I’ve already described how, during 2019 and 2020, I had started to break down what I’d always thought of merely as intense anxiety, and define what was really a cluster of debilitating symptoms that added up to feeling unbearable tension.
In another post, I described a few, perhaps odd and shaky, but effective early steps in an attempt to alleviate this misery and get onto a path of healing. In addition to those steps of doing a small project to create mental space, trying to think in terms of one priority task at a time, and joining the Creative Calling book club, there was one other thing I started doing that turned out to be foundational to healing. I had started meditating.
The Focus Problem
Noticing that my lack of concentration was a huge problem, and that I was never really present during conversation or during work, I had started experimenting to alleviate this symptom. I couldn’t focus, so I would enter this odd circle putting a bunch of distractions in place in order to get anything done.
In other words, I never felt as though I could start any task unless I had a distraction. I couldn’t do anything—brush my teeth, get in the shower, get in the car, open my email inbox, nothing—without an audiobook or podcast or something playing. In a way, if I was going to be distracted, I think I was at least choosing a distraction that was somewhat soothing so that I could at least take a few steps on the task that I wanted to get done.
The thought of tasks, once they were decided on, automatically became distasteful, and the thought of simply focusing on those tasks to the exclusion of all else felt intolerable. So I had to go through a routine of distractions, including all the little scattered “preparatory” tasks before starting my actual task, in order to get anything done at all, even though those other tasks dragged out the time it took me to get anything done, and compounded the lack of focus to a painful level.
Needing to Be Present
So, despite a very great many misgivings about the topic, I looked up up “mindfulness meditation” and started using the Waking Up app.
And there was no doubt about it. The results were immediate and dramatic. Just being there, being present, counteracting my mind’s tendency to unmoor, uproot, and escape from any situation or conversation—what an unbelievable difference. Of course, that sounds obvious when it’s laid out like that. And it is. But that’s not how my mind worked in the moment, so it was incredibly difficult to realize what I’m doing.
I had a lot of reasons that I was resistant, both psychological and philosophical (which I’ll tackle in a future article). I chose mindfulness meditation over other kinds, such as trancendental meditation. I chose mindfulness because it addressed the focus problem, and seemed to emphasize awareness of reality, rather than something woo woo that emphasized emtying the mind. Once I got at least a few split seconds’ worth of being present, I really started to understand that I wasn’t living on a functional level. This was the thin end of the wedge that started it all, as I recall.