Mulling Over My Thoughts of Mayhem

Heavy is the head that wears the crown -Shakespeare

It seems to be a universal belief that if we want to live a good life, we must be a good person. We are to uphold that belief and teach it to our children, who will then teach it to their own children. But perhaps, as usually happens in a game of telephone, the initial message often loses its form as it is passed on through several people. Several generations since the dawn of our civilization, perhaps our universal belief has shifted too. Rather than striving to be a good person, we instill in our children to be a valuable person. We could argue that it’s because our society and civilization have shifted as well; that "good" means contribution and value, which usually take form in tangible achievements nowadays.

Wirya, Arta, Tri Winasis

Power, wealth, and knowledge. According to my ancestors, those are the three things — achievements if you will — that would provide value to a human. If one is to find himself amiss of the three, telas tilasing janma — he is reduced to nothing: a being of no value. Quite literally a dried up leaf of the teak tree would be more valuable than he.

I’m not saying it’s a bad or harmful principle to uphold. I realize that as a civilized society, we must continuously strive for betterment. And for betterment, for development, for continous growth to happen, we all need to contribute our parts. But perhaps there is something our parents forgot to teach us along with that principle: the concept of limitations.

We are taught to strive for a good life, without anybody ever really questioning what it might entail to, to us. Of course we are taught what a good life is: good school, good grades, good degree, good job, good money, good house, good rides, good family, good friends, good hobbies. Have we ever really stopped and asked ourselves which of those do we really consider as good, and which of those we would rather limit our efforts in? Or perhaps, is that really the trade-off for a good societal development: the perceived limitation of personal preferences? We may not live in a colonized nation anymore (some would argue against that statement, but face it: it’s physically so much better than what our ancestors lived through), but I have met people whose entire lives are exposed to a certain way of life, to certain principles, and it seemed like along the way they forgot they could reject some of those principles and live another way. It’s sort of the new, modern prison for the free, really.

I was one of those people. To some extent, I still am.

I grew up among ambitious academics. My parents are lecturers who want to see their students strive, graduate with good grades. Teachers favored me and at many opportunities encouraged me to help my friends get better grades, or achieve better titles in better competitions. My sister is a nerd who continuously graduated with good grades from good schools. I was guilty of that too. I grew up talking with my mother’s colleagues, her peers, her graduate students, and professors more than three times my age. It was an environment that resembled a perpetual motion of learning, of great, big ideas, dreams of humanity and society — of striving for something, and never really tolerating shortcomings, or any semblance of it.

My peers throughout kindergarten, elementary, junior high, senior high, and college were all ambitious children from good families who seek to make a good fortune and a good life, which manifested in their obession with good grades and good connections in school. All in all, I was conditioned to believe in the gospel of excellence: a life without excellence is a life wrongly lived. I became obsessed with excellence, but worse, I became obsessed with not failing.

Of Failure and Suffocation

One of the hardest questions I had to answer from recruiters was: what was your biggest failure and how did you deal with it? To tell you the truth, I never really failed with no safety net below, and so I never really experienced failure in its rawest form. Nobody criticized me to my face, I still won second or third place. The worst I ever got was fourth place, and even then I still got a trophy and recognition. So, imagine how I reacted when I got my first, actual negative feedback at work.

I broke down, that’s how.

The feedback itself wasn’t 100% justified but also wasn’t 100% unjustified, I know parts of my fault and parts of my superiors’ fault. But it made no difference to onlookers with no internal knowledge of the situation. At first I was stupefied, and then I found myself struggling to control my breath and tone. My voice shook when I tried speaking faster, and it felt like a barbed wire was choking my throat. Somehow we got through that session, my manager and I, without me completely losing it.

My unfamiliarity with the concept of ‘accepting failures’, my unwillingness to be painted as the bad guy, and my pride in having a stable mental fortitude battled for power that night. When things go south, people trust to be the rational and calm one, that I would give them some type of believable reason and encouragement that hey, you’re doing alright — you’re going to be alright. But I couldn’t even tell myself that. Suddenly, all of my beliefs started crumbling because I could no longer believe it when I told people it’s going to be alright. And it’s always been a thing that when I can’t believe something, I wouldn’t say it. So, I stopped listening to people, I stopped encouraging people. I stopped being what I thought I was good at, what I was meant to do: to listen and help. Instead, I started to feel like the biggest phony on Earth, like a hypocrite, or a con artist that tricked people into thinking she can contribute to something important in society when in reality she’s nothing.

I physically felt the hurt in my chest upon hearing that feedback, and like a man drowning, I desperately swam around seeking shelter. But, like a man drowning too, the harder I swam against the stream, the stronger it pushed me back. I found no savior that night, because the hands that I thought would pull me up just pushed me under even further. “Don’t overthink it,” one hand said, “I told you so,” another hand said. “I’m sorry you have to experience that” felt like the best response I heard all night, except it was followed by “don’t mind them.” I was so tired fighting against the stream, screaming like a man possessed, but no hand held me the way I wished to be soothed. Instead, the water entered my lungs and suffocated me even further. At one point, I caved in. I let the hands send me under, I let the water fill my lungs, and I let my own hands stop paddling, stop reaching.

I saw my therapist a week from then, and it’s been five months since the incident. There are several things that I learned, both from my reactions and from my therapist that I want to share here.

