The tale of the spider in the bathtub

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I was back in the UK this week, staying in my parent’s house.

When I went to take a shower, I saw that a spider had taken over the bathtub. There was an impressive amount of webs that had covered the whole area.

I needed the shower, but I saw that it would most definitely kill it. So with a bit of paper I managed to poke at it. It quickly scuttled up the paper, and started running up my arm. In a bit of a panic, I managed to fling my arm out so that it fell onto the bathroom floor. I was quite happy to see that the spider was still moving on the floor, where it sought refuge behind the toilet.

I couldn’t help but reflect that my act of mercy on this poor spider probably felt like a deeply traumatic event for it. I had come along and essentially destroyed its home, along with hurting it from its fall.

This made me think about how life does similar things to us as humans. An inexplicable event occurs, filled with tragedy. Yet in the end, it might actually be a real blessing, we are just unable to see it at the time.

For those that aren’t aware, Bangladesh has gone through rather seismic changes, with the Prime Minister being ousted following protests. The movement originated as a student movement against unfair quotas for government jobs going to descendants of liberation fighters. The quota was disproportionate and essentially meant jobs for the families of those already in power.

The brutal repression against the student movement ended up turning the public against the government. Eventually, this led to a wider movement, with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina having to flee to India; she also announced that she had resigned as Prime Minister. The state has now shifted into a delicate situation with a clear power vacuum.

I’ve been rather fearful as to what happens next. Bangladeshi history has had bad instances of the past where the army simply took control, with brutal repression following. Power struggles are extremely bloody and damaging, and if things go wrong, the country could descend into chaos. Fortunately, the first signs look somewhat positive. Students successfully called for Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yusuf to come in as a chief adviser. It looks like order is looking to be achieved and new elections to come.

I can’t help but feel naive and misinformed about the degradation of politics in Bangladesh. People have been snatched away, and political opponents heavily repressed. Honestly, it’s pretty upsetting to learn about this all going on. Whilst corruption was evident, I hadn’t realised it had gotten this bad. All I can do now is hope that it settles down and good governance is the ultimate winner.

The week has also had a few other events dotted around. The riots of far-right protesters around the UK has been unsettling. It makes me question a lot around our narrative around multiculturalism, and how far we really have come in society when people can be openly racist. The events made its rounds across Europe, to the point that I even had people in Belgium question whether I should go back to visit my parents because of what they heard.

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing several hours of assessments around my neurodivergence. These are several hours of rather tiring questions, jabbing into uncomfortable personal memories on childhood.

I suppose I took it as a compliment that the psychologist described me as an ‘interesting case’. Turns out I am very contradictory in my answers. On the one hand I need routine and repetition. But I also need novelty and colour. I need my peace and quiet, but I also need intense social stimulation.

I’ll have to see what this really means, but it could be a blend of different conditions in play (somewhere between Autism, being a Highly Sensitive Person, having some form of ADHD and/or being ‘intellectually gifted’). What is clear at least is that I fit the profile of a neuroatypical person.

Processing these sorts of events is pretty exhausting. I’ve felt fear, as well as emotionally drained.

But I return to thinking about that spider, running around my parent’s bathroom floor.

The traumatic event it lived through is the reason it lives to see a new, better day.

Resetting the calibration of our internal motivation

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Motivation is like gold dust. When we have it, complex tasks can feel so simple. But when our motivation runs dry, even the most simple of tasks can feel extraordinarily difficult.

‘Refinding’ motivation is a search many of us go on. There’s an abundance of motivational slogans, inspirational quotes and an industry of positive-vibe speakers to cater to this need.

Unfortunately, most of these external sources of motivation have a rather limited effect. Whilst these things can give a temporary boost, they are no match for genuine, internal motivation to succeed.

Books like Grit by Angela Duckworth highlight as much – someone with an intrinsic motivation is far more likely to accomplish a goal than someone who is doing it for some form of external validation. Doing something for the love of it means we will persevere for far longer than doing something just because we want to become rich or famous.

The funny thing about motivation is how wavering it can be. Some days, it can feel like it we are abundantly motivated. The next day, it can feel like it has completely disappeared.

The key to understanding this is that it’s not the activity that’s changing, it’s us.

The way we think and feel about something shapes our reality. The more time we spend dreading a task, the harder it becomes. We can flip this by committing to actions come rain or shine, as well as focussing on the positives, or pleasure that we get out of something.

