Journaling project, Day 15

[drwex]

Inner peace begins the moment you take a deep breath and choose not to allow another person or event to control your thoughts. You are not what happened to you. You are what you choose to become in this moment. Let go, breathe, and begin again.

What are you holding on to that’s holding you down? What can you let go of right now (without losing a thing)?

Again I feel like I'm listening to someone speaking out of unacknowledged privilege, and it's an error I've made myself many times, despite being non-neurotypical. While I'd agree that clear deep breathing is helpful for self-calming and for countering negative and stressful thoughts, it's not true that (all) people can clear their minds, even with practice and lots of willpower. Some diseases, including brain ones, sap this kind of willpower. Some diseases actively induce thoughts that drown out these sorts of "inner peace" ideas.

I learned a lot from the moment I started being aware of my own breathing, learned cyclical breathing techniques, learned about relationships between posture and breathing, muscle tension and mental tension, and breathing. That's valuable. But inner peace begins differently for each of us, I think, because our minds are each unique. Likewise, we can't just "choose to become" something different, though we can set goals and work toward goals including self-change and becoming different than who we were.

Flip side: I agree that "you are not what happened to you." The subtle language shift from "I'm a depressive" to "I'm a person with depression disease" is important. I'm not homeless, I'm a person experiencing homelessness. We recognize that there's a basic humanity involved that isn't 1:1 identical with the situation, diagnosis, or condition that person is experiencing. As I said in response to an earlier discussion, I feel like every person is a continuous function of their experiences, environments, and genetic predispositions. Take any of those away and you have a different person.

Asking about what I'm holding onto that's holding me down is sort of like the baggage question from an earlier prompt. I feel like I don't have the outside perspective to know that. Partly that's why I work with a therapist; partly that's why I hope my friends are willing to be honest with me.

Analogy: I love mussels. Sometimes you get a bowl of mussels and the shells are open so you can see what you're going to get. But often, they're mostly closed and you have to work to pry them apart. Sometimes you do that and it's well-rewarded and tasty. Sometimes you do that and there's nothing inside. The things I struggle with, to me, seem like the mostly closed shells. I can hope there's something good I'll get from putting in the work, but I don't really know until I've done it.

And, as I said earlier, I believe that experiences change us. Even if I don't get what I was hoping for from a particular effort, I try to learn and grow from it. How do I differentiate "putting down" from "quitting" (in the negative sense of giving up too easily/early)?

Comments

[gale_storm]

I could go look this up, but I'll include this here as some kind of itsy-bitsy experience or whatever: I'd thought that mussels (and other sorts of shelled creatures) which had been cooked but not had a gap in the shell were the ones that shouldn't be eaten because of of of of whatever spoilage. As you can doubtless tell, I don't eat those sorts of things, from mussels to clams to oysters to lobster to crabs, but only because my body has taken to an intense dislike of creatures without scales.

So, in there could likely be found a different way of looking at the thing holding someone down.