On the relentless, ever-churning contraption that is my mind
I’ve always been more sensitive to my emotional life than many other people. It’s not something I chose – it’s just how it’s always been. Growing up, dealing with increasingly mature themes in life, this complex inner world of mine became more of a nuisance than anything else, causing me to numb myself with varying substances over the years, making life more tolerable, albeit at a great price.
I’ve spent the majority of my adult life dealing with this abundance of emotion to some degree or other. There have been self-help books, self-medication, self-loathing, therapy, faith, rejection of faith, meditation, immersion in creative projects, winter bathing, a regime of different workout styles, long navel-gazing talks with friends – pretty much every tool known to man, to help me escape this part of myself, however ingrained it might be. Whoever designed this mind forgot to add that crucial OFF button.
It wasn’t until recently that I realized, or maybe just accepted, that this wasn’t a problem to be solved, or something I could rid myself of. This was and is a part of me, of my construct, and as such essential to my character and lived experience. Discovering this to be a lifelong burden I must carry wasn’t exactly a relief – quite the opposite actually – but not without its merits either. Accepting this part of me provided a new set of tools for dealing with it – or to be more exact, not to deal with it.
Sometimes just letting it be shortens its life. This means accepting that your thoughts are running loose, worry keeps you awake at night, and any time spent indulging this only worsens it. When the machine is running, the most honorable task is not sticking your hands in the gears. This far from always works, but it’s the only method that’s yielded any results to speak of. Which makes no sense, as it’s also the only method requiring zero effort on my part. But then again, doing nothing often requires the most effort of me.
So now, in this substance-free life, I am much closer to every emotion running through this midlife-crazed mind and body than I’ve ever been before. With no bottle-shaped escape on hand, I am practicing the skill of mere awareness of all these feelings, all these emotional hoops my mind is forcing me to jump through, and maybe trying just… standing still. Doing nothing. And somehow discovering that most of the time, every problem resolves itself in a manner that didn’t even require intervening, and brings no harm to me either.
This feels unnatural and rather unintuitive. I still haven’t figured out how the universe somehow solves all these big problems without my intervention, but it seems to manage, forcing me into a slightly begrudging surrender of my “Main Character” status. It’s not easy. It’s not fun either. Really, most of the time it’s still quite the struggle. I wish I could lay out a structure or program for this, like in my many self-help books, that would make child’s play of it. But I guess that’s not how you grow up or mature. And in some instances, I am still very much like a child.