What Have We Learned?

It's been a few days since I fell off my latest productivity push. I want to take the time to prepare a real after-action report. So far, I've just been spinning around in circles, it seems, so let's just start noting this down to get some perspective. 

The Current Situation

First off, there's no avoiding the fact that I have BPD. I did experience significant neglect as a child, and that continues to affect me. No matter what I try, I can't shake this core trauma of being a burden to my caregivers, a relationship I repeat with everyone I meet. 

What happens when a child feels unwanted and ignored? They grow comfortable with disappearing and are overly sensitive to judgment, rejection, and criticism. I've found that I'm far more at peace with simply numbing myself with viceral pleasures and shutting myself out from the world. Being seen means risking pain and suffering. Why is the fear so deeply instilled within me? 

I feel as though I was hyperactive, needy, emotional, volatile, and annoying, which is why my parents could not manage to deal with me and opted to check out. Checking out and leaving me to my own devices made me feel alone, vulnerable, weak, scared, and helpless. I would be pushed out to school and herded like an animal. I hated it and saw all of it as a punishment for being unworthy or too much.

Why do I need to numb myself with engaging, demanding, and hyperintense pleasurable experiences? What is it that I'm numbing? Whenever I sit alone, all I can see are my flaws. I'm too fat, lazy, dumb, ugly, ignorant, loud, indifferent, and unproductive. No one would ever find me useful or worthy of care and attention. No one would ever be involved with me if I stayed this way. I need to do something right now to improve myself, or I will die alone, in pain, and full of regret.

Those thoughts immediately rush to my mind as soon as I try to sit still. What's wrong with dying alone? The pain of loneliness is too unbearable. Why was I born on this planet? Was it only to suffer alone? Am I nothing more than a cruel joke for others to laugh at and put down? These thoughts sting and slash me like a sharp weapon. Every time I make an effort to improve things, I run away from these thoughts as desperately as I gasp for air.

Surely, all the years of being alone and suffering are worth it if I find real love in friends who know me and a real sense of family. I just want to feel like I belong somewhere, surrounded by people who understand me, who want to hold me, who see me, hear what I really say, and want me to be there just as they want to share their life with me. Why do I need that so desperately? Why can't I live without it?

What is the true source of this immense suffering, harsh judgment, and endless hate? It's a way to live that I've learned from my childhood. Being mocked and made fun of for being myself. Berated and criticised for being unable to keep up. Abandoned, neglected, and ignored by my core family. I internalised this soul-crushing sense of worthlessness, which I embody and carry around with me everywhere. 

A tough time long ago has kept me from moving on. It's not external achievement that can make me whole. I've rejected plenty of love, care, and opportunity, deeming myself unworthy. How can I even begin to change this three-decade's worth of hate? 

Let's Break This Down

First comes the scalpel. Overthinking and ego-issues get a bad rap. Eckhart Tolle even said that over-identifying with thought is the original sin, which is a fair take, ngl. But Kahneman taught me that the mind has its uses. Logic, when used correctly, can work wonders. So let's look at this more carefully. Was it wrong for me to react as I did? What exactly did I do? Who even am "I"?

• Physiology: At my core, I am my physical body. Everything that is me is made up of hardware. All my thoughts, memories, and emotions are compilations of raw data input via the senses. My genetics gave me shape, my parents gave me life, and sustenance kept me alive. This is always true for everyone, as far as we know. Yet, I am not aware of all this raw data. I do not keep my heart beating, my eyes seeing, or my blood flowing. It just happens on its own. As far as I know, I also did not choose any of it. In that sense, much of my physiology is unconscious and outside of my control.
• Emotions: This is the most powerful and apparent part of myself. I feel intense, palpable, visceral, and specific things that are very clearly either good or bad. Yet, in many ways, this is a subconscious level of awareness just above my physical senses. I don't feel the individual movements of my internal organs, but if something is wrong with my body, then "I don't feel so good." If I think certain painful thoughts, then I feel "sad" or experience pain. It's not completely in my hands, but much like the breath, I have some sway and more awareness of it.
• Cognition: My mind is the most boring, less significant, but loudest part of me. My thoughts seem to be my own. I can make choices, choose focus, and guide my attention. It's slow, tedious, and tiring, but there is a sense of will here. This is the most conscious part of me.

