Waking up divergent – Part 1
(The dawn)
I feel a dawning clarity beginning to emerge within a shitstorm of emotional overwhelm and confusion.
By which I mean, I am simultaneously confused and overwhelmed and certain.
Confused as to whether my personality was ever a real personality—or a reaction formed to hide my true self? Hidden, not only from the world, but from the me that I thought I was…
Overwhelmed because I am shocked at the depth of my own self-deception. And afraid of what comes next. Does this ‘get worse’ or ‘get better’? What is worse? What is better?
Certain that whatever is happening to me, I am leaving behind a way of operating and existing in the world, and that now I have started down this road I can’t go back to the way I was before.
Ok, slow down, I’m getting ahead of myself in typical (neurodivergent) fashion…
Since the beginning of the year I’ve retreated from the world in a self-imposed self-development bootcamp: ghost mode activated.
With a whole house to myself, zero time constraints, and very few responsibilities or obligations, I’ve had infinite space to focus on nothing but my mental and physical health, my creative interests and my business. If you were to ask me what true luxury is, this is exactly how I would describe it. Just me left to my own devices, blissfully undisturbed for weeks on end.
Our productivity-enslaved culture might prompt you to ask what I have to show for this time? How is my physical and mental health? How is my business? Well…I have achieved some of what I planned. But while working towards the various goals I had set, something unplanned began to happen.
One of my goals this year is to continue to explore and support my mental health. The not-so-hidden-agenda being that I know that the more space and harmony I can create internally, the more space and harmony I will create externally. The one is a reflection of the other. I know that to achieve all the things I want to achieve in this next chapter of my life, I need to go where I haven’t dared to go before (at least not consistently with outside help): into the depths of my inner world.
To do this I committed to regular IFS-based (Internal Family Systems) therapy sessions, at least every two weeks, which I have stuck to since I began in October last year.
They’ve been going well, very well in fact. The sessions themselves could be challenging and uncomfortable to work through, but satisfying regardless. I noticed positive changes in my mindset and overall feeling about life and the future immediately. Things that felt difficult or blocked before, feel easier. Internal resistance on multiple fronts has lessened or dissipated. I feel more and more like I’m working with my ‘self’, rather than against it.
However…
I’ve also noticed other changes. I hesitate to define them with a word like ‘negative’, but they have been confusing to me. Or to be more accurate, using IFS parlance, parts of me are confused by them.
Certain coping mechanisms are starting to fray. Or are no longer eliciting the same response. Or are cycling through in quick succession, like a broken trouble-shooting protocol. Other ‘tendencies’ have become more intrusive. So intrusive that I’m not sure I can keep calling them ‘tendencies’.
The biggest issue is my focus.
Over the last few weeks it has shifted from being able to be summoned at will to being completely temperamental. Now, I wake up each day unsure if I’m going to be able to get anything done, or what I’ll be able to get done, since my focus has developed a mind of its own.
The best way to describe it is that before it was a cheeky child with an active imagination (i.e. a tendency to get distracted) that would nonetheless do what it was told when I got stern enough or could at least be appeased when needed. But now it’s gone pretty much AWOL, serving not ‘me’, but its own agenda.
My struggle to concentrate is contextual though; I can focus on certain things that are genuinely interesting to me. It’s the things that aren’t, or the things that feel forced (which is a hell of a lot of things it turns out), that are the problem.
The effect of this is an absentmindedness about various, often mundane things, which feels like forgetfulness. This is highly disconcerting as I rarely forget anything. I imagine I sometimes give the impression that I do, and I often use forgetfulness as an excuse because it’s easier than explaining the reality which is:
I have too many things in the queue in my brain and I can’t ‘get to’ that thing yet, which doesn’t mean I’m forgetting—I’m aware of it—it’s just that it’s in a specific place in the queue and is unable to be addressed yet.
The rational part of me is determined that this is all just the temporary result of uncovering layers of conditioning, of rewiring certain things, and illuminating others, that had been undisturbed in the dark for a long while. That everything will ‘settle down’.
Then I can hear the internalised voices of other people pathologising and explaining it away with labels like stress, anxiety, or even depression.
Sure building a business, finding new clients, and adapting to the need to support myself in a new way is a kind of stress—but it’s a stress I’m adjusting to.
I feel anxious at times, about money and security and viability, but am overall optimistic about the future, and excited by what I am working on and towards. Yes, freelance/self-employed life is an emotional rollercoaster but it’s one I was prepared for and am committed to seeing through to more stable times.
I’ve also been in the ideal environment to be coping with this kind of stress: no pressures of rent or bills beyond the bare minimum needed to grow and run my business, buy groceries, and go to the gym (with the odd bottle of wine and meal out thrown in—I’m not a monk after all). A beautiful space to live in, in a beautiful part of the world. Plenty of supportive friends and family checking in on me, just a phone call or message away.
Could you imagine a more ideal scenario in which to be doing this work?!
Stress, anxiety—I have felt these acutely before, quite recently. I am definitely not depressed. This feels different.
It feels like my brain, my way of thinking and doing and being, is changing and I’m experiencing it in real time.