"Nemo dat quod non habet." You cannot give what you do not have!

 Hello, Friend.

Life is a funny thing, isn't it?  Being a human is such a strange experience.  Wouldn't you agree?  We're taught, ideally, as we are growing up and learning how to interact with the world around us and the people we meet, how to do so in a considerate, respectful way.

But, are we taught how to treat ourselves with that same respect and consideration?  I'd venture to guess, if you are reading this, either you or someone you care about is struggling with this, and you're wondering how to be gentle with yourselves as much as you know it's good to be with others.

I AM NOT A LICENSED PROFESSIONAL.  WHAT I AM GOING TO SHARE WITH YOU, IT HAS BEEN GLEANED FROM 48 YEARS OF LIFE EXPERIENCE.  :)

Sometimes, when you're thrown onto your tea kettle on the floor, it's best, whilst sitting there and trying to catch your breath, wiping the tears from your face, and take stock of everything.  Don't overthink, that'll just cause you to spiral again.  

The goal is, rather, to figure out how you ended up with the wind knocked out of yourself, look around, and say, "Alright.  This is what *I* know I can do, for now," and just do that thing.  

As you start to feel the shakiness subside once you pull yourself back to your feet, see if you're okay enough - check in with yourself, and be HONEST with yourself as you do so! - try to re-evaluate if you're comfortable with doing the bigger things that you know you could feasibly do after the smaller ones are done, and try to, gently, tackle the bigger ones.  

Before you know it, you're able to just look around after each thing and with a clearer head and eyes, say, "Okay.  Now.  Let's try to figure out a sort of plan to keep on our feet again, but WITHOUT hitting the floor again."  

We talk about spatial awareness, being aware of what's around us in the physical sense.  "Hey, watch your step as you're going in that door!" if there are steps ahead.  Or, "the floor up ahead is wet, be careful so you don't slip!"  hence the little plastic and nylon signs where a spill is on an already-tractionless floor (ie Target).  

Additionally, there is NOTHING wrong with applying this to our mental capacity's spatial awareness.  It's a thing, trust me.  I'm serious.  Think about it:  if you are having a difficult time, STOP.  Look around you, what's causing that difficult thing to be so difficult?  Is it a crappy co-worker?  If you can, just keep things work-related if you have to talk to them.  Do the tasks at hand you are commissioned to do and keep your interactions with Crappy Kevin as minimal as possible.  :)  

There IS such a thing as what my circle of friends call "emotional vampires."  They are people who are just miserable ALL.  THE.  TIME, and they will deplete you of your own reserves quickly, while filling their own reserves until they drain and onto the next, rinse, repeat, until pretty soon, everyone around them is miserable, and therein lies how toxic environments are formed.

Recently, I finally finished watching a series I'd started years ago.  In one scene the main protagonist in the story was visiting with his p-doc and the protagonist was trying to figure out why he was having brutal panic attacks all of a sudden.  The p-doc, in turn, carefully took all of what the young man told him into consideration and he came up with such an interesting response.

He said to the young man, "I want you to do something for me.  When you are feeling these panic attacks coming on, I want you to ask your panic and anxiety what it wants."  

Understandably, this is a strange question, right?  I mean, here you are, just trying to do your life the best you can, trying to be a good person (I certainly hope!), and out of nowhere, your body decides to betray you by saying, "And I'm going to release the mental Kraken in 3... 2... HAVE FUN, SUCKA!" and before you know it, it's like this big explosion happens in your head and you can't breathe because your heart's threatening to pound completely out of your chest and flip you the bird as it goes dancing down the road like the friggin' Gingerbread Man, laughing, mocking you the whole way as it leaves.  Your brain's all scrambled up like a snow globe that's been shaken about by an angry ten-year-old who's been told, "No, you need to do your chores before you go to the park!"  

So, how in the world are you supposed to hold enough space to ask the mental kraken, "What do you even WANT from me?!"  this is going to take a lot of patience with yourself, a lot of time to figure out how to do it healthily.  I would recommend finding a good therapist to figure out how to do this - because if you can have a trusted person in a controlled environment to talk you through that, then once you get a decent understanding of how to go about it, that Kraken is going to, over time, shrink and shrink and shrink until the Hubble Telescope won't even be able to find it on Google Maps.  ;)

Friend, we pour so much time, energy, patience, love, and all the positive things into cultivating solid relationships with other people.  But, if you think about it, we should be doing the same for OURSELVES, too.  What I just posted above, I, too, am still learning how to do, for myself, as much as I've done for those I love and care about.  I am certain you're reading this and wondering if I've sprouted two extra heads, and four extra arms, and I'm off my cookie.  But, I assure you, I've got one head, two arms, and ... cookies?!  Where?!  I hope they have oatmeal raisins with walnuts!  

Anyway.  It's lunchtime and I'm a little hungry if you can't tell.

Also, I thought I'd put a little humour into this post, just to ease the tension a little.  I hope it helped you to at least smile, and maybe even laugh a little.

When we are eyebrows-deep in the muck and pain of whatever situation's chosen to be the pothole in our road as we're trying to walk down the road of life, it can be, as I am sure you are more than just a little aware, difficult to see that you aren't going to drown, that you're not going to be beaten by this thing.  The trick is, that you have to figure out a way to be gentle with yourself in reminding yourself of this irrefutable fact:  You, YES, YOU, have a RIGHT to be here.  You, YES, YOU, have a RIGHT to peace.  You, YES, YOU, have a RIGHT to be loved, respected, and treated with the same kindness and compassion as you extend to others.  You, YES, YOU, have a RIGHT to hold space for yourself!

