Portmantle

15 August 2024. Day 4/75

It’s a new record y’alllllll!!!!! Day 4 is looking beautiful and I feel like I’m still going strong! Very proud 🙂 I’m posting this a bit late because I kept obsessing over what I wrote for the lil journal prompt part and freaking out that I wasn’t expressing my thoughts properly. But this blog is for me to get used to hitting “publish” it’s fine if it isn’t perfect. I think it’s better that I just get used to getting things done 🙂

Here are the updates:

1. Get out of bed within 10 minutes of waking up OR don’t go on my phone within 10 minutes of waking up (except for stopping alarm clocks and checking the time) OR get up before 7:30am (can stay in bed longer if you wake up earlier) **BONUS POINTS: turn on vitamin d sun lamp for those 10 minutes
2. Eat at least 5 fruits/vegetables/plants
3. Walk at least 1 mile
   • 1.7 miles. went for a walk outside while my car was getting a new tire
4. Read 5 pages of any book. 5 minutes of an audiobook counts.
   • listened to a bit of 101 Essays
5. Spend at least 10 minutes on a creative hobby
   • writing
6. Clean one space
   • floor near my bed
7. List of 10 gratitudes, manifestations, or goals
   • 1. I’m grateful for glycolic acid
   • 2. I’m grateful for sweet summer fruit
   • 3. I’m grateful for the ability to write my thoughts and now share them
   • 4. I’m grateful for Taylor Swift
   • 5. I’m grateful for the way I look with bangs
   • 6. I’m grateful for Thai food
   • 7. I’m grateful for chapstick/lipbalm
   • 8. I’m grateful for my mom’s recipe for fried chicken. I’m being so for real right now, if she opened a fried chicken restaurant, it would easily put every single other chicken place out of business. It’s THAT good. And I’m not even saying this with a bias because she’s my mom. If you put that chicken in a room with a million other chickens and blindfolded me for the taste test and I didn’t even know that she cooked one of the chickens, I would still think it’s the best one. I literally remember the first time I ate it. It changed my life. I talked about it for a week. It’s the recipe that she now makes for every birthday. I could write a love song about this chicken. I think people who work for Food Network would be in love with this chicken. Vegans would break their morals for this chicken. I’m being so for real right now. It is THE best chicken in all of existence, there is no competition. I don’t know what else I can say to convey it. It’s just really. really. really. good.
   • 9. I’m grateful for washing machines
   • 10. I’m grateful for the opportunity to have been to so many concerts this summer
8. Do one thing the moment you think about it without procrastinating
9. Apply to 3 jobs OR send out 3 emails for any purpose

Sidequest Updates:

1. Go to one new place I’ve never been to before OR do one new thing I’ve never tried before
2. Write a to-do list for the week every Sunday
3. Get Google Ads Display Certification
4. Get Google Ads Search Certification
5. Start studying for GMAT
6. Go to one Toastmasters meeting

Journal prompt: (Continued) So I saw this TikTok that basically said that everything about your current life is tied to your identity and the way you perceive yourself and the way it manifests into reality. So today, I’m just going to be thinking about the ways I think about myself and the ways its been helping and harming me in my life.

Buckle up, y’all. This is a long post.

So I’ve been thinking that identity is the little things that we choose to focus on until they become big things. I’d been thinking about ways that I’d subconsciously formed identities or manifested things because of my identity and this makes so much sense to me.

I remember seeing something scrawled on a bathroom wall in my high school years ago, and it was something along the lines of “if no one ever told you what love was, would you still crave it?” or something like that. It’s a silly place to have seen that idea for the first time, but I think about it all the time now. If no one ever told me how to feel, would I still feel that way?

I think there’s a lot to be said about the power of language. I remember seeing this study a few years ago about the way language affects the way in which we perceive color. I might be butchering this a bit, but the general conclusion was that if a language had more words for shades of blue, then they could differentiate shades of blue more differently. If they had one word to talk about both blue and green, then they had a harder time differentiating between the shades. There’s a similar concept in how Chinese language includes different tones, so people who speak Chinese can differentiate between those tones better than people who speak any other language. The words that we have access to and see more often literally shape the way we see the world. Perception literally becomes reality.

