Memories, Like The Corner Of My Mind…

About a year ago after a particularly rough time in my life I did something I had never done before and started writing a journal. I say journal it wasn’t anything fancy it was literally just an empty A5 lined book where I made notes about notable events and how I was feeling that day.

It felt awkward at first because at the time I was still far away from having the vocabulary and tools to be able to talk about those things in any meaningful way, but over time it got easier, and I did find it beneficial. It helped me to organise my thoughts and articulate myself better to myself and those around me.

As Dan John would say though, it worked so well I stopped doing it.

I don’t recall why in particular that I stopped. If I had to guess it was around the time that I moved out into my own place and there was just so much to be done I fell out of the habit of doing it. However, I did manage to capture a good six months of entries during what was arguably one of the more transitional periods in my life.

I recently found the book I would write in and morbid curiosity got the better of me and I decided to have a read through. What was interesting to me was that at the time of writing I didn’t feel like I was writing anything interesting. In fact, I remember feeling that I was saying the same things repeatedly which bored me at the time.

However, taking the entire body of writing its clear to me in retrospect that what I had captured was the genesis of the changes that I would make to lead me to where I am today. I can see in painful detail the self-reflection that I was doing and the roadmap for change that at the time I didn’t know I was laying.

So, I wanted to share with you some of the thoughts that I captured during this period that shaped my thinking to where it is today.

Has my desire to react quicker in situations damaged my ability to choose my response?

One of the criticisms that I used to get was that I would take a long time to respond to questions. As an Aspie sometimes I need time to understand what is being said and to try and think of a response and articulate it in a way that was fitting for the scenario. However, for various reasons I found myself in situations where a quicker response was needed from those people around me.

I went from acting purposefully to reacting and this ultimately became an issue of quality versus quantity. I consciously learned to respond quicker but the quality of my responses was poor. From the words I chose to the way in which I delivered them my output was shockingly poor.

I think at the time I was trying to be what I felt people around me wanted and I wasn’t acting in a way that was with integrity to who I am. I need that thinking time to articulate myself because quite frankly whenever I blurt out my first response, I usually upset people and once its out there you can’t take it back. I have returned to a place of being more purposeful with how I interact with people and that just seems to work better for me and people around me.

Negativity is addictive because it is easy, and it allows us to justify self-destructive behaviours and absolve ourselves of responsibility

I think I wrote this when I was feeling particularly negative and for no obvious reason. I used to get this a lot and its easier to slip into than we think.

I was a chronic complainer. I always had something that was annoying me or that I was moaning about even when life was generally good, and it was to be honest draining for me and those around me.

Now, admittedly there are times in life when it is right and proper to complain and/or moan but I found I was doing it for the sake of it and it was boring me let alone anyone else who had the misfortune of having to listen to me.

Being negative is seductive, it feels good to moan and complain. We feel a sense of release and as I said above its easy-to-use negativity to justify our own poor behaviour. But long term it’s also not ideal.

You know in Star Wars when they talk about giving into the dark side? That’s exactly what giving in to negativity feels like. One-minute you’re a happy and functioning member of society the next you’re wearing all black and breathing through a respirator (nobody? Just me then).

Its way harder in life to acknowledge the negative but choose instead to act or focus on the positive instead. Its hard work being a decent person but ultimately in the long run its worth it. Just make sure your negative outbursts are short and justified.

The quicker you take responsibility for a situation, the less time worry robs you of your happiness. This in turn means you can deal with the issue at hand calmly and rationally.

I was that person who when faced with a difficult or unpleasant situation would do absolutely anything rather than deal with it. Whether that be a difficult conversation, dealing with a bill etc. the longer I could put it off I would.

However, I realised that in delaying dealing with it I was just prolonging my own misery. Even when I would manage to forget about the situation for a while it would randomly pop into my head and ruin my mood or whatever I was doing. The longer I delayed dealing with it the longer I went through this cycle of negativity.

