Regeneration

I cut my finger on a staple the other day as I was delivering some takeout for DoorDash. (I now have a side-hustle job).  As I searched frantically for a napkin in a napkinless car, I did the only thing I could think of and popped my finger in my mouth.

After a few minutes of that metallic taste on my tongue, the cut began to stop bleeding.  Eventually, over time, that little cut starts to scab over.  My skin breaks down and begins to build itself back up, scabbing over, as good as new.

Unless I pick at that scab.  If I pick it, it may fester or scar and take much longer to heal properly.

This made me think of the last few years of my life and fighting things like anxiety, depression, and negative thoughts.  I had a lot of things bubbling under the surface that were starting to manifest externally through a loss of patience with myself, students, athletes, etc., exasperation in the face of simple frustration, and a general listlessness in my daily routine.  You may be surprised to hear that.  I think a lot of us have gotten too good at hiding how they really feel day to day.

One thing became clear to me though.  I had to do something.  I couldn’t keep ignoring how I felt.  This wasn’t the life I wanted to live.  I wasn’t behaving like the person I wanted to be.

The first step, I think, was realizing that a lot of the reason I was feeling the way I was ended up being a direct result of choices I’d made in my life prior and also exacerbated by conscious and unconscious denial of some of my own negative behaviors, habits, and social skills.  Sure, some of the problems I was dealing with were external, but stress obviously all mixes into a big stew anyway, no matter where it comes from.  What helped was realizing that I couldn’t tackle everything at once.  I wasn’t prepared to attack the credit debt I’d accrued, didn’t have the time or motivation, or grit to organize the entire house, or able to really come to grips that I needed to change my entire outlook and possibly, more terrifyingly at the time, who I thought I was.

If you’ve gotten this far, and reading over this makes you think of something that maybe you are feeling, or someone close to you is feeling, let me simply say:

It’s gonna be ok.  It really is.  Take the first step…whatever it may be.

You know something has to change.  If I have to suggest starting with something, it’s to understand that you really need to let go of the idea of who you think you SHOULD be, where you think you SHOULD be, and all the other useless SHOULDS that social media and society impose on us.

I’m 38.  For a long time I beat myself up over the idea that I didn’t have kids, I was living paycheck to paycheck, and that I generally didn’t do enough with my life compared to a lot of other people I saw on Instagram or Facebook.  Do other people eat cereal for dinner?  Is that what adults should do?

It’s so easy to let our anxiety, depression, and negative thoughts to overwhelm us.  So easy to stay in bed all day mindlessly binge-watching Netflix and eat an entire bag of Doritos.

All too easy to keep picking at our emotional scabs.

My regeneration into the person I wanted to be started with (I think unconsciously at the time) seeking out professional development opportunities that involved mindfulness, yoga, meditation, and other stuff that for the vast majority of my life I wrote off as some sort of cross between hippee stuff/voodoo/delusion.  For whatever reason, likely my own lack of self-confidence/self-awareness, I’d attached a negative stigma to these things.  I perpetuated the idea that they couldn’t possibly help me.

I didn’t need a counselor, or therapy.  That’s for crazy people who can’t deal with their own problems, I thought.  I was the type of person who internalized every slight, every hurt, said yes to everyone else regardless of what I actually wanted because I felt some sort of obligation.  I was tough, I could cope.  Swallow it all down.  I set up defense mechanisms to continue avoiding conflict to a fault.  I’d order at a restaurant, and not say anything about any mistakes in the order when it arrived because of some stupid social anxiety.  I WOULD EAT A MEAL I DIDN’T ORDER!  I’d refuse to take responsibility for my own deficiencies.  Felt too embarrassed to speak about ongoing problems in my life and relationships.  I ignored the effect those behaviors were having on my life, my marriage, others around me and my emotional well-being.

What a f*cking moron I was.

Okay, that’s probably a little harsh.  I regret it getting to the point and extent it did.  It was a lack of self-reflection that lead me to where I was.