In regards to mental health, I am glad that there is this push for resources and help, but I wonder if we’re all just overthinking it a bit too much sometimes. I wonder if depression would be less severe if we never put a name to it, or if it wasn’t talked about so much. I wonder if people who existed before mental health language existed felt mental illness in the same way. Scientifically, I understand that there are actual chemical reactions in the brain and that these aren’t made up conditions. But I’m just speculating about how we can reframe the way we think about mental health based on language. I’m saying this as someone who’s been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, PTSD, ADHD, and Dissociative disorder at different points in my life. I’ve had a lot of awful things happen to me. I’m not looking at this through the lens of someone who’s privileged, but someone who is out the other side for a lot of these things. But maybe, just maybe, what if we are leaning too strongly on the concept of mental illness and using it as an excuse?

I think there’s a fine line. When awful things happen to us, we need to process them and feel the emotions and talk about them. But then, there comes a time when you talk about it and you get this negativity back. People start to tell you how to feel before you can figure it out yourself. When I dislocated my knee, I was absolutely in a dark place. I felt people pitying me, brushing me off, cringing when they thought of the pain. It made me pity myself and think of myself as helpless. But that night I dislocated it, before I overthought it, before I talked to people about it, I remember laughing in the Emergency Room. Maybe I was high on the adrenaline, but I remember being in pain and still thinking “this would be such a funny story to tell later.” I didn’t pity myself that night. I didn’t feel helpless that night. I didn’t feel panicked that night. I remember my friend wanted to call 911, but even through the pain, I remember brushing it off and laughing at the situation and trying to be fine and I think it made it so I kinda was actually fine. I called my sister instead, we went home and I changed my clothes because for some reason, the first thing on my mind was that I was in an outfit that I didn’t want the hospital to see me in. I couldn’t walk that night, but “not being able to walk” wasn’t part of my identity yet. So I was hopping around on one leg laughing.

But then the next day came, the day after that, and the day after that. I saw the way people’s faces fell when I told them what had happened. The way my mom told me to stay in bed and rest. And eventually, it consumed me. I saw myself as someone who just needed to rest. I saw myself as a victim, as someone who things only happen to, but can’t make things happen herself. I felt so unbelievably, abysmally helpless. I failed so many classes. I never went outside. I ate like crap. I stayed in bed. I said “no” to things. I stopped pushing myself. And I know it was only a temporary disability, but I think that’s the way that the world sees disabled people and makes them feel. And in the moment, it makes sense to feel awful when you’re injured.

But here’s the key: not everyone who’s injured feels awful. Not everyone who’s disabled feels awful. There are people who face the exact same circumstances and they see it through different eyes, and who find ways to be happy with it. I’ve seen some people say that they attribute this to accepting the situation. Personally, I attribute it to finding something to be positive about in any situation. I don’t think it would’ve helped me to accept that I couldn’t walk, but at a time where people were constantly telling me the things I couldn’t do, I should have been thinking of the things I could still do.

I couldn’t walk, and I amplified that characteristic so deeply into my mind at the time. In hindsight, I wonder if instead, I thought about all the art that I could make from my room. All the writing I could’ve gotten done. All the ways I could’ve helped myself. If I had just amplified the positives of the situation and the things I could do to help myself, I think I could’ve really changed my entire life back then. I probably could’ve healed faster, too.

I saw a different post on TikTok the other day. And it said “if life is an endless cycle of dirty dishes and laundry, then it means that life is an endless cycle of homecooked meals and clean, comfy clothes.” And that post changed me. In the moment, I felt it. All the things that I see so negatively have those positive aspects as well. And we can choose what our minds amplify.

And I have about a million examples of this.

I remember in high school, I loved giving presentations. I had so much anxiety about the public speaking and the grades and everything that people usually hate about presentations, but then after the presentation, I would get the most amazing adrenaline rush. I felt so good after it, every single time. And in my mind, that’s the part that I remembered. Feeling good about myself.

A part of me thinks that kids start out like that. I know there’s a whole nature vs. nurture debate over these things. I’m not an expert, but I can speak from experience. When I was a kid, I didn’t know what depression was. I didn’t know what anxiety was. I would feel what I felt in the moment and then move on. If I was sad, it was a situational sad because something made me sad. I didn’t get sad and label it as depression, or make jokes about depression, or say that I’m sad because I was depressed. And I think as we grow up and we’re exposed to so many genuinely awful situations and people and struggles, we find the language to talk about these awful things. We seek the validation for our feelings. We compete with other people who are struggling to see who is struggling worse. You say “I’m so tired, I got 6 hours of sleep last night.” Someone replies, “well, I got 4 hours of sleep.” Someone else replies “I got no sleep, the baby was up crying, I had so much work to do…” Someone always has it worse.And out of a need for validating that our situation is also bad, we think about the ways that our situations are worse. We think in terms of relativity instead of just thinking. And if it’s harnessed in the wrong way, then it makes us so much more negative. We start finding things to go wrong so we can justify why we feel a certain way. I’ve used mental illness and mental health as an excuse for everything and anything because I had the language to do so.

