Tolerating Distress

One of the things that has been very difficult for me in DBT is the idea of “distress tolerance”. For the most part, American society does not promote the idea that there are times that things will suck and you’ll just have to let that be and you can’t do anything to fix it. We’re a society of fixers. There’s always a solution if you try hard enough right?

Unfortunately that’s not the case. There will be times when we simply have to wait out unpleasant feelings. In general those unpleasant feelings will dissipate or be relieved with time, or after some time we will be able to change something to improve our situation. Sometimes we also just have to accept things that are shitty: certain people will not change their behavior, your health may not improve, politics might always suck. These are things that you might just have to let be. And for these things, you have to learn that your feelings may stick around and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. This is where distress tolerance comes in.

Distress tolerance is hard. It’s not about making yourself feel better, it’s rather about making it to the end of the bad feeling without doing anything to make your situation worse. This is one of the hardest things to remember while trying to tolerate nasty feelings, and it also makes it a lot harder to be successful because it’s hard to feel like it’s working. However it’s not a bad thing to feel like crap for a while. This is hard to understand for many people. It is normal, acceptable, and in fact healthy to feel like crap sometimes.

So what is distress tolerance? There are a number of elements to it and I’m not going to touch on all of them here, but I do want to talk about how many people give tips for distress tolerance and how we can really improve on those tips. I see lots of lists floating around about what to do if you’re tempted to self-harm, or how to resist purging. These lists are GREAT. They include things like holding a piece of ice, drawing on yourself with red marker, ripping something up, all great suggestions. Unfortunately not all of these things work for everyone, and it can be extremely frustrating when you look at the list and can’t find anything that speaks to you.

It seems to me that there might be a better way to approach distress tolerance that is more individualized. Of course sharing ideas and letting others know what’s helped you is great, but not everyone likes or responds to the same things. One of the things that we’ve been discussing in DBT are larger categories that can help you: things like using your senses, imagery, taking a mini-vacation, or relaxation. Each of these categories is then open to all of your personal ideas. Let’s look at a couple of examples:

Senses. I’ve heard a lot of people give examples of this without quite realizing it: finding something soft, holding ice, listening to music. However I’ve often found the examples unhelpful until I heard the larger idea that you should think about your senses and try to pinpoint what sensory experiences really ground you. What makes you feel like you’re really in your body? I’ve heard people suggest scented candles, but those make me sneeze a lot and I don’t much like them, so I basically just discounted nice smelling things. When I heard that scent was something I could think about, I immediately thought about my dad’s spaghetti sauce. It makes me think of home, of youth. It grounds me. I got some from my parents to put in my freezer and now I can pull it out on a bad day and heat it up, letting that smell permeate my whole apartment. This personalization is far more effective for me than the generic suggestions were.

You can do this same sort of thing with any of the skills: what kinds of images calm me down? What would be a “safe place” I could picture? What has calmed me down in the past? What kinds of things do I find relaxing? What places feel “away” for me in my daily life? What’s out of the ordinary that I could use as a small vacation?

It’s a good idea to take some time when you’re NOT distressed to think about these things so that you have a small stockpile. For an explanation of each distress tolerance skill you can go here. I don’t think we spend enough time personalizing our coping skills, but it is important to think about what works for YOU.

Building Mastery

There’s a skill that we’ve been working on in DBT called “building mastery”. This is the process of doing something new/difficult/fulfilling in some way and feeling a sense of accomplishment after you do it. You don’t have to complete the entire project (get in shape or graduate from college), but rather every time you take steps towards getting something done you are building mastery. Building mastery also doesn’t have to be anything huge, it simply has to result in that special feeling that can be describe in no way except “I did a Thing”. This is about building a self-identity through feeling accomplished. Generally these things should be guided by your values, so that they contribute to feeling as if you’ve done something worthwhile.

 

I’ve been struggling with this skill lately, and it’s something that I think many people misunderstand and could use some work on. So we’re going to do some building mastery of building mastery today.

 

I’ve noticed among many of my friends, particularly the accomplishment minded of us, we discount all of the work or effort that we put into something until we have reached the end point, and then we simply nod and move on to doing something else. Rarely do we take the time to look at our accomplishment and accept it as something we’ve done and done well. This is a serious problem, especially as we’re part of a culture that expects us to be endless wheels of perfect accomplishment. Particularly for the women among us, perfection is apparently a prerequisite of acceptability, and the number of things we need to be perfect at just keeps on growing.