It took reading some great books on the subjects (Dan Harris’ 10% Happier being required reading) and working with some amazing mentors living their own examples of mindfulness (thank you so much Danielle Seem and Jenifer Guay), in some professional development classes focused on yoga, meditation, mindfulness, etc., for me to realize:

Holy shit, I need this stuff.

I realized the first thing I had to let go of were those preconceived stigmas I had developed about mindfulness and meditation (it’s not at all about finding enlightenment for us normal everyday folk) and really starting to look honestly at my own behaviors and habits.

Hindsight is 20/20.  I think had I adopted these things into my life much sooner, I would not be dealing with a lot of the stuff that made me need it in the first place.  Much stress, pain, and anxiety could’ve been avoided.

Here’s the thing though, like three years later….I don’t think the point of life is avoiding negativity, feelings of anxiousness, and stress.  There’s a space for noticing those negative feelings that pop into my head, and instead of perseverating on them, letting them overwhelm me, I’d try to analyze them.  Asking myself “why?” actually took a lot of the sting out of them and lead me to some profound discoveries about my own role in creating them or the situations that caused them.  It also let me detach myself from them emotionally and helped me make some logical choices and changes to the way I did things in order to repair whatever breakdown had caused them in the first place.  It’s a process that sometimes I need to actively force myself to do, but it works.

A lot of the wounds I’ve suffered in my life are figuratively self-inflicted.  Again, think of the scab analogy from earlier.  If I pick and pick and pick, it gets worse.

The goal isn’t to be wounded and move on though.  I think anything that makes us suffer physically, mentally, emotionally, should teach us something…should improve us in some way.  We can’t ignore the damage caused.

Enter Kintsugi.

No, not the 2014 Death Cab for Cutie album, but in retrospect maybe more of that would’ve helped things too.  Ben Gibbard’s voice and lyrics do have healing powers.

Kintsugi, or “golden joinery”, is the Japanese art of of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.

The philosophy behind it is profoundly simple: the breakage and repair are part of the object’s history, not something to be disguised.

The damage is part of who we are.  It doesn’t define us, but ignoring it or trying to hide it only leads to more damage.

It’s ok to fail, ok to mess up, ok to make mistakes.  The idea though, is to come through the pain, the fire, the anxiety, the depression as a stronger, truer, wiser version of yourself.  We make the mistakes part of our story, instead of feeling like they are the end of it.

I’ve only scratched the surface of my own existential regeneration.  I’ve taken some long, long looks at myself and started cutting out the bits that don’t mesh with things I’m passionate about.  I’ve gotten better at saying no, and not feeling guilty about doing so.  I’ve owned my shit, so to speak.  I go to counseling every two weeks with an absolutely amazing therapist.  Talking with Sarah at North Country Behavioral Medicine in Peru has been absolutely incredible.  I take meds to help me curb those bouts of anxiety.  I’m no longer crippled by those negative thought vortexes that would keep me up at night or wake me up at 4AM.

I don’t pick the emotional scabs.

Do I still have a lot of work ahead of me to dig out of some of the cavernous holes I’ve dug for myself?  You betcha.  But I can tell you without a doubt I am 10,000x more prepared for that project than I would’ve been before getting the help.  I can’t recommend talking to a therapist enough.  Seriously.  Holding onto pain, anxiety, and depressive thoughts is like forcing yourself to go through mental cancer.

You aren’t alone in this.

You are not the one person that deals with these awful thoughts, you aren’t the only one bothered by something that someone said to you, you aren’t the only one overwhelmed by the repercussions of your choices, and aren’t the only one in pain.

The first step to healing what is broken is realizing it’s broken.  The second step is realizing that you aren’t alone.  The third is realizing that help is out there and getting it.

If you’d have told me I’d be saying all this and offering it up to everyone I knew via FB, I’d have probably had some sort of panic attack, vomited, and/or tried to de-invent the internet.