Yet, all three of those things are processes or characteristics that I have, rather than aspects or parts that create who I am. They can be measured and are concrete, but I can't point at my brain or its thoughts and say this is me. I can't wholly believe that my eyes are who I am, or even the sense of prevailing doom or anxiety that I feel constantly. These are the components that make me, which arise from and comprise the above characteristics, processes, or phenomena:

• Experiences: All the above three levels of consciousness combine to form my experiences. Most of it never registers or makes it to my memories. That's why there is a sense that real experiences are more valuable than practice or preparation. There is a clear sense that something more exists in any given moment than a person can absorb or take in. I don't remember how my uniform fit or what I carried to school when I first joined it. Yet, I remember a distinct feeling of dread. How does the mind know what to keep and what to discard? Is it merely a process of repetition? 
• Narrative: Emotions are the shorthand of the human being. We take a glance at complex situations and quickly judge them as good or bad by boiling them down at lightning speed. My life story is nothing more than a highly subjective, partial account of my history. Yet, it's exactly what shapes my perspective and sets my priorities. It's the frame, setting, or premise that sets the tone for my life. It's a set of beliefs formed by conclusions drawn from long-term memory. Yes, it's the stuff that repeats, but it's also susceptible to the follies of all stories: Oversimplification, unnecessarily harsh judgments, and an undue prioritisation given to coherence.
• Identity: These are the sum total of my thoughts, but they also chase a simple end-goal: to make better decisions. My ego is simply a mental construct that's supposed to make my life easier. It has a short memory, but is painfully aware of its role in the life story. It's the labels I stick and the boxes I try to fit in, hoping to find a place to be. 

In short, my experiences are deep, complex, and multidimensional, comprising all of the raw data from my physiology, emotions, and mental activities. Both my narrative and my identity are just mental constructs that exist for specific reasons.

My life story offers an intuitive, broad-strokes set of beliefs, a simple progressive or regressive pattern, and a perspective that highly influences my emotions. Meanwhile, my ego or sense of self, while deeply intertwined with my story, is a conscious effort to make better decisions that ensure my survivability. Those are the key players that make me, me. So, what went wrong with all this?

How Did We Get Here?

My dad was quite entrepreneurial and took great initiative in his early life. He made money by learning IT skills and sought my mom for a highly unorthodox love marriage. He came from a very old-school family, but with globalisation around the corner, he was infatuated with foreign culture (hence the interest in IT). Mom was from a very liberal and scientific family and grew up comfortably with Western ideas. Yet, she met dad in school, didn't do much in college, and got married a bit too soon, considering her semi-Western roots.

By the time I was born, Dad was fully on his way to becoming a provider in line with his traditional values. Meanwhile, Mom discovered the horrors of being a mother surrounded by the local culture. Perhaps she failed to adequately discover the world, explore herself, or have more individual experiences before settling down. 

Hence, she likely felt a growing unease. My sister's birth didn't fix it, nor did trying her hand at work. Going nuclear and giving birth to me likely made it worse. What finally gave her relief was a Buddhist organisation of which she's a very active member to date.

Unfortunately, I grew up in the midst of a chronically busy dad, a doted sister, and a mom going through a midlife crisis. Children are very needy because human beings are highly complex creatures living in a self-created environment with little to no understanding. Not to say that things were better in the harshness of Mother Nature, yet they were certainly far simpler. In the jungle, you had little to no control, so you took what you got and accepted it all.

With more factors came further complications. I simply needed a core companion to support me fully during my vulnerable years. Yet my parents were basically spent, trying to navigate an increasingly complicated economic and social reality successfully. When you are small, and you try to play with your mom and get her attention, but she just shuts down entirely, looking off in the distance, ignoring you completely, as tears stream down her face, what options do you have?

You don't fully understand why she is unhappy and don't want to get ignored, so you look at the only information you have: your conscious actions and decisions. You were jumping around the place, causing a ruckus and making a lot of noise. Perhaps you should be quiet and try not to be such a bother? Is this the right decision? Try to understand that the child must protect itself. It's weak, small, vulnerable, and dependent on these bigger creatures for everything. It can try to interact with the frozen one, but that might cause this problematic disengagement to continue. 

