Powerless

During my third or fourth session of therapy, I told my therapist I needed to learn how to communicate. She disagreed and said I knew how to communicate fine, but when I'm uncomfortable, I choose NOT to communicate. I sat back and thought for a while. In high school, I studied telecommunications. In college, I studied journalism and communications studies. I excelled in writing and speech courses. So maybe her assessment is more accurate than mine. I certainly have the ability to communicate. At any rate, I think I can learn to communicate better. I'd like to know that my communication is effective and I often question if the message I've intended to send is the one that's being received. 

I sit for long periods of time sometimes trying to write and can't think of anything, no matter how much I want to or how well I know the story. And other times, with little or no time to prepare, I say or write things that just seem to flow so naturally, I wonder if it was even me that said it.

A couple weeks ago I was on a Zoom call with a group I've been meeting with since near the beginning of quarantine. The topic for the evening was to share who we are yielding our power to that's holding us back from achieving our dreams and reaching our goals. For me, it wasn't a 'who' but a 'what' - depression.

I've been battling it since I was a teenager and I've tried a variety of things to deal with it. Nothing thus far has been successful, at least not for the long term. While I have good days, the depression is always there. It's not a seasonal or situational depression that some people go through during the winter, or following a job loss, or after the death of a loved one. It's a clinical diagnosis, and it's one that sometimes is all-consuming. 

A few weeks ago in therapy, I was talking about struggling to finish the first round of editing my novel and we were discussing the thoughts that fill my head. I need to do it faster. I need to do it better. No one will want to read this. No one will buy this. I'm wasting my time. I'm not good at this. The story is trash. And any other negative thing I could tell myself. My therapist has told me more than once that these thoughts are the depression talking, not me. She finished our session by telling me to write about how depression affects my writing, and I did that. To be honest, it wasn't something I'd even considered before. I knew on bad days it was more difficult to write. I knew in rough situations, I didn't even feel like writing. But I never knew the true impact depression was having on my attitude toward writing.

After writing about it, I realized that depression isn't taking away my power with regards exclusively to writing, but for a lot of areas in my life. I don't confront people. I don't set boundaries. I don't feel worthy. I don't trust easily. I've become a people pleaser at the expense of my own happiness.

When I shared in the group about how it's completely taken over my life and made me feel powerless, the words just came out. I talked about how depression is in the driver's seat and seems to be in control of everything. But then the focus of my message shifted and became about how we can take our power back from whomever - or whatever - we've given it to. There are factors of my depression I cannot change. I have a family history of mental illness, including depression and addiction. I cannot change my genetics. I cannot change the treatment options I have tried in the past that failed. I cannot change everything that life throws at me. I cannot predict how long it will take to overcome this massive hurdle.

But the power I do have is to recognize my illness is real. I can take advantage of the treatment options available to me. I can make sure to attend therapy and be as open and honest as possible. I can be diligent about taking my medication. I can reach out to friends and mentors when I'm having a bad day. I can reframe the way I approach and handle situations. I can override the negative thoughts with positive thoughts. I can commit to doing the hard work.

I completely let my guard down when these words spilled out of my mouth and after it was all said, I felt a small sense of pride. I'd allowed myself to stop thinking, got vulnerable and let my authentic self show up. I don't know if a higher power took over and was using me as a medium to convey a message. But in that few minutes, for once, I did not feel powerless. And neither are you!

Put Down the Pennies

I've been working with both a mentor and a therapist for roughly three months. Between the two of them, I've been called stubborn, resentful, tightly wound, skeptical, and bitter. While none of these are compliments, they're also not false. I am those things. They weren't said to hurt me or to put me down. They were said because that's what good mentors and therapists do - help you identify the areas of yourself that need work and growth, and then they give you the tools you need to work through those areas.

When discussing resentment, my mentor said the times we get angry about the other driver who cut us off in traffic, the rude cashier at the grocery store, or the pile of dishes in the sink, we aren't angry about the other driver, the cashier, or the dishes. The feelings we express in those moments are an accumulation of all the times we've felt hurt or betrayed or left out or whatever. She said we can carry that resentment around forever, or we can choose to work through it and get rid of the extra weight it puts upon us. I began to consider this and for some reason started thinking about pennies. 