But I’ve come to understand through my own journey that communication and honesty are what destroys stigmas.  Honest self-inspection is necessary to a healthy life.  Don’t like this part of your life, cut it out, and regenerate.

Start simple.

I got sick of looking at clothes and shoes piled on the floor on my side of the bed.  I had the epiphany that if I bought a yoga mat, oil diffuser, and set myself up a dedicated mindfulness space on the side of my bed, I’d do it every morning, therefore connecting with myself, breathing, and be better at working through my shit.

I did it once.  🙂

My yoga mat sat there, unused other than to cushion my feet as I stepped on it, and occasionally had both clean and dirty laundry on it.

In the past, I probably would’ve viewed this as a failure.  But mindfulness helped me realize that the space didn’t have to be hard-wired for one particular idea I had for it.  That through being fluid with what I thought the space “should” be, (we need to be careful with that word in our lives), I could make it something functional and mentally pleasing.

So I bought a couple six foot bookshelves.  That was the logical progression of all those thoughts above, right?

The bookshelves were actually a manifestation of something on my pre-2020 bucket-list of things I did towards the end of last year.  Having a more mindful introspective view into what I wanted my life to be led me to making a list of things I wanted to do, or do more of, in the coming year.

The list is as follows:

• Paint
• Skydive
• Hike
• Bake
• Photography
• Learn to sew
• READ MORE
• Travel
• Visit Mike and Erin more!
• Blog (added about two hours ago when I started this post)

The bookshelves purchase came out of this, basically:

Books are my vice.  Yard sale books, used book store books, thrift store books…I am a glutton.  The problem with this, is that for a long time I really only read before going to bed.  Getting through five pages and then zonking is not a recipe for churning through novels.  I literally own hundreds of books.  After putting together the bookshelves, I began the process of shifting books from the small bookshelf that was previous over-stacked with them to the new ones.  The painstaking process of extricating the rest of my boxed up books from the attic was and epic undertaking and one that had me dealing with sore muscles for a few days.  However, after a few days of sweat and organization, and some purging that fell disastrously short of Ms. Kondo’s recommendations, I had ALL the books I owned shelved.

I’ve been reading so much more because of these beautiful things staring me in the face every day.

See?  Small, simple changes can make all the difference.  Can I still have my yoga mat there and try to spend some moments in meditation?  Absolutely.  Do I need to beat myself up if I don’t?  Not at all.

I made the list above with things I wanted to experience more of.  Things that I didn’t make time for prior.  Do I expect to become a painter who sells his works?  Not in the least.  I just wrote it down one day when I had an idea for a painting pop into my head when I was feeling a certain way, and mindful thinking allowed me to say “hey, that’s interesting, I should do something with that”.

Even if I only sky dive once, or bake some cupcakes a couple of times, I can at least say I tried it if it ends up being something that doesn’t stick on as something I want to keep doing.  Learning to sew came about through me wanting to be able to repair holes and rips in my own jeans.  Can’t be that hard, right?  I don’t think I’d have thought of this if I hadn’t tried to actively slow myself down mentally.

Our very best friends, Mike Hollis and Erin Cashman have moved from Boston to Addison, VT, a mere hour away instead of like 4.5.  Their old stone farmhouse has literally become one of my happy places.  Mike is gonna be my skydiving buddy this summer, since there’s a place that offers it like five minutes from said farmhouse!

Ok, I have to wrap things up, you have things to do today.

I tend to spin off on tangents easily.  I’m working on it.

TLDR: I was a skeptic about things that could’ve helped me a more well-rounded a better person…a stronger person.  I didn’t think the logic applied to me.  I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.  I probably wouldn’t have made the big mistakes that lead me here.

I messed up, but I’ve owned it.  Little by little, I’ve started making things better for myself and others around me.

The path I’ve traveled isn’t littered with the pieces of myself that I’ve managed to break along the way, but I’m proud of the golden scars I have now that I’ve begun the process of repairing/renovating who I am and want to be.

You can too.  Let’s talk.