“Sometimes the sky rains gasoline instead of water and you have to be strong enough and ignore the urge to set yourself on fire.” – Oliver Nolau
Two years ago my life took a 180-degree turn. It was winter and let me tell you, winter and I are not friends. My relationship of three years had just officially ended. Although one could argue it was over way before then. In hindsight, everything seems so much clearer, doesn’t it? We can even pinpoint the exact moment when the love wanes, the effort stops.
I had moved to a different state to enter this relationship that was now over and I needed time to decide if I was going to stay there or move back home. I slept on my friend’s couch for a couple of months. This was a small couch. I didn’t fit. My friend’s dogs watched me every night as I tucked myself in. They always watched me so intently. To them I was a stranger. My friend, her dogs, and I all knew – I didn’t belong there. We all knew I was going to leave soon. Before leaving and before being able to actually verbalize it, I had to tie up some loose ends. Thus I needed a place to stay. Thus the small couch and my gracious friend and her cute dogs. And I’m not even a dog person. I tried to be once… a dog person that is, in that same relationship – that didn’t work out either.
After much thought and many tears, I resigned from my job and let three years just be. There would be no more reconciliation. No more effort. No more progress. Not there, anyway. Everything was going to change.
So, what do you do as you’re looking at the past three years of your life thrown into boxes? Life forced me to re-group, re-examine, and self-reflect. The doors to the dark rooms of my soul were slowly being opened and I lacked the strength to keep them closed any longer. I stood exposed. The life I had been creating collided with a very hard and very concrete wall and everything felt broken. Scattered. Chaotic. I stood there in the midst of all the pieces, thinking to myself, “what the hell is going to happen now?” and “who am I?”
I clearly remember contemplating how I had merged who I was prior to entering that relationship with whom I had become. I longed to rediscover myself again. I had lost parts of myself in the fixing and the trying. The scattered pieces possessed parts of me I needed to reconnect with. Some pieces I had no interest in ever picking up. I left them there, probably on that small couch. Some I wanted to stomp on and shatter. Some needed serious polishing.
I cried a lot. I cried over the people whom I would never see again and never speak to again. I had a very hard time accepting how one day something was and then it just wasn’t. I replayed the past three years over and over in my head desperately hoping that it would all magically make some sense. We see so little when we’re in the storm, you know? We just see the chaos and the mud being flung on the walls. We rarely see the current demons for what they are. It’s only when we step away and look at the situation from afar that we begin to understand that the change is necessary. That the pain is necessary. That everything happened because it needed to. And we know that it’ll take us months to readjust, to learn, to adapt, to try again. But we do it. Because we get past the point of trying to fix and we finally see things for what they are.
Do you know why this is hard? Because taking down your blinders symbolizes not only that you’re open to change, but that you finally realize you played an active role in the shit that you’re finally choosing to leave behind. And this is painful. This is where we tend to get stuck. It is hard to accept responsibility for how you have allowed your life to turn out. It is much easier to remain in the shit, blindly content in your own ignorance and inability to face the truth.
It’s much harder to look in the mirror and let all those dark rooms be exposed.
Hey… promise me you won’t. Promise me you won’t remain in the shit. Promise me you’ll find the courage to rip the doors off of the dark rooms and face every demon that resides within.
Now, make the promise to yourself.
Promise yourself that you’ll fight. That you’ll find the strength to walk away and feel all the responsibility instead of staying where the weight is slowly crushing you. You feel the weight, don’t you? You don’t belong there. It’s suffocating you. You expend countless amounts of energy pretending that it’s not that bad, trying to fix something that can’t be fixed. Stop. You need to go.
You want to know how you become mentally tough? You go through shit. You experience pain and you work through it. You live through difficult situations and you feel all those emotions you’d rather not feel. You don’t hide. You don’t run away. You don’t block. You don’t avoid. You just live through it. Each and every day.
And you work towards your vision every day, not just on the days that things are going great. You work on the days that you feel confused, or uncertain, or you’re fighting with your significant other, and on the days that you feel stuck, and on the days that just basically suck. Yes, those days. Don’t be guided by temporary feelings. Be guided by your vision. Tailor your decision-making towards the long-term. That is how you will improve your mental toughness. By facing your biggest obstacles and your biggest fears. By problem-solving. By finding the light on all your darkest days.
There is no magic formula. There is only life experience. You will have to think, stretch, problem-solve, cry, scream, grow, and change. And THIS will build mental toughness. So don’t run away from challenges, seek them out. With time, your resolve and mental tenacity will increase. You will notice yourself thinking differently, responding differently, and reacting to stress differently. You will have trained yourself to do this.
But first, you have to face the truth. You have to open all the doors.
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Another well written article 🙂