This is all stuff that I had learned several years ago. Yet putting it into practice is always the most challenging part. Life also finds new ways to test us at different periods of our life.

My recent period of fatigue has had stretches where I had no desire to do anything at all. I had no motivation to move. I had to push myself just to eat. My body’s response was to slow down, making me just want to stay in bed.

Things have improved since then, yet motivation still can feel scary – asking myself what I want opens up deeper, existential questions about what I’m doing in life.

I went to a festival last weekend. It was a lot of people, and I did have rather strong bouts of anxiety at several points. But it was also really fun. The weather was (mostly) good, and I felt alive after passing a few days on my feet dancing.

Afterwards, I felt a jolt of energy in life. This was despite being far more physically tired (and rather sleep deprived). My therapist described it as a sort of reset to my dopamine controls.

When I reflect on it, creating fun for myself got simplified in my head. Going outside when it’s sunny is something fun and enjoyable.

This is in contrast to my more recent ways of thinking about ‘fun things’. I had inadvertently learnt that fun was meant to be challenging and/or educational – there needed to be a ‘point’ to everything. It’s probably why I found myself in such a humourless state recently.

Doing things for the joy of them can return us to a more innocent, childlike state. In our adult lives of routine and responsibility, we can lose the ability to have fun, like we did as kids. Part of the recipe of wellbeing is reconnecting with this side of ourselves.

For some people, recalibrating is instead doing less. We may be overdosing on our dopamine hits, making us crave the hits we get from it. Knowledge about social media addiction is pretty prevalent now, but most of us have experienced how all-consuming it can get as to whether we get likes or not. Time away can give perspective that perhaps we’re getting too engrossed in that one thing.

I don’t doubt that my life will be a see-saw act between being overly invested in something all the way back to a sense of ennui, or boredom. But finding the sweet spot of general motivation is important. It’s what makes us take care of ourselves and accomplish our goals.

And the best way to do that is to have fun.

Learning to express our internal anger

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Anger is often seen as a negative emotion. Anger is often synonymous to being petulant or violent. We get angry because we are not accepting something that we ‘should’.

In many social settings, it’s seen as better to refrain from displaying anger. Anger is seen as impolite, or inconsiderate. So instead, we bottle it up until it comes out in a messy burst. It’s certainly a reverse culture shock to come back to the UK and see how these uncontrolled emotions spew out on the streets when people get drunk.

It’s true that uncontrolled anger can be unhealthy, and even dangerous. When we are consumed with rage, it can be hard to think clearly. We might act on impulse, or enter into violence.

But the problem is that by trying to avoid conflict, we often unintentionally suppress our anger. Suppressed emotions doesn’t lead to a healthy emotional status.

I’ve had the unfortunate double whammy of being an ethnic minority as well as being neuroatypical. Being a minority with a moustache and beard, the perception of my actions tend to be seen as more aggressive, predominantly by white people. Unfortunately, white people are the majority in the spaces I inhabit, and are the ones who also tend to be the power holders in my life.

It’s been a constant source of frustration that I cannot display my displeasure at a situation without being perceived as threatening. I’ve received countless sets of feedback about the ‘way’ I raise an issue. At first, I believed that this was something for me to work on. But after a while, I realised that this was an impossible standard. My carefully planned statements of unhappiness still get perceived as threatening.

The frustrating part about this is how acceptable it is for white people around me to verbalise their emotions in a shocked, emotional or angry way without it being an issue. I’ve seen countless times how the reaction of a white person is excused due to emotions running high, but no such benefit of the doubt is given to me.

I had a situation recently where I pointed this double standard out. I even highlighted the inherent racism within. How did the white person across me respond? At the mention of the word racism, they got up and stormed out of the room (while I was still speaking). A few hours later they told me off for implying she was racist, as well as highlighting that I should be sorry for the hurt I had caused her.

As I’ve explored my neurodivergence further, it’s become apparent how difficult I can find it to be caught by surprise. Whilst nobody likes having a last minute change, it can sometimes affect me quite deeply. This can also throw people off guard, as the things that can upset me don’t tend to be the ‘normal’ things that I should get upset about.

I’ve learnt to be very careful about the way I express myself, even when someone has done me wrong. Expressing my upset can actually be dangerous, as I can be branded as threatening or aggressive. Of the conflicts I have had, there were countless times where it actually started from someone else doing something disrespectful to me. Yet the original issue is glossed over upon, and the focus instead turns to how I reacted.

