Down…
Hello. Welcome to your Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday, and to another episode of WANZ-OLO-GY-GY-gy-gy!! Ooh, Lord! Holidays in full swing. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Won't be long until Christmas is here. I hope that you have at least made your list, checked it twice, maybe actually completed you're shopping. I'm not one of those, but I wish you all the best.
Today, um, today I want to talk about where I'm at right now. I am what I call down. I'm in ‘the pit’. I always worry about getting into the pit, but, uh, when I'm in it, I very rarely talk to a lot of people. I try to work things out and, and just kind of lay low because my experience has been that no matter what I'm going through, it will pass.
That's just been my experience. This, however, has been more of a challenge because of the length at which I've gone to, to not address the root of the problem.
You know, one of my favorite movies has always been The Matrix. Neo goes to see the Oracle for the first time, and they're talking. She points him to a sign that's above a doorway, “It's Latin. It means, ‘Know Thyself’.”
Well, imagine what it would be like to think that you knew yourself only to find out that you really didn't know yourself. What if what you thought was your authentic self wasn't your authentic self? How do you know your authentic self? How do you know you're being genuine and honest? Not only with yourself, but with other people. ‘Tis is a very, very, very daunting question and what I've learned in the last couple of weeks, it really came to a head a couple of days ago. What got me down was realizing I have an issue that I didn't know I had before. I thought I had correctly ascertained what my quote unquote problem was, the root of my depression. What I thought was the root of my depression. And I noticed it because I was in a position to see similarities in a pattern that I've been repeating since college. I have an anxious attachment style. And if you don't know what attachment styles are, I would suggest that you go to YouTube and just type in “attachment styles” so that you can find out the various ones and maybe find something about yourself you didn't know before.
Now the odds are pretty good that you have a ‘normal’ attachment style. Pretty much half the human population has a ‘normal’ attachment style. The other half has varying degrees of ‘not secure’ attachment styles. One of the main characteristics of an anxious attachment style is putting an inordinate amount of emphasis on how your partner feels about you. For some reason, not believing the data or the stimuli you're getting. Basically, you don't understand why anybody would care for you. You're worried all the time if they care for you, and then you act as if you're trying to make them and all of this has the underlying root of a lack of self-esteem, lack of belief in yourself, a lack of self-awareness and self-compassion.
How do you get that anxious attachment? Well, the science says that highly likely that you were emotionally neglected in your formative years and I know that about myself.
Growing up in the 70s wasn't all Saturday Night Fever crap. It was a time of a lot of change. I mean, coming out of the 60s with all the civil rights things, and then the early 70s with the women's movement, by the time the mid-70s came around, my parents were pretty well spent on how to instruct another human being how to be, emotionally. And being that they were both post-depression black folk raised in Jim Crow in the South. Mom was a Bible thumper. Dad was, both of his parents passed away before he was 12. And his emotional upbringing, I can only imagine, was horrible. Mom's was probably pretty good, but it was rooted in the church. So, in the mid-seventies, I was contesting with two people who had already raised two other kids in the fifties and sixties, and the Lord knows the sixties were not exactly smooth for black folk. So, I can imagine. By the time all the liberation and freedom and rights here and there that were starting to show themselves in American society, for my parents, was a lot. So when young Michael here came home from school, not understanding things that he had to interact with, with his peers at school, emotionally, they were not equipped to arm me emotionally with the underpinnings that would create a healthy self-esteem. And that's what happened. I kind of figured out by eighth grade that they really didn't understand.
I felt completely misunderstood because when I was trying to deal with, does someone like me or do they not like me? Why do I need them to like me? Why do I feel that need to be liked? All I got was, “Well, you don't go to school to be liked. Just be yourself. And if someone doesn't like you, don't worry about it.” Well, I was worried about it. That's why I was having the conversation. I really didn't get very many answers. So I had to kind of figure stuff out on my own and what I figured out, turns out, stuck with me all through college and beyond.
College was different because I became a different person in college. I mean, The Wanz was born in eighth grade, but he actually came into his own in 11th grade. By the time I got to college, I had completely reinvented myself from what I had known since the second grade. But what I had done was created a persona based around, “I know myself”, or at least I thought I did. I wasn't really looking for boyfriend/girlfriend, ‘the rest of my life relationships’, I was too busy worrying about if someone like me!! And being that it was college, it was, you know, are you going to sleep with me or not? Are you a person that I want to be friends with, be lovers with? Be friends with benefits? Be homies? I don't know.
But after college, bringing that mentality to the real world started leading to a pattern.
And that pattern was when someone cared for me and I cared for them, I would start being fearful that they were going to leave me. Fear of being dumped became the catalyst of my underpinning, my subconscious behavior. Which was not healthy now looking back over the three or four serious relationships I've had since college, they're all the same. They're all the same. I get to feelin’ ‘some sort of way’, I feel misunderstood, and the outcome is either I leave because I don't feel loved, even though I was, or I get left. And it's that getting left part that is the scar. That creates the underpinning of, I'm not sure if I am good enough to be loved by you. And that creates behaviors and those behaviors are hinged on decisions that really shouldn't be made.
