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[wednak]

The one where I make🥛

Oh dear Weddud. I‘ve been thinking about your song (lol thanks for using the links btw, I would not have recognized Vienna nor Billy Joel if you hadn‘t… tragic I know) and I have so many thoughts that‘s it‘s hard to even know where to begin. 

I knew from the moment I hit publish that there was a high likelihood that Ed would be annoyed, feel resentful, rushed or whatever else you might be feeling about my actions. But that was and is okay with me, because this isn‘t for him, it‘s for Weddud. No matter how far you might have buried him, I know he will always be inside of you somewhere. And it‘s him alone that I‘m writing these for.

Nevertheless, I have been reflecting and there is a good chance I have been letting my enthusiasm for the topic and my own personal comfort in this particular space influence my judgement which then came across as if I was trying to rush you or push you to do something that you may have deemed an unworthy investment of time and energy for your current mission in life. I have thought about it and I will happily change it up and tone all of it down but what I won‘t do is stop. 

Because what I need you to understand is that I have no demands or asks of you. I’m not afraid or trying to hurry along some imagined future. I‘m not doing this because I expect you to change so that one day you‘ll come back and be ready to give me all the things I dream about. There is no price for my love, it‘s not conditional and it doesn‘t need to be repaid with marriage, children, money and success or whatever else you think you need to be able to provide in order to deserve to be loved one day. I don‘t expect you to want me to be part of your life, I don‘t expect you to respond in any way whatsoever, I don‘t even expect you to read any of this if you don‘t want to or if it doesn’t feel right to you. We haven‘t spoken in nearly a year and I have absolutely no idea what is going on in your life. For all that I know you could be happy and thriving and if so, I would be ecstatic to deem everything I have said completely and utterly void. But we all have those broken pieces of ourselves that haunt us, the pain and suffering that feels like it’s too much to bear, and for whatever reason God has granted me the privilege to know yours better than anyone. To this day, that privilege is one of the most precious gifts I’ve ever been given. I cherish it with all my heart and I will continue to honor it to the best of my God-given ability. And so all that I care about at the very core of my being is that you know that I‘m here and that there is another way. There is always another way.

I could come here every week to write about psychology or Bible verses or the weather or what food I ate for dinner or any of the various annoying things people have done in the world. It wouldn‘t actually matter to me. I chose to write about what I wrote about because a) I thought if you and I are both stuck in whatever you want to call this bond that makes us return to this Tumblr thing over and over again then I might as well talk about something useful that could help you make your life better and b) thinking through these topics and writing them out in a structured manner actually helps me a ton in applying them to my own life and my work.

But at the end of the day, what I care most about isn‘t any of that stuff about trauma, emotions, the window of tolerance or any of the things I was planning to write about ADHD, genetics, mental illness, etc. What I care about is making sure you understand that it doesn‘t matter what you do, there is always a space where you will find unconditional love and forgiveness. And while I try to model that unconditional love and forgiveness for you, I have no doubt that my presence in your life is nothing but a sign post or a vessel, designed by the universe to lead you down a path to the truest form of unconditional love and forgiveness there is.

Jesus is our Savior. To me, that isn‘t just an ideological phrase to utter in church on Sunday or the most recent way of virtue signaling. It’s a metaphor for the realest truth I’ve ever been able to find. It‘s the answer to life‘s most fundamental problem which the knowledge of life itself, the knowledge of its finiteness and the knowledge of suffering. Jesus is our Savior because what he did was recognize something so powerful and wise about the universe that it has moved billions of people over thousands of years and helped them resurrect their lives from the ashes, to turn pain and sorrow into true meaning, hope and joy. 

And so what that means for me is that it doesn‘t matter how hurt, resentful or angry I might feel with you (and believe me I get tempted to fall down that rabbit hole every single day), I will always choose love and forgiveness instead. Over and over and over again. You can judge me and think me weak. You can tell yourself I’m just afraid or I don‘t understand or I‘m trying to distract you from your ambitions. You can scoff at me and go back to thinking all of our time together was a waste. You can think whatever else that you might be thinking but none of it will change the faith I have in what I‘m doing here and who I am becoming. 

You have a soul worth saving EG. It doesn‘t matter what you‘ve done, what you‘re doing or what you will do. The weight of our sins doesn‘t matter to God, His arms are always open and redemption is always possible. On the path towards a successful and fulfilling life, God would never require you to abandon yourself and forsake your soul as payment for success. He would never require you to punish yourself for mistakes made in the past. And He would surely never require you to achieve a state of flawlessness before you could receive His love, mercy and generosity. 

That doesn‘t mean we shouldn‘t all strive to become the best versions of ourselves in order to serve God, our family and our communities. Service is the truest and most rewarding form of gratitude there is. But that is very different from the idea that we have to be perfect in order to become worthy of love, happiness and success.

I‘ve said this to you in so many ways. And I‘ll continue to say it in any way that I can think of. I‘ll say it using psychological language, religious language or any other language that I know. I‘ll learn Latin or Greek or even Dutch if that‘s what it will take for you to be able to hear what God so clearly wants you to hear: 

You are worthy beyond your wildest dreams ESG. You can find your way to Vienna without having to continue to sacrifice your soul. Vienna doesn‘t have to wait until that one day when you’ll finally be worthy of arriving there. You can continue to run away from the omens, the signs and little nudges, the synchronistic moments, the voice in the back of your mind trying to get your attention. You can run until your lungs run out of air, your body is shutting down and all of your hair has turned grey. Or you can decide to stop running and rise from the ashes like a phoenix. 

The choice is completely up to you. The power is in your hands alone. My only job here is to continue to remind you of that … which is exactly what I‘m going to do.

(Read the comments) 

[wednak]

WW#6: The one where I 🐄

Deuteronomy 8:2-3

And you [the Israelites] shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

Corinthians 12:9-10

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

[wednak]

Weddud Wednesday #5: A void we all try to avoid

Lol first things first, I wish I could claim the copyrights to that hilarious title but unfortunately it was a joke that I read a few weeks ago in the book that I’m reading. When I saw it, it immediately sparked the idea for this type of post so here I am, venturing into the void we all try so hard to avoid venturing into.

I’ve had a really long and somewhat stressful day, and I’m exhausted, so today, I don’t really feel like being teachy explainer Nn, I kind of feel like being genuine and vulnerable Nn. So I thought I’d just try to share without thinking too much about what I’m writing.

I can remember several different conversations that you and I have had about “the void” and all the different strategies we use to fill up the feeling of that void with things/people/activities, etc.

Before I read that joke about the void we all try to avoid, I’d never really thought to connect this idea of the “void” that you and I have talked about to other psychological concepts or ideas that I know of.

Cuz what is that void actually? Is it memories of past experiences and trauma? Is it negative emotions we don’t want to feel? Is it insecurities and parts of ourselves that we want to hide from others? Is it all of the above and more? Or is it something else entirely?

I don’t actually know the correct answer to this and somewhat doubt that there even could be one. But there are a few different ideas that have popped into my mind while I’ve been thinking about this for the past few weeks.

As humans, I think we all probably have the same foundational void that comes along with being a conscious being in this marvelously beautiful and tragic universe that we find ourselves in. It seems like a rather unlikely phenomenon that humans would respond to human consciousness, the knowledge of good and evil and the awareness of our coming death with anything other than complete and utter overwhelm and existential dread.

Life is fucking weird man. It just is. There is so much happiness and so much suffering and the knowledge of all of it is a handful to deal with on an everyday basis.

I don’t know if this has any scientific basis but to me it makes a whole lot of sense that once humans realized what the fuck their consciousness had just unlocked for them, our minds and bodies would work really hard to be like oooook, if we can’t unlearn this shit anymore let’s at least just suppress that knowledge back down as far as it can go so we don’t have to think about that fucking mess and become completely debilitated from functioning as a living organism.