There is a statement I was taught by a person who is very important to me, it's Latin:  "Nemo dat quod non habet."  It means, "You cannot give what you do not have."  If you don't take time for yourself to be present for yourself and to make sure your own self is okay NOT JUST PHYSICALLY, BUT MENTALLY, TOO, then how are you going to be able to extend the same for others around you who may be struggling to understand how to function once life chooses to knock them down?  If you're already on the floor, how are you supposed to expect yourself to help the other person stand back up again... IF YOU AREN'T STANDING UP ALREADY?

Please, sit with what I'm saying here.  Think about it.  Sure, at its face, it no doubt looks like one of those pithy-worded greeting cards, "Awww!  Buck up, camper!"  I promise you, that is in no way, shape, form, or fashion, my goal here.  Mine, simply, is the goal to, in a virtual sense, tell you, "We may not know each other, we may never meet in person, but you are seen, you are loved, you are wanted, and you deserve to be here, too."  Because you deserve to have nice things, and one of those nice things, truthfully, whether or not you agree, is having peace.  It's not the absence of chaos, but the unshakeable confidence that no matter what may happen, you know that if you can't pick up that sword to fight that Kraken yourself, there is NO shame in saying, "This is too heavy right now.  I feel like I'm drowning," and reaching out to a trusted friend and saying, "Please, help me..."  Another important person in my life once told me, "The hardest sentence in the English language is only seven words long:  'I don't know, and I need help.'"  In other words, we have been taught for so long in so many different ways that there's a stigma that should NOT exist in asking for help when something's too tough to handle on our own.  To ask for help, we are taught, is "weak" and  "[insert negative thing here]."

I have a challenge for you:  I want you to sit down and take out a piece of paper and a pen.  I want you to ask yourself four questions:

1.  What am I FEELING in this very moment?

2.  What is my BELIEF about this thing I'm feeling right this second?

3.  What about this thing I'm feeling is the TRUTH about the causality of this thing?

Once you've sat with these three questions, I want you to then ask yourself a FOURTH question:

4.  If this situation is NOT something I can handle alone, who in my life do I trust the most to open up with about this, to help me work through it?

Then, I want you to make a list of the people that come to mind.  REALLY consider the nature of your relationship.  Do you trust this person with every intimate detail of your life that you wouldn't want on a podcast or in the news?  Do you know beyond any doubt that if you were to reach out to them, they would listen not just to respond or react, but with their heart, their love, and their patience?  

If the answer is "yes" to more than one person, reach out to them however you typically communicate with each other and have a very detailed conversation and say, "When my panic and anxiety decide to bully me, can I count on you, if I reach out, that you will talk me down from that extremity and bring me back to reality?"

Make sure to be upfront and honest not just with them, but with yourself about the people you have in mind, and then reach out to them and set up a plan, a sort of "emergency brake", if you will, or an "emergency exit hatch", metaphorically speaking, on expectations, not just yours of your chosen "tribe", even if your tribe is only one person, but what they expect of you, and most importantly, what you expect of YOURSELVES in those moments.  

An additional question to consider:  "What if [person] were needing me to do this for them?  Could I be just as able to show up for them as I'm hoping they will be for me?"  If the answer is no, then you both need to work that out, too.  

Identify those concerns, give those concerns their own voice, and show love to those concerns because they are just as valid as anything else.  Concerns are how we can gauge what we can and cannot work out, and once they are shown respect by not just giving them a voice, but being listened to and discussed openly, honestly, and without reservation, we can then identify wherein those struggles truly are and why they are there, so we can try to work them out.  If they are not "figureoutable" on our own, or with a friend, then the next step would be to take it to a professional who has been well-trained in trauma, and anxiety, and will be willing to help you sort things out, but with the care and compassion you deserve to have, and deserve to extend to yourself, and if you don't know how to extend that to yourself, a good therapist will walk you through how to do it, step-by-step.

Just remember, Rome wasn't built in a day.  There is no such thing as a once-and-done.  Progress takes time, healing takes time, and what you are doing, essentially, is a sort of surgical procedure to extract the lies your anxiety is telling you (because, Friend, trust and believe me when I tell you, anxiety LIES THROUGH ITS JAGGED, SHARP TEETH!) and exiling them as far as possible from you.  Sometimes, those mental cysts will come back and will bring friends.  And that's okay.  Sure, it won't SEEM like it in the moment, but sometimes surgeries need to happen more than once before the troublesome thing gets the hint that it's not welcome.

If there's only one thing you get from this entire post, I hope it is this:

YOU MATTER.  YOU BELONG HERE.  YOU ARE LOVED.  YOU ARE WANTED.  YOUR PRESENCE IN THIS WORLD MAKES THOSE WHO LOVE YOU SO MUCH BRIGHTER, AND THERE'S SOMEONE OUT THERE WONDERING WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE TO KNOW YOU.  <3

Additionally, YOU DESERVE TO BE COMPASSIONATE AND GENTLE WITH YOURSELF, TOO.  yOU DESERVE TO HAVE PEACE.  I hope you can get your feet back underneath yourself again.  Just be patient with yourself, okay?  It may take longer than you'd like, but keep pushing, it will happen.