My rumination is still so powerful, or so it seems. It's still debilitating. It still seems to have the upper hand. I'm achieving my daily goals but feeling little sense of joy or satisfaction. I think, yeah, I'm doing these things, but I can't live like this. And doom seems just around the corner. Everything seems dire.
Pretty much every day, even in the midst of this struggle I have windows. There are windows and waves. Windows are times of respite when you feel OK, and waves are the opposite. Waves are the norm. David Powers talks about how you have to try - and 'try' is the operative word - to keep opening the window. You only have to try. The window is welded shut. Try anyway. It makes a difference - that consistent, thankless, dogged effort, day in day out. Maybe after 6 months, you get a few seconds of feeling OK. Great! That's huge! Keep going. You have opened the window. You have formed a new connection in your brain. You can build on that.
Today I had a window because I was able to stop ruminating. I said to myself - you don't need to go over and over and over these old stories. You can think systematically. Consider how you're healing. Consider how you can heal. And then there was that sweet, incomparable relief. But of course it passes. It gets washed away in the torrent, and there's a kind of counter-attack when things seem worse than ever. It's like the demon or whatever it is says, that's cute. Did you think there was hope? Did you really think you could escape? I will pull you out of heaven itself and plunge you back into the flames of hell. You face the reality that you're going to be suffering acutely for the rest of today and tomorrow and this week and next week and for months and years.
But....the window was real. I made a point of writing it down. In that moment, I had beaten the rumination. And that's what's going to grow. My progress, my healing, my new life, my daily goals. That's real. The rumination is just a bunch of scary stories. It still seems so powerful, but it isn't. It's losing it's grip.
I was thinking - I am better. This thing doesn't stand a chance. What is it? It's just stories. It's just some disembodied voice. But I'm a living being with agency and talents and I can take action. I have a life.
As I wrote yesterday, I had a window because I accepted the fact that this struggle is going to be long and hard - maybe never ending. Maybe I'll never feel good again. Maybe I'll be in mental pain for years. I'd gotten in the habit of thinking of times in the past when I really struggled and how bad it was and thinking, that's what I'm going through now...it's going to get that bad. But a turning point was me thinking, so? What if it does? Was it really that bad? If it gets bad I'll just deal with it as best I can. And there was something about letting go of the dread that brought relief. It broke the vicious cycle, because that cycle is fed by all the dread and thinking about how bad things are and how they're not getting any better. My problem is that I have a tension that I just can't release because it's deeply ingrained in my subconscious mind. But with so many of these things - anxiety, rumination, worry, etc - resisting it feeds it.
But just like today's window, I felt OK for a while and then it's back to the fight.
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