Living a Lie to Stay Alive

It's startling to have lived with something your whole life and have so little information on it...

Or that's how it would have gone if this exact blog post would have been finished and published if I wrote it 4 months ago when I initially wrote the headline and the first sentence. I was eager to write about it but I had a hesitancy stopping me. It was at the beginning of a newfound love of educating myself and becoming more self-aware of my mental illness, but it was at the beginning of it so I didn't feel like my words would or could help anybody in my position yet.

I have finally come to the conclusion that I will never get to a point where I'm good enough to start if I never end up starting. So here I will be starting this blog and starting more after because I have a passion for writing and it is a source of happiness. Even if nobody else reads this I can't wait for my own personal growth through it and to look back at it later down the line. I would give a more detailed introduction about me but I'm finally just learning who I am so maybe I can do my introduction blog later down the road.

But let us get into the real reason that you clicked on this page, because of the title. I wasn't always so comfortable with discovering who I actually was, I spent most of my life mirroring everybody else because everything that I was passionate about got shot down and eventually my self-confidence got pushed down to the ground so hard I didn't have a self anymore.

So I could go on to explain how most of the traits I have developed have been through fear and made it so I was always wearing a mask. I always was so jealous, my sister has a masters degree, my brother is in the marines and hopes to join the navy seals one day, and my other brother has the job of his dreams with coding and just bought a 700,000 penthouse in the city and so you could see the attacks on my mind when I was a kid who couldn't get out of the bed most days. I've never felt like enough because everything around me told me I wasn't. I think about 75% of my life I've been stuck in the prison of my mind that was stuck in bed.

There are a lot more details that I could go into but just imagine that was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to all of the experiences I had that told me I was better off dead and there are still so many people that those experiences never get proven wrong and even still affect me in my everyday life even with how much progress I have made.

Getting into what has actually been the push of my newfound perspective of that wasn't who I was and it was not my fault, I lived the way I lived to survive and I can't ever get my time back, but I'm okay with that now that I'm not letting my experiences ruin even more of my time. I want to end this post with a few tips I learned that I wish I knew a lot earlier.

Tip #1 You can't think your way out of bad thoughts. It's been a habit for a lot of years, to overthink and try to overthink my way out of overthinking. The only thing that will get your negative thoughts out of your brain is to go and get your body moving, running, jumping, dancing. get adrenaline and heartbeat up and your brain will become more positive naturally because it has other urgent things to focus on and you can't think two things at the very same time.

Tip #2 Find a perspective that works for you. I've tried to do it other people's way for so long knowing they don't work. Try other perspectives and educate yourself on how your brain likes to learn. You could hear the same message three times, three different ways and one way will stick with you most.

Third and final tip: Don't go the rest of your life without information. That is the key to self-awareness and growth. Read, research, whatever you do just make sure you are learning and growing. Make your older self happier than you are now. I went so long just saying I was stuck when in reality I wasn't trying to grow. I was comfortable but I've learned I don't want any regrets later in life.

Stay safe,

Bri