Self-Sabotaging Thoughts

The first telltale sign of my cracked-up wall showed up way before I received the feedback. I lived and worked for almost a year through what people call as self-sabotaging thoughts. I started to doubt everything I did: my ability to make presentable slides, my ability to work with numbers (I suck at this, I admit), my ability to work in general, but the worst part was I started to doubt my own ability to think. I couldn’t even trust my own thoughts: as if none of my words were mine, none of my thoughts were mine.

The second was the way I would doubt the sincerity behind everyone’s words. My manager would say “good job!” and I would think that he meant my work was subpar at best, but it had met his expectations, so work harder and do not fail me going forward. My boyfriend would say “I love you!” but all I would hear was that as my boyfriend, he’s obligated to assure me that we are in a loving relationship, regardless of what he actually thought or felt.

They were so horrible, and honestly so destructive. After hearing my story through many coughing and snot-induced pauses, my therapist closed the session with a homework: find something good to say about yourself. Everyday: write it down, tell it to yourself, and do it in a way that you will find believable.

The first day, as is the case with many first times, was difficult. I really couldn’t bring myself to write a whole sentence without wanting to scratch everything I had written and argue with myself. At the end, I wrote anything that came to mind without really believing in my own words. On the second day, I realized a flaw within my method: I am naturally critical about myself, sugarcoating things about myself won’t make me suddenly believe that I am ‘good.’ What I needed at that time was somebody telling me that I’m doing a good job, and actually providing tangible evidents along with justifications why they’re good.

So, I switched things up. Instead of writing from a first person’s perspective, I wrote from a third person’s perspective — as if I was evaluating someone the way I usually do: with affection and logical justifications. Instead of saying “I did great today” I wrote “Milen, you did well today in terms of…” My therapist smiled at the story when I told her about it, and told me that’s actually a form of Acceptance Commitment Therapy. Rather than fighting with my own thoughts and feelings, I tried to acknowledge and accept their existence, and identified ways to be mindful around them. And that’s the center of things: mindfulness.

Most of the time, it’s not the contents of the thoughts that send us into a spiral, makes us feel like we’re drowning with no glimmer of hope for a savior. It’s the branches of thoughts. It’s like the initial thought was what should I have for lunch but then the thoughts morphed themselves and forced us into thinking about fifty different thoughts triggered by the thought of lunch: where should I go for lunch, with whom, how long would it take, how much would it cost, what did I eat this morning, what did I eat yesterday, how will they interact in my body, I should watch my weight, do I look fat in this outfit?

You see how one thought of lunch can spiral into a harmful insecurity about one’s body? I learned to be mindful in a sense that I acknowledged their existence and expected their arrival. When I could do that, I could prepare to put a cork in their stream. This is a skill I previously never learned: creating limitations/boundaries for myself.

The trick sounded really simple when my therapist said it, but boy, was it hard to do. It was just two simple words: so what?

It was a process of sitting with your demons and conversing with them, really. You let them into a space in your mind, sit with them, and converse with them as if they’re your equal. My therapist taught me to name that pile of toxic thoughts, that demon, that space, and I chose Rima. It’s an abbreviation for Ribet Amat or the Indonesian slang for “really, you’re making this a lot more complicated than it should be.” After that, I learned to talk to it (metaphorically, in my head), asking it so what? For every difficulty it’s trying to impose upon my existence, I asked what’s that good for? Is that right? Okay, so what?

It’s a form of defusion process; detaching or distancing oneself from their thoughts and emotions. I found it worked splendidly. I am a critical and difficult person by nature, so it wasn’t hard to criticize my own critic. The contents of Rima’s words differed from time to time, but mostly it was about my ability to work. This slide is rather ugly, don’t you think? She would say. Is that right? You want to revise it again? What for? For whom? I would reply. Your analysis is rather dumb, she would say. Is that right? So what? I would reply.

You see, the hardest part was dealing with the fact that my work will never be perfect. Rima would always have something to say about anything and everything. But, after repeatedly saying so what and bantering with her, I found that Rima has settled into an amiable silence. And I found that by creating limitations between what is actually important, and what Rima had been conditioned to think as important, I could see things from a larger perspective.

My demon is a very caring creature. She doesn’t want to see me fail because she associated failure with worthlessness, and she doesn’t want me to be worthless; she doesn’t want me to be hurt when somebody else deems me worthless. At the center of everything, it’s about survival in the society. I couldn’t blame her: that’s what she grew up believing.

So, I tried to listen to her and filter her words instead. I’d like to think we work well together now: her pointing out potentials for mistakes, and me considering them with a grain of salt. Even though I rarely hear “good job!” from my superiors now, I no longer destroy myself over it. I think I’m starting to see things for what they are, not what Rima wants them to be.

Closing

I still believe in the pursuit of excellence. Except, now I see that there are two ways of living life: a) practically, and b) philosophically. Wirya, arta, tri winasis can mean a lot more than just material things or status when we look at it from philosophical perspective. Practically speaking, you do need them to be able to survive in this society. But philosophically speaking, you can define by yourself the limitations of their power: how much money is enough, how high of a status is enough, how wide of a knowledge is enough? There is no guidebook to adulthood: our elders also fumbled around blindly through some points in their lives, once. And if they have enough wisdom to admit it, they would say it’s the mistakes that taught them valuable lessons; moreso than their winnings.

Of course, it’s nice to stand at the top of something, but if you failed, so what? You can always discover yourself over, and over, and over again. Nobody ever, and nobody should ever, set a limit for failures.

But still, it’s nice to stand at the top of something. But just remember, heavy is the head that wears the crown: with great power comes great responsibilities. Or in many cases, with great power comes a great deal of self-sabotaging thoughts. Choose your battles wisely.