography · Mental Health

Something New

Ruby Pipes13 Comments
"New York Transit Museum" © Geoff Wilson, 2008. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
“New York Transit Museum” © Geoff Wilson, 2008. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

My new therapist gives me homework. Tells me to notice when I’m triggered and my thoughts try to get away from me. “All you have to do is recognize that it’s ninety-percent old hurt. You don’t have to do anything. Just recognize that you’re reacting to a situation you’re no longer in,” he says. His voice is soothing, but firm. I can imagine him in a lecture hall with hundreds of students nodding their heads and scrawling notes on yellow legal pads. He tells me, “It’s easy to get swept up in it. It’s an instant reaction. But we can start to recognize it for what it is and then we can work to change it.”

I nod my head. At first because I’m intimidated by him and I want to be agreeable, but then because I know he’s right. I can feel myself opening up to him. A flower unfurling its petals. Slowly at first, and then all at once. “I can do that. I can do this,” I tell him. The sweet sigh of realizing that there are things I haven’t tried yet.

He looks at me over the top of his notebook and says, “You know, it’s not just the big traumas that shape us. Sometimes it’s just a steady drip. It works itself into everything you do, really just ingrains itself into you. And no matter how safe you feel later, or how different your environment is, you are always expecting that drip.”

My breath stops and it’s a moment before I’m able to let out a slow shudder. I crack a smile because it’s the only thing that makes sense. “Yeah, I am.”

On the train ride home I repeat a line from a Shane Koyczan poem over and over again. “If you believe with absolute honesty that you’re doing everything you can, do more.”

It is so easy to think that I’m doing everything I possibly can with the tools I have to work with. Simple to assume that I am at my limit. I swear I feel the strain, the edge of breaking. But I wonder if I’m made of stronger stuff than I think.

At night I find myself curled up in bed, my knees to my chest, and the blankets pulled up over my head. “I can’t do this,” I whisper soft into my palms, my cupped hands catching my breath. But it’s just pulling back, not fact. It’s the automatic reaction to being challenged, to having more thrown at me than I think I can handle. But I’m capable of dealing with it. Of taking a breath and recognizing that I’m not threatened in the way I think I am.

In the morning I put on my running clothes and head out into the dark. One foot after another, I let my body go. My mind finally settling into a rhythm. And instead of submitting, instead of telling myself again that this is too hard and I’m never going to get it, all I say is, “Do more. Do more. Do more.”

Autobiography · Personal Development

Guts

Ruby Pipes17 Comments
"climbing." © Michael Pollak, 2013. CC BY 2.0.
“climbing.” © Michael Pollak, 2013. CC BY 2.0.

At some point, I had to finish my book. Had to put down my pen and wrap the whole thing up. Submit my final drafts and walk away. It was a project that didn’t get to go unfinished. That’s what happens when you set a release date.

My stomach is still in knots every time someone tells me their copy arrived in the mail. I’m sure there are things I could have done better. Positive they’ll find all the flaws in my work and be upset they spent their money on it. But the project is done and I have to learn to move on. Have to let good enough be good enough.

But it’s made me wonder what I could have done if I pushed just a little harder. If I was more willing to take a chance. More okay with letting go of the idea it could be perfect. To risk not making the deadline and publish something I was genuinely scared of. It’s like I ran as fast as I needed to run to win the race, but not as fast as I could have. How many times have I cut myself short just because I knew my previous limit? All the times I did what I had to do to get an A, but never wondered what would happen if I pushed further.

When things turn out to be easier than I thought they would, I don’t try to make them harder. When I succeed easily where other people struggle, I don’t try to find the point where I’d be challenged. Even with this blog, I’ve found the safe spot to sit with being vulnerable, but not completely open. I write about the more comfortable scary things and push the rest into journals.

But I don’t want to do it like that anymore. I want my projects to make me uncomfortable. To terrify me. I want to make running plans, and book ideas, and blog posts, and commitments that I honestly don’t know if I can finish. And then I want to do them anyway.

I am sick of being comfortable. Of living up to it all the time. I’m sick of knowing I can do the things I set out to do. I am sick of not having the guts to find out if my dreams are tougher than me. I am sick of only standing at the bottom of hills I know I can run up.

I’m ready to do something mesmerizing. I’m ready to dazzle. I’m ready to stop toying around with the easy, the doable, the fragments of sparkle. I am ready to be valiant.