I’ve spent this past week dedicated to the craft of building new neural pathways in my brain. I wish I was exaggerating, but this is the terminology all of my doctors use to describe my trauma recovery. Without getting too into the weeds, the TL;DR is that I need to spend the rest of my life rewiring my brain after being put through the wringer over my first ~20 years on this planet. Having now spent more than a decade on the practice, I figure, why not spend the remainder of my life on it?
The level I took this to over the past few days, however, was striking – even to me, as I begin to steal a couple of moments to reflect. I say this because I wasn’t prompted by an event, a person, or my environment to do so. The only conclusion I can draw up to this point is that everything I’ve been told, everything I’ve been learning while focused on my recovery has finally started sinking in.
In the beginning of the week, I made a promise to myself to stop detracting from my self-worth (a bad habit) through every means possible, even in the littlest ways. My trauma response to anything going wrong in my life is often self-blame, which eventually evolves into self-hatred. This is what made it a practice in carving out new neural pathways – what if I could create a new avenue for my brain that didn’t wreck me psychologically and physiologically?
Right off the bat, it was hard to ignore the sheer speed at which my mind threw itself into shame and self-hatred. I think that the self-awareness I gained through that alone was worth the practice.
As time went on, the pathway-building process itself ebbed and flowed. At the beginning, I was fueled by motivation stemming from a bit of self-preservation that made it seem easier than it really was. Progressively, there were many moments that made it feel like I was fighting a losing battle. In short, life happened. People, places, and things impacted my stress level, detracting from my focus on the task at hand.
As I close out the week, however, I think that the pathway carving has gone well enough for me to not only consider it a success, but a reason to keep going. I know now that, while carving new avenues for my brain is significant to my recovery, it’s just one benefit of thinking – and acting – differently. If you can change the way you look at your job; the place you live; your family; what you see in the mirror every morning; the last fight you had; the timing of the traffic you encountered on the way home; you’ve already done the hard part by accepting the other possibilities. Developing new pathways from there with the variables of your choosing winds up feeling like a privilege.
Truthfully, I’m still determining what I want those variables to be. I had ideas of the people and places I wanted to be at the end of these new pathways to reach my ultimate goal (happiness). If this week has taught me anything, though, it’s that you can always expect the tides to shift. Placing blame on yourself for it is absurd, but it’s easy to lose sight of that when you’re treading water.