So I think in a way, we all probably have a collective void that we really don’t like to think about. All of these things that cause discomfort, anxiety, fear, sadness or whatever reaction we might want to lump into “existential dread”. That sort of meaninglessness that we know deep down is at the root of our very existence.

Religion exists across culture because it provides us with a meaning, a WHY and a way out of the meaninglessness. That makes sense to me. And it also makes sense that everyone these days is losing their goddamn minds because we have nothing else to replace that anchor with.

Responsibility for children, a project, a job, a community or group of people is probably also a really good tool to help anchor us to something that resembles “stability”. Good luck bringing that one up today lol.

Marriage is probably also up there. Being shackled into a commitment that you can’t escape from, no matter how badly you want to or how badly you screw up. And yet we dish out divorces like they’re candy. Ahhhhh 2018 me.

We’ve pretty much eradicated all of the “effective” strategies that humans have used for thousands if not millions of years to cope with innocent Eve eating that apple in the garden. No fucking wonder that everyone is turning to fucked up coping mechanisms to deal with the void.

All of that is the collective part of the void that I’ve been thinking about. The part that we all kind of have in common.

But then people also have their individual voids that they are trying to avoid, don’t they?

The shit I’m running from, that is different from what you’re running from, that is different from what my mom is running from, that is different from what your dad is running from.

That part of the void is probably more like the personal shit we experience and suppress because we don’t know how to deal with it and so the only strategy we know is to stuff it somewhere where it is outside of our conscious awareness.

This is literally when I had the idea that the void could be what Jung called the Shadow.

Should not have been a surprise lol.

You have the collective aspect which is part of what he called the Collective Unconscious. And then you have the personal aspect which is part of what he called the Personal Unconscious.

Shadow is such a good word for it too imo. Because it really fucking feels like a Shadow doesn’t it?

It’s always there and creeping right behind you but it’s never quite with you either and it isn’t “real” enough for you to grab or get a hold of. You can feel it but at the same time it also just feels empty and numb.

This murky thing that always follows us no matter where we go.

Sure, if we face away from it, we can’t really see it. And if we try hard enough we might momentarily forget that it’s right behind us. But at the end of the day, it never actually goes away.

I think the thing I love about psychology so much is probably that it gives you at least some tools to deal with all the personal things you’re running from. They’re so different for everybody but on average, people can usually find something that helps them face whatever trauma or insecurity they might have suppressed out of conscious awareness. And thus reduce that feeling of emptiness and numbness that happens as a result.

Now the existential void is a whole other can of worms. I don’t know if that one will ever go away, even with religion, responsibility, marriage, children or whatever else humans cook up to try to deal with it.

“There is a burden that comes with this level of power. The burden of knowing. Or maybe the burden of knowing that you can never know. That at the end of everything, the only thing that is certain is you and your relationship with god or the universe or whatever it is you want to call it. Nothing really matters, and that’s why everything matters. Despite all the burdens, it’s the greatest freedom I’ve ever known and the greatest that life has to offer.”

I’ve tried so many times of the years but I’ve never really been able to put into words exactly what my life used to feel like before I reached that level of insight.

I think the thing that inspired me about the void is that it comes pretty close.

It was like I was numb and empty in a place in my mind and my heart where there should have been some sort of feeling. That a part of my experience of life had to be made unconscious for otherwise I couldn’t have functioned in the way a normal child or teenager is expected to function. But I had absolutely zero awareness that it was happening. I had so freaking little self-awareness in general because if I had had more of it, I would have been aware of how miserable I was and I don’t know if I could have figured out how to deal with that.This part of myself that felt unheard and abandoned, that should have felt shattered by the pain, rejection and inauthenticity I was experiencing.

But what did I do, instead I projected all of that anxiety, fear and sadness onto intense insecurities about things that the universe provided as an excuse and that I had a vague sense of control over.. having bad hair or skin, being too tall, being too skinny, … Looking back on it now, I can see that sure, I might have been a bit of a lanky, awkward kid with frizzy hair and bad teenage skin and those things might have fueled my negative self-image as I was growing up. But that deep-rooted self-hatred that bubbled up from the void every time I looked at myself in the mirror or in a photograph didn’t really have anything to do with my hair or my skin or my boobs. That came from a place so much deeper where there was an endless source of anxiety, anger, fear, grief and sadness.

Is it weird that thinking about the void in the way I talked about it today kind of just makes me feel better about all of that?

I guess it’s the realization that while we all have our personal shit that we run from and that stuff can be rough, there’s always an element of just having normal human existential dread to deal with as we grow up. And damn if you’re not given the proper tools to learn to deal with that, then that alone is already enough to make people run to the shittiest of coping mechanisms in an attempt to erase that void.

Pretty sure I was somewhat all over the place today and my thoughts weren’t structured as smoothly as usual but sometimes that’s just life and I’m rolling with it.

Maybe next time when it’s 2 am and I’m only half a human, I’ll do a Nn deep dive into what it felt like to finally open that void and realize all the shit that came pouring out. I always talk about how important it is to face all the repressed trauma and all the usual stuff but I don’t think I usually admit how thin the line is between getting a hold on that wave in order to ride it out and being pulled under in the flood of negative emotions.

There are days when I realize how easily I could have been completely drowned by it all. And then I’m not 100% certain as to what it was that helped me stay afloat.

People who are close to me always tell me that I’m too self-righteous. That I make people feel judged or shamed when I push them to become the best version of themselves because it makes them feel like they are falling short of some bar that I have deemed worthy.

There is so much to unpack in that which has nothing to do with what I was writing about and which I am also entirely too tired to do right now. But I guess maybe the unexpected place that this post has carried me today is this:

I hope you know that judgement is never my intention. This path of self-healing is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life but it is also the most painful and the most difficult thing and while I personally think it is worth it, I understand that there are real dangers to people opening up that door. I understand why people don’t want to or can’t do it.

And I think in today’s culture where personal development and working on yourself has become such a trendy thing to do, it’s really important to remember that a person’s worth doesn’t depend on any of it.

Alrighti, sappy Nn needs to post this and go to bed now before she changes her mind about being too sappy. Or at least more sappy than usual. Which of course she then followed by…

Non refert ubi es, ego semper tecum.

Nn

[wednak]

Weddud Wednesday #04: The one where I use the word “arousal” a lot

Alrighti, one of the other concepts that I want to weave into the web of concepts I’ve spun so far is something called the Window of Tolerance. Lol I know it sounds corny and I can vividly picture you rolling your eyes but in reality, it’s just a stupid name for being in a state where your nervous system is regulated and happy.

I don’t know how much you know about the autonomic nervous system as a whole so Imma do a quick rundown of it and then get into why this is so freaking important to understand when it comes to trauma, emotional regulation, coping behaviors, addictions, etc. Honestly, it plays a huge role in just about everything so it’s worth talking about just for that reason alone.

Soooo in “short”, our nervous system consists of the central nervous system (CNS) which is our brain and our spinal cord and our peripheral nervous system which is all the nerves that go off of the spinal cord and into the body.

*Cue helpful visual*

Your brain and spinal cord are obviously hugely important and very complex, so I won’t go into much detail about them here. But basically, they send messages down into your body through the peripheral nervous system in order to get the body to do anything and everything.

The peripheral nervous system in turn consists of two more systems - the autonomic system and the somatic system. The somatic system regulates all of the parts of your body that you have voluntary control over aka your muscles, and nerves that send sensory information to your brain.

The autonomic nervous system is the interesting one because it controls all of the parts of our body that we don’t have any control over, e.g your heart beat, digestion, all the functions of your organs, etc.

And because that isn’t quite enough yet, the autonomic nervous system is divided into the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system which are most commonly talked about these days.