I actually talked to a (white) professional about the situation I had with the white woman recently. She actually suggested that it was better for me not to try and explain my point. In the situation I was in, the people in the room were most likely never going to accept my point of view, as they had basically already made up their mind. Alas, I learnt to take the loss and move on.

A lifetime of suppressing my anger for fear of being perceived negatively has taken its toll. I feel fear at the idea of expressing anger, and I usually have deep anxiety attacks after I have done it (even when I have been justified for doing so). I recently felt an intense pain in my throat because I did not know how to express the frustration that I had built up within.

Although I have learnt the importance of standing up for myself and setting my boundaries, I’ve learnt to do this by simply accepting the suffering it causes. I know that I will probably be branded a troublemaker, aggressive or impolite. But it is better that then getting walked over. Yet it is still painful.

I’m now looking at new ways in which I can express my anger in more healthy ways. Excercise and physical contact can be a good space for this, and I’m learning to use these powerful emotions in a way that is conducive to my performance. Anger can be a very good motivator, and I am looking at how I can use it through artistic expression when moving my body or dancing.

I’m also becoming a lot more conscious as to where the spaces I am in, and how safe they really are. Whilst many left-leaning areas purport to be ‘safe’, there tends to be a lot of white fragility around mentioning race. That doesn’t mean that I cannot participate in these spaces, but I need to be wary that there are certain topics that are better to not be touched upon. It’s tricky to explain this to well-meaning individuals who see these spaces as safe for themselves. But it’s important to trust my own instinct as my experience will be different to the majority of people.

The positive side to being more conscious is realising whoare genuinely open to understanding, as well as finding the spaces which are more accepting. These do not need to be necessarily minority led spaces (although that can sometimes help). Instead, it’s finding people who have the emotional intelligence to genuinely have discussions of issues in an open minded way.

Fundamentally, anger is not a negative emotion. It is just an emotion, like any other. It’s more about how we act upon the emotion. We can use anger to drive us to destruction, or to constructive change. Without anger, our sense of moral justice would be totally flat.

I can’t pretend to have exactly figured out how I can most healthily express my anger, but I think I’m on the path towards it.

What I do know is that I feel healthier and happier when I feel more in tune with what I am really feeling.

The critical role of forgiveness in moving forward

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Forgiveness is one of the key words in the world of spirituality and religion. This makes sense – it’s better to forgive than hold on to a grudge for many years of our life.

I think we know this intrinsically. Yet it’s a lot more challenging to do in practice.

My recent months has involved a lot of exploration and experimentation. This has meant there have been bumps along the way. People have been hurt. Sometimes I have hurt people. Sometimes people have hurt me. Sometimes, it’s a mix of the two.

Forgiveness has two aspects. Firstly, forgiveness for ourselves. We can be some of our biggest critics. When we berate ourselves for every small action that we might have done wrong, it can be very hard to find a sense of peace and happiness. A lack of self-forgiveness is probably why we see so many people with low self confidence in today’s society.

Then there is forgiving others. Understanding better why people may have done some things, accepting that they may have had their reasons, and, if they give one, accepting an apology. Even in a space where disagreements persist and no apology is made, we can choose to forgive someone for what we believe they may have done against us.

Forgiving ourselves and forgiving others go hand in hand. If we judge others harshly, we implicitly are setting rules for ourselves of what we should or should not do – ‘That guy is very obnoxious, I would neverbe so loud in public’. We are binding ourselves in a construct about how we should act. Without realising it, we are restricting our own freedom.

I’m generally one who is relatively quick to forgive. Admittedly, this is by my own estimation, but even then, I would say that I tend to be more on the empathetic side. Yet I’ve also felt quite frustrated with forgiveness, especially in the last few years. Despite focussing on getting better at forgiving, I wondered whether I was excusing the actions of people. I’d find myself giving a reason as to why someone acted negatively towards me, without feeling like I could actually address the issue with them.

In an attempt to avoid uncomfortable conversations, I feel that we often sweep issues under the carpet. This has often left me in an uncomfortable position – do I endlessly hold a grudge because I feel unsatisfied by the actions of someone I know, or do I get on with life?

In the end, I cannot control the actions of others. I would wish that there was more space for open conversations, yet I also recognise that many of us were not equipped for such style of conversations. I’m sure I’m no saint either in this.