If things progress further, they might even snap and hurt you. You don't want to find out. One way or another, the meals are still coming. Better not to do anything and to avoid creating any further issues. Surely, this new pattern will get rewarded. The parents discovered the possibility of living their own lives. The child seems to be growing up by itself; the previous one certainly did not seem to benefit from greater attention. Let's see how long this can go.

So they send it off to daycare, kindergarten, and school. How can we manage work, religious practices, personal interests, and school? We are earning money, might as well send him to study at a tuition. For the child, being quiet and not demanding attention is met with further neglect. It doesn't feel good, but it's bearable. Slowly but surely, it makes its home in this darkness. It learns to escape to the world of imagination at first, then addictions, drugs, substances, and finally, physically running away from the environment.

While the child grows up just fine and manages to find a place in society, there's a sense that it remains broken. So, it keeps searching for ways to fit in and fill that gap with something or someone. After all, there was no abuse. Nothing was loud, flashy, or violent enough to break it completely. Yet something fundamental is missing, keeping it from generating any real inner strength. Poetically, a parent's hatred for life gets personified by the offspring cycle of traumatic recreation.

Yet, a person is not defined by their lowest moments, neither parent nor child. My life was full of magical, wonderful moments of excitement. I used to play spy games, pretend to be characters, and make tons of mischief with my siblings and cousins. I had the time of my life watching the Discovery Channel with my nani and traveling the country with my parents. So why do these particular events carry such immense influence? I believe it's simply because they make a better story.

Kahneman & Amon's work found that people are twice as deeply affected by negative experiences than by positive ones. We can consider this an evolutionary adaptation: finding food more easily might keep you alive longer, but failing to avoid predators will definitely end your life. Perhaps this sensitivity to the negative is what makes this story compelling?

Where Do We Go From Here?

Cognitive behavioural therapy recognises that human beings work in a loop: External input from the environment gets filtered by the senses, judged by the mind, interpreted by the emotions, and translated into meaning. Experiences feed thoughts, thoughts guide emotions, and emotion leads to certain actions. 

Over time, the repeated thoughts, emotions, and actions form deeper grooves within our mind-body connection that become our habits. Patterns of thinking, behavior, and feelings become personality, ego, and narrative. This can feel very restrictive and debilitating. No matter how much I try, I keep falling back to my baseline after crossing a certain threshold. I fly too close to the sun, crash, and burn.

Yet burnout is the result of intense effort with no reward. It's another defense mechanism, because if something is not giving back what you're putting into it, evolutionarily, it's a waste of time. Just as shutting down, conserving energy, and becoming a turtle was a viable survival strategy when I was weak. Today, I enjoy the freedom to do anything I want and potentially create a life of my dreams.

The imaginary worlds I escaped to in my childhood can be recreated and shared with countless people who are struggling alone today. James Clear has pretty much cemented the latest research into the mainstream: you break habits and create lasting change by going atomic. If you are in a bad spot, as most people are, the trick is to slow down and reduce the effort in relation to the rewards.

For someone with core trauma, this can be tricky nonetheless. Our modern culture numbs us by dazzling us with the world-class, evoking the tyranny of exceptionalism. This creates an "all or nothing" mentality, and why not? Why not reach for the stars? Even if "Survival of the Fittest" means those who fit in the best, being rich and famous can open so many doors for you.

Isn't the real measure of your life in the lives you touch? Being fit, rich, and famous can get you there, so why settle for anything less? The question is more about how to actually get there. The farther you want to go, the slower you have to move. I can attest that every single one of my setbacks was a direct result of reaching too far, too soon, not seeing the appropriate results, and then burning out.

Luck is another major part of the equation, where a lot of things are just out of your control. The key is to keep the entire process in sight. I got so severely depressed when I couldn't do every single thing that I wanted, that I literally wanted to kill myself. Why was it so? 

It's because human beings are dependent on each other, and I believe that without external worth, achievement, or usefulness, no one would ever accept me. Achieving my daily goals became a desperate struggle to survive and justify my existence. If I failed to meet my goals, I might as well give up and kill myself before dying a slow, natural death, because a good life is anyway out of reach.