I know there was a time when you tried to do box breathing and stuff like that to help calm yourself, so you might actually understand the purpose of these two systems anyway. In short, the sympathetic NS is the one that increases your nervous system arousal and thus increases the energy that is spent on all the bodily functions. It’s the gas pedal or green light of the body that says GO GO GO.

And the parasympathetic NS is the one that calms us down, tells our body to stop spending energy on bodily processes and relax. It’s basically the break or red light of the body that says STOP or SLOW DOWN.

Both of these systems fulfill an important purpose at specific times. On a daily basis, they are activated before or after anything that we do. For example, the sympathetic NS produces high levels of energetic arousal during exercise or when we are really excited. The parasympathetic gets activated after we eat or when we go to sleep at night.

In more extreme cases, these systems are also responsible for our “fight or flight” or “freeze” responses.

Sometimes it is very beneficial for us to expend high amounts of energy to escape from danger, to deal with a threat or enemy, to hunt and kill that animal that we need to eat to survive. When our sympathetic NS is activated, your brain sends a signal to your adrenals to pump out stress hormones which in turn increases our heart rate and provides more oxygen for us to use.

This is a high-energy state or the “arousal state” and it comes along with high-energy emotions, such as anger, rage, anxiety, restlessness, agitation etc. In a dangerous situation, these emotions are helpful. It’s like you’ve said for years, anger can be used as fuel. That’s exactly why we have the sympathetic nervous system. To arouse us enough to get shit done.

But the body can’t run in that mode forever. It’s incredibly energy-intensive and we wouldn’t possibly be able to consume enough energy to fuel such arousal on a long-term basis without having to make serious sacrifices elsewhere in the body. That’s why we have the parasympathetic nervous system to calm us back down to normal levels afterwards.

The parasympathetic NS is designed to make us rest and recover from any extreme stressors. When it is activated, our heart rate and breathing rate drops, our blood pressure goes down and we feel relaxed and safe.

In extreme moments, it could even be beneficial for us to go into complete shutdown mode to avoid a threat or to preserve energy in order to increase our chances of survival.

If you’re a child and you’re in a situation that is likely to become violent and your chances of winning an altercation are slim, it makes a whole lot of biological sense to shut down and try to avoid any attention being drawn to you. If you’re in a famine where you can’t get a whole lot of food, it makes sense that the body wouldn’t try to spend as little as possible.

But like I said last week, if you stay in a freeze response for too long, you’ll just start to wither away so eventually the sympathetic NS has to kick back in to get you to move again.

It’s a perfectly designed system that helps us balance between two extremes so that we can always return to the ideal state of equilibrium or homeostasis.

Except of course that nothing in nature is perfect.

In a well-regulated and ideal state of being, humans should spend the majority of their time somewhere in the middle between extremely high levels of arousal and extremely low levels of arousal. We want our nervous system to feel comfortable and safe, have our needs met and feel capable of connecting to our environment. In moments of need, we want to be able to encounter an environmental trigger, have that switch on whatever nervous system response we need, get the job done and then return back to the normal state of homeostasis in which we thrive.

What we want to avoid is unnecessarily extreme reactions of the nervous system and being stuck in either nervous system response for prolonged periods of time.

Say whaaaat? Some people get stuck with one part of their nervous system in overdrive?

I did NOT see that coming!!

Lol but for realsies, this is where the term “the window of tolerance” comes in.

The window of tolerance basically describes the window of experience in life during which you are able to keep your nervous system well-regulated without needing to have an overly extreme reaction to help balance you back out to equilibrium.

I shall insert these handy little graphics I made for a client last year because I think the visualization makes it a lot clearer than words can:

The state of “hyperarousal” refers to a state in which you become overly stimulated by our sympathetic nervous system. And on the other end of the spectrum “hypoarousal” is when you have incredibly low levels of arousal because your parasympathetic nervous system is in overdrive.

As an example, we can probably all think of an example where something that usually doesn’t bother us that much, suddenly sends us flying off the handle because we just can’t tolerate it that day.

Our window of what environmental triggers we can tolerate depends on a huge variety of factors such as nutrition, sleep, general health, stress factors in our life, etc.

But the nervous system has a memory and if we experience something out of the ordinary that turns out to be a threat just once, then it is very likely that it will save that information and respond with the “appropriate” reaction the next time around, even if that threat is no longer there.

*cue every type of trauma to enter the room*

This is literally why we get triggered by things, experiences, places, people, even though we might rationally know that there is no longer a threat in this current situation. If something was once a threat in the past, your body will want to continue to react as if it was a threat and so your window of tolerance will shrink.

Depending on your unique set of circumstances, some people might respond with chronic hyperarousal (that is basically what an “anxiety disorder” is) and others with chronic hypoarousal (aka “depressive disorder”). What’s even more common is for people to constantly bounce from one extreme to the other because the body is trying to compensate for each extreme by inducing the other (aaand here we’ve got “bipolar disorder” everyone).

I put “ ” around all these disorders because we live in a climate where people just looooove to throw a label or a diagnostic at any sort of behavior as if the source of that behavior were a disease or an illness that just happened to befall someone at birth or later in life, the same way a virus would.

Don’t get me wrong, all of these things are absolutely real. But the origins and the functionality of these symptoms and behaviors are so much more nuanced and complex than the current medical system allows space for. Hence why I use their terms with caution.

I’ve found that once you’ve understood how the nervous system functions and what can go wrong, it becomes impossible to look at mental health the same way as before.

All of a sudden, we may realize that while these extreme sympathetic and parasympathetic responses have their biological purpose, they too can get out of balance or programmed the wrong way if we are exposed to a threat or danger that sends the wrong signal to our nervous system, especially when growing up.

We may realize WHY we have extreme emotional reactions to certain places, experiences, people or even thoughts, memories and feelings. And why we develop coping mechanisms to deal with the underlying emotions that cause these reactions.

We may realize WHY some people get addicted to stimulants or to depressants as a form of trying to regulate themselves back to the place of normal that the body craves to be in.

We may realize that we are never doomed to live a life of dysregulation, going from one extreme to the other because the window of tolerance is malleable and can be expanded if we consciously do the work to do so.

The process of learning to regulate an unbalanced nervous system back to a place of balance is called self-regulation. It’s hugely important because being able to self-regulate without the use of external things (such as substances, activities, people, etc.) is THE hallmark of a psychologically mature human being. It’s a process that we technically should learn how to do as children but in reality, the vast majority of us don’t because our parents don’t know how to do it because their parents didn’t know how to do it because their parents didn’t know how to do it, etc. etc. 

The point of today’s post wasn’t really yet to go into any detail on what we can do to regulate the nervous system in a more effective manner and thus gain control over our dysregulated nervous system responses. What I wanted to do here was make the connection between what we have been talking about before today, mainly trauma, emotions and coping mechanisms.

I thought it would be helpful to understand what trauma of any kind can do to our nervous system, why that causes specific emotional states to be triggered (hyper- and hypoarousal) and thus, why we usually all develop some form of shitty coping mechanism to help calm us or stimulate us back to the place of equilibrium we want to be in.

Non refert ubi es, ego semper tecum.

Nn

[wednak]

Weddud Wednesday #03: Why Emotions Can’t Be Trusted (Sometimes)

Okay - so do we just blindly trust what our emotions encourage us to do? Do we just chase what feels good and avoid what feels bad because that’s how nature designed us?

Judging from last week’s post, you’d think that the answer to all life’s questions would be to just follow our emotions as this internal guide that will lead us to some magical land of constant joy and happiness.

Obviously that shouldn’t happen. Obviously we all experience many instances in our lives where good things feel bad and bad things feel good.  

So why is it that some emotions can’t be trusted? And how do we discern between the ones that can and the ones that cannot so that we can adjust our behavior appropriately?

There are a variety of different answers to this. But I will get into one of them today.

