afiaandherordinarylife

[afiaandherordinarylife]

Day 9th

Although the stigma with regards to mental health has been rapidly easing out in the country, I still haven’t gotten the courage to actually talk to a stranger and entrust to them the most sensitive aspects of myself. The first three quarters of this year has been traumatizing. That’s why I decided to at least try to do my own therapy with the help of some people closest to me. It has been two months now since I started it. I am using guided meditations and motivational videos of the three people I look up to the most. I do not know them personally, they have been tremendously helpful in my journey. And it wasn’t an easy task. Although I have seen some major changes in my life for the better, I still fall into relapse plenty of times. But these events did not discourage me to try and try. The people who truly know me are very much aware of the fact that I am a very very impatient person. But this experience has been teaching me a lot, including patience with myself, because it has shown me the value of this virtue. Life is hard, but it is worth all the endless repression and taming of unnecessary reactions. It is difficult at first but with the right reasons, right perspective and mindset, we can all achieve the kind of life that our souls truly and deeply desire.

[afiaandherordinarylife]

First Attempt

In my twenty-four years, 2020 hasn’t ended yet but I consider it to be the most eventful year that I’ve ever experienced. It is like after all those years of auto-pilot and just constantly fast-paced culture, an unseen somebody stepped into the break and all the dust settled, exposing all the important things we were missing despite our hardest attempts to experience and feel life. I wasn’t an exemption.

2020 has been a mixture of extremely good, extremely bad and everything in-between. To be honest, even though I am already in post-grad school, I still didn’t know what I was doing with my life. I was just on auto-pilot mode all my life. I was merely existing, instead of living. Dr. Henry Cloud, in his foreword to John Ortberg, talked about a specific moment in his life that forever changed his view of his life and life in general. He owns and runs a Christian psychiatric hospital. And every wednesday, he and all other staff of the hospital would convene to talk about how their patients are doing, their treatment plan, successes and their harder times. One of them talked about how well her patient was doing and was already preparing to be discharged. Another one talked about how his patient’s uncle who played a huge role in stabilizing the patient himself. But the problem was, that particular uncle was already moving out of the house and the patient is worried that he might go into relapse and end up doing drugs and other self-destructive habits. That’s why this particular staff member is doing all he can to help his patient transition to this new chapter of his life. However, at the moment that the name of the next patient was mentioned, everybody in the room let out a big sigh, more of a sound of deep exasperation. Everybody was too familiar with this patient. Her name was Maggie. Dr. Cloud asked her psychologist how Maggie was doing. He replied, ”Well...it seems that Maddie still has no interest in having an interior life.” 

Dr. Cloud will never forget it. He wrote: Maddie has no interest in looking at her internal world. Her attitudes, her hurts, her strengths, her patterns of thinking and behaving, or not trusting and not risking, her spiritual life, and maybe most of all, her avoidance of embracing her real suffering and the courage to resolve it.

One can feel in the tone of his voice that they all shared hopelessness when it comes to Maggie. For their other patients, even the ones who are still having a hard time moving from where they’re currently stuck at but are working hard to improve the quality of their lives, there was something to hold on to and find hope. Whereas for Maggie, Dr. Cloud said, “Our task was to get her to see that she has one [life]. There really is a ‘life’ inside of her that gives rise to the external life she complains about every day. That was our task...to get Maddie to see, embrace, and develop her internal life--her real life.”

Up until a couple of months ago, I was Maddie outside of a facility. I won’t go into all the details for now, but I was rather unhealthy in all terms. Although I first had significant awareness of my health status, I was already symptomatic even way before I could remember. But to give you an overview of how I was before this day, I was the kind of person who had a tremendously hard time seeing, recognizing, understanding and accepting herself. We are imperfect beings living in an imperfect and broken world. So it is normal to find ourselves having bouts of insecurities within ourselves from time to time. But mine was rather pathologic. In the few years of our friendship, I and my best friend never had a single major nor minor conflicts. Everything was smooth-sailing. Until the first quarter of the year when my condition became more apparent and I had lost control of the wheel. It was adversely affecting our friendship. I would find myself to be in remission from time to time. But the episodes became more frequent and harder to manage that I finally decided to face it and deal with for the better.

The world teaches us so much to feed our bodies with so-called ‘Instagram-worthy’ food and experiences but highly neglects the soul. To be frank, 2020 has been both my darkest and most redeeming year. I saw first-hand how badly-shaped my soul was. In medicine, we categorize it as already an emergency case. I was unconsciously destroying everything on my path and every little thing within me. I knew I needed to tend to it right away.

As Ahn Lin once said, “True acceptance of the soul is unglamorous. It doesn’t always look like pampering yourself with the best skincare products or gloating about your accomplishments. Not at all. Although it is nice to treat yourself from time to time, it’s your soul that needs tending to when you feel empty, broken or hopeless. It’s the nature of your soul to need. It needs love, validation, purpose, joy, peace and a deep sense of fulfillment--things that only a connection with God can sustain.”

As much as the events of this year prior to my therapy was already unpleasant, the process of healing itself was far more traumatizing but therapeutic when done at the right time and in the proper way.

Right now, I am sitting on my couch writing some of the most important things I learned from this period of my life:

1. Seek for the Truth. We are human beings naturally made to crave and seek for knowledge. My own experience taught me the hard way that the first step to wisdom is to know who you really are, how you got here in this world and to know why you are here in the first place. And I am not talking about just grabbing your computer to aimlessly look on the internet for answers. I am talking about deep, purposeful, proper and lifelong learning.

2. Be patient with yourself. No one is born perfect and with a spotless life. Grab all the right opportunities to learn and grow. We are all works in progress no matter how seemingly good our lives are already. And if life treats you hard, pause, take a step back and take your time to thoroughly assess your situation in light of the Truth.

3. Be careful of what you subscribe to. Some of us are living in pretense that we already know everything that we need to know and has decided to stick by it for the rest of our lives. The world is deeply entangled with so many false ideals. 

4. Always be honest and true to yourself. And I can never emphasize this enough.

I firmly believe that we the right ingredients, right mindset, right perspective, and right approach, it is very possible to live a peaceful and meaningful life. Life is not an easy road. But it is definitely worth all the legwork and pain.