What Can I Do?

The mind is a tricky thing. A restricting thing in my case. What to do about it? What to do?

I think the first thing I can do is to locate the sources of my panic. For instance, the prospect of talking with a person across the table from me. I am anxious of that. Let me not examine why, let me just simply state what I experience. 'Why' is too heady. Where does it go? Does it matter that I can generate a laundry list of reasons of why I think I am anxious? The reasons that I give are likely not the true reasons anyway - for any cognitive explanation can only scratch at what the true factors are deep down. So, let me say, and let me say only this: I am anxious of interacting with the person across the table.

I feel looser when I say this. I feel more playful when I declare this present experience of mine. It feels helpful for me to identify this. I actually feel less anxious when I declare my anxiety.

There is something healing about noticing, about taking inventory. For no reason, importantly - it would be an entirely different matter if a manager was breathing down my neck whilst doing this, or if this 'taking inventory' was for a defined purpose. Just being with the self, in its emotions and thoughts, offers a peacefulness to life, a recalibration to a steadier pace of living, and an openness to new experience for which an otherwise routine existence would not allow. It allows the mind to mull over things with new perspective - the same stimuli, certainly, but, with it, an emerging and novel quality of the thing. This is exciting, this is worth living for. It is a subtle expansion of my area of comfort, or rather, my domain of flexibility. With each new moment (that I survive), I incorporate it into my mind - it makes sense to me, in some way or other, and I thenceforth have more confidence and eagerness to venture towards it again. Competence. It creates competence. Figuring out where the mind wants to go, investigating where it does not travel easily, and then exploring an iota of the unknown and surviving it - oh, that is wonderful. It is riveting.

It must be done, however, not just thought about. Because the most potent updating, the most powerful expansion, is one that is embodied, not just virtually simulated. The latter affords some remodelling, absolutely, but there is such a great degree of uncertainty in that because, of course, the mind cannot predict all the factors. It is really in the former, in the embodied life, that the most meaningful transformations take place, as it offers genuine moments of meeting with the infinite factors of the external world, of the reality which we desperately wish we could understand. In real, physical moments, you meet the world in all its complexity, and you dance with it; you dance with those countless fragments of the universe, and though you cannot comprehend what they are, you mix and mingle with them nonetheless. There, in that dance, you update, oh you update, so meaningfully, so unshakably, that no wonder people wish to limit these moments. Too many of them, or if too powerful, could knock someone down, overwhelm them, to the degree that they cannot bring themselves back together after. We need to return to a narrative of our life that we tell ourselves, and too potent or too numerous moments of newness cast doubt upon if we shall ever find coherence again. What story shall we tell ourselves after this moment? Who shall we become? These are indeterminate, and always are. The mind of another is helpful here, to help you re-construct a good-enough narrative after a new experience - especially because (I believe) there may be experiences that you yourself cannot incorporate alone (my view: you are physiologically insufficient, yourself, to make sense of certain 'too-much' experiences, so you necessitate the aid of another mind to feel out and think out - and thus incorporate - these moments of newness). But I think almost everybody can survive more newness than they think possible. By survive, I mean coming back to a stable narrative afterward. I think people are much more able to experience newness, and re-discover and re-establish themselves, than they believe. 

At least now, in their adulthood. I think that we, for the most part, are held under the sway of the limited capacities of our infancy and childhood, and experiences which, at the time, were overwhelming to our limited psychological/emotion-regulation systems, subsequently define our belief of what (or, to what degree) we can or cannot tolerate. Thus, I think, largely, we go on with our life, perpetuating the physiological limitation of our childhood, owing to us being 'burned' before in certain events - even though, in our teenage years or adulthood, we have significantly more cognitive and emotional capacities to problem-solve, experience, and incorporate these certain experiences into our mental structure, into the narrative(s) of our lives. Thus, the areas in which we could not tolerate before, the episodes that could not possibly make sense by ourselves alone, I think, can be tolerated and made sense of by ourselves now, with our developed prefrontal cortices (i.e. more sophisticated problem-solving and emotion-regulation strategies) and, and this is big, our, likely, more ample and supportive social connections we have. In your adulthood, you likely meaningfully know more people than you did than when you were a child, and, therefore, have more people who you can turn to for their regulatory capacities too. You no longer are a child with a meagre mind and limited 'regulating' relationships; you are now an adult with a sophisticated mind of increased cognitive and affectual power and several more in-tune relationships which amplify your 'narrative re-creating' capacities by several degrees of power. 

It is almost ludicrous to know that almost everyone, including myself, lives such restricted existences because of this lack of appreciation for their ridiculously powerful capacities now, in contrast to their younger years. But it is not surprising, it is rather perfectly intelligible, because of the feeling, the deep-seated factor for why virtually all decisions are made. It is the sense of violation of trauma in the body, the despair of incoherence of certain pockets of one's life, the lovelessness felt when trusted caregivers have not helped you re-affirm any narrative and so you remain stranded, alone, petrified, and mistrusting eternally. It is these feelings, amongst many others, that perpetuate such miserable limitation. These feelings are so forceful that almost no amount of cognitive thought, or attempting to will a 'can do' attitude will stand against them. But... but... it is with small discourses like this, and the associated feelings conjured up, feelings that orient one towards their real competence now, their genuine and increased capacities to survive, that is, to re-establish a personal narrative, after a new experience, owing to their amplified mental power in thought and affect-regulation, and the probable enhancement of the breadth and depth of their meaningful, emotionally in-tune, social relationships... it is with these new, exciting feelings of how one is, in the here-and-now, that liberation can light the way.

What can I do? More than I believe.