Losing your mind

I recently have been doing reflective work with myself. Going over different times in my childhood and life over all has been tough, but also rewarding. I’m 27 years old, and I’ve had my fair share of transitions and trauma's that resulted in losing my mind. The thing with losing your mind though is that sometimes you never know until you get it back. Losing your mind can manifest in so many different ways, and the objective is to find triggers so you can identify them. For example, anxiety is a form of mind loss. You lose control of your mind to the point where you can hardly live a “normal” life. Worry and fear petrifies you to the point where your life is no longer your own. The strangest thing with anxiety is the actual confusion of what’s real and what isn’t. There isn’t a rhyme or reason because, your mind is convinced that you’re in grave danger.. which triggers fight or flight. This can be seen as a survival instinct, but it's not. Anxiety is a manifestation of something that could potentially happen, but is not there. This in my opinion is a form of LYM, even though it's just for a second. Let me be very clear though, from experience this usually comes from trauma. Something has shaken you to the point where you feel it in all aspects of your being. It causes a ripple effect of wanting to stay one step ahead, so you'll never feel that pain again. Now think about this, this form of LYM could be rectified by finding healthy spaces to deal with the trauma. By healthy spaces I mean, setting safe and secure boundaries with people. Also by going through the pain to get to the root of why it stuck with you the way it did. Two of my personal favorites are meditation and journaling. It’s a pure form of self love because, you turn inward instead of seeking someone else’s counsel. A person can only give you so much advice, and at some point you have to give yourself credit too.

Make no mistake.. as someone who has dealt with chronic anxiety, trusting yourself is not an easy process. It takes hard work and patience.. remember to always be patient with yourself. I don’t know what it is about human nature that says “be patient with others, and give yourself the short end”. One thing I'd like anyone to consider is that you cannot take care of anyone until you take care of yourself.

Moving on to the second form I want to address.. I'm not sure of a proper term for this, so I'll explain what I've experienced. A few times I’ve gotten to a place where I had absolutely no idea of what I was doing. It was like being in airplane mode, and just coasting through life. Nobody was looking for me and I wasn’t looking for them. However, I was conscious enough to know that I was not in a healthy space or on any kind of road to recovery. For whatever reason though, I couldn’t do anything about it. It was like I was outside of myself watching me go through this weird ass transition. I was yelling at myself internally, asking myself to just do something. Every day like clockwork, I showed up disoriented and departed. I was completely detached. I wasn’t sad, upset, happy, or disappointed. I had so many things going through my head at one time that I just simply COULD NOT. It could be believed that I was depressed, however, I didn’t have anything to contribute to that assumption. Depression can be perceived in many different forms, but a knowing of self makes you aware.

I was not depressed.

Slowly I started to gain my mind and self back. I was more focused on myself rather than what the world required of me. I mean how could I be bothered with that when I didn’t have shit to give to myself? I was barely present for my two daughters, and that wasn’t fair to them. I started to create space to process what was really going on inside my head. I learned that I could’ve avoided majority of that if I had focused on one thing at a time. The first thing I should’ve focused on was me. I probably wouldn’t have been there for so long had I trusted myself enough to deal with what was troubling me.

I didn’t wake up one day and was magically cured. I started doing “video journaling”, and I still can’t watch those right now because they frighten me. I started writing in a book and I still can’t read it because it frightens me. When you get intimate with yourself through those ugly times, that shit is scary.. but it’s necessary. I would stand in the mirror and force myself to look at myself and feel whatever emotion I needed to; because I had to. Nothing was going to get better until I stopped avoiding myself. Avoiding who I actually was was costing me my sanity.

Self love, SELF LOVE, SELFFFFF LOVE!! It is not debatable or negotiable. You have to be able to show up for yourself. I’d like you to consider how you show up for the person you love the most in the physical form.. then ask yourself if you show up for yourself in those same ways. Do you have boundaries for yourself the same way you have boundaries for this person?

When you don’t set boundaries and stick with them, you risk being spiritually hijacked. Becoming spiritually hijacked means leaving yourself wide open, and allowing anyone to pour whatever they want into you.. then waking up one day with imposter syndrome because, you don’t even know or RECOGNIZE who the hell you are.

I told y’all in an earlier post, I’ll never tell you or try and teach you about anything I have not been through.

Life is not always fair, so unfortunately some forms of LYM don’t have an easy fix. However, the ones mentioned all start with you and how much you care about yourself.

You are unique when you’re able to show up authentically as yourself. Do the work, and you will be greater than you ever thought possible.

I hope this helps.