 

So how can we fight back against a culture that tells us we should always be getting more done? How do we retrain our minds to accept the things we’ve accomplished and praise ourselves for them? This is something I’m struggling with myself, but here are my suggestions so far:

 

1.When you finish something, do more than cross it off the to-do list. Give yourself a reward, take a break, or spend some time thinking about what you just did. Let it sink in that you got something done.

 

2.Make sure you check the facts at the end of the day. It’s so easy to discount all the things you did when looking at the endless list of things that still need to be done. Sit down and honestly think to yourself about what you did today. It’s probably a lot more than you think.

 

3.When doing 1 or 2, try to honestly compliment yourself about some element of what you did, or at the very least think about the effort it took and the impact of your success. This doesn’t have to be big. I’m sick today, so if I manage to get clothes on and leave the house that will be a huge success because of the effort it took to get there. It’s incredibly easy to just assume you should have been able to do everything you did, so it doesn’t count. That’s not true. Everything you do is a victory for you. Let it sink in, don’t brush past it.

 

4.It’s especially easy to ignore your progress across time. If you’re working on something like getting in shape, it can be a good idea to keep a record of how you’re doing so that you can look back and see how things have changed. This is especially true for things like depression and anxiety. Often we don’t notice when we’re getting better. Keeping a diary card like this one of how you’re feeling each day is a good way to notice when you improve. Pay attention to that! Even if you don’t write down how things have changed, spend some time thinking about how far you’ve come in the last year, what changes you’ve made, what you’ve done. I’ll bet if you think about all of it you’ll feel pretty darn accomplished.

 

5.Avoid the comparison game. Your accomplishments are yours, and they don’t lose importance because someone else did more or better or different.

 

I’ve been trying to keep these things in mind when I get things done each day. While it still doesn’t make me feel like master of the universe, I have felt less of that anxious bug that tells me do more, do more, do more! When you stop feeling as if every second of the day needs to be spent accomplishing something, anxiety and exhaustion really disappear. So today I’m patting myself on the back for writing this post, for getting up and taking care of all the animals, for finishing my Lumosity workout, for reading all my regular bogs, for writing a blog for work, and for checking all of my work email even though I am sick. And it’s not even noon! I think I should reward myself with a nap.

How I got Through My Bad Day: A Chain Analysis

I was planning on writing today about recognizing your achievements when your each a goal (especially for those who are competitive and highly driven), but it’s been a bad day. I woke up to a super triggery comment, read a few articles I should have avoided, and my mood plummeted from there. Add in a lack of sleep, and the soreness from working out for the first time in nearly a year, and you’ve got a recipe for a bad day.

 

So instead of talking about what I was going to talk about, I’d like to talk about chain analyses and applying skills to stop a bad day before it happens. Sometimes it can be hard to notice when you’re on the path to a meltdown. You might know that you’re having a bad day, but you don’t quite know why or you don’t know what you can change. I’m going to try to go through a chain analysis of my own day to give you all a conception of what it might be like to think about what’s making you anxious, unhappy, depressed, or stressed out, and then go through the steps that I could have taken (and may still take) at different points during the day so I don’t engage in any target behaviors (this is DBT speak for doing Bad Things like restricting, purging, drinking, self-harm, suicidal ideation etc.).

 

I’m going to start by talking about emotional vulnerability. I’m surprised this isn’t something that we talk about more often because it’s intensely important when you’re having a bad day or are on the verge of letting your mental illness take over. Emotional vulnerabilities are those factors that make you more prone to feeling extreme emotions. The most basic forms of emotional vulnerability are things like lack of sleep, lack of food, lack of exercise, use of drugs or alcohol, etc. These things make us sensitive and keep us from regulating our emotions well. Right now, I haven’t eaten since last night, I didn’t get enough sleep last night, and I have been working out more than I’m used to, leaving my body tired and sore. I’ve also been dealing with some headaches and bad tension through my shoulders and neck that are really fairly painful. These things are making me far more emotionally vulnerable.

 

However in addition to these very obvious forms of emotional vulnerability there are other things: are you stressed out and busy? What’s going on in the back of your head that’s stressing you out? Are you having relationship troubles? Are you unemployed? What other things are hanging over you that surround the events of the individual day or event that you’re trying to understand? For me, this includes a number of things. I recently changed jobs and I’m not good with transitions. I had some new information about my family that was Big and Important and Scary dropped on me this weekend. A number of my friends have been having relationship troubles recently and I’ve been worried and anxious for them. I also haven’t been keeping up on my blogging so I’ve been feeling overwhelmed and busy. Each of these things adds to that cloud of vulnerability that’s surrounding me today.