Ha!! This is finally the point where I get to go beyond just defining random concepts and actually start weaving together a narrative. Ahhhh I’ve been desperately waiting to get to this point for the past two weeks lol.

Remember how we talked about trauma being a wound in your mind where you’ve become injured? And as a result that part of your mind forms “scar tissue” just like a physical wound would?

Well, let’s imagine for a second someone who has acute pain in their back from an injury that has not healed properly. What does someone who doesn’t have the tools to heal the injury do to deal with intolerable pain?

They start to accommodate it. They start developing a coping mechanism that helps them avoid the pain in their back. Maybe they adjust their posture and start to hunch forwards which relieves some of the pain because it takes the pressure off of the back muscles.

This adjustment will feel GOOD. That’s the whole point. It’s a relief because less pain = good emotion. But is it actually a good thing that the person should be doing?

Well, that depends.

In the short term, the adjustments might be protecting the person from excruciating pain or it might even help to protect him from causing even more injury to the area. So maybe such a coping mechanism can be protective for a short period of time until the person manages to see a doctor or a PT and get that injury treated and healed properly.

But what about the long term? What if the wound is never actually healed properly and the body develops scar tissue/chronic stiffness as a way of avoiding the pain that is being caused from the injury? Chronic bad posture will probably cause all sorts of problems over time. You might start to have lower back pain, neck pain, chronic headaches, etc. etc.

So in this case, is the “good” emotion that someone is experiencing by avoiding the pain in their back actually a “good” emotion? Or is the “good” emotion actually just a tool to avoid feeling a “bad” emotion which over time will cause even MORE “bad” emotions?

SURPRISE!

The “good” emotion isn’t actually good. We’re just tricked into thinking so.

There is no difference when it comes to trauma we experience in our mind.

If we have a painful experience in life and we don’t learn how to process and deal with it properly, then we will develop coping mechanisms to help us deal with those negative emotions.

But in most instances, our coping mechanisms are designed to help us AVOID pain and not to HEAL pain. They’re bandaids that momentarily make us feel better but just like in the instance of chronic back pain, they don’t do anything to actually help the root cause to heal.

The sneaky thing of course is that we become tricked into thinking that coping mechanisms are good because they help us feel better. They make the pain go away and that relief is experienced as a good emotion.  

Something that helps us avoid deep emotional suffering and pain is experienced as something good. Therefore it must be something good because we are wired to do what feels good.

But of course that isn’t actually the case for many reasons:

The underlying pain doesn’t actually go away. It’s always there, lingering, watching us. It is just masked for a while by whatever crutch we use to run from it. So if we are ever in a situation where we lose the ability to use whatever tool, substance, person or activity we use as our crutch at the time, then the pain always returns. Most of the time with a vengeance because it has been left to fester and grow. Remember pain is a biological cue indicating that something went horribly wrong - it WANTS and NEEDS to be dealt with so that you learn whatever lesson and adjust your behavior accordingly. If we ignore it, it’s going to start getting louder and louder and louder until it can be heard. Like a sick child screaming for attention (This is why people who don’t deal with their emotional pain very often become physically sick because it is the body’s last resort to say HEY I’M TRYING TO GET YOUR ATTENTION)

Not only does the original pain get worse but by using coping mechanisms to avoid the pain, we are actually adding even more pain to whatever original pain we are running from. Like I said before, coping mechanisms are designed to be protective for a short period of time. Both fight and flight responses are designed to get you OUT of danger ASAP. But no living organism can remain in flight or flight mode for extended periods of time. This would require an insane amount of energy that would take a huge toll on the body in a variety of different ways. Even freeze responses can help you avoid being seen by a predator, but if you don’t start moving again eventually, you’ll only end up starving to death. And just like fight, flight or freeze, every single coping mechanism that we develop (while beneficial in the short term) will eventually just cause more destruction in our lives. The problem then is that we feel even worse than we did before. The coping mechanism literally causes more pain and so we need the coping mechanism more than we did before. And so the cycle begins …

This is literally the foundation of every. single. addiction. anyone has ever developed. It doesn’t matter if a person is coping by using to alcohol, drugs, gambling, shopping, sex, XYZ reckless behavior, partying, working out, eating food, being lazy, getting attention on social media, reading personal development books, posting on tumblr about Taylor Swift, moving from country to country in the hope of finding some “magical” place that has no problems …

It literally doesn’t matter what it is. No matter how amazing and positive a behavior or an activity might be in its own right, if we use it as a way to avoid something we do not want to feel, then that it has the power to become an unhealthy coping mechanism. And then that behavior will start to dictate our entire life because we become dependent on it to help us escape the pain.

So … As always there are of course a million other details that I would like to get into. How do we learn to discern what is a coping mechanism and what isn’t, what is a real good emotion and what is a fake good emotion. What is the importance of facing bad emotions? What do we actually do to start dealing with these kinds of behaviours? Oh so many ideas lol. But I think for now that maybe this is enough input to 🐄 for a while.

I will, however, leave you with the following realization I’ve come to this week:

If the pain that you are experiencing from your current coping mechanisms is less than the past pain you are trying to escape from, then it makes perfect sense that this would not trigger any sort of meaningful behavior change.

In other words, for many people serious behavior change only happens when the consequences of their current actions become even more painful than the original pain they were trying to escape from in the first place.

If someone were to go through something really painful, say the loss of someone really important to them, and still not be able to change their behavior in the ways that would allow them to not lose said someone, then there are two possibilities for why this might occur.

It could very well be that the person didn‘t actually care that much because their priorities simply lay elsewhere so the pain of losing the other person just wasn‘t strong enough to trigger meaningful change.

OR maybe, the loss of said someone was actually incredibly painful, but the pain and the darkness that this person is carrying around inside them and trying to escape from is so vast and all-encompassing that even the most painful loss in the present moment, wouldn’t be enough to allow them to alter their behavior in any significant way.

Because they desperately depend on that behaviour to cope.

Thus making them clutch to behaviors that cause idk say 5760 problems in their life. Yet, no matter how badly they try, they can never figure out how to actually produce any significant behaviour change. And the simple reason for that may be that the pain of said 5760 problems doesn’t even come close to all the unresolved pain that is driving their behavior in the first place.

Just thought that realization was sorta interesting.

Non refert ubi es, ego semper est tecum.

Nn

[wednak]

Weddud Wednesday #2: BEWARE THE E-WORD

I’m sorry but there is no way I could have continued without addressing the e-word first. We can use toxic masculinityese and say “who you are as a man” or call them biological instincts or subconscious cues or whatever makes you feel comfortable (I’m mostly joking here ofc, I know you understand their importance) but there is no way around talking about emotions. 

And that’s exactly what we’re doing today. Buckle in weddud, I know you’re gonna absolutely love reading this one (lol).

So what exactly are emotions?

To start with, I first want to talk about what emotions are NOT. Because honestly, in today’s environment that seems almost as important as talking about what they are.

Emotions are NOT emotional reactions.

When people say things like “oh, that person is so emotional” or “Ahh, she has her period, that’s why she’s being so emotional again” what we usually mean is a person who is being erratic, irritable or irrational in a way that doesn’t align with logic or reason.

Those are not emotions.

When we say that men shouldn’t be “emotional”, it usually comes from a place where we expect men to be clear-headed and rational, not erratic or irrational. But this has absolutely nothing to do with “emotions” themselves. Why?

Emotions are generally understood to function something like this:

External stimuli > Subjective experience of said stimuli > physiological response of the body > behavioral reaction to the physiological response

Okay. What does that show us?

There is a space between the emotion you experience in your body and the behavioral reaction you have TO the emotion. The thing that makes us human is that we have the ability to CHOOSE how we behave and react to our environment and the stimuli around us.

