Once again, The Brain and I have been locked in mortal combat.
(I can almost hear the theme song from the game playing in my head as I write that.)
read more ↓Obviously this is nothing new – it’s been going on for a while. But this weekend it reached an annoying pitch, likely because for the first time in a long time, I took three days off in a row. Sure, I answered e-mails and whatnot, but on the whole I focused on riding my couch like a triple crown jockey, watching movies that I’ve seen so many times that the tone and inflection of every line is burned in my memory. It seems to be that when I’m not keeping The Brain busy with other things, it starts in with its nonsense.
And really, that’s what it is – nonsense. Nonsense like bugging me about why I’m no longer hanging out with certain people, even though it knows full well that said people were hurtful and manipulative. Yet still, it finds a way to convince me I’m missing out on the friendship of a lifetime. Nonsense like focusing on the good in past experiences rather than the reality of what led to the end of those experiences. It’s noise, it’s chatter, and it makes me insane. Seriously – when The Brain gets like this, I suddenly have a crystal clear understanding of how and why people get committed.
But it’s been doing this more often than not lately. My face has been breaking out, my stomach has been cramping, all because The Brain will not stop chattering. It’s been so bad that I’ve been having trouble falling asleep at night to the point where I’ve been calling in my hypnotherapy tapes to help put me down. In fact, I didn’t fall asleep at all the night that I went to that wee-hours-of-the-morn meditation – I pretty much stayed up for 24 hours and crashed like a heap out of sheer exhaustion after I got home (but not until after I watched Rock of Love – I have priorities.) And on nights that I have fallen asleep, I’ve been grinding my teeth so much that my jaw aches in the morning and it hurts to chew my breakfast.
So I let The Brain prattle on for a bit and watched what was going on inside me while it did. And let me tell you, that really sucked. I greatly understand why people don’t want to change – it’s horridly embarrassing to watch yourself from a spectator’s point of view. Being blissfully unaware of your own idiocy is a beautiful thing in some ways, but I’ve never really been one about the easy way out, so it’s looking in the mirror for me. So as my brain yammered about the things I’ve screwed up, irreparably damaged, made bad decisions on, you name it, I realized something crucial:
It’s blithering because I’m winning.
I’ve been doing a boatload of hard work on myself in the past year, and a lot of that is about undoing old behaviors and habits and programming – things The Brain loves, because they’re things The Brain knows. But the more I tear those old buildings down to create new, more structurally sound buildings, the more it complains and whines and tells me about everything I’m doing wrong. Apparently I had to exhaust it with no sleep and hours of meditation to get it to shut up, and when I did, I finally felt calm. I could sleep. And when I slept, I dreamt deeply about a million things in a way that showed me I’m working things out.
It’s like a battle between the old me and the new me. For once, I really feel like the new me is finally getting an honest to goodness leg up on the old.
(Thank god. Straight jackets are hard to type in.)
↑ close
