#i need to hibernate. i physically cannot care about anything anymore at all

[thehappymessproject]

Wallowing 101 : let yourself feel the pain

Yesterday, I had to answer a lot of similar questions. It seems like a lot of us have a hard time letting themselves feel the pain they are feeling deeper, inside, wearing those closeted feelings on their shoulders, heavy and bitter.   

It's only natural to fight something unpleasant. Trouble comes up when avoidance and numbing become the only ways we interact with those feelings. Here are a few leads to let yourself be when you feel really low : First of all, stop doing anything you are doing just in order to avoid unpleasant feelings.   

Anything you will do solely so you don't feel bad anymore won't be that rewarding. You need to engage on things you truly value and learn to do them for the sake of them. Like with any kind of physical pain, if you focus solely on not feeling the pain, your life will become an utter nightmare. If you accept that the pain will come and go as it pleases, so in the mean time, all you can do is take the best care of yourself possible, and go on with your life because pain doesn't rule your life. It's just an occasional road companion.   

Then instead of trying to change how you feel :

1 - Be compassionate and gentle   

Again, if you break your leg, it doesn't make sense to decide you will ignore the pain, get out of the cast and go for a run. Even if you really love to run or you need to run that race. You keep your cast, make sure it doesn't get wet, wait for the bone to heal itself and take it out when the leg is ready. Not when you wish it would be. Being very sad all the time means you need to stop and rest. Protesting that you don't want to be sad, resisting it, avoiding it only make it worse and more susceptible to bite you in the ass when you least expect it.   

2 - Be mindful 

To really engage with your self care you need to be on the moment the more you can. I've written already about easy gates to mindfulness and connecting to yourself (meditation, yoga, writing). Those methods are the most efficient and straight forward. Although any tiny step goes if you are struggling.   

Try this easy 5mn grounding exercise :  Look around you. Breathe deeply. Find : 5 things you can see. 4 things you can touch. 3 things you can hear. 2 things you can smell. 1 thing you can taste. Very efficient especially if you are panicky.  

Other tiny things that help if you really engage with them :   

- Eat an apple and just do that for the few next minutes. - Open and close the curtains and watched the difference in lighting. - Listen to a song, keep coming back to it until it's over. Hum it or sing it ideally. - Watch your pet be. Your fish swimming, your cat licking herself, your dog playing. Or interact with them calmly. - When doing any of it, be all at it. Don't rush to the end, take your time. Find ways to enjoy it. Pause and reflect on what's happening in you. 

You are going to be distracted, just make a priority out of coming back to your mindful moment. Take your time : nowadays, this is the ultimate luxury. 

3 - Ask your Little one inside : "How I can take care of you right now?" 

They're the ones who know. It will probably sound childish, something along the lines of 'I want my mummy'. Not that you really want your mom. You don't need anyone in reality.   

You need the ‘idea' of a mom. You want to feel safe, nurtured, held, supported, encouraged, loved. We all do when we feel really vulnerable and helpless.   

What helps you feel that way? Or How can you engage in what you do so you can feel that way?   

4 - Let it go. Whatever it is.   

Drop the struggle. Let go of resistance. Stop fighting yourself.   

That's a key. I realised a couple of years back that every time I'm getting crazy trying to find "what I am missing", you can be sure I'll end up on "you forgot to accept everything you can't change".   

You'll know when you'll let yourself really go. When you'll trust yourself enough to be as big of a mess as you are inside. Any progress is to be celebrated, victory is adding one moment of awareness and gentle presence at the time. Yes. Even if you're gross, ridiculous, weak, stupid, ugly, any awful word you beat yourself up with to avoid feeling whatever you need to feel.   

Often, tears are involved, if so, often what I call 'belly crying'. 'Chest crying' is superficial, a bit like when we feel like complaining about everything but wouldn’t know we feel so crappy and snappy. When it happens a lot, it's a cry that means there are a lot of crying that should be happening but isn't. But belly crying feels like our guts are ripped off. Like nothing can help but letting out the suffering. We stop fighting and totally let ourselves go. That’s when the healing can begin, when we can feel all the pain.   

