LIFE: METHOD TO THE MADNESS
The chaos, madness, trauma that is life. I often found myself going through the motions of it. At times I was not aware, aware that I was only existing, not living. Go to school, try to get good grades, pick a good career, try to mould myself to fit that career, maintain a functioning relationship with family and friends. Somewhere in between try not to lose myself. It’s easy to forget you’re an individual. Forgetting my identity. Wait, who am I?
It’s all too much. The endless exhausting cycle that we label life. At what point do we say enough? Pause, take a breather, heal. Stop time?! How I wish that was possible. Truth is, there’s danger in letting things stay as is. We pick up experiences and relationships that shape us. To love, to lose, betrayed. The recipe for trauma. The pain and damage sticks with us. We may not recognize it at first but these events cause the mind and body to go at either fight, flight or freeze state. Personally, I was a proud member of the flight community. Lol. Any inconvenience that threatened my deluded state of sanity, norm, I ran.
I had created my own safe and happy bubble that helped me cope. The people I hung around, my environment, everything that I could shape, predict, control, was my safe space. I feared unpredictability, change. I still struggle with that. I got better when I learned and accepted the reasons that led me to how I took on life. But it was not an easy fit. It is scary when you make a mental decision to stop running, hiding, compartmentalizing, whatever it is you do to avoid facing you, all that you’re going through. Past, present, future. All of you.
Committing to understand the method of madness that is your life, is a necessity. With this, you will come to understand and hopefully accept that there’s purpose to the cycle and patterns that have shaped your life thus far. With that, maybe we can do better, heal and learn to control the pain, damage, harm that consumes us so to the point it overflows to the people around us. Those we care about.
Self-sabotage, self-destruction, all these are inevitable if we do not learn better coping mechanisms. What do you do when you’re stressed/conflicted? Those temporary fixes, are they healthy for you? A trick that can help you figure that out is by asking yourself; ‘if this negative feeling did not exist, would I still engage in this behaviour?’ ‘What’s my true motive in doing what I do?’. Asking the right questions is key.
So, I ask you, have you had enough? Are you tired yet? Think you can keep up with how you’ve been? If yes, I genuinely wish you the best of luck.You need it. The stubbornness and commitment you have in maintaining your deluded state of sanity, if you were to give only half of that energy to the process of overcoming, healing, then darling, a much more lighter life awaits. Perhaps breathing won’t have to feel like a chore anymore. And truly, isn’t that what we all want? Freedom.
