Failures and huge setbacks in life bring awareness of the strength that comes from weakness

I came across this interesting passage recently, and had to save it it because I knew immediately I wanted to write about the flood of thoughts it produced:

While straightening up a few bottles and jars on my bathroom counter one morning, I found myself lost in a memory of a bathroom in an apartment I had rented when I was young. It wasn’t a happy memory, and my mood started sinking. But then I said to myself, “I’m not there, thank God.” And the memory evaporated, to my great relief.

For a long time, I fought a losing battle with bad memories. They entered my mind like a train I couldn’t stop. Once they were there, I was caught up in a vortex, wrestling disturbing emotions, overanalyzing, and futilely trying to redo events.

Victoria Walsh

I’ve re-read this passage several times, and I have to say my response is going to be deeply counter-intuitive. For me it’s not the bad memories that cause as much harm or disturbance in our psyches as it is the rumination of endless what ifs or negative thoughts that precede the events that leave the horrible memories.

Rumination is a bad thing. It can foster self-destructive thoughts and spirals of negativity that lead to, or which become, the most awful characteristics and side effects of major depression. I’m very much acquainted with this from past experience going back to childhood.

Back in the 1960s, we didn’t know what to call obsessive, harmful thought patterns that we couldn’t shake. I remember battling with those demons as far back in seventh grade. Since I was too young to know what this was in psychological terms — Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) — I kept it mostly to myself. How many lay people read or even knew about the DSM, the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders? My parents certainly didn’t, understandably. How many people back then, compared to now in the days of Covid and pandemics, fully appreciated the mental health problems afflicting kids in that long-gone era, but which are even more acute in today’s world?

So there’s a big difference between bad memories, and rumination and clinical depression, where negative and bad thoughts run wild and render a sufferer incapable of rational action or decision-making.

Walsh says that once bad memories enter her mind they’re like a train rushing headlong that she can’t stop. She ends up wrestling with disturbing emotions, overanalyzing, and futilely trying to redo events.

I understand what she’s saying, but instead of viewing this as a curse to remove at all costs, I instead seem to need to do this with specific bad memories from my past, several of them related to events that were traumatic in the sense that they gravely threatened my mental health, preservation of which has always been a delicate balancing act, and consequently my ability to function afterward.

One event was so horrible mentally, emotionally, and psychologically, that I believe to this day, 33 years after the fact, that recalling it, facing up to it, and trying to understand why it happened, has been a kind of saving grace, strangely enough. It helped me realize later that I’m not alone in this, that other people go through not just bad, but harrowing job experiences, some for only a very brief period of time, only three months in the instance of the job I am referring to. Friends who have known me for a long time will not be surprised that this nightmarish situation occurred. Others who know me less well, might shake their heads and say, “Thank goodness I never experienced anything like that.”

Without going into the specifics and presenting the scenario and background for this colossal setback, let me just say it involved a college teaching job that I had hoped to land all my life. In a sense that entire, very-unfortunate-for-all-concerned fiasco, was the end result, the culmination of all the bad job decisions I had made in the past. This one was the granddaddy of all failures, but I moved on from it, as I have in the past, teetering on the edge of severe depression.

Why, many would ask, do you go over in your mind those events that caused such upheaval and anguish, and which essentially, in the instance just recounted, effectively ended a teaching career path for which I was completing a master’s degree in journalism? For one thing, trauma becomes seared into your very being. I couldn’t wish it away. It happened. It made me realize that in weakness there is strength, strength to continue on even if I felt worthless for an extended period of time.

You can’t over-analyze a trauma like that because it cries out to be analyzed. I accept that it was mostly of my own doing because I was so desperate to get a job in just about any kind of college. I learned so much about myself from that experience that I would rather forget entirely, but of course can’t. Since I can’t, I accept it for what it is and was. It has shown me that I am a very vulnerable human being, as we all are, and that suffering, whether from bad dreams or traumatic events, has made me stronger. Without that knowledge, what real hope is there?

I’ve analyzed things to excess all my life. I’m going to suddenly turn off the tap and stop the flow of bad memories, or tell them to be gone forever? I don’t think so. I don’t even want to, and that’s the whole point of writing this. No more shame. Just awareness and closure at some point. That time is now, as it has been in the past.

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June 25, 2022

I also struggled with OCD as a child and had no way of knowing I wasn’t just crazy for pulling out all my eyelashes until my eyelids were bleeding.  I remember one cousin asking me why I did it and I said I didn’t know.  She said, “Well, it’s ugly” but what I heard was “Well, you are ugly.”  I struggled with that and having to count things and touch things until they felt right all the way through childhood and my teenage years and into adulthood.  I wish my little girl self would have known there was a name for what I was going through and that I would have had someone to talk to about it who wouldn’t have just made me feel stupid.

 

June 27, 2022

@happyathome I hear you.  It was very painful feeling alone in my suffering back then because no one knew what it was.  The sad part, however,  is that even if they did, what could be done? That was 50 years ago.

June 25, 2022

So very odd that I came across your entry today when comparing where I am in my life to yours. Your insight is very interesting though and this was a good read. 🙂

June 27, 2022

@notworthmytime Thank you!  These types of entries are very therapeutic for me to write, and I hope that if others relate, it might help them in some way.

June 25, 2022

Wow, this entry strikes home for me, especially that quote. That’s exactly how I feel when I crawl into bed and turn out the lights and close my eyes … here comes the freight train, out of control. I think it’s my mind’s way of processing things. Trying to make sense of them. Trying to turn the mess into a work of art. Trying to overcome the wrongs things I thought about myself because that’s what I was taught. A lot of people can just say, “Well, that’s behind me! Onward to the future!” but I have a hard time with that. Maybe they can do that because their past wasn’t as bad. I don’t know. Anyway, I really resonate with this entry.

June 27, 2022

@startingover_1 Thank you for sharing these thoughts.  I think you’re right.  When people can just say, “Well, that’s the past,” as if the past is some closed, unreachable  place we can permanently escape from, is both unrealistic and wishful thinking.

Or, as you say, some people’s bad memories might be much more tolerable to those who have truly suffered in life.   The idea is that everyone suffers equally, it’s all relative to a host  of circumstances, etc.  I happen to think some people are just lucky.