I don’t know how or what changed but one day I just stopped being this way and implemented something of a one touch rule which basically is I only look at a problem if I’m ready to deal with it, and when I do I either deal with it right away or in more complex scenarios set up the steps I will need to resolve it. It has saved me a lot of mental space and anguish because I’m using my mental and physical energy for better things.

A lot of this is down to what psychologists call the change curve which I urge you to research as it expertly explains the process we all go through in relation to change and the more you understand it and master moving yourself through it the easier life gets generally.

If life is just a series of decisions, then every day we have countless opportunities to make the right ones.

I mean this one sounds obvious on the surface and I was reluctant to put it in but on reflection is it that obvious?

Every day we are faced with countless decisions from the mundane to the important. A lot of these we do on autopilot because they have become a habit and from a biological perspective this has its advantages. If we offload the everyday decisions to automatic responses and commit them to habit then we use less brain power making them, leaving more brain power free to make bigger decisions and solve more complex tasks.

Like I’m willing to bet not many of you gave waking up, having a wash and getting dressed much thought today and you likely won’t give too much thought to many of the other decisions you make on a daily basis because these things are just habits now.

But every day is unique enough to require us to make conscious decisions. What we say, what we do, what we eat and when for example and depending upon the context these can range in importance from minor to big decisions. Think about any time you may have tried to lose weight. Suddenly a simple decision such as what to eat becomes a huge one requiring a lot of thought and planning and problem solving to overcome.

But whilst this may seem overwhelming at a glance if we can keep our presence of mind enough to give these decisions some actual thought then we can use them for good. The truest fact of life is that beyond ourselves very little is under our control.

We can’t make people act or think certain ways and we can’t ever truly anticipate what will happen or come next however we can control ourselves. Our thoughts, actions and beliefs are all under our conscious choice. We have the power and ultimately the responsibility to ourselves to make better choices. Ones that are in accordance with how we truly feel and want to live our lives because life is an active process and we should participate as such.

Assume less, ask more

I’m not sure whether it was ego, ignorance or both but at this time in my life I genuinely believed that I knew the rationale behind everyone’s behaviour. I could be caught often in a sort of rant when people acted in ways that I felt was unbecoming or unhelpful, droning on about the whys and wherefores of someone’s motivations for their actions.

However, the truth is whether I was right or wrong it wasn’t really my place to make that judgement and the ironic thing is one of my triggers was when people wrongly ascribed motivations to my own behaviours that weren’t true.

We have all heard the saying about the danger of assuming but most of my daily interactions were built on such things. I don’t know how or why I came to figure out that asking people questions about their behaviour was a much better way of dealing with things but trust me it works.

The caveat is in how you phrase the questions. You can’t say things like “Why are you acting like an arse?” because generally people respond negatively to that and become defensive. Rather you must take ownership of your own feelings so rather than “Why are you acting like an arse?” you might say “I have noticed that you aren’t acting like yourself and when you act this way, I feel upset” Its more of a statement but its more of an open ended one which doesn’t assign blame to anyone and make anyone feel defensive and leads to much more productive conversations.

Focus on the process not the outcome. We can control the process but not the outcome.

Wanting things in life isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We all want to be richer or happier or fitter for example. But wanting alone isn’t enough.

Some of us might find the willpower to work towards our wants as a personal and the journey from where we are now to achieving one of our wants is going to be different for every one of us. The commonality between us all is that things don’t happen overnight. There will be a period where we must actively work on achieving the end goal.

The fact that evades a lot of people is that the end goal isn’t guaranteed. I know we live in a world where we are told everything is possible if you work hard enough but for reasons beyond our control some of us will never achieve our goals.

Now, I am not for one second suggesting that we all stop trying to achieve our goals, far from it. We all need a purpose in life and something to strive to wards and it is the struggle of reaching our purpose that gives us meaning.

