Spiraling

What are you consuming and what is consuming you?

This week I commented that I believe that part of the reason why I have been finding it hard to escape bouts of anxiety and depression is my diet. I am not talking about food. I’ve got that part under control. I am talking about the media, social posts, news broadcasts, books, YouTube videos and such that I consume on a daily basis.

The world over the past many months has seemed to be in a constant state of ‘doom and gloom’. We are constantly being flooded with memes and voices telling us we need to be ‘afraid’; ‘to not trust’; ‘to believe all is about to be lost’; ‘to feel that all hope is gone’. Mix together religion and politics and you get a massive storm of potential negativity. Where there should be a striving for hope and unity, there is often despair, hate, suspicion, and disunity.

And these messages hit our eyes and ears from the moment we wake up until we go to bed to their chants. How is a constant diet of such things not going to begin to corrupt us from within?

We are immediately being asked to pick sides. To hold to certain ideologies or parties or thought patterns. All this does is create more and more division and after a while we end up isolating ourselves from entire segments of society.

I know there are urgencies and times to take action concerning harmful things but we need breaks away from that constant fight. We need to somehow reclaim the beauty and worth found in all of humanity. Somehow we have to see the ways in which we are all being manipulated towards a very specific way of seeing the world. It happens on all sides of the discussion. We can easily get tunnel vision. We can easily forget we each individually have our own framework of seeing this world. We do not have to jump on every bandwagon. I left one very controlling, closed-minded and manipulative bandwagon. I do not desire to just turn around and jump on another one.

So I have to be careful what I allow into my mind. I need to take breaks away from it all. I absolutely need to keep seeing the beauty around or otherwise I will cease to trust others at all.

My life circumstances over the past 3 years already hit hard and took a toll on my ability to trust and to connect to others. I started isolating and withdrew. If I keep listening to and feeding off of the social struggle happening in our world right now, I will trap myself within it. I do not want this for my life.

I also want to reclaim my spiritual side from the abyss that it has fallen into. Just because I experienced great abuse from my previous religious community does not mean that ALL followers are like them. All of that generalization has to go. I have seen good fruit amidst the bad. That’s perhaps the main point here. There are loving people everywhere. Free the mind to see them.

I have been spiraling for a while. Carried by the storm of opinions, thoughts, truths, and bandwagons. When my foundation was snatched from underneath me, I quickly grabbed hold of whatever I could that brought me support. Some of that support is still with me today. They were a lifesaver. They give me hope and help me normalize and stabilize during all this change. But some of what fed my brain, over time began to make it a little jaded. I ran from one certainty right into another certainty just along opposing lines. As I have said before, to me any claim of certainty has the potential for much harm. It erases mystery. And I’d rather allow for such mystery. I believe it keeps us humble and teachable.

My spiraling also has caused me much anxiety and depression. When you feel that the world is totally against you, it breeds paranoia and paranoia breeds anxiety and depression. I told myself these things and to be honest still have a tendency to continue doing so. But it is the messages of media, social posts, politics and the like which create this image. Often times we convince ourselves of something to the point we give life to it. I don’t want to continue to see people in this way. There is good fruit out there. I have to believe this. In order to silence the doom and gloom voices, I need to make some changes to what I consume. I have a few action steps for this:

• Does what I am consuming feed the production of good fruit or does it feed the negative? Am I seeking a balance?

• Have I connected today with actual people or have I isolated once again?

• Have I tried to see the good in people? Think the best of them?

• Have I fallen into the trappings of ‘certainty’ regardless of which side or angle of the conversation it is coming from?

• Am I recognizing when I am letting paranoia set in or anticipatory anxiety?

• Have I taken the time today to look at the beauty around me?

• Have I tried not to take myself so seriously today?

• Have I attempted to not over analyze everything???!!! This is my kryptonite!

• Am I letting the true and authentic me shine?

• What am I consuming and what is consuming me?

I want to stop spiraling and finally touch the ground. It is only then that I can keep stepping forward on this journey.