I wondered what it would be like if every time we got hurt - or whatever - we picked up a penny and carried it with us. The first one won't add a lot of weight, won't take up a lot of space in your hand, and won't interfere with most tasks or responsibilities, at least not to a great degree. But what happens when we pick up another and another and another and another. At some point, the pile gets to be too big for your hand, starts becoming uncomfortable to carry around and everything we do becomes a challenge. And if it gets too big, some of the pennies simply fall away - this is when we explode and get angry. The expression gives us a release and the chunk of resentment we're carrying once again becomes a smaller, more manageable load. We're able to keep moving forward.

But we'll also keep picking up pennies along the way. Someone else will be rude. The employee at the drive-thru will forget our fries. A friend will repeat a secret told in confidence. And before we know it, the pile becomes too big again and becomes more than we can handle and we explode. More of the pennies fall. 

We continue in this cycle until we consciously make an effort to put down the pennies. Every one of them. We have to take them one by one, identify the cause of each one, and work to see our own role in the situation. What are we really upset about? It's not about a stranger in traffic, a cashier who's had a long day, or a forgotten order of fries. 

I recently sat down and wrote about the things I'm harboring resentment over and began to work through them with my mentor. It is not fun work. Introspection is difficult, especially when it's to identify shortcomings. But I hear once you reach the other side, it's all completely worth it. The weight will be removed and you become free to move forward without an extra, unnecessary burden. 

We will probably continue to collect pennies for the rest of our lives but we don't have to carry them around forever.

Squeezing the Snake

They All Saw a Cat by Brendan Wenzel is a children's book that provides a lesson in perspective. The story follows a cat as he walks around and meets different animals. In every encounter, the cat remains a cat, but he is seen in a unique way by everyone else. To some, he's soft and beautiful. To others, he's a blur or spotted or broken. He appears large and scary to one, and to another, he's skinny and weak. When he finally makes it to the water, he gets to see his own reflection and sees himself in a different way than anyone else. 

A couple weeks ago, after wanting to give up AGAIN on my goal of publishing a book, a mentor made the suggestion that I write about motivation. It appears that any time I get discouraged, I just want to quit. Knowing this is my default response to becoming discouraged, my perspective is that I have no motivation, or that my motivation for writing a book is unclear to me. I can't identify it. That's what I wrote about.

I discussed this with my therapist and she said "I don't think that's true at all. I think you have too much motivation." I waited for an explanation. She said I told her in previous sessions that I wanted to write because I want to share my story - my struggle with depression and suicidal ideation - in hopes that it'll help someone else. I nodded in agreement and then she presented me with an analogy. 

She said to think back to those water snake toys - did you think I was writing about a real snake? If you don't know what a water snake is, imagine a soft flexible tube about five inches long full of what looks like water with glitter or other toys in it, or plain and with nothing but liquid inside. You can squeeze them and they're a great stress reliever. If you squeeze it, the end bulges out into a large bubble. And if you squeeze too hard, it might shoot out of your hand uncontrollably. On the flip side, if you don't hold on well enough and your grip is too loose, it's going to slip right through your hands.

She said think of my motivation as the water snake, and use the Goldilocks method - find the grip that is just right. 

I thought my own grip was loose because every time I get discouraged, I give up and watch my goal slip away. She saw the opposite because when someone gives me words of encouragement, she said I interpret it to mean I have to get it done right now. It has to be fast and perfect or it's not worth doing. She sees the driving force in me and the determination, but it's too fast and too hard. With a little more work - mental work as well as more writing - I might be able to find the sweet spot, the Goldilocks grip on my motivation.

I love analogies and this one was the perfect one to give me a new perspective. My mentor said write about "motivation," and I wrote about how I see my motivation. I didn't ask why she gave me the topic or for clarity as to what aspect of motivation to focus on. I don't know her view of my motivation. But just as every animal saw the cat in their own way, even different from how he saw himself, it's possible there is yet another perspective to consider.

