Ava Jarvis
Gold Member
My brain has both rational and irrational bits, same as everybody else.
Sadly, my father and then Amazon and a whole bunch of people drilled into my head that unless I am doing work that earns money or is helping someone else, I am being lazy and also am a worthless human being. And this is the kicker: if I'm not working myself to exhaustion every day, I am being lazy and inconsiderate.
The thing is, my mind kind of broke after three decades of that and now I'm trying to pick up the pieces. Literally the only things I can do is work on my therapy, meditate, pray, make a little art sometimes, and rest.
But my brain screams at me that I'm lazy, from time to time, that I'm bad, that I don't deserve this time off, even if it is spent without a job and unpaid. The screaming has been getting pretty bad of late—it comes and goes. Unfortunately I think in the past it only goes when I give in and start trying to do excessive amounts of work—that was how I achieved complete breakdowns last year and earlier this year.
So goal: try to get my brain's irrational bits to understand that my recovery time IS work. That me learning to rest and not work 16-hour days IS necessary. That overwork is the cause of me not having recovered from decades of trauma previously, and that now I have to pay the price—which is to do therapy and reflect.
And that working myself into a frenzy with therapy action plans isn't good either—therapy is something like 30% action and 70% active analysis and reflection over that action.
My brain is slowly understanding that the meditation and prayer are good things, necessary things, but only with constant validation from my friends, which helps me a lot.
I don't know if I'll recover to the point where I can completely deny my needs and work 18 hour days 7 days a week again.
But I don't know if this is something I (a) want or (b) need or (c) healthy. I always kind of assumed that if you were healthy and a good person you just worked 18 hour days 7 days a week. But I'm starting to learn that this is probably really not good for any person, traumatized or not. I'm not terribly sure sometimes why people who used to be around me act like it is.
I wonder if I'll be able to run my own business eventually, like I want. One of my business mentors told me that I couldn't make it unless I was 100% healthy, that if you're disabled in any way your business will 100% fail, and like
Like I feel bad that I tried so hard to be 100% healthy and gloss over my issues, because I broke down 6 months in and proved her right.
Sigh.
I think I'm getting enough better that I can actually reason out to my brain that my job right now IS my therapy, reflection, and healing. That this is totally my job. And also that 8 hours of sleep is perfectly normal and not a sign of "losing my work ethic". And that taking time to cook my own food isn't wasting time.
Seriously my brain thinks the only worthy work is to write code for a Fortune 500 company, and I simmered in an environment that encouraged that thinking for a decade.
But that's not how it works.
That's not how any of this works.
Sadly, my father and then Amazon and a whole bunch of people drilled into my head that unless I am doing work that earns money or is helping someone else, I am being lazy and also am a worthless human being. And this is the kicker: if I'm not working myself to exhaustion every day, I am being lazy and inconsiderate.
The thing is, my mind kind of broke after three decades of that and now I'm trying to pick up the pieces. Literally the only things I can do is work on my therapy, meditate, pray, make a little art sometimes, and rest.
But my brain screams at me that I'm lazy, from time to time, that I'm bad, that I don't deserve this time off, even if it is spent without a job and unpaid. The screaming has been getting pretty bad of late—it comes and goes. Unfortunately I think in the past it only goes when I give in and start trying to do excessive amounts of work—that was how I achieved complete breakdowns last year and earlier this year.
So goal: try to get my brain's irrational bits to understand that my recovery time IS work. That me learning to rest and not work 16-hour days IS necessary. That overwork is the cause of me not having recovered from decades of trauma previously, and that now I have to pay the price—which is to do therapy and reflect.
And that working myself into a frenzy with therapy action plans isn't good either—therapy is something like 30% action and 70% active analysis and reflection over that action.
My brain is slowly understanding that the meditation and prayer are good things, necessary things, but only with constant validation from my friends, which helps me a lot.
I don't know if I'll recover to the point where I can completely deny my needs and work 18 hour days 7 days a week again.
But I don't know if this is something I (a) want or (b) need or (c) healthy. I always kind of assumed that if you were healthy and a good person you just worked 18 hour days 7 days a week. But I'm starting to learn that this is probably really not good for any person, traumatized or not. I'm not terribly sure sometimes why people who used to be around me act like it is.
I wonder if I'll be able to run my own business eventually, like I want. One of my business mentors told me that I couldn't make it unless I was 100% healthy, that if you're disabled in any way your business will 100% fail, and like
Like I feel bad that I tried so hard to be 100% healthy and gloss over my issues, because I broke down 6 months in and proved her right.
Sigh.
I think I'm getting enough better that I can actually reason out to my brain that my job right now IS my therapy, reflection, and healing. That this is totally my job. And also that 8 hours of sleep is perfectly normal and not a sign of "losing my work ethic". And that taking time to cook my own food isn't wasting time.
Seriously my brain thinks the only worthy work is to write code for a Fortune 500 company, and I simmered in an environment that encouraged that thinking for a decade.
But that's not how it works.
That's not how any of this works.
