Stop Thinking About Yourself
Welcome to a world that gives our lives meaning
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For the past ten years, all I’ve thought about is myself. It was necessary. You see, mental illness had taken over my life and I had to do the deep work it took to pull myself out of the muck.
I improved a little each day, until it started to snowball and before long my illness took a dive off a cliff and ceased to be the ruling factor of my life.
Now I have far less depression, and I am left dealing with what little anxiety and panic I have left in me. I’ve conditioned the damaging voices caused by psychosis to mute themselves, to the point where now all I hear is a buzz in the background.
Ask me how I did it and I won’t be able to tell you outright. It was the result of ten years of consistent improvement, and no one thing contributed to the downfall of my poor mental state.
I am still mentally ill. If most of you had to operate with the amount of depression, anxiety, and psychosis I deal with every day, you may just give it all up. But, it is far less than it was, and I am grateful that I can operate with focus and motivation.
But with all these changes, the thing that I noticed the most is that my focus is starting to turn outward. It’s not any one big thing, but a combination of a hundred small things that contributed to this change.
I restart my quest for a Master’s Degree again in two weeks. In the beginning, I chose Marketing because I thought it could be a path for me to see some financial success in my life.
But, I started thinking about my mental health advocacy, and how I love helping people, and changed my degree program to Psychology. Eventually, I want to be some type of counselor or coach for people with mental health issues. I want to give back to the community that gave me so much while I was recovering.
I’ve also been spending time researching cannabis and cannabinoids, because I truly think the plant’s compounds can be a beneficial medication to be used in treating depression and anxiety, without the harsh side-effects of prescription medication. I’ve suffered with the problems prescription medication causes and it is my hope, in the future, people won’t have to accept the bad with the good.
The psychiatric industry hasn’t accepted cannabis as a real medicine yet, content to shuffle their papers and let someone else do the work, but I want to be one of the people who advocate for cannabis, and other natural drugs like Psilocybin, to be used where harsh chemicals have ruled for so long.
Yes, medication helps mental illness, but we as patients have to deal with weight gain, numbness, and drugs that turn us into cold, unfeeling robots because there is no other alternative. I for one am tired not feeling emotions, because emotions connect us to other people, and in the state we are in, the last thing we should be is disconnected from other humans.
I don’t know where my journey will take me. Will I go to medical school and become a psychiatrist, will I transfer over and start to learn a more holistic approach to medicine, or will I start researching the nature and biology of the plant to see where that leads me?
I don’t know, but I have stepped on a path to help other people, and at 53 years old, feel the necessity to do something about it right now, rather than waiting for “someday” to come.
I’ve spent a life dictated by my mental state, and I no longer want that kind of life anymore. I want to walk without limits and push myself to find out just what kind of person I can be.
Politics and the Nature of Society
When I was sick, I didn’t care about the state of the world. Racism and inequality didn’t push my buttons because I had my own issues to deal with. I was surviving, so the world and how it was working passed me by.
But now, I am making up for lost time. I am learning about the bastardization of history and how the events we learned about in those dusty books in school was not the REAL history of the world.
The history I learned was the one made up by groups of white men wanting to peddle their version of how the world is and how it should be.
I have learned more about the real lives of Black, brown, and indigenous people than ever before. Every day is a learning experience, and each new person I meet is a new piece of the learning puzzle.
Like most intelligent people, I have developed a set of liberal ideas that drive the narrative in my mind, that focus the activity of my hands as I try to do my part to battle injustice.
Eventually, You Have to Look Outward
No matter what happened in your life, there comes a time when you stop thinking of yourself, and your focus turns outward. It’s inevitable that we stop driving our horses based on what is happening inside of our little lives.
The world is a bigger place than the space between our own ears, and when we start focusing on that, instead of what we are feeling or what we want in life, and start focusing on the needs of the many in society, our worldview expands and we become greater than the sum of all our parts.
We must start thinking about the needs of others, instead of living in our own heads and coddling the monkey mind. Thinking inward causes us to become selfish, and that is how billionaires are born, and right now, we need less selfish billionaires and more people willing to do whatever it takes to help others.
So if you find yourself caring more about other people than what is happening in your own life, rejoice! A lot of heartbreak and anguish can be avoided when we start to think about others instead of our own meaningless lives.
Welcome to enlightenment.