I’m absolutely guilty of it. And I don’t think it’s bad. I think too much of it is bad. We should be talking to people about our struggles in a way that gives us perspective, that helps us get over it, not a way that makes us identify with it so much deeper.

I remember as a kid, I would hear it so often: “kids bounce back faster.” Every adult was envious of my youth because of this perception that I would heal from hurt faster. As a child, it irritated me to hear these adults make me feel like my hurt wasn’t as significant as theirs. I felt that they were wrong, but everyone would always say “you’ll understand when you’re older.” And as I grow older, I start to understand what they mean. But in another sense, I also understand the ways in which they were wrong.

I think so much of society and culture revolve around age. I see my mom paint her nails in neon colors because she likes it, then she takes it off “because it looked too young for [her] personality.” I see how my mom will spend time with me and she starts singing spontaneously, she jokingly teases me more often, she feels braver and more adventurous, she hikes the waterfalls and wears the bright colors. I see how she is when her aunts and uncles visit. She starts saying no to things, looking at youth as something to envy, rather than as something to choose and feel and embody.

We say “kids bounce back faster.” But we need to ask ourselves WHY. How could something that came so easy to us as children become so difficult as we get older? How can we use that knowledge to help ourselves now?

There are examples all around us of people who face the same challenges or circumstances and look at them differently. There are retirees who skydive, teenagers who join world-changing research projects, injured people who join the paralympics. But we put ourselves into boxes of identities, and we grow so comfortable in these established meanings that we forget to question them. We forget about the other people who have questioned them and redefined themselves.

We envy the simplicity of youth, but forget what that simplicity entailed. Things get more complicated as we grow older, but what if we’re the ones complicating it for ourselves? We face challenges throughout our entire lives, and while the challenges of an adult may seem more complicated, there is also a certain aspect of complication to the troubles of a child. A scraped knee may not seem like a big deal to me now, but it’s because I faced it before. As a child, that first scraped knee is the most painful thing on the planet. You watch the blood ooze down your otherwise unblemished knee and you think about how wrong it is to see your skin broken. You feel the pain. But you don’t think about it in that way. You don’t put words to it in a way that establishes that pain as permanent or significant. You don’t classify it to a list or a pattern of every time you’ve been hurt, then use it to form an identity of someone who always gets hurt. You don’t overthink it. The adults kiss it better or dismiss the pain or teach you how to put bandaids on it, or they do whatever adults do in that situation. They know that in the grand scheme of things, this scraped knee is temporary, it’s a part of growing up. And by the next day, you’re playing in the park again. And now you know that playing comes with the risk of a scraped knee, but you love playing in the park and now you know what to do next time you scrape your knee. And overtime, it hurts less.

They say that ignorance is bliss. Maybe the way to think about it is that unnecessary overthinking is pain. We can’t keep associating depth and intelligence with overthinking and overclassifying. It’s not about intelligence vs. stupidity, or glorifying knowing less. It’s about not using so-called intelligence to torture ourselves. I am guilty of thinking that dwelling on the past is a necessary defense mechanism to prevent that thing from ever happening again in the future. I obsess over my failures and justify them as learning experiences because I want to succeed so badly. But what if instead, I went into something without thinking about past patterns and each loss and gain was its own independent situation. What if I stopped hiding my overthinking and negative categorization/identity with a mask of intellectualism?

As kids, we might not have had the brain space or language to intellectualize every emotion and think about the greater significance of it all. And it’s not because kids are stupid or emotionally unintelligent. I would argue that it’s because they’re intelligent in different ways. They are constantly surrounded by different information and processing it. They are learning from situations that adults would usually skim over. They are experiencing so many things for the first time that each experience adds a new perspective and new knowledge. They are intelligent enough to take it all in at once and process it without anything prior to compare it to. They haven’t fully figured out their identities yet, so they don’t cling to them as tightly. They are more adaptable, and thus more resilient. They are more adaptable because they haven’t formed negative identities. As adults, we get used to things so easily and so much fades into autopilot mode and muscle memory. We get jobs and follow routines and nothing feels new anymore, so we dwell on old memories and identities to feel things or to justify actions or to establish patterns and mindsets.

What if it all really is that simple?

