there is, so i am told, a concept that is commonly known as 'moderation'. i have to be honest that i am not personally familiar with this concept, i am told that this is something that some people practice, i believe it will by now be obvious that i am not one of them. dichotomy is something i am familiar of, i can do 110% or 0%....this has problems but it also has gains which is really where the problem comes. society loves 110%, whilst you are in 'all' mode, you will be rewarded and for people like myself, that is very very appealing. unfortunantly consistency is also a key concept and that is something i can't really balance....balance is also a key word, again not something i am so familiar with.
as a child and as a teenager, being able to completely submerse myself in work gave me an out from a life i felt increasingly unhappy with, it divorced me from a self that i despised and numbed me from feelings that were incresingly unmanagable. food, rituals and obsessions gave me the out that i desperately needed in order to survive. being able to have that level of obsession can be extremely productive externally, however it becomes incresingly corrosive internally. i found this out too late and by 15 i experienced my first nervous breakdown. i took the idea of starting early with revision to a whole new level, a level all of my own. when the teachers said it was important to give 100% they did not expect it to be taken quite as literally as i was capable of doing. i had a deep felt sense that i was less clever than other people therefore to make up for this i needed to work considerably harder, which i did....i worked and worked and worked. i got results the teachers were thrilled with, i was ambivilent about (no result would ever be good enough), i then crashed and burned.
i have spent the last 8 years trying to make sense of something that makes no sense and some thing that makes complete sense, a different kind of dichotomy but dichotomy nonetheless. i have never recovered, i didn't learn and i have continued to employ these mechanisms to greater and greater extent...always an external obsession, never the actual cause of the distress, a distraction at best.
can you learn moderation...or is it only something you can achieve when you are no longer trying to escape something you don't know any other way of escaping?
difficult question. i believe moderation can be learned and it's also something that gets easier - i can only speak for myself - the older i'm getting. i feel like i only developed a sense and then desire around age 25. add a couple years and i feel that now, close to 30, i finally am starting to bring balance into my life actively. that includes being able to say no and to take a break (and then really relax without feeling guilty or solving the next problem in your head already). i'm still working on it. but i too thought i could only be +20 or -20, and i found that this is not true. it's a slow process for me but i'm quite happy sometimes with how far i've come in this already, so i'm confident that the next years it's gonna get even better.
ReplyDeletequestion to you: do you - personally - value moderation?