Who we are now, who we were back then, and who we will become one day is a journey marked with fear, etched with courage, driven by strength, and laden with every emotion available in our affective spectrum intersecting with the multiplicity of experiences of what will hopefully experience over a very long and happy life span. This is the very crux of our health as living beings. Our threshold to be content, comfortable, and find satisfying meaning with what we have become and who we are now as people. There is no greater measure of our happiness than how we feel about ourselves, how we see and understand ourselves in the greater realm of our peers, friends, family and the larger world around us.
Too many of us get caught up in the endpoints. What I mean is that the extremes of this spectrum, the exterior self, and the deepest interior, are spaces in which no person can exist for too long without feeling unbalanced. If not unbalanced, then definitely distorted in perception, and certainly someone who is caught up in the limits and frontier of what is truly important. I mean to say that no person can function or exist peacefully for too long if they exist at odds with him or herself. There is no question that anyone caught up in such an extreme or bipolar emotional state can persist without becoming agitated, or persistently delusional for too long.
Some of us focus more on our exterior presentation, but all of us are experiencing life in the manner in which we choose. There is no right or wrong when it comes to how we live our lives when it comes to how we see ourselves. Our perception is our own. We own it, and we have to live with it. But for how long can we persist when we are unhappy with what is happening in our lives?
This is why and when mania, grandeur, or anything so immensely disproportionate can become toxic to the body. Mania and anything so immensely new and different can become and can trigger our psychosis and delusions when we live at the very limits of our inner and exterior self. Without cause or warning, when we shift our persona with such rapid and unplanned gait, immense speed and will to live beyond our limits, something is bound to go awry. Whether it be our outward behaviors, articulations and demeanor, be it our emotional regulation, something will fail us during such a radical shift in our our understanding of who we are at any given moment in time and space.
Many of us wonder about where and when this moment of misery and sickness exist. Where is our mental breaking point? How much can we handle before totally collapsing? All of this depends on how healthy we are before we push ourselves to such radical extremes or succumb to new active symptoms without warning. This is why we always need to push ourselves to be our best selves at all times. Only when we are living out our lives at our healthiest peaks will there be enough space from wellness to free fall to the lowest low before our lives becomes too unsafe to keep going moving forward in life.
Our personal evolution is not a gift bestowed by good fortune. It is instead our privilege as people to choose for ourselves whom we want to be. We grow beyond our present self through self determination, and the want for change. So why do some of us stay the same? And other choose to transform themselves? I would hazard to say the difference between these two is not a question of can but the presence of our capacity to capture a greater need to grow. It is the presence of this mobility, the seeds of transformation and change, that only sprout when we are at an impasse.
This impasse or holding pattern plagues our soul and demands from us that we move forward and beyond our current status and achieve what it is we set out to accomplish. There really is no bad or good self. What we need, desire, and think will ultimately be the righteous direction we choose which projects and maps out the pathway to our next great transformation. Choosing to be a criminal or wayward soul and partake in crime, a life which brings with it pain, heartache, and bad fortune is not really an extension of who we are but instead, what we are doing which continues to be at odds with our purpose and our meaning in life.
Choosing to live a life of happiness, good will, and positive nature is always our choice, and our ability and capacity to know what it is that we need to exist without sickness and a fate bound in misunderstanding of our own humanity. What will continue to drive us into the next great phase of life hinges on our with good intentions, and willingness to challenge the great stuck points with persistence, determination, and will to move beyond the immediate perception and needs of the moment. The constraints of today are just that. Tomorrow, being and will to be persist, exists only in our eyes, the very gates of our being and the keeper of our happiness in the greater realm of all things capable of transformation and change.
Author Info:
mentalhealth
Max E. Guttman is the owner of Mindful Living LCSW, PLLC, a private mental health practice in Yonkers, New York.
