Mental maze

Sometimes, getting started is the hard part.  Sometimes, the hard part is keeping at it.  And sometimes, it's both.  I started this post hours ago, and here I am, still at the beginning.  My mind (and my body) keep wandering off to other things.  It's time for me to focus.

Yesterday in group, we came up with a list of things to do every day.  My list includes very basic things like brushing my teeth and taking a shower, the kind of things I need to do every day.  I had no idea when I wrote the list that it would come in handy the very next day.  Without that list, I would still be sitting in my pajamas! 

Another task in group was to describe our healthy selves.  A list of adjectives was provided, and we had the opportunity to come up with other words.  This was hard for me because I cannot remember my healthy self very well.  Right now, I'm not sure I've ever been healthy.  I've been better, of course, but I can't really remember what that was like.  I did manage to come up with two adjectives - curious and introverted.  That's as far as I got.

Even if I could recall my healthier self, I really don't trust my ability to look at myself objectively.  I'll add an explanation or justification most descriptive terms, something to qualify them.  I try to describe the underlying why or the resulting what of a quality.  For example, I am intelligent.  I would qualify that by adding that it just means that I do well on intelligence tests.  In other words, I might not be intelligent in real life.

I do have the ability to come up with a plausible-sounding answer.  When someone asks me a question, and I don't know the answer, I try to figure it out.  (I'm working on saying, "I don't know.")  I realize that people are satisfied when I give them my best guess.  Sometimes, I have just made up an answer to see if other people would buy it, and they would.  (I did tell them later that I really didn't know.)  I bring all this up because I think I do it with myself as well.  I come up with plausible-sounding answers to why things in my life are not as I would like.  These answers, or explanations, make me feel better because I then think I have the answer for making things better.  They feed the delusion that things will be different in the future.  I think it was coming to the realization that I've been delusional about my own life was the trigger that brought on this downward slide. 

It could have been the trigger to live more authentically, but that did not happen for me.  Instead, I began to feel defective, like I had a piece missing from my psyche.  It was the piece that let me connect with other people.  I felt very lonely, and at the same time, I was running away and hiding out from anyone who tried to reach out to me.  I was hiding behind a mask of, "I'm okay.  Whatever problems I have, I've got them figured out.  I can deal with them." 

It's hard to distinguish between working a realistic plan of navigating life and living in a fantasy world of what and how I'll accomplish things.  But I think there exists a small, very quiet voice within myself that alerts me.  Time will tell for sure.