You don’t get into your dream school. You feel the pain. You do the things that will make you feel better. You move on. You don’t spend your time thinking about every other time you’ve failed, convincing yourself that this is a pattern. You give yourself something new and novel to think about, and you gain a new perspective.

Your boyfriend breaks up with you. You feel the pain. You do the things that will make you feel better. You move on. You don’t spend your time romanticizing your agony and listening to break up songs about wanting them back. You give yourself something new and novel to think about, and you gain a new perspective.

Perhaps the resilience of childhood lies in the excitement and novelty of everything. There were set milestones for us, we had things to look forward to. Everything is a first-time experience. After growing up with all of those “firsts,” we start to get used to things, and we like to think that we’re smart and well-adjusted and well-acquainted with the world around us. We fall into habits and routines and patterns. We find favorite restaurants, favorite movies, favorite people. It makes life easy, but it closes us off to finding new favorites. We fall into easy identities. We get jobs and have families and forget that there is still novelty to explore and things to look forward to. We dwell on past experiences to make up for the lack of new ones. We simultaneously romanticize the past for having better days and curse it for bringing us to a worse present day. But if our favorite thing about the past is that it was familiar, then we are going to miss out on the thrill of the present-day unfamiliar. In hindsight, the past is only better because we know now how it turned out.

I think it is that simple. If we keep adding experiences and memories to our lives, the sheer number of good things will eventually outweigh the bad.

I don’t believe in sharing my more personal traumas on such a public space, but I have gone through things much, much, much worse than dislocating my knee and I handled them better. It’s all in the mindset. And it can’t keep being this thing you aspire to, it has to be this thing that you normalize. It has to become a part of your identity. You have to let yourself move on and rebuild in the way that a child would.

I remember when I was probably in my early teens, one of my main life philosophies was “you become what you romanticize.” I remember talking to my sister about it because I had a friend who romanticized being angry and hurt and taken advantaged of. And she built her identity off of this idea that she had to be strong and mean and tough to prevent others from taking advantage of her. Now, every time someone does anything remotely wrong, regardless of their intentions, she feels like they were out to get her. Every time something went wrong for her, she added it to her personality of someone who things go wrong for. She made jokes about her depression. She made art about her hurt and called it self expression. And this isn’t to judge her or to judge artists or say in shallow words that these forms of expression aren’t valid or right. I’m not blaming artists for what they need to do to make their art (that’s entirely another topic that I could say a lot about, but not right now). But there’s a fine line. You can express yourself and then move on and make things better next time. Or you can get lost in the expression and dwell in the hurt and never pull yourself out.

Personally, I’m a big fan of music. When things go wrong for me, I listen to songs that validate my feelings and I call it appreciating good songwriting. And it is appreciating good songwriting. It is helpful to feel the emotions. It is helpful to find art to empathize with our feelings. But eventually, I lose sight of what made me listen to sad music in the first place, and I get stuck in the pattern and muscle memory of listening to it, even when I’m no longer feeling sad. I drive to work listening to music about someone who feels stuck because I feel stuck, but then I don’t pull myself out of it. I get lost in the music. I find catharsis in feeling the pain. I use the music to justify my emotions. I amplify feelings of hurt until they are no longer simply feelings, but a part of my identity.

I’m a writer. I love poetry. I love art. I love watercolor. I love self expression. But sometimes, to create my poetry, I force myself to revisit painful emotions to inspire me to create something deep and hard-hitting. But we have to be mindful about the things we romanticize and draw inspiration from, and the extent to which we let them fuel us. We have to decide the boundary between feeling emotions and dwelling on them. We have to choose whether we let these things fuel us or consume us. We have to be mindful of the things that we add to our identity. And we have to remind ourselves that there can be art born of happiness. The sad songs feel good to listen to, but the happy songs feel even better.

There’s this quote I love from The Alchemist: “When we strive to get better, everything around us becomes better, too.” When we start to focus on the positives, we start to realize that the positives are everywhere. This realization forms a reality, an identity. When we see the good in everything, we internalize it and believe that the world is truly good. When we believe the world is truly good, we act in a way that coincides with that belief. We take more calculated risks, go on more adventures, travel more, talk to more people, build more relationships. When we believe we’re smart, we take the harder classes. The harder classes teach us the skills to succeed. The success leads us to pursue more difficult things. We learn and grow from those. And those things feed into each other and lead to even more abundance and positivity.

This has been such a long post today, but I have so many thoughts and examples of the way in which this works. I think I’ll be writing about it for days to come. Stay tuned.