Imagine this. Imagine that you like to swim. Swimming is your thing. You like to go to the pool and you swim five or ten laps and you feel good about yourself, right? And when you get out of the pool you feel really good because you've exercised your muscles and you're staying fit and you like the feel of the water and the sound of the splashing and all that stuff. You like it. Right? It's your thing, it's your jam. Now, imagine that you were doing it because you wanted other people to see that you liked it. Other people had to know how much you liked it. You would wear swimming this and that when you weren't even at the pool. The center of your universe was swimming. So that became your main characteristic, the basis of your personality. And if someone liked you, you assumed they liked you because you were a swimmer, not because you were you. Maybe this is a bad analogy to tell the story, but it's the first thing that comes to my mind because what I feel like is, at this very moment, I feel down. I feel down because who I thought I was, turns out, I may not be who I thought I was. I may be pretending in my head to be something I'm not, which creates this lack of self-confidence and therefore fear, and with the fear comes actions, driven by fear, and those things affect others. Like the Taylor Swift song, “It's Me. The problem is me.”
I'm trying to arm myself with knowledge these days about this anxious attachment to that I have. There's no doubt about it. This is not the kind of thing that I need a second opinion on, because all I have to do is rewind the tapes to my past relationships and I'm the one who feels ‘some sort of way’. In that feeling, I say and do things that don't support a healthy self-esteem. What I have done is, like I said, I've armed myself with knowledge, and I've been reading on this attachment stuff, and there's work that needs to be done. Work that I don't really like, that I've never really been good at. This is why I'm down. I'm down because it's like, I'm going to climb a hill and the hill looks tall and it's steep and the only way to get there is puttin’ one foot in front of the other. There's no stairwell, there's no rope to pull myself with,I have to do it. And I have to do it from the standpoint of this is what I need to do, not what I want to do and that is hard. I've never been good at journaling, but I've got to journal. I've never been good at meditation, but I've got to meditate and the worst of it all is I've never been one to not tell anyone what's going on in my head and that's going to be the biggest challenge for me. I’ve If I want to get up from being down, if I want to climb this hill, I have to be alone, in a way that I'm not used to being alone.
This is different from recovery. This is the inner underpinnings of one's personality. Now, I've got therapy, and I've got medications, and I've got the support that I need. But what is very telling is that unlike being able to go and do a performance somewhere, to go sing a song for someone, for something, to help someone else get through their down time, this is different and therefore a little scary. I lie. A lot scary. It's very scary. It's a lot like with my recovery from alcohol. You know, you get to a point where you get sick and tired of feeling sick and tired, and I'm so far past that. I'm so far past the point of, Jesus, why does this keep happening to me? Because now I have definitive proof as to why. But I'm not really sure that I'm capable of executing a solution. But I have to try.
Now I'm not saying that you have this kind of an underpinning of an issue, but I will tell you this, when you feel down, there's a reason and you can be honest with yourself about that reason but life is a contact sport, baby, it's a participation thing. You have to be and will do something, because you won't like being down. I know I don't like it. A couple of days ago, I mean, I couldn't get out of bed. I was just so down, nothing really felt like it was worth it…not even ‘my-self’ (two words) and that's bad. That's bad.
So what I would suggest is if you feel that way and it persists, I mean, the things that bring you joy don't bring you joy. The people that you like being around, you start questioning why you're around them and why they are around you. You start feeling, quote unquote, ‘some sort of way’ about who you are and why you're here on this planet. The answers may be easy. You may not have a problem. It's just that particular day at that particular time, you just feel down. That's legit. But me, having armed myself with a buttload of knowledge, you gather information from a lot of different sources, and you find that similarity as it applies to the subject. This is how you find the truth. When you point at somebody and there are three fingers pointing back at you, you may be the very thing you're accusing someone else of. Can you, uh, be honest enough with yourself to consider that to be a possibility? A legit possibility? Or just something that you just don't believe because you think someone's ‘telling’ you that in order to distract from what you've told them? Kinda of doesn't work that way.
So on this journey of climbing out of down, I may have a plethora of topics for this podcast. I try to navigate that four inches between or six inches between my ears. The most dangerous place on the planet. And I've made a discovery that needs to be addressed a problem that needs a solution, else, you keep repeating the problem. Just go back over your life. And whenever you've had bad experiences, keep in mind, the common denominator with the way you felt about those things is you. So you better take a very serious look at you. Ask yourself, who am I and what do I believe about myself and why? Because if you're honest, really honest, the answers might surprise you a little bit. If they don't, I don't know. I'm not a doctor so I can't say into a microphone to people that I'm not looking at whether they're lying to themselves or not,
that's up to you to determine. But, if you gather information and find out something about yourself, that something about yourself needs to be the priority, because without you, you can't be of any use to anyone else. Take care of you. I'm gonna go take care of me cause I don't like being down, I hate it, but I put myself here so now comes the work of getting myself out of here so I can be ‘there’. Wherever ‘there’ is.
I really appreciate you putting up with me and I hope that you stick around to see how things go. That'd be great. You can find WANZOLOGY on Instagram, Facebook too. Let me know what you think about this journey that I'm on, I could use the support.
I appreciate you for being here and I hope to speak with you again next week.
Cheers.