When I ran my ideas about unconscious, heinous thoughts by a mentor, she urged me to understand that humans naturally have thought after thought, some of them heinous, and that none of us needs to feel compelled to act on them.
In other words:
“Just because I think it doesn’t mean I have to do it.”
I actually had that realization about the “doing” part when I was working with extraordinary colleagues, the synergy was heady, and my mind generated ideas from an ever-replenishing horn of plenty. When I had an idea, I executed it. Then another idea came and I executed that. But then another idea would come and I hadn’t finished executing the previous idea! I began to feel exhausted from having had the ideas, and frustrated from not being able to execute every single one of them all at once.
I remember being at work in my standard attire – a business suit, a blouse, a scarf, flat tie shoes for fast moving and easy standing – when I had what my beloved 9th and 12th grade English teacher, Mrs. Amos, taught us was an “Ah-ha! moment.”
All of my ideas are not equally meritorious. Just because I think of them doesn’t mean I have to do them. I can choose which ones to do.
I’ve had few epiphanies in my life – I’ve had to wrestle and pin most of my insights to the ground before I could see their faces – but that I can choose what I do is one of them. I continued to have idea after idea, but I wrote most on scraps of paper and put them respectfully in a file marked “Ideas.” I felt so much lighter on my feet.
Thinking about Doing
I have viewed my current challenges with ups and dowwwwns, not in terms of “doing,” but in terms of “thinking.”
Yesterday, in this graph, elaborated upon in the post’s text, I theorized that I begin to think hard thoughts about myself when a hard time happens. That causes my down to go downer. I thought it was the content of my thoughts – terrible statements of self-contempt and derision – that increased my anxiety. Feeling powerless and helpless about that anxiety, I then became depressed.
Ah-ha!
My mentor helped me see that it is not the content of what I tell myself that distresses me – it is that I believe that content to be true.
Ah-ha!
I postulate today that, to change the pattern of feeling low and sinking lower, I must not only catch heinous thoughts in the hands of my awareness as they happen – or just after, before they hurt me – but to address them.
Address my thoughts?! I laugh! I was taught by my brilliantly incisive mother and my radically professorial father to challenge pretty much all thought on all things.
It never occurred to me to challenge my own thoughts.
So let me see if I’ve got this: What I am to to do is to challenge the validity of what I believe to be true about my thoughts.
“Just because I think it doesn’t mean I have to believe it.”
Ha! I might be very, very good at this. Even on day one of giving it a try, I feel lighter on my feet.
Pictured in the photo, left to right, joyous Anne Giles, Bob Giles, Anne’s and Margaret’s father, Margaret Galecki, Anne’s sister, and Alan Wiley, Anne’s nephew, on September 11, 2013 at the wedding of Jimmy Galecki and Renee Burns Galecki, Anne’s step-nephew and his new wife.
