The experience of being a human being is a rather interesting one. Of course this is a subjective observation, as I do not have the experience of existing as any other entity- At least not that I remember. *Wink wink to the Reincarnation Theory subscribers*
In our short lifespan we are burdened with various complex emotions that we have to contend and wrestle with inside our minds. As exhausting as it is to struggle with these emotional issues we barely even understand, it is important that we all get to a point where we feel like we can negotiate with ourselves in good faith. For you to be able to make a deal with your mind that if you can make some effort on your part to understand your emotional shortcomings better and invest reasonable efforts in combating said shortcomings, it will stop trying so hard to destroy you every chance it gets by picking up these heavy and complex emotional issues as you navigate life. One such complex emotional issue is the paralyzing fear of not being enough.

The fear of not being enough is a feeling that tells you that despite all that you are, despite all the lives you know you have touched, despite all the people who verbally say that they love you, despite all your high moments where, as the adrenaline ran through your spine, you felt like you were the best that the Universe had to offer, despite all this, you are just not enough. The “enough” in this context is usually not directed to any specific aspect of existence. It is distributed equally to all significant areas of your life. I know all about this fear on a personal level; it has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and was strengthened in my adult life by academic failures and the unfaithfulness of a lover, among other things.
 
When you repeatedly tell yourself that you are not enough, you are not only denying the world of potential greatness, but you are also denying yourself the opportunity to be the best version of yourself. You constantly sabotage your happiness with your thoughts, and every time something that resembles peace and joy comes your direction, you pick up a magnifying glass and over-analyze it until you find something wrong, and when you cannot find something wrong, you make it up. This cycle of behavior naturally leads to (unconscious) self-hate. If you knew a person who made it their life mission to relentlessly sabotage your happiness, relationships and success, you would probably start hating that person, no matter how much of a nice person you are. Well, in this case that person sabotaging your happiness is…YOU. It only makes sense that you will begin to dislike and even hate yourself for always ruining potential happiness and sabotaging your greatness. This is why it is important that you forgive yourself actively. I say “actively” to remind you that this will not happen automatically. You need to make time where you consciously isolate yourself and attempt to have a conversation with YOU, and apologize for standing in your own way. For being your own worst enemy. You need to forgive yourself– your peace of mind depends on it.

It is better to not think at all than it is to overthink.
Both the man who does not think and the one who overthinks produce the same result: irrational decisions and fears that betray all laws of logic. The man who does not think at all, however, watches the horses run and the sun setting, and he breathes. He sits back on his chair and finds comfort and peace in his ignorance. He breathes. Eventually he self-destructs, but in the process, he gets to keep his peace of mind.
The overthinker looks at the sun setting, and he does not see the beauty of the horizon lighting up the skies gently, instead he sees another day slipping away from him and time being wasted watching the sunset when he could be doing whatever it is he believes he should be doing. He questions why the horses are running in this particular direction and worries that they may be overworked. There is no peace inside the overthinking mind, only possible alternative realities to the current reality; Scenarios of what could go wrong and what it can do to protect its host if things do go wrong. When forced to confront himself, the overthinking man convinces himself that he is smart. Possibly smarter than most. He convinces himself that he overthinks because he can look at situations and see what other people do not see. This answer satisfies him and, subconsciously validated in his intellectual capacities, he continues to think, accomplishing no logical objective or intellectually productive results that a mind is meant to achieve when it thinks.
You see, thinking is a productivity action. It is a tool that you use to either improve yourself or how you see things and the world. By the end of each “active thinking session”, you are meant to be at a better place than you were before you started thinking. Your options are supposed to be laid out clearer in front of you and by virtue of successful thinking, you should be clear as to which option is the most beneficial or at least less harmful.
When we accept this loose but fair definition of thinking, we can therefore see that overthinking is NOT by any means thinking. Because this fruitless activity is called “over-thinking,” it may be easy to think that the word means that one is thinking A LOT, but I feel that it is not thinking at all, as it does not seem to produce any of the results that thinking is supposed to produce, even on a hypothetical level. Overthinking produces anxiety, stress, panic, self-loathing and a need for perfection that leads to procrastination and then more self-loathing.
I challenge you to actively guard your mind against overthinking. Make it a habit to catch yourself out when you start to overthink and remind yourself that nothing good can come from that activity, and that whatever stressful situation you are experiencing, overthinking will not make it any better.
You cannot control everything, and you should be okay with that. There is a strength in being able to let things that you have no control over just be.

