Yes, and it was the opposite of everything I had ever tried...
- I was in therapy at age 9
- On medication by 14 (not because I was worse, but because that was the point when the medical establishment decided that all mental illness needed drug therapy)
- Self medicated a year later
- Tried to drown myself in men
- Gave my life and everything I thought I wanted to a man, who ultimately left me
- Found a new man and decided to live the life that I had always heard touted on "The Brady Bunch" and in "Good Housekeeping" magazine; I had everything any woman would ever want
...and by 30 I was having a full blown mid-life crisis. I didn't know who I was or where I was going. I had made myself irrelevant.
I looked out over my life and saw a sea of nothingness and realized the most important thing:
This mess was ALL MY FAULT.
Not my father's, not my brain chemistry, not my abusive boyfriend's, not society.
My whole life there has been a voice in my head (not literally, ok) that said, "You cannot get out of this". I was completely focused on what I might potentially lose. I felt I had so little that I could not afford to lose anything. I had to clench my fists and cross my arms to desperately hang on to what I had...never realizing that this closed me off to ever getting more...never seeing how clinging desperately created anxiety and distorted my reality.
Now here is where it gets a little cheesy, but follow me on this one:
I am a football junkie. I was watching an interview between two of my favorite people,
Tom Brady (QB, New England) and
Bob Costas. Costas says to Brady something like, "Tom your rookie season was a disaster, no one thought you would amount to anything and here you are 2 time Superbowl champion (old interview); how did you turn things around". And what Brady said was that his first year, he was totally afraid of throwing an
interception. He made all of his decisions around that. But the kind of thinking that avoids interceptions had the unintended effect of also avoiding
touchdowns - and a game where there are no interceptions, but also no touchdowns, is a loss. So he stopped thinking about interceptions and focused only on throwing touchdowns - and accepted that there would be interceptions and that did not actually matter...as long as there were touchdowns.
Millions of people watched this interview, but it was the message I needed to hear at the moment that I needed to hear it. Focusing on not screwing up worse had a 0% chance of making my life better.
So here is what I did:
1) I gave up.
You know how people say, "never quit", "stick with it", "hang in there"...that's bullshit. It only makes sense if you are headed in the right direction. Think more like - "if you are in a hole the first thing you should do is stop digging". I realized that this would initially cause loss, but I needed to step back and regroup.
2) I dropped the word "should" from my vocabulary
...and then I focused on what I wanted. People said, I *should* put my family first. WRONG. That's what I had been doing. Putting them first was ruining all of our lives because I was so miserable. As a wife and mother I *should* be home every night, but as a Miami girl, this was slowly killing me. *Should* is about how other people view my life - and those people don't really know what's best about me or give a damn about me.
3) I stopped trying and started doing.
A little borrowed from
Star Wars here, but the concept of "try" is failure-focused. It implies the idea that it cannot/will not happen from the outset. Instead I just announce I am going to *do* things and if it doesn't come off the way I thought, I am learning to say "f*ck it", and *do* something else. The idea is to keep doing. Imagine any
battle scene in a movie...does the leader say, "Well, guys, let's give this a try"? Hell no, and neither will I. I draw the broadsword and rush into battle shouting at the top of my lungs.
4) Don't believe in hope.
Hope is a double edged sword. Hope in my world is something that I take out of my pocket in a quiet moment when I am all alone, look at for a second, and then put away. Hope, when stared at too long, is what keeps a woman sitting by the phone on Saturday night waiting for one guy to call instead of going out to meet a dozen more. Hope, in this context, is the enemy of action. An apology to people who believe in this, but every time I see a room full of religious people with their hands lifted up in prayer, it looks to me more like a bunch of helpless victims at a bank robbery. It's ok to have hope, but in a lot of instances, I have seen where hope has actually created victims because people use hope as a replacement for personal action and/or responsibility.
Do I know what I want in life? - nope. Is my life perfect now? - nope. I still have problems and I still have to work everyday to solve them. The difference is that I wake up in the morning (or whenever) and put both feet on the ground and feel that I have a reason to get going today (and usually a reason to smile about the day before). I have stuff to do today...and if it gets f*cked up, fine, I'll have stuff to do tomorrow.
There are bad times...but they have really become more like moments...maybe an hour...rather than lost months and years. I am amazed at how quickly taking action and grabbing the reins of my life turned things around. I'd say just about a year of consistent effort has done the trick.