The key distinction I learnt this week is that I can forgive people for their actions, without necessarily conceding my point. This includes actions (like some that have happened to me this week) that have done me a lot of harm.

Forgiveness does not necessarily mean that I concede my point of view. Instead, it’s understanding where the other person is coming from and seeing that they had their reasons for their actions.

In some senses forgiveness is somewhat selfish. It’s a way to let go of the past and move on with life. I do not want the actions of someone else to have a constant hold on me. The memories stop provoking anger, and ultimately I stop thinking about them.

By forgiving, I actually reclaim my own power.

Managing my life’s dopamine rollercoaster

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Recently, I realised how boring I had made my own life.

That’s not to say my life is objectively ‘boring’. To many it probably seems I do lots of fun and adventurous things. But subjectively, it’s felt unexciting. The things I’ve been doing haven’t felt particularly enjoyable.

In the quest for commitment, consistency and hailing ‘the grind’, I seemed to lose the idea that things were meant to be fun.

It’s probably no wonder that by the beginning of this year I found it so hard to motivate myself to do pretty much anything. Everything seemed tiring and exhausting.

Through this process, I think I lost a part of myself. I was modelling myself on the ‘boringly consistent’ types – gym everyday, unremarkable but consistent small gains leading to exponential growth.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to be said about this way of being. And I’ve certainly learnt lots about the importance of committing myself to what I say I will do.

I think I have been suppressing my chaotic nature. I’m an emotional being who thrives upon a mix of planned and spontaneous excitement. It’s what makes me buzz and really thrive in life.

In the quest to be regulated individuals within a society, I think a lot of us implicitly learn that being quirky is something to lose with age. Such ways of being are tolerated with youth, but in adulthood we are meant to give up such frivolities.

In my own effort to grow up and become independent, I think I lost that sense of fun and freedom in life. Everything needed to be a goal to be achieved, or something to improve upon. Only in my 30s am I taking the time to regain my sense of liberty.

My life realisations don’t come without challenges. My life feels more like a rollercoaster than ever – with greater vulnerability comes greater lows. These can be pretty damned tough. But the highs are also far more satiating and joyous. And now that I’ve experienced them, I couldn’t imagine a life without those amazing feeling again.

I’ve realised how much I enjoy people’s company. In some senses this isn’t a surprise for those people who have seen me going around speaking to people. Yet I’ve also had intense periods of reclusiveness too. I think this paradoxical nature has made it hard to understand what was going on. But I think this has been down to me finding it hard to find my place. In those spaces, it was easier to withdraw into a nihilistic pessimism to protect myself.

The challenge now for me is to figure out how I ride this rollercoaster without crashing. As my energy slowly returns, the temptation is to just fill my days with more people and events. Yet I’m not actually at a state where my body can quite handle that either.

Part of understanding my neurodivergence is seeing that my brain does not work in a particularly logical way. The more logical way of seeing the world would be that we have so much units of energy in a day and that therefore we can complete that many activities.

But for me, sometimes a small task can take me hours, whilst at other moments I can also do an incredible amount in an extremely short amount of time.

Before ever realising that my brain was wired different, I always saw the importance of momentum. There have been weeks where I have done the amount that people would do in several months, whereas the last few months have been extremely slow going. There were points that I put off simple tasks like folding my laundry for weeks on end, only to find it took me 15 minutes.

It’s why it’s so important to connect with ourselves to really understand how to live. The moment we try to overly rationalise the way we work as humans is the moment that we lose our understanding of what our bodies are really saying.

As an example, let’s take the idea of a night out. Many of us experienced this during our university days. We kept insisting to our friends that we were tired to go out. Later on we find ourselves buzzing with energy on the dance floor at 3am.

If our energy was based upon rational, measurable units, this would not be possible. Yet our bodies abilities to seemingly create energy is abundant. It’s probably why we feel more awake after exercising than before it too.

What makes this difficult is understanding the difference between what activities will revitalise us, and when we are doing something by simply struggling through. This is confusing because the same activities can be both things depending on the circumstances.

I’m much more on the overcommitment scale of things. I love having new and exciting things for me each day. But I’ve also learnt the importance of empty time without needing to rush around too. I’m still a work in progress on this, and probably will be for the rest of my life

But fundamentally, it’s important to keep doing things that feel fun. Fun is so subjective that sometimes these can be very mundane things. I see that for many people, they don’t need their lives to be so spontaneous – they are happy with the daily rhythm and stability.