As I sit and try to negotiate with a heart that was just broken to a million pieces by a girl I gave all my love to, I’m still drawn more to the mysteriously interesting nature of feelings rather than actually feeling them. In fact, I don’t care very much for feeling them, they hurt. It hurts. It feels like a dagger has been driven into my heart and the person on the other end of it was laughing with me the whole time.
It is not an attractive feeling.

Because of this, I would rather not feel the feelings. I would rather put on my philosopher hat and analyze them instead. I want to know why I feel the way I do and why it matters in the grander scheme of things, if it does. I would think that the Universe is a little bit busy with bigger problems like Global Warming, ending world hunger and Donald Trump, so why should everything stop when I, a seemingly inconsequential human, get a broken heart? Will what I’m going through right now even matter this time next year? Is this a defining moment of some sort for the person that I’m going to become or is it just another idle experience that hurts like hell, but isn’t significant, like maybe accidentally biting your tongue while chewing through your favorite meal? What does it all mean?

But the more I think about these feelings on a conceptual level and what they mean, a persistent and ironic truth that I’ve known but avoided for a long time keeps talking to me: None of this matters. And I’m not talking about the feelings, but rather the question of their significance in the grander scheme of things. What matters right now in this moment is that I should feel the feelings, and that I should feel them the way they demand to be felt. No matter how big the Universe is and how insignificant I may feel, the truth is that I am a person and I exist, and this makes how I feel important and valid and significant. The feelings, of course, come with vulnerability. I feel naked. My ego has been shaken to the core and I feel vulnerable and stupid that I did not see this heartbreak coming. I am also realizing, however, that vulnerability is not weakness. When one chooses to love, they do so knowing that it may end like this: with pain and heartbreak. But that is what makes love so strong and powerful: the vulnerability. That is what makes it worth pursuing.
It is a risky gamble that you can always lose, but if you don’t play you have zero chances of winning.
Almost as a dreamy and detached external observer, I’m asking myself out of curiosity, would I do it again, given the opportunity? Would I allow myself to be vulnerable like that with someone else? Probably. But at this moment my conscious answer is a vehement no. I say this fully aware that my ‘no’ is probably due to the hurt I’m feeling currently and my lack of readiness to expose myself to another person right now at this moment, And of course this all might change. In fact, I hope it does change. I hope I one day find someone who is finally gentle with me and cares enough to tend to these wounds my heart has accumulated over the years. In the meantime, though, I will dedicate myself to healing. I’m not even sure exactly what healing looks like or what it means, but for now it just means being able to wake up in the morning and not allow the echoing hole in my heart to stop me from getting out of bed and trying to be the best version of myself.

The first thing I see when I open my eyes is the silver zinc roof of my rather small room. It is shiny and sweaty. There are droplets of water marching across its lines to be vomited down at the end to a bucket I keep there for rainy days. I stare at it for a while, trying to convince my defiant body that it is indeed the morning and I must get up at some point.  This time I lose the argument.
I shape my pillow into a knot with two grumpy fists to get more comfortable.
I can already hear the soundtrack of life playing outside; a baby speaking their alien language to some adult, I assume, who seems to be completely deaf to the screaming of this child, and of course the birds chirping a monotonous jolly tune which I imagine is the Animal Kingdom’s version of a happy song.I want the birds to shut their beaks. Or alternatively, sing something that is a little more reflective of the real state of life. It is not a good morning, and It hasn’t been a good morning for months now. Mornings are emptiness, they are feelings of uselessness. Mornings are wrestling with the Universe for hours, fighting your own mind and summoning all the little strength you have to get out of bed and not die that day. Mornings, for me anyways, are ” You can end it all now. You don’t have to do this again today the whole day. You won’t make it.”I turn to lie on my left side, I have no more energy left to fist the pillow into a knot again.
Suddenly I remember the man from the television show I watched last night. He was wearing a purple 3-piece suit that seemed tailor-made for a man his size, I remember because I had found it peculiar and impressive that a fellow that big could run around the stage like that. The man was preaching about the power of prayer. He said that if you pray every night before you sleep, God will clear your mind and chase away the dark energy around you, therefore allowing you to wake up refreshed and happy.

So I prayed.

