WITH MEANING & FULFILMENT
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mental health
What do you do in a world that demands your submission just so you can stay alive? What do you do when your job and your paycheck demand that you keep doing more, and more and more? How can you stop in a culture that thrives on you exploiting yourself completely?
This is how: You change the culture.
Most of us are living in fear of our darker emotions. And why wouldn’t we, when our culture and media are telling us that our ideal state is one of constantly being happy and productive? And if we aren’t, then hey, here’s a solution to help you BECOME constantly happy and productive.
Perfectionism is an artificially created disease of constant doing. A delusion that we as humans have a godlike purpose to create a world that doesn’t already exist. An obsessive belief that we are here to fix something that isn’t broken.
I know you’re probably busy working or getting to the end of your day, but I invite you to take a few minutes to slack off, and read this. Go ahead, slack off for 8 minutes.
We are stuck in a vicious cycle in society.
We don’t let ourselves be vulnerable to each other because we don’t trust each other to not hurt us. And we don’t trust each other because we don’t trust ourselves to take care of ourselves.
Ultimately, when you’re depressed, you are mourning your past. You are reliving some part of your life, and all of the emotions that came with it. You are mourning what has already happened, and your inability to change it.
Something’s been on my mind this year. Something dark and heavy. It’s been crushing my skull down into the ground with its painful, menacing force, threatening to flood my sight with darkness, my mind with hopelessness, and wrap its cold slithering fingers around my throat tight until it squeezes the life out of me.
I’ve always been a goal oriented person. I learnt how to decide what to focus on, and then focus on it so pointedly, blocking out all distractions until the goal had been achieved. Only to move onto the next goal.You can read a ton of articles about how positive thinking helps you become more productive, and it’s true — focusing on what you can change and ignoring what you can’t is a great way to make progress without distraction.
It's not an easy thing to admit to people who care about you, even though you realise at some point that you had better tell them before it's too late and they find themselves wishing they had done something.
It's not the first time I've felt this way. And somehow I don't think it will be the last.
The feeling of failure is so deeply wired in us as being “wrong” or “bad” that it keeps us from playing, experimenting, trying new things. We are wired to think in black and white, in safety in numbers, in not sticking out of the crowd by being the anomaly.
One might think that a lack of something means there's less to think about, less to worry about, but in fact negative space leaves a tremendous space for anxiety. Worry about what's missing... like an unfulfilled hunger or an indefinite wait for something essential.
It’s hard enough to navigate through life and all its emotions, challenges, losses and frustrations without having to also be the best version of you in your work, family, friendships and still manage to come out feeling accomplished, creative and free.
I’m standing at the very bottom of a deep and dark valley. Deep. Dark. Vast. I feel tiny. I know where I came from, the mountain I scaled to get here looms behind me, so far in the distance now, it's dwarved by time.
We live in a world where you are known for what you believe in, and as you get closer to your own truth, you may lose some people along the way. This is actually great. Who wants followers or friends that don’t believe in us, anyway?
After I lost my faith, I did everything I could to take care of myself and get back up. But even after I started feeling a little better, I found that I had lost more than just my faith. I had lost my passion for the future I had been creating.
If Faith can make you do anything, what do you do when you’ve lost your faith? Especially in yourself? It happened to me, and here’s what I did next.
