You can be so sick for so long that you have no idea how far down you’ve really fallen. That’s partly what happened to me. I didn’t realize how bad I really was. Being unwell is a terrible vicious cycle. All your energy goes into bearing the burden, and it’s easy to lose sight of what it was like to be happy. It’s the old “frog in the slowly boiling pot” thing. You have no perspective left.
At last, I was starting to realize how miserable I really was.
As an antidote, I was trying various medications, as I’ve already mentioned. And typing phrases into Google about anxiety, depression, “how to stop being miserable”. So I was doing some reading about this and trying to figure out how to pull myself out of such a terrible funk. While the medication experiment turned out to be a dead end, there were a few things that ended up laying the groundwork for really turning this ship around.
I guess there are two phases to this, and the first stage is a little bit deceptive. Phase one consists of first steps that were steps in the right direction, but that didn’t by themselves result in early improvement. I was still on the downward path, although these steps would later prove critical to beginning some recovery. So let’s call these “pre-recovery steps”. Phase two were steps that were added on later, that really got to the heart of where I needed to put my energy in order to feel better and start healing.
This post will describe the first phase, the “pre-recovery steps”. One was a deliberate attempt at self-improvement, and two were more impulsive decisions.
One Thing At a Time
One of those was reading the book The One Thing by Gary Keller. The ideas in this book were to prove so helpful that it has to have an early mention in this path to recovery. Reading this book helped me realize that one self-sabotaging thing I was constantly doing was piling on impossible goals, then berating myself for not being able to achieve them, then attempting to “fix it” by piling it on even more. As in “Okay, this time I’m really going to catch up on all this stuff that I know I need to do.”
Continually piling it on, failing, beating myself up, and then telling myself to suck it up has been repeated downfall for me for years. Most of my life maybe. So The One Thing was a major perspective shift, in that it concretized the idea that being under constant pressure is counterproductive as well as unhealthy.
This is where I finally started to get it through my thick skull that the solution to anxiety wasn’t trying to get more done. It was trying to do less.
Following a major exercise in the book (called “goal-setting to the now”) I wrote out my long-term goals, broke them down sucessively shorter-term plans. This wasn’t the first time I’d done such an exercise, but this one stuck. Perhaps this upmpteenth iteration of it was finally decisive and compelling enough. Perhaps the specificity of this book’s structure was clarifying. I followed the steps completely, so that those goals follow a course and are connected right down to the current day. They go from being a vision to being a part of my daily schedule.
In addition, I started a series of 66-day challenges which are time frames to work on a single priority. I took my first step, which was deciding to focus only on getting to work on time for 66 days (I’m chronically late), and not to stress about anything else. Of course it didn’t really work out that I couldn’t stress about anything else, but it did help to remind myself of this goal over and over again. Just focus on that one thing.
I read this book in the fall of 2019. I’ve stuck with those 66-day challenges (the time length to be varied as needed, but the basic idea remains) ever since (as of November 2021).
An Impulse Purchase
Sometimes, a seeming whim actually amounts to groping in the dark and coming up with the right solution to very tough problems.
In March of 2020, it became clear the pandemic was not going away, and that it was going to change our lives. At my job, the change was that our pay was getting cut by 25%, and I was going to start working from home.
Almost on a whim, I ordered a paint by numbers kit. These kits were incredibly cheap, less than 20 bucks, and I just felt like it might be a nice thing to do to relax. I can’t remember for sure now, but I may have imagined that I’d have time on my hands working from home. We were supposed to cut our hours by 25% along with our lower pay.
It turned out to be more than relaxing. Although I hadn’t defined it before I began this paint by numbers kit, this was the first step I’d taken in a long time to create mental room for myself. Room not to beat myself up, not to pile on “shoulds”; room not to fight the constant fog and confusion and resistance inside my head. And, critically, room for myself in the present moment. Not planning to relax in the future. But just concentrating on one simple task, getting absorbed in it as I was doing it.
I can’t remember exactly what my One Thing challenge was during that time. But at this point, I was working on a deliberate plan to improve my life, (the One Thing challenge), and I had also accidentally stumbled on a healing activity (the painting project). Soon came the next step in making things better. And that was the Creative Calling book club.
The Book Club
I don’t know what made me open that email. It is a testament to perfect marketing copy that it caught my eye in the Gmail inbox that I’ve neglected for years, and only very rarely opened up to scan to see if there was something critical that I’d missed, and then either to ignore or delete the rest.
Sometimes you just have an impulsive sense that something is important, and this was like that. I told myself I’d sign up to this book club, and I didn’t have to attend if I didn’t feel like it (it wasn’t my ONE THING priority, after all). Chase Jarvis, a photographer and educator, and now the author of his new book Creative Calling, was going to hold group session via Zoom every Saturday morning for six weeks.
I hadn’t picked up my camera in a long time, and didn’t have any particular ambitions toward any kind of creative project at that time. what I had was a vague feeling that this might be enjoyable, and it might be something that I needed to do. I didn’t know in what sense I needed it. I was probably giving into my habit of piling on “shoulds”, but in this case it was actually beneficial.
I was conflicted about it. Remember thinking that I shouldn’t pile it on. That this was not my “one thing” right now . But I told myself that if it was stressful or overwhelming, I could just quit. I just try it out because I felt like it.
It turned out to be another “pre-recovery” anchor. The book is an excellent foundation for working through mindset issues. The “creative” part can apply to any determinedly first-handed endeavor, not just to artistic creation, and therefore it turned out to have wide applications to my life at the moment. The other advantage was that it gave me connection to a wonderful group of people in a time when I would have been otherwise isolated. Social connections are as problematic for me as they are healthy, but it was still a lifeline during the worst days of the pandemic.
In hindsight, putting these 3 “pre-recovery steps” in place in late 2019 and early 2020 set the stage for my recovery. Looking back, I can see what they gave me.
- The One Thing gave me some focus on clearing away mental clutter, relieving the pressure of constantly having more to do than I could accomplish, and helped me prioritize my actions to my long term values.
- That paint-by-numbers kit gave me some desperately-needed (I had no clue how desperate at the time) mental breathing room.
- The Creative Calling book club taught me steps to the mindset of idea-to-execution process steps, and exposed me to people who shared some of the same struggles, and yet who were just obviously beautiful, complex, good-hearted people.
These and other steps were what would finally, over an agonizingly long time, allow me to right the ship, so to speak. To “pile on” the metaphors: there is a “stage-setting” phase that has to be completed before you can start the actual show. If you’re running too quickly downhill, or on a treadmill, you have to slow down before you can stop, or you’ll come crashing down.
With mental health, I had to put the brakes on my most runaway habits and thought patterns before I could start to form new, healthy ones. I couldn’t see this at the time. I was always trying to jump straight onto the right path without seeing what was keeping me speeding down the wrong one. But with a mix of deliberate effort, and an almost blind groping toward giving myself a break, I was starting to move away from self-destruction.