Raspberry Iced M

Having been in therapy for almost a year, and having been given feedback from someone more expertly qualified than me to challenge my thought processes, there are still certain thoughts I continuously entertain that do absolutely nothing to help me.

And on days when those thoughts take over, I often snowball emotionally, so that at the end of the day, I cannot readily see if I am even capable of being someone different than who others believe me to be.

These thoughts don’t solve problems or make me wiser or help me heal. They just exist – out of habit really – to consume energy and to distract me from more productive thinking.

1. What if they never see me differently? What if people never believe I’ve changed? What if they only ever always remember my worst choices? What if I put in all of this effort to become a completely different person and they still see the old version of me? The truth is that they might. And that I cannot build who I am and what I want for my life around someone else’s willingness to update their opinion.
2. What if I never become who I am trying to be? This one is tricky because it sounds productive in my head, as it is disguised as a motive for growth. But it is actually usually fear. I start measuring myself and checking progress and wondering whether I’m doing any of this fast enough, thereby turning my goal of growth into something performance based. The reality is that there is no deadline. Or finish line. There’s just a direction.
3. What if I had done things differently? I exhaust myself when I ruminate on this thought. Yes, things might be different. Maybe better. Or worse. I’ll never know. And replaying alternate timelines doesn’t change the one I’m living in now. It only keeps me emotionally attached to a life that doesn’t exist.
4. Why wasn’t I enough? This one has put me on the floor of my bathroom in a giant puddle of a depressing cocktail self-pity and self-loathing. This thought turns every rejection into a verdict, every distance into evidence, every loss into proof that there is something fundamentally wrong with who I am at my core. I know that another person’s decision does not automatically reveal my worth. I know that some relationships end and that love is complicated and that sometimes people just choose differently. I know, objectively, that endings don’t necessarily mean I’ve failed some invisible test. But in the throws and in the aftermath of this thought, I struggle to find the clarity needed to recenter myself and press ahead.
5. I should be further along by now. When considering my past, and the regrets therein, followed by the remembrance of tangible things – like my age, my career, my debt, the number of friends I don’t have…I tend to automatically attach healing and maturity to a calendar, thereby dismantling my progress altogether. And the lessons that take years and consequences and repetition are highlighted, while the things I’ve done right are forgotten almost entirely.
6. I need to figure this out right now. My brain is hard-wired for urgency. Everything must be solved, explained, defined, resolved. Immediately. It is hard for me to accept that some things become clearer only with time – that forcing an answer doesn’t create wisdom.
7. What are they thinking about me? Objectively, they’re probably not. And even if they were thinking something negative, I can’t fix that. Still, I have spent a lot of energy participating in imaginary conversations that can occur only on the inside of other people’s minds.
8. If I let this go, then it never mattered. As if I am permanently nailed to a soapbox that will only weather but never collapse. This thought keeps me attached to pain longer than necessary, like healing somehow minimizes what happened, like forgiveness equals approval, or like moving forward means I wasn’t hurt “that” badly to begin with. But letting go doesn’t erase significance – it just means that I don’t want the pain of that situation to govern what I’m trying to do now.
9. I have to fix this. I don’t, though. I can help, communicate, apologize, make a better decision. But I can’t repair every relationship or change every outcome or heal every wound or control every person involved or affected. Some things just have to be prayed over. All circumstances belong to God. Some belong to other people. And some just have to remain unfinished, despite the fact that my brain seeks closure.
10. What if this feeling never goes away? When my emotions are loud, I become convinced that my sadness and anxiety and loneliness are permanent. And the remorseful part of me is reminded that none of those feelings will ever subside because (A) I deserve to feel like this; (B) I am not worth deliverance, restoration, or redemption; and (C) I’ve used up all of the chances I’ve ever been given to make things right. On good days, I feel guilty for having joy, for being happy, for not hating myself. And on bad, highly-charged emotional days, you can find me laying on a tear soaked pillow asking the Lord to relieve me of any will to continue to live. A smart person should know that feelings move…and that the goal is to not panic just because something hurts today, while looking forward to another day when it might not hurt as bad. But when there is no sight of change, I tend to focus more on whether or not I’m doomed to melancholy imprisonment forever.

I try my hardest to remember that I don’t need every answer today. That I don’t need for everyone to be on my side. That I don’t need to try to rewrite the past so that my present means something. That I don’t need to predict the future. That living faithfully in the present is enough work for one day.

Peace cannot be only about removing stressful circumstances – because that’s not possible.

And one of the things my therapist has taught me is that we actually can’t control what thoughts enter our minds – which is a real epiphany when I consider the amount of energy I have spent in the last 40 years trying to force myself not to think certain things.

What we can control, though, is what we do with the thoughts that enter our minds. How long they get to stay, whether or not they get to “win,” how to effectively challenge them so that their volume decreases inside my head. Some of my thoughts inform me. Some argue with me. Some help me grow.

And some just suck the life out of me. I’ve already learned to identify the differences. But applying the appropriate course of action? That’s the hard part. Regardless, my attention and energy and time are all limited. And I am doing my best to not dwell on the thoughts that don’t benefit the life I want to create for myself.