Motivation

I've always liked the idea of meditation but never saw myself as someone who would practice it. But, at the advising of a mentor 76 days ago, I settled in to my first three minutes of silence, peace and stillness. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing but I sat on the floor in a dark, quiet room and hit “start” on the Headspace App. After about a week, I felt different. I wasn’t able to pinpoint the difference but wanted more so she said go up to five minutes. I did that for a couple weeks and still wasn’t sure I knew what I was doing or that it was working at all. I’m a person who likes visible, tangible results, and just wondering what was changing, if anything at all, was driving me crazy. But I kept doing it anyway.

During the past two weeks, the voice guiding the meditation says to remember your motivation and intention of doing this practice. At the beginning, my motivation was easy – I’d started working with a mentor, meditation was on my daily list of tasks to complete, and I wanted to be able to say I’d completed them all on any day she asked. I wanted to get a “gold star.”

About a month ago though, my motivation changed. I’d had a series of four instances over the course of three days where people I highly respect pointed out things I’d done where I hadn’t made the best decisions. I wasn’t reprimanded – that word is too strong. They weren’t wrong or bad decisions, but decisions made for the wrong reasons – the wrong motivation. The choices were made with ME in mind. Not anyone else. No one was harmed or mistreated, and there are no lasting effects, but their schedules and lives were temporarily altered because of my choices.

Rather than getting upset and defensive, which is what I usually do, I was able to step back after each correction and recognize how my decisions affected someone else. I acknowledged the mistakes, admitted what I could have done instead, apologized, corrected and moved on. This realization is when I knew mediation was working, even if I didn’t know how, and my motivation shifted. In this moment I knew I was becoming more aware of my own behavior, my own thoughts, my own habits. I still wanted the gold star, but now I was curious about what else I could learn, what other ways I could grow. And I kept doing it.

It’s often said that it takes about 21 days to build a new habit – if you Google how long, it ranges form 18-254 days but… you get it! After doing meditation begrudgingly for about a week, it soon became a habit, and now is something I look forward to. It no longer feels obligatory and I’m not doing it simply to please my mentor, though it’s still nice to tell her about the progress I’m making with it. I do it because I enjoy it.

I tried this “21 days to create a habit” thing with my writing about a year ago and got stuck. I wanted to write for 15 minutes a day. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but as a mom of three who also works a full time job, finding that chunk of time isn’t always easy. I can wake up 15 minutes earlier in the morning, but I’m already getting up at 5:30 to do mediation and start work at 6. I can squeeze in 15 minutes before bed but often times I’m too tired and the content would be crap. Sure, these sound like excuses – and they are – but they’re also real things. By the time I’ve worked all day, taken care of dinner, showers for three and put the kids to bed, I’m exhausted. And sleep is important for my mental health and necessary to function.

But I tried it anyway. Maybe it was too big or maybe my motivation wasn’t there because it didn’t work. I made sure to work in the 15 minutes but it seemed to be staring at a blinking cursor for about 13 minutes and writing for two. Is that progress? Of course! But it’s SLOW progress and I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to finish my book, get it published and move on. I was doing it because I said I would do it and didn’t want to let anyone down. I didn’t know who I’d be letting down because it wasn’t a promise or commitment I’d made to anyone else, but I was sure I would disappoint someone if I couldn’t work in the writing time, get the book written and get it published. I’ve loved writing for as long as I can remember and have hoped to one day publish a book. But now I was writing for everyone else, not myself. It became something I was not enjoying and I quit. My motivation wasn’t right.

If the intention is to publish a book, a shift in the motivation doesn’t make it impossible. But it has to be clear and it has to be true. Do I want to tell a story that entertains? Do I want to write poetry that provokes thought? Do I want to share my own experiences to inspire others? Can it be a little bit of all of it? The truth is, I don’t know the answer to any of these.

I’d love to be able to tell a story that entertains, but I’m not sure my skills are where they need to be for fiction writing. I LOVE poetry and the beauty it creates in the mind, but again, am not sure I have the skill set. Are my personal experiences really something that could help someone else? Maybe. But even then, who am I talking to? Who am I sharing for?