That means that there is, by definition, a difference between an emotion (or in this case we might call it a feeling in the body) you have as a result of something/someone and “emotional behavior” as we usually describe it in society.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a closer dive into why nature designed us to have said emotions in the first place.

If we look at bodily sensations as a whole, it’s fairly easy to comprehend that sensations are guides that encourage us to behave and respond in ways that increase chances of survival (of ourselves and the species) and decrease chance of death.

You put your hand into fire, it hurts, you don’t do it again, you don’t burn and don’t die. Standard example.

Our body is full of these kinds of cues - food tastes good, water is refreshing, sleep is a relief, orgasms feel amazing, movement makes you feel euphoric. By nature, we are designed to feel great when we do things that are good for us and feel bad when we do things that are bad.

When it comes to many of our biological needs, this cause and effect relationship is fairly straightforward. You feel hunger, you eat and then you feel satiated. You feel horny, you have sex, you feel satisfied. Your hand hurts when you hold it in fire, you pull your hand away, you don’t do it again. You eat something poisonous, you puke for 4 hours, you don’t eat it again.

But it’s trickier with the bodily sensations we call emotions or feelings. Because what emotions do is guide us for biological needs that are more subtle than just “food, sleep, sex” which are fairly simple to navigate.

In short, all animals (mostly humans and mammals but actually almost all living beings) have two distinct behavioral drives that are designed to keep us alive: attachment and authenticity (sometimes also called individuality or independence).

When we are born, humans are utterly helpless. Significantly more so than any other species of mammal. We entirely rely on our caregivers to ensure our survival and so we are biologically wired to attach to them and behave in a way that encourages reliable care. Aka why being connected to others feels good.

It isn’t just babies and children who need attachment either. Adults need to attach to children because that’s how their offspring have a realistic chance of survival. That is why we have evolved to feel parental love.

Women need to attach to men because they can help their chance of survival and men need to attach to women because they help their chance of survival too. That is why we have evolved to feel romantic love.

Adults generally need to attach to other adults, form groups and tribes and societies because as a whole, it increases our chance of survival. That’s why we have evolved to enjoy having friendships and why we feel good when we have a community, a tribe or a nation to be a part of.

All of these things are good for us and so when we engage in behaviors that increase these attachments, our body responds with physiological reactions that feel nice.

Of course, there is a flip side because life is nothing if not balanced. 

We all know you can’t have too much of a good thing without it becoming bad.

Because what we also need is to become an independent, authentic individual that can function reliably on its own, without being dependent on others for its survival.

So no matter how nice and important it is to be taken care of and protected by other people, we also have to be able to separate ourselves from others so we can take care of ourselves.

This is why humans love learning new skills, why it feels great when we learn to walk or talk or read or ride a bike. Why we have a deep instinct that pushes us to grow and to try things for ourselves and why we feel really proud of ourselves when we’ve accomplished something new.

(Side note: watching the joy and pride that young children feel when they push themselves to try new things and acquire a new skill that was inaccessible to them before is literally one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever experienced. Which actually only reinforces what I’m saying which is that even adults are wired to feel positive emotions when children learn to become independent, that’s how important the drive is)

And the flip side of this is that when we are pushed into relationships or situations where we are required to give up our individuality, when we become powerless and can’t express our authentic self with the people around us without feeling like it would harm us in some way - what happens? Exactly! We feel negative emotions and those negative emotions don’t just happen for no reason.

They happen because they are discouraging us from continuing to engage in a behavior that is bad for us. They signal to us that we are doing something that isn’t in our own best interest and show us what we can change in order to optimize our life for higher chances of survival.

Too attached to people > negative emotion > isolate yourself to become more independent 

Too independent > negative emotion > attach to others to become more connected 

Right amount of either of the two? > positive emotions > ideal circumstances for survival 

____

So what’s the moral of the story for today? 

Emotions aren’t a lifestyle choice or a gendered behavioral adaptations (although it is very interesting to explore the biological differences in the experience of emotions between men and women because I do think you could maybe make the case that there are differences).

Emotions are a biologically necessary function that signal to living beings how to behave and how not to behave in order to live optimally. Emotions are the rewards (or punishments) our brain gives us when we act out certain behaviors that are good for us (or bad for us).

Modern humans think that our consciousness is becoming so increasingly powerful that we can rationally make the best decisions and choose what is right from wrong. Now, there is a time and place to be rational and use conscious decision making over instinctive behaviors. If there wasn’t we would never have gotten to where we are as a society today.

But as with anything (oh how could it ever be any different) - the key is that there needs to be balance. We may be too evolved to rely on instincts and emotions alone, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t powerful guides that can help us on the journey of figuring out how to live happy, meaningful, authentic yet connected lives that prevent just enough pain as would be good for us.

I hope maybe that in the face of all of this, we can see that perpetuating a culture in which emotions are seen as something bad that needs to be suppressed is (not the only!) but a huge factor in the crisis of despair and suffering that most people (especially men) are facing.

Okay, this is where I was going to dive into why emotional suppression is so harmful but I think I’m gonna just let you ruminate on the importance of emotions for now. Better stay tuned for next week’s episode where we’ll look at EMOTIONS GONE AWRY!

I will, however, leave you with this beautifully life-changing thought to ponder:

If we look at all emotions in the context of their function of helping us live a “optimal” life - then isn’t our distinction between good and bad emotions entirely arbitrary?

Regardless of its bodily manifestation, is every emotion (even sadness, fear, despair, rage, loneliness, etc.) actually a GOOD emotion in the sense that it is useful and serves its function to keep us alive and healthy?

And to that, I only have one answer ...

YOUR DOG DIED? 

GOOD!

(I couldn’t not do it)

Non refert ubi es, ego semper est tecum

Nn

[wednak]

Weddud Wednesday #1: What is trauma?

Hi. Hehe.

Look, I have no idea at this point if you’ve read what I wrote last week. It doesn’t actually matter that much when exactly you’ll read this and it matters even less if I know about it.

I don’t want to sound too presumptuous but I’m just going to assume at this point that maybe (if my own feelings are any indication on the matter) I still hold the kind of place in your heart that might allow you to listen to what I’m writing without having your guard up in all the ways you usually do. I don’t know if there are many other places or people in this world that you would be able to listen to in the same way you might still listen to me. And I will never not see that as the privilege and responsibility that it is. So after everything I wrote last week, I decided that I’m going to use this weird position that god has granted me to truly serve you in the only way I know how. 

I’m in no way naive enough to believe that you couldn’t seek out this information anywhere on the internet from people who are insanely more qualified than I am. I also never once want to make the impression that I’m pushing information and advice on you when you haven’t asked for it.

This is your journey. You have the power to choose what your path will be. You are the one who decides what steps are the right ones to take and when to take them. After everything we’ve been through, I really hope you still remember that I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

Like I said last week, I truly and wholeheartedly believe that there is a purpose as to why you and I were bound together like this. You and I both have wisdom and knowledge to share that would allow the other to flourish in a way that is much more difficult to achieve alone. And for me, I believe that a part of that role is to be a vessel for feminine wisdom to emerge so that it can help those around me come back to life when they have been lost to the underworld.

And I have no ulterior motives other than wanting to be just that. Whatever happens when you’re back alive, is whatever happens. If God intended for this bond to disconnect, then I’m willing to accept that. But I’m not willing to let this power that I’ve been granted go to waste until then.

For me, that means sharing what I know in a way that will allow you to take whatever is important to you and leave everything that isn’t. Sometimes I might write stuff that won’t resonate with you at all, and other times it might be a major niknak essay moment and hit a cord so deep it’ll make you want to cry.

My hope of course is that I’ll be able to allow you more of the latter but those kinds of things are impossible to predict in any case, so I’m not going to make that my main focus.