 

These are helpful concepts because if you start to notice vulnerabilities you can try to head them off. I’m going to go get something tasty and filling very soon, not let myself work out today, and try to get to bed early. Sometimes you can’t fix the vulnerabilities, or you get triggered or upset before you notice them. When you’re doing a chain analysis, the next step is to figure out what some of the precipitating events were. These can help you notice or avoid these kinds of events in the future, or if you’re in the moment, figure out why they bothered you and how to process/deal with the emotions you’re having right now.

 

So today the precipitating events were a few things. The most noticeable of them was getting a comment on a blog post about veganism that said “having an eating disorder is no justification for forcibly impregnating cows and keeping pigs locked up in tiny pens etc. etc.” The topic of veganism is an intense trigger for me. I was writing about this in the post, and this person chose to ignore that and tell me that I was wrong and bad for trying to take care of my own health needs. I felt disrespected, and I felt as if another person was confirming to me that I am not worth the food that I put in my mouth.

 

In addition to this, I saw another blog post defending “Blurred Lines” that made me throw up a little bit in my mouth. So I could see that the precipitating events to having my mood spiral out of control were that I felt people were challenging my values and my self-worth. So now I have a good understanding of what the problem is. I’ve had this difficulty a number of times before and so I’ve learned some techniques to help with it. One of them is that I try not to click on links that I know will upset me, and so usually I can head it off at the pass, but sometimes one gets by me or my morbid curiosity gets the better of me, and I can’t exactly not get the comments that are emailed directly to my inbox. Whatever your precipitating event is, it’s good to understand what it did to you and why so you can either avoid it in the future or figure out how to best tailor your response.

 

So my response was to reevaluate my values. Check the facts. Remind myself why I do the things that I do. Remind myself why I felt that Blurred Lines was offensive. And then I tried to radically accept that some people have different values from mine. I did some self-soothing, because I felt attacked and raw and afraid (especially when someone said the line in “Blurred Lines” that goes “you know you want it” is not rapey, cause damn is that triggering and not ok at all). This consisted of seeing my boyfriend for lunch and drinking a chocolate shake. I tried some distraction by playing Lumosity and by focusing on work. But I also did some self-care by allowing myself to tackle the simplest tasks at work first so that I wouldn’t get overwhelmed. Because I had figured out all of the ways I was riled up, I could address each of them. Now that I’ve calmed down some I’m willing to look again at these emotions, understand what provoked them, and understand how my use of skills actually worked quite well.

 

If you do engage in a target behavior, your chain analysis might include ideas of what you could have done differently. That’s why I find them incredibly helpful. They give me a framework with which to reflect on my experience without ruminating and becoming overwhelmed. You can even draw it out all nice and pretty like with bubbles and arrows and things. If you want to really break it down you can delineate your reaction into thoughts, emotions, actions, and bodily reactions (so did you clench your hands etc.). This chain analysis method helped me head off the nasties before they got too nasty, but I’d love to hear other suggestions in comments. Tea, hot bath, nap, delicious food, mindfulness, self-soothing…whatever helps you!

Silently Invalidating

The concept of validation and the dangers of an “invalidating environment” are things that pop up in mental health treatment over and over. From what I’ve picked up over about four years of therapy, being invalidated is really bad for your mental health. In fact, in DBT the theory is that a predisposition to mental illness requires an invalidating environment to development into a full-fledged problem. Invalidation in that framework is actually one of the precipitating causes for mental illness.

 

What is so negative about invalidation? Invalidation tells you that your emotions are wrong or fake, and thus undermines your identity and your confidence. It can lead you to distrust your emotions, feel ashamed or guilty, or even begin to think that you’re not in touch with reality. It asks you to ignore the very real messages your emotions send you, and tells you that your emotions are inappropriate. Unfortunately, emotions are always real and valid: the actions they cause may not be. The emotion may not fit the facts appropriately, but it is always real.

 

In my personal life, I have always found this a bit confusing. I haven’t seen my life as something that involves a great deal of invalidation. My parents never told me my feelings were wrong, my teachers have generally been intensely supportive of me, and I’ve had some fairly fantastic friends. There have been a few negative relationships in my life where I was told repeatedly that I had no right to feel the way I did, but overall other people have just let me feel how I feel. So how was it that I had ended up with mental illness without any invalidation at all? How did this apply to me?