I prayed last night like I did the night before, like I did last week, like I have done every night for the past year, but I still wake up every morning with butterflies in my stomach. Not the bright, lively ones you get when you are excited about a new project or when you fall in love, no. The dark butterflies. The ones that breathe anxiety onto your stomach and interrogate you like relentless officers, asking you why you are so undeserving of love…why you always manage to destroy every authentic relationship you build…why you seem to not succeed at anything you attempt to do. They keep asking, mocking, teasing and replaying your not-very-good past moments in your head until you become so tired that you give in to them and let them arrest you. Because, you see, the officers of self-doubt and self-loathe never arrest you against your own will. You give yourself to them willingly. You have to be the one who extends your hands in surrender and give them the power to hold you prisoner.
My throat has an aching, dry lump now. My cheeks feel wet and my eyes keep blinking involuntarily. A part of me knows this was a bad idea, I should have just gotten out of bed as soon as I woke up. I should not have convinced myself that I would be okay if I pretended I was.
But the truth is, when you are engaged in the battle of your life against your own self, you sometimes find yourself lost in the darkest places of your own mind, and when you are in that forest you don’t immediately realize that you are actually lost. Not consciously anyway. It is easy to reason with yourself and convince your consciousness that you are just off your usual path by a few calculations, that you will get back on the wagon in no time. You keep saying this to yourself until you wander off so far from your path that you stop recognizing the person on the mirror: You are completely detached from your dreams, your hopes, and the things that used to make you smile and burn with passion. What remains is merely an optical illusion of the person you used to be, and at this point, any hope of help seems far away. Too far away for your exhausted arms to try and reach.

I finally muster enough energy to get out of my bed and head to the kitchen for some food. Depression also grabs a plate. I will be having cereal for my breakfast, and Depression will be having me for his.

Less than 2 years ago, my mother died.

How she died was and still is a mystery of the Bermuda triangle proportion. The doctor responsible for her was not present when she checked out, so a nurse delivered the news to us.For what felt like forever, time stood still. The whole thing did not make sense (As if the mean grip of death ever makes sense. Ha!). Naturally, we all asked the nurses what had been the cause of death. We got different answers from all of them:It was liver failure. It was food poisoning. It was an asteroid that collided with a NASA spaceship and the explosion resulted in invisible lightning that struck my mother and sent her to an early grave.Nobody was giving us satisfying or conclusive answers.I decided to let it go. We were not the first family forced to live with the loss of a loved one who died a mysterious death under the care of a government hospital. It was not some huge conspiracy- Only a powerful, unwelcome and ill-timed reminder of how fluid and expendable a life is.

The following months I coped just okay. All I needed to do each morning was pull my mask from under the pillow, carefully wipe off the dry tears from the previous day, fit it on my falling face, and go about my day. This is how a lot of us today deal with overwhelming emotion that we feel we have no time to address. You see, the millennial is faced with the impossible dilemma of having to choose between stopping every now and then and dealing with one’s subconscious feelings that dictate the everyday unhealthy habits we employ to cope with all that we face, and suppressing it all for “another day” that never comes, in order to continue juggling the many responsibilities and expectations that are imposed on us by society, our families and even ourselves through fear-induced ambition. It is our generational crisis.I learned a very valuable lesson within the last 2 years of trying to deal with the mysterious death of my mother , I think it may be beneficial to share to share it with you. It is this:
Grief, sadness and all distasteful emotions are a debt, one that you can postpone paying now, but when you least expect it, it will come rushing to you like an angry ocean wave and mercilessly swallow you whole.

Being “strong” when you are supposed to be sad or grieving is only telling the debt-collector that you are currently broke, and he must come and collect next time. As sure as the screen you are looking at right now, he will come back to collect what is due to him. With interest.  The pain will double, Depression will have an angrier face, and Anxiety will hug you tighter than she has ever had before. It will penetrate your relationships, your dreams, your academics, and everything else you hold dear. It is really not worth it. I know from- and I say this with some regret-experience.Feel what you need to feel, when you need to feel it.

For my first blog post, I somehow felt like it was important for me to speak about the importance of grief. Not just grief, but all other similarly bitter cups we so often have to drink as humans. I don’t know why, but it felt urgent and necessary. Perhaps because as I am speaking to you, I am really just speaking to myself.
The next post will be-or at least should be- much lighter than this one. All the best Barmen know the importance of dashing their spirits with lighter fluids.
Until the next time..