 So much to say about this. So many different ways to say it. So many different experiences of leaping. The one that comes to mind a lot is one that until recently haunted me. A few years ago I took an awkward leap of faith and did not land on the other side, or wherever people wind up when they tell the happy ending stories about taking that leap of faith and the net appearing. The idea behind that saying is relatively down to earth. When we take (measured) risks, we often find that things work out much better than we feared - people/opportunities come into our lives at the right time creating a smoother landing than we expected or even hoped for. I know that has happened to me, but usually with things that didn't feel like a big leap (i.e. by the time I made the "big" change, it was really just the next natural step.) And I believe that big leaps that end beautifully must happen to others - but we usually only hear about it from the people that make it because they lived to tell the tale and their success brought them into the spotlight where they could share it, where we would wind up hearing about it. But what about the others who didn’t survive, or who are still falling? It doesn’t always have a neat little ending - people can die in pursuit of their dreams (well, we all will die eventually on the way somewhere). Or things can get worse before they get better, which is what happened to me when I left my day job and created my first children’s book only to spend all my money producing it and winding up virtually homeless and reliving childhood nightmares for several years after. My initial understanding of the experience was two fold. One, that I took the leap a bit prematurely, not well calculated and with a lot of anxiety. It was more than the healthy excited anxiety when one stretches outside ones comfort zone; and more like the panic and stress from being way too far out without the proper resources and support in place. And two, that net didn’t appear because I didn’t have enough faith. While I whole heartedly believed that with faith it would appear, there was a part of me that didn’t believe it would appear for me, and/or that I didn’t deserve it - possibly in part due to the lack of preparation and strategy. (The strategy and planning piece ties into the faith piece so much that it's hard to untie them in way to really know what is causing what). The frustrating part of it, was that when I wandered back to the 9-5 job world with my tail between my legs, I still felt like I was falling. Sure, I evaded homelessness and brought myself back up to being able to support myself, but still worse off in many ways than I was before I took the leap. Meanwhile, day by day, my dream of having a successful career in children’s media continued to grow and evolve while every step I took was too slow and ineffective to make a dent or get a foothold anywhere, so the gap between where I was and my dreams just kept growing. It was a literal nightmare. And up until a few months ago, I was still falling. A spiritual retreat to Peru in 2019 to treat trauma didn't stop the fall - it may have changed the course of my fall, but I still can't tell if it was for the better yet - as I was also re-traumatized and had things come up without the proper support to heal it. A spiritual entrepreneurship program in 2020 was the first thing that started to slow the decent with some basic online business skills and exposure to a group of wonderful supportive women. At the end of the program I finally got it. I finally received the unequivocal message that I needed not just to get trauma therapy, but from the RIGHT people. When I started to get the trauma therapy I needed, I started to learn how to fly, in bits and pieces: how to navigate stress and the unknown without crumbling and falling, and how to show up outside my comfort zone consistently in baby steps. While I still feel like I'm falling, I'm starting to wonder whether we every really find solid ground. I'm starting to realize that wha ti need to do is learn an entirely different skill set - how to hold myself above the abyss of helplessness without a corporate job, and to learn how to fly in the creative entrepreneurship world. Let's see! This quote really resonates: “The bad news is, we are falling through the air without a parachute. The good news is, there is no ground." ~Chogyam Trungpa 
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I am in the process of both literally and figuratively drawing myself back to life, as I emerge from a nine year depression and begin healing life-long untreated traumas and early conditioning. In addition to being diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in my twenties I operate on the outskirts of the autism spectrum and suffer from untreated cPTSD and major depressive disorder that got worse as I got older and resulted in me becoming totally isolated and cut off from human contact. It is my deep belief that most mental illness is a result of early childhood developmental trauma, which I define as anything that distorts a child's perception of itself as anything but basically good and lovable. For me, mental illnesses are really just names for a set of symptoms that arise as a result of various disrupted developmental processes and untreated trauma. A child can be traumatized even while being raised by well-meaning parents, because it has such a simplistic way of interpreting information. Typically, healthy parents will help guide the child in processing and working through them and regulating their nervous system so they don't carry around the activated trauma state into adulthood. The outlook, however, is more grim for those who are raised by addicts and people with untreated mental illnesses and traumas themselves, where trauma after trauma gets piled on without anyone helping to process it. Almost everyone is bound to experience something scary by the time they are 8 years old. But what makes something emerge as a mental illness later or dysfunctional behavior later resides in how it was dealt with immediately afterward, as much as the baseline nervous system stability at the time of the event. I spent the greater part of two decades trying to address my issues by taking responsibility for everything that was going on in my life and understanding how reality was impacted by my perception. And at 35, I thought I had a grip on things. I thought I had finally figured out how not to go off the handle in work environments, how not to have nervous breakdowns in public and wind up in hospitals after a break-up, how to basically seem "normal." But it was all surface level. Sure, I created some new beliefs and ideals that helped me maintain stability. I grew some resilience through sheer acts of will that helped develop confidence and social skills. I even became an expert at finding the silver lining in every situation. But it was all mental, and overall the deepest wounds of the heart hadn't healed and I still found myself in ridiculously abusive situations (when "I should know better!"), bordering on poverty (when "I have a Harvard degree!"), and eventually, as of a couple years ago, just fading away into the oblivion of an unlived life, completely isolated and out of sync with the things I really loved. My belief is that it was all due to a low level of self-worth I carried around in me, deep in my cells, despite intellectually knowing better, despite reading so many self-help books, despite subscribing to all these lofty ideals of "anything is possible" and "we are all worthy of our dreams." It is only this past year that I have actually started to do the work of real healing - which no one really tells you how to do. They just tell you to love yourself more. But how do you even do that? They tell you to meditate, but what if meditation uncovers such painful traumas that it sends you into a psychosis? No one tells you about that. No on tells you that your problem isn't your mind, but in your body's ability to regulate stress. It IS possible to change - but it must be with the right team of healers who actually know about healing trauma (and at the same time humble enough to know they don't know everything) - to really uncover the deep set beliefs embedded in our nervous system and underlying our experiences of life, and release them and replace them with the truth of being lovable - the truth that people with healthy self-esteem naturally embody - the truth that everyone deserves to feel. (And by the way the healing processes it doesn't have to be expensive like many in the self help world will lead you to believe). I started this process of uncovering and releasing deep stored beliefs in December of 2020, and started making real headway this summer around the time I started a 100 Epic Day challenge where I committed to creating and playing with art every day (with the intention of become a person that was healed). And for the first time in my life, I see progress - real progress - in getting outside the mental prison I've been in since as long as I can remember. Breaking free seems to have very little to do with any kind of mental process, or brute force behavioral changes, and everything to do with getting present enough to access the core wounding memories in the safety of loving professionals - professionals that don't tune out the second your 50 minute-hour is over, and really hold a space of love and compassion. So far drawing, rather than writing, is what helps the most in processing, because it gets me out of my head more.  |
Author:Amanda I. Greene This is where I share thoughtful, and sometimes unpolished, musings in the form of philosophical explorations, inspirations, poems, and artwork.
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