Content

I’m no psychologist, psychiatrist, or specialist in the brain.

I will, however, claim to have a Ph.D. in exploring my own PTSD, OCD, bipolar swings, and spectrum tendencies.

I get manic. I get depressed. I get triggered whenever I see a police officer.

I ruminate, obsess, and do wild, stupid shit sometimes.

Okay, often.

Then, I ruminate some more on that.

I beat myself up constantly. I magnify my mistakes to the point where I am the mistake itself.

Then, when I’m successful in my expressions, I regret I may have shown ego.

My ego would like to think it does not exist. To pretend I don’t have a care in the world.

The reality is I care a lot. Too much even. Way. Too. Much.

It takes a while for me to recognize my own shit as it’s happening.

It takes me even longer for me to get over my own shit after it is smelt so plainly.

I work hard to come back from feelings of inadequacy and have fought many mental battles in isolation, in addition to depending on others to fight them for me.

Given that, something has to be given to me in the context of implying my perspective is substantiated. Some kind of award. Fuck!

Which is to say, I deserve some credit when I state my words are ones that matter.

My claims have weight.

However.

At some point you just have to let go of what you thought should happen and live in what is happening.

Mind you. Some of us struggle with this on a daily basis.

Not because they want to. No. Not because they aren’t aware of its follies.

It’s simply a matter of what we went through.

Humans are impacted by the things they go through and that context sets them apart from others. We cannot all be the same and, unfortunately, it appears time traveling is a ‘gift’ many have to waste their mental resources doing in order to catch up with the present.

It takes practice to think clearly and know what thinking clearly looks like enough to know you’re even doing it.

When you grew up being gaslit, it can be to lay claim to anything about yourself as real, or positive even.

Additionally, it takes work to understand that things aren’t always about you.

Yeah. Things aren’t always about you.

In fact, things are usually never about you unless you make them about you.

That, folks, is the ego. Plain in sight and clear to see.

The ego is the storyteller of our minds dictating how life’s outcomes are delivering what we call fate to ourselves and others around us.

It is the meaning maker of all things and it is what we act with when we work from a context of surviving a situation over thriving in what it can stand to bring us, which is new context.

When we act from a context that is old, from a perspective that is dated, what we get are results indicative of an experiment with unchanged parameters.

Which is to say, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Sometimes we do this in certain ways that manifest themselves into observable behaviors.

Other times, what keeps us stuck in the mud can be rooted in our subconscious and, when life’s rubber hits the road, we end up spinning our wheels in a ditch of thought wondering what went wrong time and again until we learn we were making things about ourselves. Again.

Humans can be so entitled and impatient to the things they want.

Okay, I can be entitled and impatient to the things I want.

But it’s through reflection of one’s past that keeps the mind present to its own machinations.

Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it.

On a mental scale this, too, is true.

If we don’t stop, time and again, to look at ourselves as humans with needs and battles of our own to fight through, we fail to look at ourselves with compassion.

This becomes a habit we repeat until we find ourselves stuck in ruts we couldn’t see ourselves walking right into and grasping for help to get out of.

In the context of self-help, we truly only have ourselves.

One can only be helped if they indeed recognize themselves as in need.

It’s okay to admit you need help. But it takes strength to admit that is the case.

Many view it as a sign of weakness, like it is the end of something.

But, for those who take the jump, asking for help is just the beginning.

The beginning of the end of our past lives as we know them.

Never completely different, but never truly the same again.