Reality Realization…
Today, for the first time ever, I woke up without a worry in the world.
Yes, my mind kept bringing up all of the things I generally worry about, but I just didn’t care about them – there was no anxiety response in my body and brain.
There are a few unchangeable aspects of my life that bring me a consistent anxiety and cause me to become fixated on or lost in my upset thoughts. This is where my repetitive posts come from – I keep getting stuck on the same problems, because I just can’t resolve them properly. (Or I resolve them internally once, but then forget how I did it. When the problem returns, the same old anxiety builds up to an overwhelming level.) Believe me, nobody gets more annoyed or tired of this than I do.
You’re lucky – you have a choice in whether you want to hear about my experiences and perceptions. My brain just keeps spinning that information on repeat at lightning fast speed until I get overloaded with negative emotional responses in a brain already naturally low on ‘positive’ neurotransmitters. And so, it’s been scientifically proven that I’m unhappy by nature and don’t have a choice in this.
That’s all there is to it: my brain circuits are wired oddly, and this is one of the symptoms of that oddity. It’s how my brain functions; there is no alternative. It has only been in the last couple of years – since I’ve been writing about my thoughts and feelings – that I’ve even realized that my thoughts are largely anxious and fearful. I never even knew there was anything else I could think. For twenty-seven years, I just thought it was Life, how things were supposed to be.
I have always wished I could just pop a pill or have some kind of surgery to change how I am… It was easy for doctors to label me with depression, but then things started to get weird when no traditional treatment worked at all and I was telling them about new treatments to try on me. It wasn’t until I did the research and initiated an autism screening for myself that anyone even had a clue what was really going on.
In reality, no medication or medical intervention can fix or change me. That was a rough thing for me to digest; it still is. I existed my entire life with the belief that I was faulty, and needed to be “fixed”… but now I’ve been told there is nothing to fix.
I have no identity at this point. My entire identity was an amalgamation of all of the things people told me they hated about me, all the things they told me to be. I had to exorcise any vestige of my true self just to be acceptable to anyone, even my own family. Now, I have a bona fide excuse to be me, to tell people to go to hell with their criticisms? It seems extremely preposterous to me, even nearly a year after the official diagnosis.
I still have a very difficult time remembering that it’s okay to be myself, listen to my intuition, even voice my opinions and needs. It is not easy for me to intentionally displease people by making my own decisions and speaking against their demands or opinions, even as I know this people-pleasing is what I always hated the most about myself. People get angry at me all the time, but I just don’t care anymore. I spent far too long trying to appease them, and for what? To be The Nothing – invisible, expendable, worthless.
No more.
I reached a breaking point – I couldn’t take anymore, and just wanted to die because there was no brightness in my life at all. I had a child by then, though, and wasn’t going to abandon him. So, I started to work toward finding goodness, and I’ve slowly built things up to a point where I do recognize happiness and peace and joy. I still have the weariness and longing for death when I get overwhelmed, but I have learned now that death isn’t the way to go. I have learned that the way to decrease my anxiety and dissatisfaction with life is to take action and change my circumstances. In that vein, I now finally understand that my reaction to the world cannot be changed, so I must change the world itself. To live, I must make my world what I need it to be.
That is what I have been doing, that is what I will continue to do. I still am often and easily upset, I still feel negativity, and I still think I’m worthless sometimes. But, not all the time. I realized today that all of the things I want and need are already in my life in some way – they just need time to become what they are to become, at their own pace. Just as I need time to become what I am to become, at my own pace.
Today, for the first time ever, I woke up without a worry in the world.
May my future life contain many more of these days.