It's ok. It's probably scary, unknown, it is going to hurt. But only once you feel the hurt and bleed, only then you can let go of the pain and move on. Unfelt pain feels SO heavy and empty at the same time. It really isn’t worth it on the long run. 

5 - "I can't understand why I feel that way" +  "I don't know what to do"   

Don't look for a why. It'll be wrong anyway, it's always lots of reasons and a lot of randomness.  

Right now, you need to feel, not to think. Not to act. 

Emotions make us more prone to action. You will feel like you need to do something about it. That doesn't mean it's true or that even if it is that you need to listen to that impulsion. Give you room and time to decide what YOU really want to do. Not what your habits tell you to do.   

Stop reflecting. Talking about it. Complain about it. FEEL IT. Where is it in your body? Is it cold? Hot? Hard or soft? Is it still or moving? Does it have a colour? Does it have a pulse? Feelings don't have words. That's our interpretations. Feelings are sensations. Focus on that, leave room for that feeling.   

6 - "I don't feel that bad when I let myself go."   

That goes with a lot of emotional control. Usually, when a patient is feeling that way, he/she feels stuck, but me saying certain things can actually make them feel very emotional very easily.   

If you really don’t know how you feel, try reading those prompts and see what happens, which ones strike a chord when you try them out and imagine they are true (spoiler alert : none of them is more than a thought) :  - I feel so lonely.  - I feel so helpless.  - There's nothing I can do.  - I am lost.  - I am scared.  - I am ashamed.  - I am so angry.  - I am so disappointed.  - No one has my back.  - I should be different.  - I should feel differently.  - I have bad thoughts. 7 - This is your hibernation time. Honour it. Cancel everything that feels unpleasant for a while. Even if you have nothing to do and it's scary or depressing. You need space, the most space you can give yourself. You need space and time to do nothing. To reclaim back your time. It's not to hide yourself because you aren’t presentable : talk about your hibernation, be proud of your ability to know when it's time to retreat and your courage to do so. This isn't defeat. This is strategical self care. You aren't weak, you are smart. You know when you need to rest and recharge. So put your phone on plane mode. Shut down the internet. Stop the time for a while. Retreat. 8 - Treat yourself like you would treat a young, desperate and hurt child. Or someone you really love who has anything that makes you want to protect them and make sure they feel loved if you wouldn't have the patience to be kind to a child who needs you. A pet who really needs you is obviously totally ok too.  

When we lacked a lot of the love we are talking about here, being compassionate gets really really hard. That's because compassion starts with ourselves, and we weren't given that much, so we struggle to know what it feels like. It takes practice to learn how to treat ourselves. Most of us don’t know how to do more than numbing or avoiding the pain and discomfort. 9 - Keep showing up for yourself Persevere. Keep going. We have days when everything feels awful and we feel it won't ever get better. It's part of the human experience. Teach yourself that you will love yourself unconditionally even if it never gets better. Prove it to yourself by never giving up on giving yourself self love. When I am having a true hard time, my only focus is to be there for myself. I don't necessarily know when it'll be over, it doesn't always change the way I feel. It's not the point. The point is me, still there. Not only numbing myself or avoiding displeasing feelings, but there on the hard times. Not just being harsh with myself and judging me, but when I do (old habits die hard), learning to repeat to myself things like :  "It's ok that you feel that way.  I love you anyway.  It doesn't mean anything about you, or your future.  Millions of people right now feel that same pain, you are not alone.  You just need some down time and space and room.  Whatever happens, you'll find ways to make it work.  You are going to be okay." 

10 - Do your best, and celebrate the smallest step.   

