'And yet, that’s exactly what we do with our deepest dreams and desires'
Reading corner
What I can do, though, is tell you my truth. I can tell you the one thing I believe above all else, and that’s this: There’s no formula for success. You don’t have to be a certain kind of person with a certain set of magically acquired skills (or, more appropriate for this discussion, you don’t have to be a certain person without a certain “limiting” condition) in order to do what you want to do. Your path will look different than someone else’s path, even if you’re both striving toward a similar goal, because that’s the nature of individuality. What works for me in any given situation might not work for you, and vice versa. It might take me twice as long or I might do it twice as fast or I might decide halfway through that I don’t actually want what I thought I wanted at all. That’s how life works — with or without mental illness.
People ask me all the time how I balance the raw and often unpredictable experience of bipolar disorder with owning a business and being an endurance athlete, and I don’t think I’ve ever had what people consider a “good” answer. Because my answer is this: I just do. It’s exactly how a similar conversation went when I asked a friend how she maintained such a thriving business amidst the chaos of raising young children. “I don’t know,” she said, “I just do?”
You figure it out along the way. You accept that there’s no definitive guidebook to being who you want to be, doing what you want to do, and having what you want to have. And then, once you’ve accepted that, the only thing left is to just do the thing you want to do. And if (read: when) you encounter obstacles and setbacks, you find a way around them.
Picture this: You’re walking home one afternoon and you come across a lone orange cone sitting in your path. So, you walk around it, and you keep going. But let’s say, instead, that it’s 10 orange cones. What would you do? You’d walk a little more to one side to get around all 10 cones, and you’d keep going. Now, let’s say there were 100 cones, or 1,000, or even 10,000. What would you do? You’d be annoyed, probably, and frustrated – and maybe even a little unsure of how to get home since you’ve never had to go a different route before, but you’d find a way nonetheless. You’d take as big of a detour as you needed to take; you wouldn’t just sit down in the middle of the sidewalk and say, “Well, this is too big of an obstacle, so I guess I live on this sidewalk now because I’m never going home again.”
And yet, that’s exactly what we do with our deepest dreams and desires.
By Esme Wang
Full text here: https://esmewang.com/the-truth-about-entrepreneurship-mental-illness-guest-post/
Healing notes
I discovered Esme Wang thanks to my friend R. She used to post about the lovely things Esme wrote. A long while ago, I bought her book Light Gets In. Apart from the apt title, it felt so great to read it, even though I neither have schizophrenia or bipolar. There was a sense of calm in her writing. I revisited it all of this week thanks to a difficult mental health week.
I've been processing some very difficult memories in therapy and my brain has decided to make sleeping an arduous task. I have been revisiting what were previously banal memories with new endings and hence new revelations. Through my dreams, my memory network is attempting closure for memories where I never had closure. It is both remarkable and deeply disturbing. I marvel at all the things my brain is capable of while I stay in bed from the sheer exhaustion of having slept 8 hours - in practise and having not slept at all - in feeling. The exhaustion I feel from being stimulated is exhausting. Oops. Words have become repetitive but you understand.
Irony is that it is mental health awareness week and I have no idea how to wrap my head around my mental health which is so closely tied to my physical health and of course what I process in therapy. I frantically messaged my therapist who sent back the sweetest message asking me to ground myself and breathe through this. Now, these are both fantastic suggestions and I did them both. But yesterday, she reminded me in therapy that this path of learning from my past, acknowledging the experiences and remapping the memory network in my brain - is hard work. And in a week of talking about mental health, I think reminding myself this is all I need to do. None of the paths are easy. But we walk them and Light Gets In.
I hope you know the work you do on yourself is beautiful and I wish easier and calmer weeks for each of you.
Food experiments Bad days mean warm meals for comfort. I always keep a couple of knorr packets of soup at home for pain-full days. I took a large vessel of water (roughly 500 ml) and emptied a knorr packet of tomato soup (serves 4) into it.
Let the soup thicken for a while.
Meanwhile take butter in a pan and fry basil, parsley and mint. Sprinkle a little pepper on it. Once fully cooked, add the greens to the soup.
Next step, boil the noodles in the soup itself. Takes roughly 2-4 minutes to cook.
Pour into a bowl and add cheese (or not. I like cheese in everything). Enjoy the warm bowl of comfort with a book or some toasted bread. <3
Dear you,
May this week have the comfort you need and the love of
those you want. <3
Love, kindness and warmth,
Nidsitis
'I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: Am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?' - Rainer Maria Rilke