I’m a rather rigid person. I have a very high expectation of meeting all of my routines, my standards, and my goals on a daily and weekly basis. The problem with this is that if I don’t meet any part of those standards, the rest of the day falls by the wayside. If I miss my sleep goals, I struggle with my morning routine. If I don’t get my morning routine in, I engage in negative self-talk, which ruins the energy I have for the rest of the day. Where I have plenty of places throughout the day to stop and catch up with myself, I tend to cater to the self-defeating words and behaviors rather than push through to the next goal. This is essentially perfectionism.
When I had to get back on a mood stabilizing medication, recently, I found myself exhausted all the time. I was incapable of meeting my standards of self-care. Uncomfortable and inconvenient simply became impossible. I was very hard on myself about it. My inability to put myself first all the time uncovered some harsh truths about my recovery plan. It was a combination of stigma, feeling bad for having to revisit an old diagnosis, being too tired to follow through on that which I preach about, and the medication-induced fog of basically just not knowing what was going on all the time as well as I normally can. It forced me to realize that I’ve not been being kind to myself, and that I need to lighten up.
It wasn’t just because of medication, though that was the catalyst of the realization. My life hadn’t been fun, lately. I’ve been so focused on therapy that I forgot about the fact that there’s life outside of it. I mean, I make a point to read as much as I can about it, because I really do want to be what I’m writing about. I want to feel that feeling of being happy, healthy, clear-headed, and emotionally balanced again. I do know what I need to do, but I expect myself to incorporate and master these things overnight. I don’t want to make room for the times that I lose executive function on a simple thought or triggering situation. I don’t want to make room for those times I would get excited and watch that dopamine copter fly off and out of my control. I don’t want to make room because I don’t want to deal with those moments…because I don’t want to have those moments.
I felt pressure to do better in places where I was already enough as I am. I was misinterpreting social cues (that I already struggle with) as indicators that I was not being appropriate or I was wrong entirely. I was being super mean to myself if I didn’t meet my daily goals. Which, this pressure was one of the reasons said dysfunction and manias would happen. One thing flipped the wrong direction, and I felt so guilty and ashamed of myself, because things I didn’t want to deal with anymore just came out with such intensity that I couldn’t deny having a problem with them. Those are just the two loudest things.
That’s the thing about being a Jonah. If you got a whale of a problem, the whale will eventually spit you out where you need to be spat, which is how I ended up back on a mood stabilizer for a diagnosis I didn’t want to have in the first place. Gosh, this sounds like something I said not too long ago about alcoholism.
Did I mention I’m stubborn?
Anyway, accepting the fact that I needed the help (and not just a symptom soother like what I was on previously), and following through on it, forced me into a two week slowdown, since the mood stabilizer basically zombifies you for a couple of weeks until it levels off in your system. Over the span of the first two weeks, and even through the first two-three months, the zombie feeling fades, and you begin to feel more levelheaded. I know, now, that my circadian rhythm is way off. I’m awake at 4am like it’s 4pm, and I struggle to get consistent full eight hour sleeps.
But I’ve learned that being as rigid as I’ve been in this condition is unfair. I can’t do what I expect of myself. I can’t be on top of my game, I can’t achieve most of my daily standards. Heck, until a couple of days ago, I’ve barely been able to get fully dressed within an hour of waking up. My morning walk was less hit and more miss, and that was a major bookmark in my day between “self time” and “people time.” I had no choice but to relax my grip on needing standards and expectations to be met, and that included people, not just routines and personal expectations.
Flexibility, in this case, hasn’t just been about loosening my grip, it’s also about letting things exist as they are, and that includes myself. Attachment, after all, is the root of all suffering. Attachment to routines, to people, to stigmas even. Attachment implies you must have some control over the thing. You don’t have control over anything, really, outside of your own self-work, but even in that, you have to be able to bend when you need to. If you wake up at the right time for a good morning routine, and you have no water, that eliminates your ability to take a shower, and unless you have bottled water on hand, the coffee is going to have to be acquired somewhere else. If someone does something that implies distance and you don’t have the knowledge as to why (that you’re not always privy to, anyway), you might assume that you need to correct something that never came up in the first place. I’m stubborn. My old habits are if you cause a problem, you attempt to fix it until you fix it correctly. But if you’re attempting to correct something that doesn’t exist, then you’re not even beating your head against a wall, you’re just headbanging into nothingness. Might as well join a metal band at this point. When the attachment creates such a desire to control that you are willing to create problems to correct in order to feel that things are maintained, even subconsciously, then you have traded flexibility for the illusion of stability. Illusion is just another word for cover. Like I did with my alcoholism. Like I did with how bad my trauma was. Like I did with my rigidity, old diagnoses, my need for stronger medication, my perfectionism…
The further I advance into my own recovery and therapy, I’m learning there’s a very common theme in all of the work we are doing: detachment, letting things exist as they are (including myself), and learning to flow with those things.
If I must maintain it, then I must also let go of it.
Attachment feels like self-care, but it’s really just control cosplaying as responsibility. When you tell yourself something has to happen a certain way, be it a routine, a mood, relationships, a version of yourself you’re trying to build or maintain, you stop working on what’s in front of you and start flirting with the version you think you’re supposed to maintain. Instead of responding to life as it happens, you end up micromanaging it. Being flexible doesn’t negate consistency. It doesn’t contradict commitment. It opposes attachment. When you let things be as they are, you stop forcing it to conform to that version you believe is “right” that you are holding so tightly to. Because changing your present shape in life doesn’t happen if you’re too busy trying to maintain a shape you haven’t even acquired yet. You cannot maintain your best self if you are not there, yet.
Detachment isn’t rejection. It’s allowing present realities to exist without forcing the standard to match the version you think you’re supposed to maintain. Attachment says “If I am not perfect, if things are not reciprocal, if all steps are not checked off, then I have failed myself and everyone around me.” Detachment says “I do not need to be perfect, I can allow this relationship to circulate and breathe, and I can miss a step or two if I must. It is what it is, and I am satisfied with that.”
Flexibility and detachment, therefore, are one and the same. Flexibility is loosening the grip on the need to be perfect at a thing. Detachment is loosening the grip on perfecting a thing. And both are incredibly relieving. As with all things, it takes practice to make permanent. But making a practice of it makes everything go so much more smoothly. Let it go. Stop struggling. Learn to exist without clinging to and tearing off every branch of every tree that hangs over the river you’re flowing with. Just. Be.
That’s what radical self-care is all about: learning to let go of all of the harsh and unfair standards you were raised to meet, and raise yourself above them.