Do your best doesn't mean give your best every second of the day.  It means accepting that wallowing takes a lot of energy and therefore we have less energy for other things. Other things can wait. If something cannot, make sure you do a tiny amount of it regularly. 10mn (1% of your waken time) at the time eg. 

Show yourself that doing things doesn't have to be excruciating. That you can do a bit, and then stop yourself and continue later. Make sure you feel safe when you are in your own custody. That may sound dumb phrased like that, but many people think they're not trustworthy when it comes to take care of themselves. How can we expect to take good care of ourselves if we keep thinking we can't do it?   

Go on the @todayifeltproud Tumblr and check out what baby steps means. Sometimes courage is moving mountains, sometimes it's just getting out of bed or promise yourself you'll do better the next day late at night. Celebrate anything that felt hard to do. Even if it might seem stupid or insignificant to others. Because if it was hard for you, and you did it anyway, well, you needed courage. Not a lot of people choose courageous paths. Doing hard stuff is hard. And anything can be hard depending on the state we are in. Drink a glass of water. Stand up every hour. Stretch. Walk inside, just a few steps. Outside your house if you can. Augment your radius every day. Spend 5mn at least everyday doing things you love. And things that help you being mindful. 

IT IS ABOUT THE TINY THINGS EVERYDAY.   

Give yourself more love everyday, one moment at the time and trust yourself : you are stronger than you think. So far, you always survived. Even the hardest things. You will find a way back to yourself. Credit photo Christine Donaldson - Unsplash

[noyonayana]

Exercise # 1

So who wins? those that get to live. Thus, I won, although tis a hollow victory because you didn’t win anything good, you just get to live with the memories of what happened and what your part was in all of it. what sort of life can come after that?

There is no sky, nothing to see upwards. only smoke, all air is grey-coloured now and that is what it will always be. and all around you is carnage, death, mutilation and by your feet a network of blood runs and gurgles, teeming from all the fallen to join together to form rivers and ponds where the grounds gives way.  You cannot do anything, look anywhere, step one step without getting closer to losing grip over yourself, to giving up control to something else that is sitting in your spot in your home: the trigger is not the bodies themselves, kill enough and you become desensitized to motion and the deed, to the blood, the innards, guts and the slop of humanity and its waste just lying about, strewn everywhere, disobeying its natural order and so far away from its proper place. It is your own traitorous mind, that looks at the torn and bloodied and otherwise rendered unrecognizable uniform on a mangled corpse and thinks that it might be your friend’s. Can you recognise your old squadron mate in cannon fodder, make out a familiar mark or tattoo on his body or his name and ranking somewhere on his outfit if it looks that way? that, those thoughts are enough to unhinge something crucial; then your mind runs away somewhere leaving you alone and surrounded by unfamiliar monsters, unknown house guests in your head to deal with what you’re processing; they are unfamiliar because you had never gone that far deep inside or wherever they came from but once you do, you recognise something in these new thoughts. you start to come to terms with the fact that it is your mind saying them, you revel in a new connection and different unknown untested ideas in a place that seems to be about killing everything old and known.

so do you touch it, the corpse that might be your friend’s. You kick out his burning hot legs from under him and straighten him out. Do you wrap something around your hands to protect yourself and gingerly attempt to turn over his body in respect or is it better to bloody yourself uncovered, unprotected in his departed humanity, in the physicality of his abandoned human vessel? and maybe that is more honest. Perhaps only then can you look his family in the eye and tell them the lie about his honorable and admirable death in the name of country, god, faith, whatever excuse paid for and justified this particular battleground. So you can spout the rhetoric of whichever fund pays for that medal of honour, courage, faith, resilience, whatever excuse and symbol of humanity that we get in exchange for giving up the real thing in totality? Since it is not my first such corpse, my hands move automatically, my brain functioning on half power, my emotions fully cut off, some part of me unrecognisable to myself and the other part silenced. If you could see my eyes, they’d be overbright. an inhuman light shining like a beam of life cutting through the smoke of death, shining brightly on corpse and soon-to-be corpse alike, reflecting off the field’s red veins,  illuminating in muted colours, an overworked mechanical  consciousness, that severed from its conscience still records every image and sound relentlessly in preparation for all the nights to come from now on. I knew what would happen. and yet i came. maybe war only revealed what was already broken.  

