Answer the Question – Does It Get Better?

I have news for you.
Moments will happen that come without warning. Sometimes life has a way of throwing us off. Sometimes people betray us. Sometimes we say mean things. We can be hurtful at times. We can grow and we can fall. We can only take so much or so it seems and just when we thought that we couldn’t take anymore, life comes along and hits us with something else.
We can heal and we can suffer.
We can stand and we can regain our composure.
Or we can submit to the world and allow ourselves to be washed away in the undertow of life.
But why?

I have news that should not come to you as a surprise.
Life is filled with a compilation of letdowns and disappointments.
“You will fail and it will hurt,” is exactly what I was told.
And this was right.
I did fail, countless times. Yes, this did hurt me in countless ways.

As the saying goes: into each life, a little rain must fall.
Ah, but it can’t rain forever.
Sooner or later, even the pains that are raw to the touch can heal. Time can step in. We can improve.
We can give ourselves a minute. We can allow ourselves a moment of silence. We can go in any direction we choose.
At the same time, we can teach ourselves the value of what it means to rise up, to execute and to get back up and stand tall again. 

Even if no one else is with us on this one. Even if people are supposedly against us; no one can stop us from improving.
Not unless we allow them to.

As for me; I asked myself that same old question
What the hell was I thinking?
There are times when I thought I couldn’t take another step. There were weeks and months when I was facing the outcome of my choices. As I was faced with the outcome of my mistakes, I can remember wondering if I’d ever feel better.

There I was, sitting in my own skin. I was constantly repeating the script in my head. I was rethinking the things that I said and did. I found myself in the quandary of, “If I had only said this . . .” or, if I had just stayed on the phone or answered the call once more. I have found myself on more than one occasion sifting through the aftermath of my choices. But the past was gone and try as we might; no one can change the past.
Or put simply, the past is gone and neither of us live there anymore.

I was trying to relitigate the past and wishing I had done or said something different.
But to what avail?
At the same time, nothing about the past can ever be renegotiated. The past is gone.
In my case, all that was left was the aftermath of my choices.

Don’t beat yourself up . . .
It’s a quick sentence yet this sentence is bigger than the few words that come with its delivery.
Don’t play that movie out in your head  . . .
I’m sure we’ve all heard this before.

At the same time, your thoughts start running away from you and your internal judgment meter is flying off the charts.
You know that you’re torturing yourself but how do you stop?
How do you walk away from the ideas of rejective thinking?
Better yet, how do you run away from yourself?

The truth is you can’t run away from yourself.
The fact is no matter where you go, there you are.
Always. Relentlessly.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Right there in the mirror with a reflection staring back at you
(always).

I have news for you.
There’s a word for all of this. There is a term for this that goes misused and misunderstood.
This is called life. It’s called normal. There are times when you wonder if any of your troubles will go away.

There are times when you wonder if the pain will go away.
And there are people who will come along and say this to you:
Pain is temporary; in which case, this might be true 
(sometimes).

But in the world of chronic truths and chronic pain or as it goes in a mind with chronic depression and anxiety; or in the world of long term and reoccurring challenges, or chemical imbalances, and in the mindset of habitual patterns and personal mapping; the ideas of pain being temporary are unrealistic.
When you’re in pain, you’re in pain.
All you can see is the world around you. All you can feel is what you can touch and the idea that tomorrow will be hopeful or the concept that there’s a brand of recovery that suits you perfectly is simply unthinkable. How could this be real if you can’t see or touch it?
You can’t feel it. You can’t see it; therefore, you certainly can’t believe it. 
Right?

I have seen people who were bigger and stronger than me and even with all of their physical ability, with all of their strength and might; I have seen the mightiest fall to their own mental conflicts.
I have seen countless millionaires, miserable as ever, rude, entitled and cold to the touch.
Meanwhile, they can afford anything they choose to make their world as picturesque or as physically beautiful as possible and still they tremble.

I say that mental health is truly the most inclusive element of them all.
Mental health does not discriminate,
Even if we do.

I know that in my case, there are moments in my life when, in fact, it was me who betrayed myself.
It was me who resulted in a format of which I acted on behalf of my worst kept secrets
(and my worst built fears).
It was me who built the models of my self-fulfilled prophecies and it was me who saw them come to pass because it was me, not anyone else; it was me who lived out of fear and frustration. It was me who saw this so much that my mind acted on its behalf.

Do you understand what I am saying to you?

I thought that I was going to lose everything. In this thought, I began to nurture a prepared mindset.
I responded in kind and acted as if this were true.
I was prepared to lose what I had; whether this was a relationship or if this was a position at work or if this was a social position with a group of friends; I detailed the construction of my own downfall by building the bricks of my own mental prison.
I built my isolation which is a contradiction of terms because the last thing I wanted was to be isolated.
The last thing I wanted was to be rejected or to be ostracized or banished.
However, in my fears that this would happen, I created a series of biased steps that eventually led me to fulfill this outcome.
There I was at the bottom of my worst prediction and wondering, “What the hell was I thinking?”

I go back to this question because oftentimes we say that we don’t know.
But ah, we do know.

I know exactly what I was thinking. I know the truth about my behavior. In fact, we all do.
We all know why we do what we do. We might not always have the language to verbalize our thinking.
Or better yet, we might not always have the bravery it takes to be honest or open about this.
But the fact that remains is we always know what we’re thinking.

I have this thing called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. I have this idea or concept which I have nurtured for most of my life. I have these mixes of fears and concerns that something about me is misfitting or distorted.
I have this challenge when dealing with rejections – or should I call them, so-called rejections.
At the same time, it has taken me years to understand this motto; but more, it will take time for me to affectively deconstruct this mindset. Then I will have to learn to both verbalize and execute my transformational improvements. However, I know me.
I know me very well, in fact.
I call myself all of this.
I am all of the above which is human by nature.

I know that my fears of not being liked or included go back as long as I can remember.
I know that my lessons in life have been an inaccurate teacher and that in many cases, I have to unlearn the inaccuracies that I had been taught. 

I know that in fear, I responded fearfully. I know that anxious thinking leads me to anxious decisions and anxious decisions lead me to anxious outcomes. 
This is a degrading hole which I also refer to as emotional quicksand.

Let’s go back to that idea of, “Has anyone ever died from a broken heart?”
The answer is yes. In answer to the question, “Does it get better?”
If you mean does life get better, the answer is yes, of course.

All things happen in time. Nothing lasts forever. 
Not pain. Not joy. Not the rain or the sun. Everything turns, just like the Earth.
We are all cyclical in a sense; in which case, we are like the four seasons. There are times when we are free to bask in the sun.
There’s the time when we transition from the summer of our life into the change of our personal autumn and as we move into the winter of our personal distortions, pay no worries because springtime will come and soon enough our world will be in bloom again.

What the hell was I thinking?
At my worst, I was thinking that nothing will ever get better. 

But guess what?
I was wrong. 

Know how I know?
I know because you’re reading this right now and to me, this is a dream come true because to me – you are my dream . . .

come true.