But I also see that I am not one of those people.

It’s coming home. Or at least I did, I think.

Just as I arrived at St Pancras, my internet reconnected. I refreshed the BBC Sports page to find Ollie Watkins score a 90th minute winner. Welcome home. Perhaps football will be coming home too? But is the UK actually home for me anymore?

Not only that, but this was the first time coming back to the UK since the General Election. The result was both a mix of momentousness and anticlimax. For the first time in a long while I felt like I could actually be somewhat content with the result. That’s probably the first time in the last ten elections I’ve followed.

Sadly, being actually into politics meant that I had to kill my own joy by delving deeper into the analyse. An increase in the far right vote in the UK is hardly a cause for celebration. Nor is the fact that in real terms, this was more the Conservatives losing their votes than necessarily Labour gaining a whole lot.

More fundamentally though, I find myself falling into the sense of questioning how much will really be different. The mood of the country hasn’t felt all that different in the short time I’ve been in London, whilst even a massive majority for Labour can’t hide the fact that there is serious turmoil and economic difficulty. The elephant in the room of Brexit is going to be ignored for as long as possible.

I used to believe far more in a centrist ideology. My ideal approach was around uniting people through sensible reform to bring meaningful change. But my recent reflections have made me doubt whether this actually works all that well. Our societal fear of discomfort means that the softly softly approach can often lead to avoiding them.

Maybe I’m accepting the more radical side of myself. I thought that the answer has been to tone down my beliefs to make them more palatable. But I’ve actually found that this makes me just compromise on my core beliefs.

So here we are with a new government. I do imagine it will be an improvement. Yet in a bid to win the election through being more centrist, it’s hard to see it being much fundamental change. The rhetoric on immigration is still similar. Many Muslim family members are dismayed at the hypocrisy around Israel. Meanwhile Wes Streeting wants to keep the ban against puberty blockers for trans people.

These events also happened to coincide with my 31st birthday. I still am not sure how I feel about birthdays, yet this one was nice and quaint. I have little desire to overly reflect on the last 12 months as I have done in the past. Perhaps that will come in a time when I am feeling less fatigued and burnt out.

Connecting to my roots isn’t just about coming back to the UK. Whilst I am British, I am also Bangladeshi. The actual reason I came across was to complete my application for my Bangladeshi National ID at the High Commission.

It’s a challenging experience in many respects. I went to the High Commission with forms filled in in Bengali. I can’t really read them very well. Most of the conversation was in Bengali, of which I can only speak at a broken level. It doesn’t help either that our language is actually Sylheti, which whilst similar, was different.

A lot of this was trying to negotiate the form correctly. It’s not so easy to write the correct full address for our ancestral home in the village, especially when it needs to be written in Bengali. Fortunately, my brother had already gone for an appointment, so I could learn from the corrections he had to figure out. Still, I did need to phone my dad just to figure out some specific questions.

It’s hard not to feel some level of dysphoria with the different identity connections I have. I find it embarrassing that I can’t speak my maternal tongue better, whilst my connection with the UK, my land of birth, feels pretty mixed. I don’t really have too much energy to properly comprehend the Belgian or EU elections quite honestly, but suffice to say the results were not feel-good.

Right now, I’m looking to just connect to my own sense of beliefs. Sometimes, it’s not worth trying to mentally ‘figure out’ what all these things mean. After all, if I do enough social deconstruction, the idea of being from a certain land is, in reality, a figurative concept.

What really matters is where I am now. And I am grateful for what I have.

Keeping focus on the positives in our lives

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This week, I’m doing a speech around how to keep focus on the positives at my local Toastmasters club.

I chose this speech because it seemed a pretty relatable topic. If you’ve been following my writing, you are probably aware by now that I’ve been facing a fairly substantive burnout period. So it’s been particularly important to keep the positives in mind.

When our life routine gets thrown up in such a huge way, it can be hard to not fall into a sense of despair. I’ve questioned myself a lot. Sometimes I’ve felt guilty for taking time for myself. Other times, I’ve wondered whether I’ll ever recover again.

These are legitimate questions, and is a key part of the process. Nonetheless, solely focusing on them only leads to a downward spiral of anguish. Our brains tendency to think negatively is much stronger than its ability to look at the positives. It’s part of our survival mechanism, and it was necessary to keep ourselves alive during our evolution. So it is up to us to set a better balance.