 

I have recently come to realize that there are some incredibly insidious ways of invalidating another person that don’t look like invalidation right off the bat.

 

Imagine this: you are having the worst day of your life. Your depression is on high, your anxiety is through the roof, and you’re panicking every other minute. You feel overwhelmed, you feel sad, you feel lonely. You just want someone to give you a hug or listen for a minute, someone to tell you that you aren’t losing it completely. You’re sitting at school, and friends and acquaintances walk past. Some of them glance at you and smile, but keep walking. Some pay you no attention. No one notices that you look like you’re on the verge of tears, or if they do they say nothing. You begin to wonder if you really are crazy, if everything is just fine. Finally, someone stops and says hi, and you bravely smile back at them. You have a pleasant, brief conversation. Nothing of importance is said. They mention that a class is stressful and you agree that you’re really stressed out right now. They brush over what you said and say they have to run to class. Nothing has been said of the dark circles under your eyes or the fact that you can’t quite get your mouth to turn up properly. Now you’re convinced that you’re crazy. Your emotions can’t be right or real if no one else even notices them.

 

This is its own kind of invalidation. When people simply ignore your problems, they by default tell you that what you’re feeling isn’t real: it seems as if you’re hallucinating whatever is wrong because no one else will react to it, or even react to your reaction. It’s confusing. It leaves you less and less certain that you can even mention your problems, more trapped inside your own mind. There’s a reason that giving someone the silent treatment is considered mean.

 

Another example of this is one that happens with kids all the time. One technique that parents use fairly often if their kids are throwing a temper tantrum is to ignore them. When kids throw a tantrum what they’re looking for is attention, so don’t reward the negative behavior, right? Well this method works up to a point. It works to get the child to calm down. What it doesn’t do is then tell the child that their desire for attention is real and important, or that whatever was bothering them deserves attention and care. This kind of method for child-rearing may not seem invalidating, but it tells a child that even if they are bawling, their emotions aren’t worth anyone’s time. It’s important if we don’t want to reward someone’s negative attention seeking behaviors that we find a way to go back and invalidate their feelings, talk it out, or recognize their feelings. This can happen after the fact.

 

Being silent to someone who is in pain or who has strong emotions of any kind is really the fastest way to tell them that what they’re feeling or doing is wrong. Imagine when you’re extremely excited about something and you bounce up to a friend, eager to tell them all about it and they just stare at you. Nothing bursts your bubble faster.

 

It’s a terrifying and horrible feeling when you’re invalidated in that way, but it is understandable why many of us ignore others’ problems. It’s overwhelming and tiring to always be checking in with people, and listening to everyone. Unfortunately, this is part of being a friend or family member: you should be willing to validate the people you care about and you should expect validation in return. We rarely hear about ways to potentially prevent mental illness, but if all of us spends more time listening and validating the emotions of those around us, we could really do some good in the world.

Mandatory Mental Health Education

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to people about concrete ways to deal with stress or improve their mental health. It’s been really interesting and kind of exhilarating as I notice how much I’ve learned in the last year or so and how wonderful it is to be able to share with others. However as I do this, I’ve begun to notice that even those people who are supposedly “normal” often don’t have a whole lot of skills around managing their mental health. Many of them have struggled to regulate emotions, to understand interpersonal effectiveness, or to tolerate distress. While they likely don’t feel emotions as strongly or have as few skills as those with diagnoses or who have been medicated, there is almost no one in this world who is an expert in navigating their emotions and mental health. To use the featured pic as an example, while not everyone is hanging out in the burning basement, few people are on the roof and everyone could enjoy being a few steps higher on the ladder.

 

The odd thing about understanding emotions is that it’s something we’re never taught. We are taught how to interact with other people, we are taught how to learn, we are taught how to budget or do our laundry or care for an animal. We’re particularly taught how to take care of our physical health. But for some reason everyone is expected to just pick up how to manage emotions and mental health. Now many of us have things modeled for us by our parents, but they were often just as clueless as we were and have cobbled something together out of their life experiences to get the best version they can. And rarely do they spend a lot of time consciously helping us sort out our emotions. All of that seems a little bit ridiculous to me. If there are two things that are really really useful to be successful anywhere else in life it’s stable mental health and stable physical health. If you don’t have those two things, everything becomes infinitely more difficult. So why don’t we give our children the tools to succeed?