All of this preamble is just my long-winded niknak way of saying that I’m not going to try to analyze you or tell you about yourself. I know you can do a much better job of that yourself. I’m not going to assume that I am superior to your level of wisdom or that it is my role to save you from yourself. All I’m going to try to do is use this thing that you and I have, this bond that won’t go away, for something good for once, to use my life and my knowledge to serve those around me, to serve you.

May all the feminists strike me down but I truly believe that the most powerful thing we can be in life is a servant to those who we care about.

And nothing I’ve ever set my mind to in this life has made me feel like I am more at the service of something greater than myself. I hope that when you read this, you are able to hear the humility that I feel in every cell of my body as I’m writing. Truly.

—

I throw around the word trauma quite a lot when I write, so does almost everyone who talks about mental health and personal development, so I thought maybe that would be a nice place to start. It’s so easy to label everything as trauma these days and it’s even easier to misuse the word and not actually understand what it’s supposed to mean.

There are so many misconceptions about what trauma is. The word “trauma” comes from the Greek word for “wound” so trauma in its simplest form is just a wound. I don’t know about English, but in German we actually use the word “trauma” for many different kinds of physical injuries and wounds.

If you get a physical wound (if it is bad enough), your body will create scar tissue, suffer damage to your nerve-endings and over time perhaps become stiff and lose any sensations in the affected area.

In the mental sense, trauma actually functions in a very similar manner.

XYZ event might happen to you but your trauma isn’t that specific event itself. It’s the reaction that your mind and body have to that event.

People sometimes try to categorize trauma into “Big T” Trauma (like childhood sexual abuse, assault, war, a horrible accident or the loss of someone really close to us) and “little t” trauma (such as lacking emotional connection growing up, loss of a pet, harassment, etc).

But what people miss is that such a categorization into “really bad” and “only a little bad” disregards the one component that actually matters. And that is a person’s unique reaction to the event.

Depending on our previous experiences and how supportive our environment is, person A might experience a “Big T” event but be presented with the tools to process the following mind and body reaction in a way that minimizes the amount of “scar tissue” to form in the mind.

Person B however might “only” experience a “little t” event but given that person’s history and their lack of a supportive environment, they might be at a complete loss as to how to deal with the emotional flood wave that happens thereafter. Because the initial injury isn’t dealt with properly, it actually has more damaging long-term effects than Person A might have experienced from a “big t” trauma.

So what that means basically is that trauma is not the thing that happens to us. It’s not the thing that causes the damage but instead, it’s what happens in our minds as a response to the event that we’ve experienced.

More importantly, it’s how we cope with our reaction to an upsetting event.

When we experience an ABNORMAL situation (such as any of the things I describe), having an ABNORMAL reaction is the NORMAL reaction.

Does that make sense?

If something horrible happens to us, that usually sends a flood wave of negative thoughts and emotions through our body for an indefinite amount of time. That is a normal reaction to something that is out of the ordinary.

In these situations, we need to be guided and taught how to deal with this abnormal reaction. If nobody shows us how we can treat the wound that this has caused, what happens is it heals in the best way it can, and that is usually imperfectly and not in the most optimal way for long-term relief.

Especially when these things happen when we are young, we have absolutely no frickin clue as to how to process the reaction that is set loose in ourselves when we experience something terrible.

So what happens is we just ignore it and repress it because that is the most effective way of making the pain disappear. For most of us, it’s the only way we know how to cope with pain so horrible that it is beyond the limit of what we can handle.

A broken bone will heal even without proper treatment and a cast, growing back together in whatever way possible under the circumstances. If we have nothing else available, that is the best the body can do. BUT that bone will probably never function the same way again, and probably severely limit mobility in that specific part of the body and thus prevent us from thriving and living life to the fullest of our capabilities.

Our brain and our mind are no different. If we suffer a really painful wound to our mind, it may grow back together in a way that will allow us to go on. But there is now a tension, a stiffness, a scar in a place where something wounded us and we have not let it heal in the ideal way.

That trauma now limits us in how our mind can experience life, relationships to other people, everything in the world around us. It keeps us stuck in a specific mode of being that helped us to heal in a moment where we did not have any other tools available to us. But that doesn’t mean that it is the only way of being, nor that it is the way of being that will help us thrive and live meaningful and authentic lives.

Imperfectly healed bones are usually rebroken and then realigned so that they can be healed properly. The same can be done for your mind.

Non refert ubi es, ego semper est tecum.

Nn

[wednak]

A Message for Weddud

Dear Weddud,

My god have I mulled over this, trying to figure out what to say, how to behave or whether or not to just let it all go. The truth is that regardless of how hard I’ve been trying, I don’t have any answers.

I’ve spent so many hours trying to reflect and analyze so I could come to a place where I feel like I know the right path of thought or of action, with any sense of surety or finality. And at the end of it all, what I keep coming back to is that I do not know. Maybe it’s okay to not know and maybe that is an answer in itself but either way those are not the reason I am writing this today.

Because one thing that I do know is that every time I said I cared more about your well-being than my ego and selfish desire to have you in my life, I truly meant it.

There was a time when I thought that meant I had to let you reap the natural consequences of your actions. So that maybe you could have the same aha moment I did one day and break free of your trauma in way similar to how I did. I still kinda think that in a way. But not entirely.

I remember one of the things I thought over and over again last year was “If he cared about me as much as he does his gym goals, he wouldn’t be acting this way.” I thought that if you couldn’t care about keeping me in your life with the same dedication and commitment that you had for achieving your PRs then you didn’t care about me enough to deserve having me. And so I very intentionally decided to take a step back and instead let you show me where we stood.

But one of the few things that I actually have come to realize is that maybe you physically can’t care about me or anyone else the same way you care about the gym for example. The gym is your safe space, your place of refuge, the thing that kept you alive and pulled you out of the darkness that threatened to overtake you, maybe even still does. The gym has never hurt and scarred you, the same way people have. You can control the gym, trust it and be it’s master. Of course you wouldn’t be able to do this with people. People are the very thing that caused your trauma in the first place so of course you wouldn’t be able to care about and trust them in the same way, even if you really wanted to.

So I shouldn’t be able to blame you or be resentful for something that you did not choose out of your own accord. None of the things that have happened to you and have shaped who you are today are things that you chose to experience.

I went into writing this with the intention of not making any assumptions about you and then I’ve just gone ahead and made a whole lot of assumptions. But I’ve thought about it for a bit and I think that perhaps, after everything we’ve been through, I might be “entitled” to make at at least a couple. They could very well be wrong anyway, I’m not naive enough to think I understand you to any degree of accuracy, especially now, but I do hope when you get to the end of this, you’ll understand why I’ve decided to make them and that there is a purposeful intention behind everything I‘m saying.

I know deep down behind that avoidant and cold facade of yours, there is someone who was abandoned and disregarded and ridiculed over and over again, to the point where you’ve become lost and trapped in a wrongful self-perception that never should have been yours in the first place. A deeply-engrained and self-perpetuating cycle of self-sabotage and stuckness that keeps you misaligned on such a fundamental level.

I’ve thought long and hard about what the point of writing this is and how to make it all sound like it isn‘t just platitudes. I think maybe the point of it is this: It doesn’t have to be like this EG. You can break out of the cycle of constantly running away from your ghosts, feeling like you can never slow down and everything you hold dear always seems to be slipping through your fingers. Life doesn’t have to be so heavy that you only find refuge in the gym or in reckless, dangerous and self-sabotaging behavior. You don‘t have to be so numb that the only time you feel alive is when you‘re going too fast on your motorbike. Life can be processed and dealt with and FELT without having the pain overcome you. It can be tragic in all its entirety but also beautiful and magical. You aren’t doomed to some fate just because of your genetics, your childhood, a diagnosis or the decisions you’ve made since. And you never have been. You can find the light again and feel the meaning and grace in experiencing a life that encompasses ALL the emotions, not just the good ones.

