Here’s the issue with feeling great and believing that everything is going to work out – at some point, fear kicks in (or perhaps it’s hormones, or not getting enough sleep, or the extra helpings of potato chips I ate yesterday). Actually, I know the answer to this one – it’s a life-long, deeply-ingrained belief that I should always be waiting for the other shoe to drop.
When it doesn’t drop right away, I get nervous that the eventual drop will be so much worse than I can imagine, so I begin creating drama in my world. Because drama is what I grew up in. Drama is the environment that I was steeped in. For a long time, drama was all I knew.
I’ve learned better over the last few years and developed a lot of new coping skills that serve me really well a lot of the time. But sometimes…well…things just seem TOO good. And then I get sucked back into the old behaviors.
For the last couple of months, things have been going so well that I began to really believe that I am on the precipice of achieving all of those things I truly desire. I believed it deep into my gut and my bones. It’s why I started to keep a miracle journal: because I saw things unfolding in ways that I’d never experienced before – easy and drama-free.
For some reason, two days ago my mind dipped into the old fears. “Things are going too well; pride goeth before the fall; don’t get too big for your britches!” I suddenly saw the “reality” behind all that excitement and surety – a conspiracy on the part of my brain to lift me up so that I could be even more disappointed than ever before, because nothing that good could possibly happen for me. And the absolute brilliance of it is that I took a couple little things that mean absolutely nothing and blew them up into absolute evidence that this is true. An innocent conversation with a new friend and a missed phone call were all it took to send me down into the depths of a misery of my own creation.
This is my particular brand of crazy. It used to be that I could go for weeks…or months…or longer…before I found a way back from the crazy. The specifics varied, but the basics were always the same – something helped me to get my thoughts back on track. Instead of believing that I was a hopeless screw up, something or someone helped me to remember that I am a decent, loving person whose presence is a force for good in this world.
I recognize it a whole lot sooner these days than I used to, and I have been blessed to learn skills and tools to pull myself out. I can look to others for support, but I no longer need to wait for someone else to rescue me. Acknowledging it and writing about it are two tools that often serve me well, so I’m hoping that writing this out will be enough to help me maintain my equilibrium this time around.
There was a time when I wallowed in this pit for over a year. This time it’s just barely 48 hours. That has GOT to be a miracle.
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The Miracle Journal » Blog Archive » The miracle of opening doors in my mind
March 26, 2011 at 12:05 PM (UTC -5) Link to this comment
[…] my deep blue funk of the past couple of weeks, I got really down about moving forward with this program. After two […]
The Miracle Journal » Blog Archive » The miracle of cycles
March 26, 2011 at 12:24 PM (UTC -5) Link to this comment
[…] the deal. For the last four days or so, I’ve been down in the dumps. I’ve written about it a couple of times, hoping that might alleviate some of the misery. Each day I’ve woken up feeling a bit better, […]