The Best Solution

In truth, the value of your life is not in your achievements. Your wins and successes are not for you; they belong to the world. Your life has to be valuable to yourself first. You can't pour from an empty cup. The baseline of you, living and breathing, fully awake, by yourself, has to become pleasant. Peace has to become the new baseline.

Right now, my baseline is one of intense stimulation. Either chasing a high, running from demons, weathering a storm, or glowing with bliss. There is space for all those things, but chaos is not a good baseline. Here, I believe that Eckhart Tolle offers the best solution. Trauma is a very charged word. People instinctively avoid it because it's generally bad to believe that you are broken.

People are who they are. If trauma is there, then it's there. If you are psychotic, malicious, or antisocial, you cannot simply ignore that. Many people are fortunate enough to be peaceful, wealthy, and happy. What use is there to criticize them? Saying that the rich are evil only creates more suffering and complications. Doesn't everyone wish to be safe and secure?

This is what acceptance is. If you have broken bones, is it advisable to ignore your injury and go for a run? Just ask David Goggins if he would recommend it to anyone. Yet, you also don't want to quit running forever because of a single injury. That fear is valid. The real art of improvement is a careful game of awareness, action, and direction. 

The only care must be taken in maintaining a balance between all three. 

- Awareness: The purpose of the brain is to make decisions. The problem is here of control, and acceptance is the solution. Good decision-making relies on an endlessly growing pool of information, but you can never know everything (nor should you). The trick to balance an unreasonable faith in your mission with end endless search for truth. With time and patience, you grow ever closer. The key to this is non-reactivity. Don't force things further than they can go and focus entirely on doing your best.

- Action: Building momentum is the most powerful aspect of any process. Life happens in the real world. You can be anyone inside your head, but your actions will always end up shaping you. The problem here is ambition, and flow is the solution. We want to lose 20 kg in 3 months, or 2 kg every week. Write a book in 2 days, learn coding in 30 days, etc. Good things take time. The trick is to get lost in the process. Things that engage you are immersive because they pose the perfect amount of challenge. Too difficult, and you freeze up. Too easy, and you get bored. 

- Direction: Think, feel, read, learn, act, build, and do as much as you want; If you don't know where you are going, you may never make any real progress. That's because your goals often end up defining who you truly are. The problem here is of image, and imagination is the solution. Most of the time, we want to achieve something that's precise yet vague, and shallow enough to be unreal. Become a millionaire before 30. Become the best actor, footballer, or musician in the world. Win a gold medal at the Olympics. We pick these goals because of the things that come with them, not knowing the true costs or our own motivations. When things get tough, you'd better have a good answer for "Why am I here? Why do I need to do this?" I find Simon's Infinite goals to be the most helpful.

Action is the key to all of life's problems because life happens in the real world. Yet, awareness is the key to acceptance, which lets us deal with inner problems, and direction gives us progress, which is key to satisfaction. So, we must act consciously and deliberately. 

For my current issues, I carry memories within my body, memories of past wounds that keep rearing their ugly heads. To ignore those wounds is to become numb to them, keeping me from healing. I must dissolve my trauma and let go of it. For that, I need to work in a manageable way toward the goal of my choosing, making deliberate progress. 

As I freeze up, feel uncomfortable, and inevitably face issues again, I must be aware of it and meet it with acceptance. Slowly, as the memories begin to clear, their intensity should disappear as I begin to relate to them in calmer ways. The most important thing is to be calm, relaxed, and peaceful in moving toward my idea of success.

I must also continue to process my emotions, letting them tell me whatever they want, so I can make more informed decisions. Slowly but surely, this new strategy will lead to a better long-term and sustainable life, full of friends, love, good health, and worldly riches. I must never lose sight of myself in any given moment as I immerse myself completely in my craft and strive for endless improvement. 

Questioning the "whys" is what has provided me with all these insights, so I must keep that with me as well. I already have a good idea of my direction, so no worries there. Finally, I will only end with a clear vision for my future by Alan Watts, "Life is a game, don't take it too seriously, and do not make any distinction between work and play."