But the truth is, you have to be willing to make that change and work for it. I won’t ever be able to pull you out of it with my care and my patience and my understanding, regardless of how badly I may have wanted to try. Nor will anybody else. You can’t drown it out of existence or rationalize it away. And it won’t eventually go away just because you’ve “gotten it out of your system”. It’s not just a phase or a habit that can be broken. Trauma is real, every part of it. It is deep and all-encompassing and it is not something that anyone chooses to experience or even to perpetuate. And it’s not something anybody should ever be ashamed of. It’s like the devil that possesses the best of us and is nearly impossible to shake. I understand that it might be the scariest thing to even just think about facing the darkness that once threatened to engulf you.

But it can be faced. And it can be shaken.

I’m not gonna sit here and lecture you about how all of it can just go away and you’ll live happily ever after. It’ll never go away completely. But trauma CAN be healed enough in order to get to a place where you can control it, not have it control you.

I’ve experienced it myself and I’ve seen countless stories of people doing it. Change is possible if you give yourself the chance to actually pursue it and not just put it off by saying “behavior change takes time”.

I made you a promise once that regardless of what you and I did to sabotage and destroy our presence in each other’s lives, I would never abandon you the way everyone else has. Now I don’t mean that in the romantic sense because quite frankly, I could write 5 of these essays and still not have come any closer to making any sort of conclusion as to our compatibility and dysfunction. After everything we’ve been through there is so much of our own shared trauma that we’ve created that it would take significant effort on both our parts to work through it together. And that isn’t the topic of this essay anyway nor is it reason I’m finally writing. Because your priority needs to be you, and only you. Not self-prioritization masked as continuing self-sabotage and self-abandonment. Real prioritization because you too, deserve to break free from the life you think you are doomed to live.

Like I said before, I started writing the essay saying I wasn’t going to speculate on your experiences or make any assumptions. I realized halfway through that I am most definitely making many of those. I am making assumptions based on the years of having known you. I am making assumptions based on having watched you play the part of tortured soul for so long and default to distrust everyone you meet. I have watched you surround yourself with unworthy people that I know you hate, just so you could perpetuate a narrative and belief that insists you also are unworthy. I have seen you say one thing and then do the complete opposite, over and over and over again. Trapped in cycles of wanting and pushing away. Slaving away towards a better future but all the while just running in one spot and never actually moving forward in any meaningful way. I have watched you create the most beautiful mind with an extraordinary value system for yourself over the years, but never have I actually seen you operate your life and make choices based on that value system at all.

Behaviors like this exist for a reason. They are coping mechanisms and trauma reactions that are designed to protect you from pain. But if held on too long, they actually become the chains that bind you and cause more suffering and pain than you ever experienced in the first place. I know you have what it takes to break out of these chains EG. You’re the most determined mf 🐐 I‘ve ever known. You’ve broken every gym goal you’ve ever set for yourself. If you actually tried with the same kind of commitment, you could break this too.

Even if everyone in your life (including you) may have abandoned hope for you, I will never do so because I continue to see who you could become and I’ll spend my life trying to push you to become that person.

Even if everyone and everything in your life is trying to pull you deeper into the dysfunction or to abandon you to it, I’m never gonna give into either of those things. I know what the darkness and the agony and the self-hatred feel like. I’ve swam in those waters for so many years and I understand their allure. How it becomes an addiction to loathe yourself while pretending everything is fine. As with any addiction, your brain tricks you into WANTING to hold onto it and fearing to let it go because for some fucked up reason, the self-loathing feels GOOD.

It has the devil’s name written all over it.

It’s hell on earth.

And there is an entire religion founded on the principles of mastering the devil‘s attempts at possession so that you can learn how to truly be free and experience heaven in all its glory.

So start surrendering yourself to God, not just in your mind but in your actions.

Or look up EMDR. Or Dr. Gabor Mate (!!). Or commit to learning about Weddud the same way you commit to the gym. Don’t hide behind labels and diagnoses as if they were irreversible and start to learn about how every decision you make is a learned coping mechanism that can be unlearned. Stop neglecting yourself with willful ignorance and watch how your entire sense of self starts to transform.

There are many, many things you could do to allow yourself to create the life that you deserve to be living. It doesn’t have to just be religion or just be therapy. It doesn’t matter what you do or where you start as long as you don’t give up.

Everything we have been through has made my heart break in more ways than I ever could have imagined possible when we first met in 2017. But I mean it from the bottom of my beautiful patchwork heart, letting yourself be dragged to hell by the devil and never even trying to fight it, that will break my heart more than any mount of loss or earthly separation ever could.

Interestingly, this essay feels very similar in energy to the last one I wrote on here. But I think what happened then is that even though we might have had the best of intentions, perhaps we both fell back into patterns of using each other as emotional crutches that continue to perpetuate the same cycles. I’m no longer interested in recreating cycles like that. Both of our behavior may be understood in the context of our past but that doesn’t mean they have to be excused.

What I am interested in however, is offering you the support and encouragement that anyone of us may need when embarking on such a journey. Helping you to safety, the way you did me, with real and meaningful actions and accountability, not with meaningless sweet talk about an imagined future that just vanishes from one moment to the next.

If you ever get to the point where you hate yourself so much you cannot continue to bare it; if everything in your life disgusts you to the point that it hurts, if you understand that the only way forward is to actually start to change; or if you ever just need extra support in holding you accountable because you do not trust yourself to do it, please know that I always am (and will continue to be) right here.

And if you are reading all of this and it does not resonate with you right now, that is okay too dear Weddud. Just because it was the right point in my timeline for me to say it, does not mean it needs to be the right time for you to hear it just yet.

I started this off by saying that I do not have any answers to the questions I‘ve been asking myself day in and day out for the last few months. Sometimes I don’t know if I haven’t gone mad. What is the purpose of this bond that I have so blindly stumbled into? This thing that neither of us actually chose to create. Why is it that regardless of all the hurt and the pain and how hard I may try, I cannot escape it? Why has god shackled me to this bond with you? Why won’t he release me from it, even though when we try, we cannot be together without imploding? Why won’t he release me from being faithful to a man who has betrayed me over and over and over again since the very first day that we met? How can this thing that feels like heaven on earth also feel like absolute hell? Is this divinity or is it just another trauma addiction? Am I grossly misunderstanding the role we are supposed to be playing in each other’s lives or am I just too afraid to fulfill the role that feels so obvious?

Look. I said before that I do not have the answers to any of these questions. I do not know why this world has shackled me to someone who resides in hell and whose fire continues to burn me and set me aflame. The only reason I can think of is because I have a role to play in helping you extinguish your fire. The same way you had a role to play in helping me extinguish mine.

I don’t know what will happen when our fires are out. If that is when this bond is released or when it only begins. I guess that is for God to know and for us to find out. So the last thing I want to say is this:

We all get tried in the fire EG but that does not mean we have to reside there. So if you ever find yourself wanting to find your way out of hell, I will be here and pass along all of the water I have.

————

Alrighti, for the fact that I have written to you again and again for nearly a year, always deleting or stacking away the papers, racking my brain as to what to say or if to say anything at all, procrastinating out of fear of taking any sort of action or even as much as knocking on a door that was very intentionally closed, all of these words really just flowed out of me without any previous planning or overanalyzing whatsoever.

One might call them careless whispers. But I actually think they are pretty care-full ;)

Non refert ubi es, ego semper est tecum,

Niknak

[wednak]

To the one that saved me,

I just spent the last few days writing the longest tumblr post of all time, even by my standards. But then I realized that the only truth that really matters is this:

For me, the dream of what we used to be, of old wednak has been dead for a while now. Old niknak died and was reborn and when she did, all of her old life and dreams died with her. I’ve never really stopped to realize that before. But there is no going back, there is only the future now.