These questions are valid and the answers are critical to resetting my motivation. I also have a good chunk of fear to overcome…

I’m still working on my fiction novel, though it’s probably more like a novella, but I’m not sure the path is right for me. It doesn’t feel right and, full disclosure, it hasn’t felt right for a long time. The last thing I wrote was a scene I wasn’t particularly happy with and I find myself again writing just to write, not because I enjoy it. I know that I don’t HAVE to write a book or publish a book. The people I’m writing “for” will certainly cheer me on and support me along the way, but if I decide to no longer follow this path, I know they would support me anyway.

Maybe I could write with resistance for three minutes a day long enough to earn a few “gold stars.” The skill won’t build itself and you can’t write by osmosis – I’ve tried. Perhaps in the same way mediation piqued my curiosity a few minutes at a time and presented me with new motivation, daily writing will too.

Two Long Journeys

I've been battling depression for almost three decades, and don't remember a time since the age of the thirteen that I haven't struggled. Sure, it's easy to wake up each day and declare "today is going to be a good day," and yes, there is some choice involved. But clinical depression can become all consuming, and sometimes it isn't simple to just do things. Some people fall to such a place where getting up to work, shower, or even get out of bed is a struggle.

While I’ve never been in that place and have always been able to do what needs to be done, I've had many days where nothing is wrong but I've still not been happy. On these days, I've made it a priority to make a list of things I'm grateful for and shift my focus to what is good, but it doesn't take away the underlying sadness. A lot of days I've felt like I'm doing nothing more than just staying afloat. My head is above water but the rest of my body feels like it's sinking.

I've had days where the easiest solution seemed to be ending it all - give in to and stop fighting the current that's trying to pull me under. It's a tug-of-war competition I've found myself in multiple times. It is not a fun place to be and it's not an easy place to escape. That's part of the reason I began writing. I was able to spill all my thoughts onto paper freely and without judgment. Great relief comes with just getting thoughts out of your head, and sometimes it feels as if a physical weight has been removed. When I learned how powerful writing could be, I really started to enjoy it.

The ironic part is that while I use writing as a way to help relieve the heavy stress that comes with depression, the task of writing becomes more difficult because of depression.

I’ve had a lifelong dream of becoming a published author because I enjoy stories, both fantasy and real, and there is a great escape that can only be found within the pages of a book. We are surrounded by millions and new ones are being released every day. I can form a sentence, spell words and have good grammar, so how hard can it be?

But it isn't simple. It's a lot more than forming a sentence, spelling well and using grammar correctly. Writing a novel takes a lot of time, skill, patience and persistence. It comes with its own set of hurdles. Overcoming depression is anything but easy. It is a long, arduous and exhausting process, and coupled together, these journeys clash more than they cooperate.

A well-written publication can get a lot of praise, but it also comes with a lot of exposure and criticism. Just as in any other aspect of my life, I've become my own worst critic when it comes to writing. Even on my best writing days, it’s not uncommon to find myself in a spiral of negative thoughts. Many are similar to what I frequently think about myself – I’m not good enough, I’m not worthy, my story isn’t worth telling, my feelings aren’t important, and on and on and on. I can write a paragraph, a page or a full chapter that I am really excited about, and the next minute completely talk myself out of continuing to write at all. I get so discouraged by one mistake or when I am not particularly happy with a scene and get driven to the point of wanting to give up.

I know writing a novel is difficult and often takes many rounds of editing, several sets of eyes to fine tune, and multiple drafts, and even then it’s far from perfect, especially in the eyes of the author.

But when I encounter one obstacle, depression completely consumes me and becomes the biggest obstacle of all. My ability to write well doesn’t diminish because of one poor paragraph. My love for writing doesn’t disappear because I’m unhappy with one scene.

What does go away is my desire to put myself out there, to be vulnerable. Depression takes over and tells me I’m not capable, I’m not smart enough, I’m wasting my time and I should quit. In these moments, it takes a lot of strength to persevere. I have to step back, breathe and evaluate the situation. I have to break down the process into its many steps and look at what I’ve accomplished rather than what I still need to do. The list of things left to do is usually the longer of the two, and I have to remind myself that no one completes their book all at once.

Overcoming depression is also a multi-step process and it won’t be done overnight. A mentor once told me “it’s not about perfection. It’s about progress.” I need to listen to her words and her voice and remind myself that doing one thing a day will help me finish both of these journeys. The most important thing is to just keep moving.