 

Especially as I’ve been participating in DBT, I’ve been noticing that it really would not be all that hard to include education like that in schools. I only go once a week for two and a half hours. And I’m supposed to figure these skills out in a year. If we began implementing some of the knowledge that we have from psychology in schools from the time children start and teach them skills that will actually help them regulate emotions and deal with interpersonal relationships, we wouldn’t have to devote much time each week to it. Think of how helpful it would be to kids to understand what being judgmental is and how to cut down on judgments without feeling ashamed or bad about it. Or how helpful it would be to give them clear strategies for calming themselves. Or to help them recognize and name their emotions. Or to learn that emotions are acceptable and that they can feel emotions and simply sit with them. Holy cow I would have done so much better in life if I had had some of this basic training.

 

I don’t know if there’s any way to make this happen, but if we could adjust education in any way, I would suggest that we should add in a basic curriculum of emotional regulation. Most schools have a school therapist: it could be something they do once a week or once a month, or it could be something that teachers start getting trained on in school. It would include skills like how to make requests, set boundaries, validate, or be generous to and with others as part of interpersonal effectiveness. It would include techniques like breathing, distraction, or self-soothing for tolerating bad situations. And it would include some measure of work on identifying emotions, accepting emotions, fighting judgments, and using mindfulness to accept situations. Does anyone have a suggestion of how to make this into a petition or move it into the broader dialogue? I never hear a question of emotional education being brought up when we talk about improving mental health, but this could be a huge step towards decreasing stigma and increasing access.

The Pros and Cons of Dichotomies

We as human beings like to sort things. It makes things easier, allows us to make quicker decisions to keep ourselves safe, and is generally just useful in a lot of ways. Unfortunately, because of our brain’s quick abilities to sort things, we often like to create dichotomies. We see this explore in a lot of feminist theory (Man is to Culture as Woman is to Nature by Sherry Ortner) when we see dichotomies lumped together: feminine is emotional is irrational is the body is nature is…and on and on and on. We see emotions and logic set at odds with each other, because we like to categorize things as one or the other.

 

Unfortunately for us, the world does not exist in neat categories and dichotomies. Oftentimes we have to hold conflicting ideas together in our minds and belief systems: I can be doing my best and still have to work harder. I can be emotional but still make a good decision. There are lots of dichotomies like this. Oftentimes, I see people who haven’t had a lot of experience with mental health trying to categorize things into good and bad: they list traits of successful people or successful relationships, they talk about what makes a person happy or sad, they talk about how to be healthy. Often this involves juxtaposing these supposedly good traits against their negatives.

 

I recently saw a post on facebook about successful vs. non-successful people. Successful people’s traits included things like “making to-do lists”, “complimenting others”, and “exuding joy”. Unsuccessful people “criticize”, “lie about keeping a journal”, and “don’t know what they want to be”. This is bad dichotomizing. It shames people for things that may not be under their control, and creates categories of things that may not go together: so for example, I am very good at setting goals, making to do lists, taking responsibility for my failures, and recognizing the success of others. However I also don’t exude joy, I don’t know what I want to be, I’m bad at setting goals, and I do a number of other things from the “bad” side. We can’t label people as one or the other: we’re all mixed bags. And the trick isn’t to make yourself everything on the “good” side, it’s to balance your traits so that YOU can be successful: some of the “good” traits are useful, others are not. This depends on individual propensities.

 

Dichotomies can be used in helpful and unhelpful ways. They can be really unhelpful when they’re simply unrealistic. This happens a lot when we’re talking about gender, or about race, or about sexuality, or any other large human characteristic that people like to pain with broad brushstrokes. We just get it wrong when we try to encompass everyone in a dichotomy. It erases those people who don’t fit, either by telling them that they don’t exist or by telling them that they shouldn’t exist (see: genderqueer individuals and bisexual individuals for good examples). This often makes people feel guilty or ashamed when they don’t fall neatly into the category they’re “supposed” to be in. These kinds of dichotomies try to force things into one category or another, but really just make a situation more confusing by obscuring what’s going on.

 

However there are times that dichotomies can be pretty great. Sometimes you need shorthand to come to a quick understanding of a situation: you’re not necessarily looking for nuance, and you need to know yes or no, white or black. This is often helpful in emergency situations, or situations where you need to act quickly and don’t have time to explain carefully. But I think there’s another really important area where dichotomies can be extremely helpful, one that doesn’t get talked about much. This has to do with dialectics. I’m currently in a therapy called Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and one of the underlying principles of this therapy is that we often live in situations that have a dialectic between two mutually opposing forces in our lives. So for instance I can at once be doing my best and have to do better. These two things contradict each other, but they can both be true. And for me to survive as a human being, I have to hold the dichotomy together as a dialectic.