I’m not in love with you anymore but I still got love for you. The same way I have love for every other human soul on this planet. And maybe a little bit more than that. That will never change.

You said that you’ll never be able to convince me that life is more brutal for men but please know, that I don’t need any convincing at all. You’ve created the world. Everything the light touches when the sun rises in the morning is because of you. You are the protector of everything. Yet you have to live with knowing that there is no one there to protect you but yourself. One of my greatest sorrows is that nobody ever stops to thank you. I know my gratitude could never make up for all the time that I couldn’t see and a world that has lost its way so badly but please, please believe me when I say my heart bursts with sorrow, gratitude and awe for all of your sacrifices and those of the men who have come before you. I promise you on the livelihood of my future children that I will not waste this chance, this opportunity of life that I have so graciously been given.

I realize now that by posting here all this time, I was doing you a disservice. Because every time you can’t help but come and read, every time you come to reminisce or to check up on me, you indeed are also living in the past. Unable to give your present and future the full attention it deserves.

And I could never live with myself knowing that I’m the one keeping you from your destiny, keeping you in this oasis and preventing you from going into the desert to win whatever it is that you want to win. So I’m going to stop posting. This space will always be here, if you ever get tired and need a reminder that you are loved beyond just words. But I won’t be using it anymore.

Please know that I’m going to be okay. You can’t win the game of love if you aren’t willing to play. This was the deal that I made with god on the night that I came to your room for the last time and jumped into my own darkness. The price I have to pay for my own journey through the desert to get to my treasure. Not knowing what and who my destiny will be, until the moment when it all becomes clear. This journey isn’t easy but it flows like water down a stream running towards the ocean. Never knowing what the final destination will be but always knowing what direction it’s heading. It’s beautiful and lonely and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

You told me once that this is who I’m meant to be and I’ve carried that with me through many a dark moment. You saw me for who I could be, not for who I was. And so this is my truth now, as I march on through the desert. Like you said, you hit a point when you become too powerful to ever go back. There is a burden that comes with this level of power. The burden of knowing. Or maybe the burden of knowing that you can never know. That at the end of everything, the only thing that is certain is you and your relationship with god or the universe or whatever it is you want to call it. Nothing really matters, and that’s why everything matters. Despite all the burdens, it’s the greatest freedom I’ve ever known and the greatest that life has to offer.

But, my dearest, most beautiful weddud, now it’s your turn to embark into the desert. I hope that all of your dreams come true and you find all of the treasures you’re hoping for. Go out and become the mf GOAT of whatever it is that your beautiful heart desires. I know deep down that you can achieve everything you set your mind to. I feel it in my bones. Stop doubting yourself. Stop ignoring your omens or one day they’ll stop coming. God knows and he’s telling you to go.

Thank you for giving me so much of your time and energy over the years. You helped carry me to safety, even when your own back was broken. And yet you’re still out there fighting. It’s what you’ve always done since you were a little boy. And it’s the greatest gift and honor you ever could have given me.

Now it’s my time to repay you and so I will let you go win whatever it is that you need to win. But I will never ever ever take you for granted, nor will I ever feel indifferent. I would give anything to be able to hold you just one more time, kiss your face and tell you how incredibly grateful I am. No matter what great things you achieve in the future, as far as I’m concerned, you’ve already achieved a level of greatness that is so far beyond anything that you would call “winning”. Keep going and god will reward you beyond your wildest dreams. Keep going and you will return home.

Nothing has ever felt more true to me than writing these words. I hope that every tear falling from my face reaches you like the sweet embrace of tenderness and love. It has been an absolute honor and the best chapter of my life.

With all my love,

Niknak

[wednak]

The old Wednak can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, cause they’re dead.

I’m sure that as I reflect for a while, I’ll have more to say (I always seem to don’t I) but all I can think of now is ahhhhh man it’s hilarious to realize how aligned we still are to this day.

I should be surprised but at this point, I’ve just accepted that life/the universe operates that way if you know how to pay attention.

Thank you for speaking your truth EG. You deserved to release it just as much as I did.

[wednak]

Your dog died? Good.

[wednak]

P.S. Also, thanks for making me feel like I was your favorite when I felt like an old cardigan under someones bed ;)

[wednak]

All the thoughts ™️

It‘s weird now. Before I would have just dumped all my thoughts here without thinking much about it because I always decided to believe you weren‘t actually reading these. But now that I‘m writing to you, it feels different and it took me a while to process. I tried to stick to that old mindset because it allows me to write freely without overthinking what I am writing. That‘s what I made this for and that‘s what I want it to be. But one of my few regrets about how we ended is how it was so unnecessarily dramatic and we never actually got to part in peace. So that‘s what this is I guess …

After everything that happened, forgiving you was easy. I’ve always been quick to forgive the people I’ve loved in the hopes that they would love + forgive me in return. It was forgiving myself that was my real challenge. Not because I think you were innocent and I was to blame for all the mess, but because I needed to learn how to take responsibility for myself and my actions. And I needed to learn that I was strong enough to go through really difficult things.

When I think back to the person I was when we were together, it kind of makes me sad. I was so lost, so weak, so hurt, so afraid of not being enough. So many things that it’s impossible to cover them all here. But I was using your love for me as a way to fill that void which is a horrible thing to do to someone who is also struggling.

I see so many patterns in my behavior back then that I wasn’t able to see or understand at the time that it’s impossible for me to feel much animosity or anger towards the entire situation anymore. Yet at the time, all I cared about was trying to uncover your patterns so I could „save you“. What we both did to each other wasn’t great, yet it has led me down a path of self-discovery that I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. I mean it from the bottom of my heart. Despite all the mess that we made, despite all the things that were “problematic“, I’m so incredibly grateful for every last bit of it that it’s difficult to put into words. The pain that I felt after everything that we went through was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to all the repressed pain I had stored up inside for years. It was just a continuation of the same pattern I would go through again and again to justify my identity of being someone who wasn’t good enough, of someone who so desperately craved to be loved. If it wasn’t for our entire situation causing the pot to “boil over”, I really don’t know how long I would have continued down that path.

My biggest hope was always that my influence would have allowed the same for you. That you would look at what happened between the two of us and realize that it isn‘t just what I did to you or what you did to me that needed to be forgiven. But that you would see the opportunity in the situation to genuinely help yourself out of your own misery. I really do still hope that that was the case but most importantly, I’ve come to realize that it’s not my responsibility to write your story. It’s not my responsibility to control and care about what you think of me and how you process this entire situation. If you can‘t forgive me for all the pain I‘ve caused you on my journey, that‘s okay too. No matter how hard I tried, I never could have saved you from yourself, the same way you never could have saved me.

And so all that is left for me to do at this point, is look back on our time together and be genuinely sorry that my own personal journey led to you feeling so much of your own pain. I’ll never apologize for who I am nor what I did because it’s made me who I am today. But if there was a way that I could have gotten to this place without hurting you along the way, then please know that I would change it in a heartbeat. If there was a way that I could repay you for everything that you‘ve had to shoulder because of me, then I‘d give it all to you.

I’m so grateful for every moment that somehow in this universe of people, we were drawn to each others presence. If it’s any consolation, I do still think of you as my destiny. For those two-ish years (it still feels like a lifetime to me), whoever is in control of this thing we call life gave me you. I meant what I said in that essay about our souls being connected from the beginning and regardless of what has happened, I still feel that. No matter what the future may hold, no matter how all of the uncertainty in my life will play out, that’s always going to be enough for me.

I hope you ride the fuck out of that motorcycle and it makes you feel as free as a bird while you do. Thank you for being brave enough to hit send. xxx

[wednak]

Seems like there were TWO weddud sightings this week ;)

[wednak]

P.S. Try not to hurt yourself on your new motor cycles please xx