Life Journal

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Be real

This one is going to be a bit of a doozy so let’s start with a story, shall we? A little over a week ago, on Friday I woke up with the plan to start packing my stuffs for Gombak but that plan was immediately destroyed when I couldn’t find my pants that I bought solely for the purpose of wearing it in Gombak. Following that, I spent the whole afternoon locking myself in my room before taking a two-hour nap. Let me rephrase that. I spent a good chunk of the day wallowing in self-pity because I could not find my pants.

Was I reacting correctly to the situation at hand? Okay, let’s all be real here. Saying I was overreacting is a bit of an understatement. For well over four hours that day I allowed myself to react to something so small with a reaction so drastic; it was ridiculous. And I’m sure this isn’t the first time I did this. I had given myself excuses that allow me the privilege of running away from matters at hand. I convinced my own self that because my mood for the day was ruined, I had the right to shut the world out and exclude myself. All because I could not find my pants. Had I been real with myself and understood that missing a pair of pants shouldn’t get in the way of packing all of my other stuffs, I would’ve had the job done earlier than I did. (Not that I needed the extra time but it felt ridiculous to waste that much hours because I was feeling unhappy.)

Which brings us to the topic; being real with myself.

Like I said, I gave myself too many excuses to get out of doing something. For example, I would avoid ordering food by myself because I am not good at social interactions. I would be on my phone in a place full of new people to avoid looking them in the eyes. I would spend the day doing nothing and later regret it because I wasn’t feeling like getting out of bed. These are all excuses because I amplified the fear, nervousness and anxiousness that I feel in order to avoid doing something remotely challenging.

I’m inching into a dangerous territory so I’ll try to thread my words carefully. But before I continue, let me make a few disclaimers. What I am about to say is only my opinion on how I should carry myself. It is not an advice for everyone to take, especially if the circumstances are vastly different. These opinions come from personal experiences and are most definitely based on my limited knowledge.

Alright, keeping that in mind, I want to say that there was a period of my life when I had taken the words “depression” and “anxiety” rather lightly. I equated them to some of the experiences that I had because the ‘symptoms’ were similar. And because of that mistake, I misunderstood myself and what I was truly going through and I used those words as tickets to excuse myself from doing things that might have been good for me, that would have helped me grow. Because I labelled myself with certain names without being properly checked by a professional, I mishandled myself in what could have been crucial years for my emotional growth. And I am still trying to fix that.

I think one of the things that may help you understand my point is a Just Kidding News episode with Anthony Lee. In the episode, Anthony mentioned reading something about how schools with anti-bullying campaign seem to have more bullying issues as compared to schools that don’t have said campaign. Anthony shared his thought that maybe because of the word “bully” itself is being thrown around and people’s experiences are equated to a single word, it becomes magnified. There are various degrees when it comes to bullying (and other things that are subjective e.g. human emotions) so when someone who is experiencing the bare minimum is seeing it as a big of a deal as someone who is experiencing it to the max, it may trigger the same extreme reaction.

And I’m saying this based on my personal experience. When I first learned about mental illnesses, depression and anxiety namely, I magnified and maximized the pain or sadness or fear that I was feeling and I saw them as those things just because those are the names that I kept hearing and in a weird way, it weirdly comforted me knowing that there were names to these emotions even though in reality, I misunderstood them.

I’m not trying to minimize anybody’s struggle including my own nor am I trying to dismiss them. But I can’t minimize something that is already small by itself. I’m just facing the fact that there are spectrums when it comes to things like this. Borrowing Peter Sudarso’s words, “feeling depressed does not necessarily mean you suffer from depression. Feeling anxious does not necessarily mean you suffer from anxiety.” What I’m saying is there’s power in words, in names and in language. Ignorant blanket statements are dangerous.

A good reference to the power of words is the GeniusBrain podcast with David So and Peter Sudarso. In the podcast Peter told the story of when he was struggling with depression. There was a point when he kept calling himself stupid and not wanting to succumb to that, he said to himself, “You know what? Maybe I am stupid. You know what I’m gonna do about that? I’m gonna get myself a damn degree. I’m gonna graduate from college.” He chose to knock depression right upside the head and say ‘fuck you’.

Another video that gave me the idea to write this entry is the interview with Doctor Mike and Jonathan Haidt. In the video, they talked about how it is unrealistic for parents to not allow their kids experience stress. This includes being teased by their friends, maybe getting scolded by a teacher or even something as simple as scraping their knee from playing in the playground because these experiences should help the kids learn and grow. Sheltering them to such extreme extent is basically putting them on a crutch without them having broken their leg in the first place. Obviously parents love their children and want to keep them sheltered from any sort of pain for as long as they can but that is unrealistic. The real world does not operate to cater to everybody’s need and as sad as that sounds, it is the reality.

Acute stress is okay, chronic stress is not. And we should all learn to know the difference.

P/S: Since this one is a bit of a slippery slope, I would actually appreciate it a lot if you share some of your own thoughts, as different as they may be, either in the comments, dms etc. I'll reply ASAP.

-Nik.