Unpacking Everything (Part Two)

Morning everyone! Seeing that May itself is the official global mental health awareness month, it seemed almost perfect that this would be a time for me to unpacking some of the things I have recently shared in my post on Sunday when it comes to dealing with my own mental health struggles as well as experiencing what I could only describe as a crisis of faith.

Managing my Chronic Anxiety Disorder

If you have been following my postings for some time, then you’d be aware that I’ve grown up with a serious struggle with chronic anxiety disorder. I have some good days, but admittingly, I’ve had more bad days than I had good ones. And sometimes, those bad days can spiral into something ugly if left unchecked. I have often described that experiencing an episode can be like being “frozen in time”. It is what happens when I feel so paralyzed with fear and overwhelming worries that I would not be able to do anything at all, sometimes for hours, sometimes days, at my worst, it can last for weeks.

In the past, I have shared about a rare season in my life where I temporarily experienced significantly lesser anxiety. It was a rare moment in my history of dealing with my anxiety disorder. I’ve come to accept that I can’t always hope and wait for that season to happen again. I have to learn how to deal with what I’m going through especially when things are worse. All the years of seeking professional help and counseling, all the coping mechanisms I have learned to build over decades; it was time for me to put them into real practice.

I will admit that it hasn’t been easy so far.

Learning to Snap Myself Out of a Spiral

After many years of trying to do this, recently I was able to successfully snap myself out of a spiral before things actually got bad. Just to put things in perspective, this was a proactive/preemptive action as opposed to the rather reactive actions that I used to take when it comes to bringing myself out of a spiral. For the longest time, I had never been able to preemptively stop myself. But with everything that’s been happening lately, I felt like I need to do something drastic if I really wanted to see some serious progress/change.

Some of the earliest signs that I’m about to spiral usually includes a combination of the following:

• Dwelling on my regrets.
• Thinking of “what ifs”.
• Feeling like my mind & thoughts are caught in a loop.
• When my genuine concerns are stopping me from doing anything.
• When I’m starting to think negative thoughts about myself, or my circumstances.

So, the one thing I decided to do differently this time, was to force myself to take action. To focus on the present moment and what I can control. I had to remind myself that there are always going to be things I can’t control. And I need to learn to accept that. In some ways, by distracting to focus on the things I can do in that present moment, it helped my mind to break some of those cycles you’ve seen above. For the first time, in my life, it worked. This is something I hope to continue practicing and doing in the near future.

You see, the thing is, I’ve already learned to accept that my chronic anxiety disorder condition is never going to leave me. It’s always going to be part of who I am, and it is something I’ll need to learn to manage for as long as I’m alive on this earth. So, instead of just trying to ignore it, or minimize it, I’ve decided to just embrace it and see it for it’s totality. By learning to accept it as a part of who I am, I feel slightly more empowered to manage it better moving forward.

There is indeed power in accepting things for what they truly are, and not a version of what we want to see.

You’ve had a Bad Day, a Bad Week, a Bad Month. But it isn’t a Bad Life.

We can’t always rely on us “feeling something” before we take the necessary actions towards it. There are always going to be moments in our lives when we don’t feel it. But that is also when our commitment and dedication will be tested. The real question that we ought to ask ourselves is, “When we’re not feeling it, will we still continue to be committed to what we believe in?”

This was just something that I remembered from some of my past professional counseling sessions. I remember my counselors and psychiatrist would sometimes remind me that what I’ve just experience was a bad moment. And I never have to let that moment dictate how the rest of my day, week, month and year is going to turn out. They always reminded me that I have a choice. I can choose in that very moment to turn everything around. And the way to do that is by first changing my own attitude.

In life, bad shit happens to everyone from time-to-time. None of us are immune to it. The really important thing we need to remember is that while we can’t control what happens around us, or to us, we can always control how we respond in the face of it. And that is precisely what it feels like right now in my life (and my faith).

It’s about accepting that this is just another bad moment, a bad season. But as long as I continue to keep a positive attitude and keep pushing forward, this bad moment will eventually pass. I don’t have to let this bad season in my life dictate how the next season of my life is going to turn out.

Dealing with My Crisis of Faith

For the longest time, I have always struggled to find the common ground between my faith in God as well as my own mental health challenges. I never truly understood why God would allow me to struggle with something so dilibitating. To make matters even worse, lately, I was starting to struggle even more because I felt somewhat disconnected from my faith. Not the best time to feel this way if you catch my drift.

For weeks now, I have been praying daily, reading the bible as regularly as I can (I’ve tried to do it daily, but it was starting to feel like a ritual, and routine). For weeks, it felt almost as if I was simply going through the motion. I would wake up, pray, read the Bible and then I would feel nothing. Spiritually, my tank has been empty for a while. So I began to question why I’m still doing it? Who am I trying to prove my faith to?

Then I remembered something that I had learned a long time ago about what faith is. The most practical way I can describe what having faith is, is this: Faith is like taking an action, doing something even though you cannot actually see the reward. It’s like acting on a promise of something that will happen eventually. You just have to take the first step towards it.

Let’s have a Discussion

I really hope to have an open and honest discussion with you. It can be about faith, or mental health. How do you deal with a situation that feels out of your control? What are some of your coping mechanisms and techniques? And when it’s your faith, have you experienced a crisis of faith before? Recently perhaps? How did you get yourself through it? What were some of the things that you did that worked, and what didn’t work?

Please leave me a comment.