 

For some people this is more true than for others, but I find that dichotomies are everywhere in my life: in order to gain back control of my life, I have to give up control to therapists and dieticians. In order to be more stable and safer, I have to make myself vulnerable to others. These are bizarre dichotomies, but if we are to move forward in our lives we have to recognize them and accept them. These are personal dichotomies, about understanding the relationships of certain things in our lives, rather than about categorizing outside things and people. And where these dichotomies become very helpful is when we can understand that the tension between them is not destructive, but creative. When I recognize that my eating disorder is both a method for me to take up less space and to assert myself into space, I can do some amazing things with trying to fulfill both of those functions in new places, and with trying to understand those needs creatively through writing and art. Tension drives us to try to understand, and when we need to understand we build things around us: narratives, art, symbols, concepts, systems. If we can make these things dialectical instead of oppositional, we can do a lot for ourselves.

Dichotomies: How to Brag and How to Sad Brag

I was reading a post earlier about labels, and how we often feel ok with labeling ourselves descriptively (atheist, female, etc) but not in a complimentary manner (hero, humanitarian, etc). While I feel like this is true, I wonder why. What is so wrong with noticing when we’ve done good things and labeling it ourselves? I feel that one of the problems that many people have is that they feel they can’t own the good things they do: they feel they have to wait for outside recognition because it’s considered bragging to talk about it and label it themselves. Well I’m going to be honest: I think we could all use a little more self-validation. While sometimes bragging can lead to comparisons and competition, I think if we stopped waiting so long to see when OTHER people notice that we’ve done good things and just said “I did a good thing” to ourselves, we might actually see a reduction in how competitive we are. We don’t need to one-up people in order to be noticed: we can notice ourselves.

So I’m going to take this moment to pat myself on the back for things that have been going really well for me lately, not because I want you all to feel jealous or compare yourselves to me, but because I’m genuinely excited and happy, would like to share, and want to be able to say that I feel GOOD about myself in a few areas. I have two job interviews in the next two days and one of them is for a job that I’m actually really interested in. I’m actually making enough money right now that I can put things away for retirement. It has been over a week since I self-harmed and I am going to continue that streak for AT LEAST three more weeks because I want to be cut free when I go to California. I have been in a bad job situation for 3 months now, and I have not crashed and burned. I have managed to deal with it, to brainstorm solutions, to find ways to tolerate the distress. There have been slipups certainly, but I am doing better than I have in YEARS. HOLY SHIT I AM AWESOME. When things go like this for me, I often look like the featured pic.

However despite being able to say all of this, and despite the fact that I can recognize that I have done some things quite well in recent history, I think the ability to speak our successes always needs to be a dialectic. I am always a proponent of being OPEN, and I think that this is no exception: if we’re going to be able to recognize our own successes, we also have to be able to recognize our own struggles. And we can recognize that these things may be one and the same. We have to be able to hold “I did some amazing things” at the same time as we hold “I am struggling so hard right now” and recognize that both can be true. Now first of all this is incredibly difficult. At the same time as I recognize that I have some wonderful opportunities right now and that I’ve done some things very right, I can also recognize that I’ve done some things very wrong. I’ve been struggling in my relationships lately, especially with the amount of effort I’ve been putting in to just feel sane with myself. I HAVE slipped up while trying to deal with this job, and I’ve let my mindset fall backwards in many ways. It has been a very hard couple of months for me trying to navigate the waters of semi-adulthood, paying for my own apartment, figuring out how to feed myself, working a full time job.

This is more what I look like when I think about those things. But I have STILL done awesome things. I have started a personal blog, started blogging for CFI On Campus, started planning a (very tentative) conference with some friends…

So I would like to propose that we as human beings become more comfortable saying out loud our strengths and weaknesses. Not the namby pampy job interview version of this, but actually going to twitter and saying “I did something awesome. I’m proud of me”, and not feeling guilty about it. And then going to twitter five minutes later and saying “I’m still struggling. And I’m not guilty about that either”. Human beings are remarkably capable of being contradictory things at the same time. We are filled with dichotomies. It’s something I’ve been spending a lot of time with in my DBT therapy, and I think it’s something that all of us need to learn to be more comfortable with.

 

Written by Olivia