The beauty is that every situation can have a positive if we choose to see it. For example, my fatigue has given me a chance to rest my body in a way that I’ve not really done for over a decade. I’m breaking out of the pattern of always needing to have a plan of what I am doing, instead allowing time to simply be in flow with life.

I believe that this burnout period happened for a reason, and I would not have faced it if I wasn’t able or ready to. The situation has pushed me to look into understanding my own brain, and in particular my neurodivergence.

Despite reading about psychology extensively in the last five years, I had little idea that my brain functioning was so atypical. It’s only when I started looking more into autistic burnout symptoms and reading further into it that I had any clue to better understanding myself.

This revelation has put so many things in my life in context: such as understanding why my reaction to things are so different to the people around me, and why I found it so tricky to make friends throughout my life.

This period is a relatively short time in the wider span of my life. So I know that taking the time now is not making me ‘miss out’ on anything. On the contrary, I think it sets me up for a far more joyous and expansive life for the coming decades.

The best thing I can do for myself is enjoying the moment I have now, as well as appreciate the things I do have. I’m very grateful that I have the space and support systems to allow me to recover. I also appreciate myself for having constructed my life in a way that allows me to have these things too.

When I hone in on this space of gratitude, my life feels lighter and easier. I can feel the anxiety and stress lifting. Life becomes just that little bit sweeter.

(more…) “Keeping focus on the positives in our lives”

Overcoming the fear of letting people down

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I’ve always prided myself on the ability to be consistent. Generally, when I say I will do things, I tend to do them.

Whilst this is a rather positive trait to have, I’m also starting to see where it can fall into unhelpful behaviours too.

This recent period of fatigue has been a moment where I really needed to go into cocoon mode. I’m not the biggest fan of the cliché of prioritising oneself, but here I really needed to make sure I took the time to rest, in particular reducing external contact.

That’s been tricky for me. I’m someone who wants to make space for people in my life and be available for them. It’s only become evident recently how difficult I find it to say no if someone wants to see or do something with me. I quickly feel guilty if I turn people down, and the feeling of guilt can hit me pretty hard.

I’m currently in my recovery period, so my energy levels are at a higher point than they were a few months ago. My internal social bee wants to spend more time with people, so I’ve been scheduling more socialising time. Yet this has been a challenge since it can be unclear as to how much energy I’ll really have on the day. My tendency is to overestimate, and overschedule.

I’ve found it a real challenge to live up to my (probably unrealistic) challenges of not letting people down. I get very stressed at the idea of being late to a social appointment (say by 5-10 minutes). It’s a bit of a recipe for disaster in my current state. My executive dysfunction makes simple tasks of getting up and taking a shower can feel heavy and confusing, meaning I can take a long time just to get out of bed. This doesn’t help for meeting up with people at a pre-agreed time.

It’s probably an ‘autism thing’, but I find it difficult to cope with sudden shifts in plans if they were quite big. Whilst I’m fine with someone no longer being able to make a coffee date, if it’s something bigger (e.g. an event I’m revolving my day around) I can feel lost when such plans fall through last minute.

It’s probably why I’m also so keen to avoid cancelling things for other people. After all, I’d rather be the solution, rather than the problem. And for the most part, I think the people around me appreciate this part about me.

Yet it also means that I can end up forcing myself to go to things, even when it might not have been a good idea. Whilst I love the idea of ‘being my word’, I also can recognise that I do not need to be an infallible human.

I never quite saw myself as a people pleaser a few years ago, but my recent experiences on the social side have opened my eyes to how needy I can get for people’s approval. In these situations, my motivating driver is a sense of guilt, rather than an actual will to be with someone. Guilt doesn’t tend to be a particularly helpful driver in the long run.

I think the solution is to be light with ourselves. I’m not a failure of a human being for having this challenge. I can also let myself have a margin of error – I don’t need to always aim for 100% consistency, and I can allow myself to cancel on things if I need to.

Even if I cancelled a little bit more I’d probably still be one of the most reliable people I know.

Letting go of our mind’s self control mechanism

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You’ve probably heard about the importance of letting go of the things that we can’t control. I’m pretty sure I’ve written about it several times myself.

But what about letting go of the things that actually, we can control?

As I’ve been progressing further into my therapy, I’ve had the chance to explore how much time and effort I spend managing myself. In other words, how I think about how I come across, what I should say and how I should present myself in a situation.

