A Work of He[art]
I hold it together, & I try my best to hear the words people are saying, rather than the words I hear. But sometimes, I just can’t help it. Sometimes, the words twist & turn like a knife in my back. That is when I start to loose control & my rejection sensitive dysphoria kicks into overdrive creating or orchestrating the strain on all my relationships as I act out not because of malice, but because of despair, rage & fear of the future.
Cognitive Distortions
Individuals who grow up with ADHD (particularly if it has gone undiagnosed) encounter more frequent & frustrating set backs in life situations — on the job, in social interactions, & everyday organizations. Because of these many setbacks, adults with ADHD become self-critical & pessimistic. This in turn, sometimes causes them to experience negative emotions, cognitive distortions, & unhealthy self-beliefs. It is common for individuals living with ADHD to think they are at fault when situations don’t turn out well, when, in many cases, they aren’t.
They may end up bringing the same pessimism to the future, imagining that tomorrow will go as badly as today. As it turns out, the demoralizing thoughts & beliefs that keep individuals from doing what they want to do can’t stand up to the light of logic.
Crisis of Consciousness
To the destiny within my very veins, the sleeping visions that dance within my soul. I have so many dreams & ideas that bubble beneath the surface standing at parade rest just begging to be called to attention so that they can be focused on & begin to flourish. I still somehow am not ready to share all of these ideas with the world, but every night as the stars light up the night sky I am reminded to nourish these sleeping desires with my passion for illuminating the places where all of our souls are calling to us, the areas which we all need to rouse from the darkness & bring into the light.
I’ve spent too much time abandoning what we all desire & focusing on the “safe” path as I have been asked to trust in the future destiny that we all feel calling to us, even if it is in the unseen. Taking some time to see what resonates with my destiny & with the path ahead as I am constantly experiencing myself as the many or as “they” is what throws constant challenges my way.
I enthusiastically undertake to overcome a new obstacle, but when problems arise, I end up exiting the game with the same rapidity of which I started. My biggest problem is that I absolutely want to get everything from life as it seems easy & simple, but it is hard for me to understand that solving life’s problems requires so much perseverance & attention (focus). Being a human being with much endurance as in a snowflake, enthusiasm — as in a child just beginning to walk, & cynicism as much as if I am already five hundred years old.
Until I learn to search the whole grain of common sense, I am doomed to make miserable not only myself, but many others.
“Your smile is your logo, your personality is your business card, how you leave others feeling after an experience with you becomes your trademark.” — Jay Danzie
To be completely honest, I more or less have always felt like I am doing others a service by helping them out of their stiflingly too small “rules” & opening them up to the idea that yes, you can in fact live life on your own terms. This “helping others out of their own rules” approach rarely is appreciated as I as I originally assumed it would be.
To my own surprise, most people love their little rules & have very little curiosity or interests in any rules other than their own. And I do mean most people, covering the whole entire universe of beliefs. Everyone, no matter how “free” is still living by some system of rules.
I am someone who “accepts all”, but I get embarrassed for other people when they act life a goof.
I pretty much regardless of any other outside factors am cursed with this peace-keeping personality that is literally so open-minded it loves everyone even those I strongly dislike as I obsessively try to understand why they act the way they do so that I can fix myself in order to suit their needs/wants/desires over my own. It was through this practice that I developed a brilliant learners mind as my fellow human being’s contradictions & rules (a.k.a beliefs) they all live within fascinate me, & my curiosity about all of us funny 3D humans only grows more vast with time.
It’s been in the last few years or trips around the sun that I have especially come across one belief that I am, in fact, willing to settle down with & live by. The belief is the most profound one of them all that I’ve found on my holy grail of quests where brain stimulations suits me best in my travels/journeys as it is more than worthy of an equal seat at the “spiritual enlightenment” table.
This belief is the path of … “No Shame.” This concept fit in all of the missing puzzle pieces that I had been playing find/seek with for most of my life as it goes something like this when in application in the real world:
No shame that you like something one day & dislike it the next? (GOOD! That means you’ve grown.)
No shame that you have contradictions & don’t fit perfectly into one ideal? (YAY! That means I have substance & I’m not a cardboard cut out)
No shame that my political views are unpopular, or my job is strange, or that I have no money, or even lots of money, or that I am a Divine Feminine worshiping anti-feminist, or a Republican Astrologer, or a deeply spiritual seeker who still eats pork & sugar? (AWESOME! You can’t spell awesome without me!)
After all of this searching on the “No Shame” path, I finally decided that the most reverend & profound thing I could possibly do is to heal my soul which entails throwing out any/all constricting rules, love my body as the magnificent partner that she is, & to be brutally honest with my loved ones.
In my own AWOL version of my “love language”’ simply put allowing myself to love every last part of my full-blown broad spectrum contradictory self & reveling in the cognitive dissonance poetic justice that this gives me prophetic power over other, less fleshed-out, human beings unable to break the mold or escape “the box” that we are programmed from a young age to think in.
