You find out how to disable pieces of yourself. Then one day you find that you’ve disabled too much.
This definitely happened to me. I realized at some point (a few years ago) that in trying to force-fit myself into roles I thought I needed to fill in order to be a “responsible person”, I’d succeeded in turning off aspects of my brain that are actually pretty vital for me to learn effectively. I didn’t do anything about this realization, though, until I experienced an Epic Fail that showed me that the way I was trying to operate was neither useful nor sustainable. The big turning point for me was in moving away from seeing myself as “a broken version of normal” to “a different kind of thing entirely”.
I am not talking about becoming complacent, mind you—quite the opposite, as I’d gotten to the point where I kept running into all kinds of walls whenever I wanted to get something done, and I was very tired of having that happen.
It was as if my native operating system was different from the operating system I’d been trying to run in emulation mode for many years, to the point where things started running a lot more smoothly once I stripped away the emulation processes and got re-acquainted with my native architecture.
You find out how to disable pieces of yourself. Then one day you find that you’ve disabled too much.
This definitely happened to me. I realized at some point (a few years ago) that in trying to force-fit myself into roles I thought I needed to fill in order to be a “responsible person”, I’d succeeded in turning off aspects of my brain that are actually pretty vital for me to learn effectively. I didn’t do anything about this realization, though, until I experienced an Epic Fail that showed me that the way I was trying to operate was neither useful nor sustainable. The big turning point for me was in moving away from seeing myself as “a broken version of normal” to “a different kind of thing entirely”.
I am not talking about becoming complacent, mind you—quite the opposite, as I’d gotten to the point where I kept running into all kinds of walls whenever I wanted to get something done, and I was very tired of having that happen.
It was as if my native operating system was different from the operating system I’d been trying to run in emulation mode for many years, to the point where things started running a lot more smoothly once I stripped away the emulation processes and got re-acquainted with my native architecture.