Let's keep talking
When I finished writing “Stuck” , I had just come to a point in my journey towards greater mental and emotional health that I didn’t recognize. I was, and am, content and satisfied with my life. Sure, I have good days and bad days, moods that appear because something has happened, because I didn’t get enough sleep or feel unwell for whatever reason, or for no reason at all. But overall, things have arrived at a largely positive place.
And it’s for this reason that I decided to read and write more about mental and emotional health now, when things are pretty good. If one is to take the self-help movement at its face, one pursues improving his or her lot in life because something’s wrong. Or I think because of what I think of as “self-optimization”. This is the effort to better oneself in an effort to become a more effective person, usually professionally, which doesn’t seem bad, except that it’s often in pursuit of ambitions like more status or money or success. Adherents want more than anything to be better wheels in the economic machine. Instead, I want to see what self-help looks like when I feel okay, and I don’t have big personal problems I’m trying to solve, and I’m open to becoming a better person who has a greater capacity for impact on my family, my community, and society at large, but think I’m already on the right track.
Mind you, this was not always the case. I have bipolar disorder, and like many with that diagnosis and similar ones, struggled with drinking for many years. I’ve been hospitalized in an inpatient setting three times. I’ve been to outpatient rehab twice. I have been in some form of mental health treatment since I was 15. I’ve had almost a dozen therapists and probably as many psychiatrists. I’ve been around the block, for sure. I’ve been exposed to many kinds of treatments and have some familiarity with almost everything that’s out there. So the perspective I employ is informed by exposure and personal experience.
Here, you can expect me to unpack various different approaches to pursuing mental and emotional health. Often this means going right to the source of dominant therapy techniques like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and mindfulness techniques. I’ll do this not from any academic distance, but by trying to apply it to my own life and identifying what feels challenging and what might be more common sense. I look forward to going on this journey with you.