But this soldier is not done yet. I have been tasked to bring back mementos from this war, if not my friends themselves. I have made an oath to someone. I can’t remember or feel anything beyond these directives. I only know I must do it or die trying. I have been looking, time has no meaning, but I cant see my friends. I have searched many corpses and found friends but too late. Yet I hunt. For some reason, I cant ignore the directive to bring back souvenirs. If I ignore that and run away, my brain jolts at that inhuman thought, I think I will die. Whatever remains of me, whatever can live after the complete unhinging, I will not remain. 

So I try but I think all of my unit have died. and I am carrying many souvenirs on my back. I stop at yet another body that seems familiar, something itching in me to check this one out too for there I might find a friend I have forgotten. This is one of the more intact ones, most others are just a few limbs or horrible expressions but this body is male and he is very tall and seems important, with his 3 stars and thick boots that even here scream of some other value that died with its owner, a death by multiple stabbings. I fall down to my knees next to his face to look closely at his features and uniform but suddenly there is an aura of smell coming from him that even I cant stand too long and I don’t want to puke anymore so my hands search, frantically, ripping apart his uniform for any keepsake or memento that might still be on him and I pat down wherever there is clothing still only onto a half charred and already decomposing human body. He must have been dead for sometime, I wonder what is the time between the start of the war and where I am now and soon in his exposed innards, I can see the telltale white slimey things on him already that signal new life. This is a veritable feast for them, they must grow here and flourish, whole species and dynasties gorging their life cycles on single bodies and singular wars. They might even have minor evolutionary cycles during the course of each battle. They may not be similar in formation and behaviour to those that inhabit other battlefields. and maybe the space of time between another carnage is unfelt to them, what if they can hibernate after such a feast like bears do? But only perhaps and I wonder what do I know of maggots? Did I study science? 

Did he? I search for his name and find it: Eal Ma. This is as much as I can make of it, his captain’s uniform is drenched in his blood and it is crusty, sticking to my fingers as I search through him. I remember my friend from school, memories and old feelings coming back as my mind comes across new information, seeing more of the battleground on his body and it sifts through my memories and points out the connections between my old partner in crime and the body in front of me. I think this guy stole my prom date or he stole something from me but I don’t remember old anger, maybe we were just close enough for it not to matter or distanced enough for the pain to have faded without a scar. Simple connections are easier to handle.  

I don’t remember too well. My name is a word on my uniform, not a familiar notion. But I don’t care now, because under his left shoe, over his sock is a girl’s bracelet worn around the ankle. The skin around his ankle is still soft and soft skin makes me think of Tara. My mind skips ahead purposefully. I’m sure its called something similar but anklet doesn’t seem English. That can’t be right, right, Mister? you look back at your friend, but he doesn’t seem familiar... as far as you are aware you never made friends with a burnt corpse before.. now. hahaha life is good for some things. I get up off Mister, nod hastily in his direction, a parody of respect and move on. Thank you, friend. I wish I had you still now, I wish I could have helped you, I wish I wasn’t alone to face this battlefield by myself, to drag along with me this morbid collection of memories, sharing my burden lightening it but why did you have to fight on the other side? Strange. 

I don’t have answers. but I am a soldier, I don’t need to. I remember my promises. I will bring back the bag of memories and give it to the families. and that means I will have gone home again and my parents greeted me and put me back in bed after some hot food and I can close my eyes finally and drop vigil. and sleep and who knows after that. But for now, I spot my next friend and robotically, I hoist my sack more closely over my shoulder and I make my steady way to the next rung of the deep abyss.