In my post before the holiday break, I talked about self-sabotage, something at which I am an expert.
That also means I have become an expert at pulling myself out of it. Most of the time, it just runs its course, but sometimes I have to employ an old tool, a stronger one I developed during my first healthcare rollercoaster – escapism.
Escapism takes many forms: immersing yourself in a book, literally escaping by taking a trip, or even sinking into favorite hobbies like exercise or gardening. The point is to get out of your self-sabotaging brain, sink further into your “I need a break” brain, and shut out the world for a little while.
My favorite is telling myself stories. When I was a kid, my dad would make up bedtime stories for me, and I would dream about them. As I got older, and there were fewer bedtime stories or my dad had less time to tell them, I took over. I would spin my own stories and dream the next parts. It really helped when I couldn’t sleep. It came in particularly handy when I was building all my medical-issue-inspired defensive walls.
Even as an adult, if I get stuck with monkey brain – chasing thoughts in an endless loop in my head – I will tell myself a story. If I need to escape self-sabotage or, say, the recent family drama that pulled me down for an additional week just as I was surfacing from self-sabotage, I will spend what time I can spare thinking about a situation I would rather be in. I play out scenes in my head while driving or in the shower or just staring off into space on my couch. Sometimes I will write them down. Sometimes, my emotions have such a hold on me that I will sit down at my computer and when I look up again my previously blank page is 50 pages with 25,000 words. (These are not writings I will ever be comfortable sharing.)
Bonus: this technique keeps me so absorbed that I don’t eat my feelings, which ripples into most of my conditions.
But just like the self-sabotage itself, this particular tool is vulnerable to overuse. I can sink just as far into the cure as I can into the original issue. It’s so much easier to keep returning to a world I created for myself, you see. Bad things happen, but I can control everyone’s response. It’s a nice, neat little package where everything is magically resolved eventually.
It should not surprise anyone that, for most of my life, I have read fiction almost exclusively. Mostly high fantasy for the last couple of decades.
I usually don’t have a problem putting my tools back when I am done with them, or when I am finally ready to deal with whatever I am escaping from, but the unfriendlier things do take longer. It’s hard, but self-awareness is a friend when this happens. It might be your only friend since most people don’t practice escapism with someone else. It’s a wholly internal fix for a wholly internal issue.
We all have ways, healthy and unhealthy, of dealing with uncomfortable situations and painful emotions. Each one comes with a downside. Sometimes I get it right, and sometimes I get it wrong. Even after all this time, I am still learning to tread the escapist line.