This is beyond some level of general reflection. I’m talking about my brain being a constant computer calculating a situation in the background. Putting this into words, it becomes pretty obvious that its a very exhausting process, yet it’s also something I’ve been doing it subconsciously pretty much my whole life.

This fits in with my hypothesis that I am autistic: my normal modus operandi being a bit too weird to fit in, so I learnt to get very good at analysing what I’m meant to say in situations. (Sidenote that I am due to get my diagnosis done in the next month or so hopefully – fingers crossed). Like many adult autistic people, I thought this was normal and what everybody did. Turns out that this is not the case.

Whilst it is good for us to have some level of filter, turned up to the extreme this can make us seem robotic and inauthentic. We can quickly get to a place where we are constantly second guessing ourselves. For much of my life, I’ve felt like a chameleon and found it hard to know what I really thought.

For me, the idea of relaxing my mind is somewhat terrifying. I’ve had real bouts of fear. I feel like a child whose had my favourite teddy bear taken away from me.

The fear is legitimate – I’ve used this mechanism of internal filtering to get through life. With the weird and wonderful way I work, I imagine that without it, I would have found myself ostracised, and potentially at the edges of society. But I also recognise that there is a downside to filtering everything I say. If nothing else, it’s exhausting, and I’m not sure my energy levels will return to a point where I can do it anymore at such a constant level.

Whilst my case might be on the more extreme end, I think we all get caught up in trying to control things. I see this happen more often as people get stressed, and it feels like there’s plenty of stress to go around right now.

Just because we can control things, doesn’t mean we should. I think it’s why so many people have a hard time delegating control or being open to different management styles. In more relaxed settings, I don’t think that we see such levels of squabbling around minor issues than we see in the workplace.

Acting without analysing is what brings us closer to our animalistic instincts. These instincts are what made us survive and thrive for millions of years.

Keeping grounded in a changing world

Photo by EXPANALOG on Unsplash

Change is a constant, whether we like it or not.

If you’re into your politics, then you’ll probably notice that there’s a lot of change this year.

The European elections took place last week. For those unfamiliar, it’s the voting across the EU Member States for the representatives in the European Parliament. Broadly, it sets the precedent of what direction EU politics will go in for the next five years.

But one election was not enough. There were also federal elections in Belgium on the same day. The results of the EU elections led French President Emmanuel Macron to call for elections in the coming weeks.

Oh, and did anyone also notice there were elections coming up in the UK? Those will take place on 4th July.

Outside of European countries, there were elections in some of the most populated countries – the subcontinent had elections in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan (all with differing levels of drama) as well as in Indonesia.

Oh, and later this year there’s the small matter of the Presidential elections in the United States too.

Outside of the elections, we’re also seeing the devastating killing of Palestinians in the Middle East, whilst the war in Ukraine also rumbles on.

In the midst of all these political shifts, it can be pretty easy to get overwhelmed. I certainly have felt it. And yet, it’s important to keep on going with our lives rather than falling into despair.

It may not surprise you to hear that I am generally more on the left of the political spectrum. So the general shift towards the right in the European and Belgian politics has felt pretty disheartening. The shift away from climate policy is quite terrifying for the sake of tackling climate change within time.

But the most personal part has been the growing rhetoric railing against diversity, in particular trans and LGBT+ rights. It hits deeper when I personally know trans people just trying to live their lives. Considering less than 1% of people are transgender, the focus on the topic has felt really disproportionate to me, not to mention rather different to the image portrayed in the media.

Election results meant additional bouts of anxiety at the beginning of this week for me. I had to deliberately distance myself from politics so as not to get further stressed by it all. That was easier said than done, considering how (overly?) connected on social media I am.

What helped me this week was trying to keep all this news in balance. As humans, we can fall into a tendency to overreact to negative news. In the case of politics, we can quite quickly fall into doom and gloom because things didn’t go the way we wanted them to. I see this more in younger people who have less experience of going through the highs and lows of election cycles..

I try to see these things philosophically – politics has a tendency of oscillating between left and right. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. As is the wheel of life. In certain spaces there are losses, whilst in other areas there are progress. It’s never so black and white.

For my politico friends – it’s also important to remember that there is a world outside of politics. So many people I know get so absorbed into the politics bubble that they forget that the rest of the world carries on existing. Indeed, for most people, elections don’t actually carry that much importance.

If we want positive change, we have to get comfortable with change that we don’t necessarily agree with.

So take each day as it comes. Change is part of politics – indeed it’s part of human nature.