Self-Reliance Means…
Thoughts on individuality, relationships, and mental health
From the outside looking in, the past few years have been the most challenging and difficult times in my adult life. What is clear to me is how much of my perspective was subject to the input by other people. As a result life was under a type of umbrella where my thoughts were influenced in unhealthy ways.
The easiest way to see this is looking at my relationships. Three years ago I was in a toxic marriage, maintained contact with friends who consistently used me as a punching bag to feel better about themselves, and allowed myself to be overly concerned with pleasing my parents or managers. Taken as a whole, the life I lived was not my own — like so many other people, I had low self-worth and told myself it was a badge of honor to continue to hold these relationships together.
I didn’t “move on” from bad situations, I stayed put. For whatever reason, I thought this was how life for me was supposed to be. All of that came apart, painfully, and now on the other side of it I can reflect back and use these memories as warnings about how such a mindset is unhealthy.
The reality is I still have my core values and passions, but achieving day-to-day function is a different process. It takes patience to regrow life into limbs that had been starved for so long. Every day brings reminders of the way I used to think, and I try very hard to not continue in those habits.
Instead of taking a comic-book, overly dramatic view of my old life that burned to the ground and feel like I have a mission to show the world, to get back what was lost, I’ve set much smaller goals. When I awake, I see the good things in my current world as a foundation. Being grateful to not be in physical pain, to not be in captivity, to not have a day full of doing things for others results in a genuine wave of contentment. As a bonus, I’ve been able to re-access my music collection, and putting on a lively, uplifting tune has done wonders for my mood…
What I’ve been able to do since getting out of jail is work with what limited resources are available and do my best to use them to the fullest extent. The trend thus far has been to make progress. From sleeping on the street to a group rehabilitation program for homeless men, to a group home, each step has been a successful upgrade from the last.
It’s not like I got a blank check or have bought my way into better living. Having financial support is not always possible for many at the bottom rung of society, but when I have received it, my drive has used it to rebuild structure and get to work. Often I recall my progress as a guitarist — starting fresh, the effort it took to rise through the levels of capability took hard work, took time, and included plenty of setbacks. I do remember the days when I would practice for so long I would rip skin from my fingertips, would grow blisters, and have to heal before I could continue.
After those blisters healed, the skin would grow back stronger. Once the pain was gone, I could return to my practice, and through practicing, I grew callouses. It was a natural, progressive chain of events that enabled me to continue advancing my capabilities with my instrument.
This is a useful analogy for how I’m looking at life now. By putting in the work, daily, to get a healthy perspective when possible, I’m training myself to emphasize Humility and Strength as a form of balance. In jail I came up with three (3) concepts that I’m trying to live by as a way of affirming self-reliance in how I live my life:
Accommodation Willingness
Occasionally I have to remind myself that some people will overload me with their troubles and challenges in life and drag me down. This is a delicate issue with a person like me who genuinely cares about the welfare of others — I’m not a sociopath. The problem, for me, arises when I let myself get convinced by them to share in their troubles or make them my own.
I’ve recently experienced this with a person who may be incapable of being successfully independent and claiming they deserve accommodation because “I have nowhere else to go!” Well, that’s their problem, and by allowing them to make it my problem, I’m putting myself in a position where I’m putting their welfare above my own in a situation where I need to concentrate on my challenges, not theirs. At some point it is healthy to back away, be sympathetic, but not be convinced I have some kind of responsibility for their success or failure.
Circumstance Attachment
One very clear observation in the past few years is understanding “nothing lasts forever” can be a useful perspective when in balance. Good times are good, bad times are bad, and how long each one lasts isn’t always within my control. Realistically, I’m a very small gear in a very big machine.
When I recognize a situation, where I’m living, what I’m eating, who I’m communicating with as friends, I can see it as part of a longer timeline. For now I am here, eventually I will be over there — but the trap is thinking that over there has to be a version of being over here. This is not true.
The result is taking the time to evaluate my current circumstance and consider whether or not I am able to make a change. In jail, no, it was beyond my control. Where I’m living, on a tight budget, it is possible if I put in effort to find an alternative. Will the alternative be an improvement? That’s the goal, but I can’t know if it is a positive or negative change until it has actually taken place.
It’s a rather big description for the idea of “picking up my toys and leaving” but with the mindset that negativity is always around the corner, yet so is positivity, so staying in one place miserable isn’t healthy. I need to be brave and willing to make changes. Then make more changes later. Then be ready for when changes I don’t make come my way…
Understanding Perceived Limitations by Others
Having skills and talents as a creative person has exposed me to a lot of negativity from naysayers. There are some people with personalities that thrive on domineering others, of using relationships as an unhealthy platform for venting their emotional baggage. Sure, being a dreamer has its downsides, but disappointment can come after the attempt — there are people who will loudly tell me not to even try in the first place.
It really can be summarized by noting “just because they can’t imagine themselves doing it, the idea of me doing it makes them angry.” It’s been so prevalent in my life that coming to grips with this very real, very destructive input is something I have to be cautious about internalizing. Sharing concerns with somebody about dangerous behavior is one thing. Telling a person not to try and share their artistic talents because it’s a foreign idea to them is a limitation of their own perception.
An Image of Self-Reliance
So in my current life, I’m not holding up any trophies right about now. A much more appropriate image would be of an athlete training for the Olympics — committed to putting in the mental, physical, and emotional effort to achieve to their highest potential. Then, when life opens an opportunity to deploy those skills, I will be healthy and ready to do my best work and see how it turns out. As Jean-Paul Sartre noted…
We have only this life to live.