Indeed, it was my own fitting pretty nicely into that same box (doing everything the “right” way) is where I found myself checking in to see what parts of myself I had needed to cut out in order to academically achieve whether this box was in fact a spiritual relational, mental or social box so that I could mold templates in opposition. This was thanks to the “no shame” path I had chosen where I no longer had to shame my contradictions as I came to understand that owning the spiritual evolution-infused power of cognitive dissonance meant showing the world who I truly really am.
The Shame in My Truth
Mental boxes be damned the molds I have templated allow escape routes for all of societies programmed responses to trauma as untold stories unfolding is just the holistic healing assessments the recipe for healing humanity called for.
Somewhere deep inside me is an infinite amount of stories that needs to be told. My truth. I’ve thought about the idea of my truth playing & dancing around the facts that it will set me free. More than that I’ve been thinking about the fact that I haven’t truly trusted myself in a long time. My truth has thrived in isolation keeping that mistrust in myself & my abilities rendered useless as I feel the pain of the world in my physical body…
One moment I feel everything all at once & then in the next moment I feel nothing at all. When it’s painful feelings such as panic, despair, or rage I can’t help but constantly wonder if this life is worth it. Then in another moment, the pain that feels much larger than myself not designed to be held by one body finds ways to escape even though there is no other me to help carry it all an extra perceived sense of control reaches out to ease my suffering.
So how does this all work? What’s happening in real time is that the shame in my truth on it’s own can suck all of my energy in a single moment leaving me disoriented unable to even send a single worded text message even if my life depended on it. The shame in my truth in superficial societies statistically validated stereotypes where I cannot seem to overcome adversity as I’m dealing with the same struggles that all of my friends & family have moved on to the next stages with.
I am forced to deal with the shame of being too much. That “too much” inflicting damage on the surround societies & my family alike the guilt eating me alive from the inside out. The emotional abandonment I faced alone was the silent killer of my marriage. It’s anthem being an ice cold white noise & color the darkness of a deep hole that reeked of pure defeating disgust. This is space in time that was carved out for me to exist in for learning purposes so that I could process in reflections as my experiences reflected that of a very foreign object to be decyphered.
This is around the time in space that I began writing to better know what I think & shortly after what followed was the blank page becoming the only landmark I had any rightful claims to as natural material phenomena to report on the frontlines of charting the frontiers of emotional intelligence took over as something I was destined to either dedicate my life too or throw away my life for. A 50/50 split in comprehensive brain capacity that in conceptualization pretty much always ended well as it balanced itself out one way or another.
In my writing, I have been brought to my highest highs & ruined myself in the lowest of lows as the content tears me apart only to build me back up again. In full broad spectrum retrospect all of the blood, sweat, & tears along with the way my brain has the capacity to feel empathy now seems nothing short of magical… yet it also feels extremely & dangerously toxic simultaneously especially when I empathically have no desire to have any power over any human like power has been reigned over me.
All of these silly things about love & destiny force me to question my existence & ask myself the hardest of questions such as, “What do I really want out of this lifetime?” Or ask myself questions like, “How do I want to be remembered?” The answers depend on the day I suppose. It depends on whether on the day I am asked these two hard-hitting questions if I am being forced to question my own existence or if am being forced to question the existence of others.
Regardless, neither of the questions are easy to answer. When I force myself to understand that the compassion to change despite the societal shame in my truth that exposes others who innocently picked up beliefs from their parents or society learning how to exhibit the kinds of behaviors to belong or “fit in” so that we feel loved & wanted is & has always been an illusion forced up us. But them I have to explain to not doubt that this illusion I’m overexposing is real because it is as real as anything gets.
If pain is my destiny. If grief is my burden in this lifetimes then so be it. I will continue to mourn, with no apology every time I am forced to feel funerals in my brain as my marriage wasn’t able to be sculpted into the different kind of love that worked for both of us or the tiny humans I co-created with him. If motherhood being my undoing (another shame in my truth) continues I will still mother my tiny humans anyway until I am no longer needed.
If leaving becomes the only way to break free then I will leave eventually, even if the heartbreak alone threatens to kill me softly as I climb these mountains in my journey of life… all alone contradicting myself the entire way as my morals, values, beliefs in this lifetime are continuously spinning in a compass searching for the true north.
I want everyone to hear my story. Instead I am guilty of complicity as I narrate these fairytales sprinkling them with all lies as close to the truth as one could possibly get as I burned down what little evidence was left of my own sanity. For me, my story feels as if it was silenced out of shame or embarrassments as its interruption happens over & over again.
The treacherous thing about the interrupted story is that, while the story itself may be invisible, it’s consequences are not. All of our physical, emotional, mental, & spiritual traumas leave us unbalanced — confused & suffering.
