I craved more knowledge so I could be smart enough to make more money and do more things for people. Continually doing good was costing me some of my income, and I bought into the idea that a piece of paper was holding me back in life. I went back to college assuming that paper would ingrain new ideas sprinkled with morsels of intelligence. I quickly found that experiencing the material in real life had already given me the knowledge I needed to pass the courses, and textbooks weren’t needed. I stopped buying books as they seemed so out of date and out of touch with reality. College put a damper on the amount of time I had to accomplish my current dreams and goals, but I was engrossed in becoming “smarter on paper”. I stopped writing because I was constantly writing in college. Homework became an everyday task and writing no longer felt like a release. What I really gained from college was more connections and respect. Honestly, it was worth the student loans to gain confidence in who I was, network with professors and professionals in the business, and gain respect from colleagues. A bit of my imposter syndrome began to fade when my knowledge was reiterated through professors with acclamations and high grades. What I lost in college was another part of who I was. A couple of professors even tossed me little memory snacks of “You should write more” and “You have a unique conversational writing style”. Yet somehow, I was untriggered. My name in college was my birth name – not my alias, just my real name. Ironically, this is where I continued to forget who I was. During college is when I stepped up my parenting game.
While still in “hero mode”, I adopted a couple more kids, dealt with trauma issues from them, continued to pour my heart into a relationship with a soulmate who didn’t know how to love freely, lost a couple of best friends, gained a new one, and ran several businesses while being told I should probably just focus on one or two. I was mentally exhausted and still craving more. It was an insatiable desire to never stop in any area of my life. I was flooding my life with new experiences, new people, new standards, new goals, and new areas of my life I didn’t even know I wanted. My life was rich with chaos, and I thought I was at the top of my game. I wrote some very bland titles that were commercially acceptable to the general public, but they weren’t works I was proud of creating. They were simply sellable works that gained me notoriety and brought in more money, people, and things I wanted to do. I almost felt magical as I whisked around in my life fixing everyone’s problems and saving the day mentally, financially, or emotionally for anyone who needed me.
I reveled in being productive and hearing everyone marvel at my ability to stay awake all night working away while others were sleeping. In my mind it was simply grinding away at a life I thought I was building – except I was just throwing rocks uphill. I did help many people, and I would never change that part of my life for that reason. But one day those rocks all started to tumble back down the hill, and no one was there to catch them for me. I’m not sure where exactly things started changing, but suddenly I no longer felt like the hero in my story. I felt like I was drowning, and no one was noticing.
I was never making enough money. I was never organized enough to see things through to fruition. I was this endless supplier of good deeds, but I was never replenishing my own emotional needs. I was running on fumes and about as empty as a person could be. Doing good stopped being good enough and started being tiresome. I held resentment towards those that had grown accustomed to my deeds and expected them. I became anxious about spending time with my children because I knew I couldn’t possibly give them enough of my attention while also getting enough work done. I felt like a failure because I was constantly in motion and working myself to death while seemingly getting nothing done. Every day more rocks piled on me… and I carried them. I had dreams of doing things, but suddenly everything seemed out of reach. I was in a vicious cycle of having to continue everything I had started just to keep up… but all I was doing was getting further and further behind in life. At that point in my life, I switched from hero mode to autopilot.
Every day, I’d throw rocks up the hill for everyone I could, and I’d catch the rocks falling back down on me that no one else noticed were even in motion. The cycle numbed me to the point that I could no longer remember why or where the cycle even started. I wanted to search deeper and find the why’s… but I couldn’t remember how. I knew there were things good and bad buried deep within my psyche, and I contemplated a therapist, but I felt like no one could dig deeper into my real desires than myself. I just had to find a starting point to begin chipping away at the surface I’d created over the past 20 or so years.
Every day I tried to unravel a small area of my memories as though I was retracing my steps to find something I’d lost. I noticed every feeling and attempted to go backward until I could understand why I felt it. There was one common theme that kept surfacing. I was seeking only happiness in all things. I had sought after it so much, that I stopped allowing myself to acknowledge any other feeling at all. I dreaded hurt, I feared sadness, and I was terrified of letting go inside. I replaced it all with educated risk-taking that only resulted in happiness… or failure that I chalked up to a learning experience for the next adventure. I no longer allowed myself to really feel any other emotion other than optimism and perceptions of happiness.
Then one day something caught my attention. I was folding clothes and having an everyday conversation with my daughter over the phone. She began telling me about a dramatic, emotional event she had planned – something special for me. However, instead of me feeling nostalgic and compassionate, I felt anxiety and fear. I told her I really didn’t like big sad moments, and that maybe we could just do something light and happy instead. She said something to the effect that she thought I was afraid to feel emotions and that it wasn’t normal. There’s something about your own child acknowledging your mental shortcomings that’s eye-opening, to say the least.
After hanging up the phone, I thought about what she had said. I sat down on the floor and started trying to trace events in reverse that might lead me to find a point in my life where sadness became fearful to me. The longer I sat there, the further back I retreated until I realized it wasn’t a single event. It was event after event where I brushed myself off, picked myself up, and told myself I was just fine. After a while, I stopped feeling the fall at all and began picking myself up before I ever had the chance to hit bottom. I had gotten so good at reassuring myself that I stopped allowing myself to feel failure or grief. They were such foreign feelings that I had made myself afraid of their recurrence. I couldn’t trust myself to adequately feel those emotions anymore, so I pulled myself away anytime I felt them looming. It was this recognition that allowed me to snip the first thread in the tangled safety net I had built around myself.