What I am saying is that when we work towards our goals the one thing we are always in control of is ourselves and the steps we take to achieve our goals i.e., the process. You wouldn’t set out to travel to the other side of the country without thinking about and acting on the steps it takes to get there. In fact, a cross country journey is the perfect analogy because we all know that what can go wrong often does and sometimes, we have to react to changes to our plans. We must focus on the process not the outcome.

So, whilst some of us may never achieve our goals for reasons beyond our control we can still take something of a win if we execute the process perfectly, because to my recollection nobody was ever worse off for trying to achieve their goals. They mostly end up better than when they started and that’s always a win in life.

Life is fluid. Our place in the world and relationships with others are constantly in a state of flux.

I wish I could remember what I was thinking when I made this observation because this seems a bit out there even for me.

The only thing in life that acts linearly (so far as we understand it) is time. We can be certain that seconds will lead to minute will lead to hours will lead to days etc. Time creeps on with no regard for anything it just keeps going.

Our circumstances, our relationships, our place in the world however acts more from a place of entropy. Nothing really is certain or set or as guaranteed as we would like to think it is. Everything is open to change at any given point in time and none of us can ever know for certain what the next second holds let alone the next day month or year.

But we don’t ever give this conscious thought because quite frankly it is scary and overwhelming. We like to believe the myth that things are certain rather than face the painful truth that we can’t possibly ever predict the paths our lives will take.

Nobody craves certainty as much as I do. I need it to just function and I am an absolute nightmare if I don’t get it, but I know that ultimately any certainty that I get comes with the caveat of being a best-case scenario and that things can go wrong.

This sounds like I’m being bleak and maybe my view is slightly marred by life experience, but actually I am not trying to be bleak at all. What I offer instead is the idea that because life is in this constant state of flux and change what we are presented with is the opportunity to actively participate in it.

In a world where nobody can agree on the true meaning of life, make your own meaning. Walk your own path. Don’t close yourself off to change. Accept that the people, places and things you have right now may not be here tomorrow and cherish them more because of that. None of us know when what we have will be gone and that should make us all value the time we have with the things we cherish more.

Anger does not exist on its own rather it is a combination of two or more other emotions.

As I may have alluded to earlier on this was a time in my life when I was angry like all the time and I didn’t really know why that was. Sure, there were things to be annoyed about, but I wasn’t annoyed I was full on ready to boil over at the drop of a hat angry. I hadn’t always been this way. In fact, overall, I’m quite a relaxed and quiet person. I’m certainly not your average rageaholic.

It took me a long time to understand why this was and I can’t remember for the life of me now whether I read or heard something that got me thinking about anger as a concept, but it just hit me one day. Anger isn’t so much an emotion in and of itself, rather it’s the combination of two or more emotions that manifest themselves outwardly as anger.

I’ve talked about before how when a man’s masculinity is challenged, he can become angry but really when a man’s masculinity is challenged what he feels is fear and rejection. He fears he will not be viewed as a man and he feels that his masculinity has been rejected and thus he becomes angry. He doesn’t just become angry there are underlying feelings that create it. Anger is the sum of its component parts.

Understanding this for me gave me the key to understanding and reducing my anger levels. When I felt angry, I looked at what was behind it. What are the emotions that are driving my angry response? And in dealing with just one of these (in the case where the anger was fuelled by two emotions) I found that I was no longer angry.

Think of it like the fire triangle. We all know that to create fire we need oxygen, heat and fuel. If we remove any one of these, we can’t make fire. It’s the same with anger. Remove one of the underlying emotions and you prevent the angry response.

I’m going to give journaling another chance. Not because I feel there’s a particular need to but rather, I can see reading back over my entries here that it really helped me to organise my thoughts and feelings in a way that was productive. I often tell people that make lists of their problems because I believe that its difficult for most people (myself included) to both remember the problem and think of a solution at the same time. So that’s what I will use journaling for as an aide memoire of my random thoughts and hopefully it will better organise them better.