being human,  embodiment

The Questions I’m Pondering Today

It’s Saturday morning and I’m feeling sad. It’s been a great week. I was on a high for most of it, and a few incidents yesterday threw me into a mental tailspin; I went to bed with a heavy felt-sensation last night and woke up with the residue this morning. My medicine will be writing, getting outside and moving my body today.

Any time I feel like this, I ask myself how much of it I want to feel and how much of it I need to move past. I think it’s important to find a balance in both. If I avoid the way I’m feeling, how will I ever get better? And will it ever stop, if I always just move past it, move on to something better? How will I ever grow if I only set my sights on things that make me feel better? There has got to be a balance between feeling it all and not letting it overwhelm me. I don’t have the answer. In fact, all of my questions only lead to more questions.

But the other thing I know is that ‘this too shall pass,’ because that’s how life works. It’s just crazy how overwhelmed with sadness I can feel one day, and how extremely on top of the world the next. “It’s just a day,” but, my, how the day sucks when I’m in the middle of it. The other questions …

  • How do we functionally live life when there’s a void and we are hurting deeply?
  • How many of us feel this way often, perhaps even consistently?
  • How many of us actually deal with the things we are feeling vs. self-medicating the pain?
  • Often our troubles concern other people. How many of us manipulate to get the things we want? It is certainly something I’ve pondered this morning as a solution to part of my problem, but to what end? Where will that ultimately get me? Could I actually do that with a clear conscience? The answer is no, but it’s something I’ve thought about, seriously, and that makes me question my mental health.
  • How important is it to talk about our pain? When does talking cease to be useful?
  • How do others manage life without writing about it?
  • Am I weird?
  • Am I alone?
  • Should I seek more help?
  • Will this pass?
  • Who am I becoming?
  • Do I like who I am becoming?
  • Are others consistently in as much pain as I have been in over the last few years? I’ve never experienced pain like this before and I wonder what this being human is really about. What purpose does it serve?
  • What am I supposed to do with these overwhelming emotions?
  • How can I grow and help others through my own experience?
  • Why do we feel so alone in our pain?

That last one has felt so incredibly true but I’m discovering that, in actuality, it couldn’t be further from the truth, which begs the next question: what purpose do our minds serve?

I think the answers all begin there. Effective control of our minds, being the watcher of the thoughts without attaching to them and finding ways to let go of our thoughts are all keys to survival and good mental health.

If you figure out how to achieve those aims, could you please let me know? I’m making myself crazy over here.