Lessons From A Colossal Freakout

What to do when emotions hijack you? There I was, feeling a renewed since of power in my life.  Then, a few drinks, a few old memories, and BAM…freakout.

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A month out from the GetReal program I have begun challenging myself more and opening up to anyone who will listen. About a week out from the program I was on a high. A major high. It was great. Then, it all came crushing down. The emotional high of new empowerment wore off. The real work began. And it is difficult. One night in particular was a difficult time.

It was “unofficial” St. Patrick’s Day on my college campus. It is a made up holiday on my university campus created by local bars who felt that they lost money over spring break when real St. Patrick’s Day usually falls. So, they created this fake “St. Patrick Day” to basically get the entire student population drunk. It is something like Mardi Gras on our campus, starting at 7am and rolling through 6am the next day. In other words, lots of people having a very good time and many beautiful women drinking and having fun.

I felt that today would be a day to really push myself. Put myself to the test. First, I went out to a bar by myself. This bar is located near my apartment, a few miles away from the crazy university bars. I wanted to go out by myself first to build up a bit of empowerment. You see, I have been working on going out by myself to bars, as this has been a difficulty for me in the past. This is one of my personal boundaries that I’ve been pushing. So, I went out and had a two drinks and, while there, I ran in to a friend and her boyfriend. I was free and expressive. I shared with them my feelings and just let myself be myself. It was a positive experience. They left and I continued on to the university bar scene.

While there I met up with some other friends. It was absolute chaos! swarms of people, beautiful women, and lots of booze. I was immediately offered drinks. My purpose this night was to be free and open in this world. And so, I took the drinks and went with the flow. I did everything I wanted to do. I expressed what I wanted and I lived how I wanted.

But, as the alcohol began to really set in, I started to lose some of my focus. I started to feel much more deeply feelings that seemingly have been just beneath the surface. As I mentioned, I have been doing really well with the insights and aims of GetReal. I put some real hard work into making changes. Well, as I started to feel drunk, I also started to feel sad. It ‘s true alcohol is a depressant, but this was more about feeling a lack of connection. And, this is something I was already feeling well before tonight’s drunken stupor.

I had already begun to realize that “connection” is a very difficult thing to achieve, alone. Well, at least, the kind of connection I was seeking seems difficult to achieve through other means of simply being expressive and open with others. Dare I say this, but, I’m seeking a certain kind of response: a meaningful attraction & connection with a woman who I find attractive.

See, I get how I can gain a feeling of connection from my own actions of being open and expressive, of sharing openly how I’m feeling, but this seems to go only so far in satisfying my desire for connection. Gaining a sense of connection from another person is so out of my control; it requires some response. But, I know that investing myself in the responses of others is doomed. Nonetheless, it is exactly what I want! And so, my mind and my heart started feeling nostalgic about the most recent woman I dated that offered me both connection and attraction. And, while under the influence of alcohol, I text messaged her…And, from there it was all down hill!

She did not respond in the way I had hoped and I fell apart.  I felt the pain of loss.

My heart broke. I felt alone and the pain of powerlessness and a lack of freedom. I hurt bad. Making matters so much worse was that I had come to feel as though I had really been taking steps to change and build the life that I’ve always wanted and become the man of my dreams. So, this kind of sadness and neediness was compounded and made even more intense. I felt like I let myself down…I knew better, but now here I was feeling and acting as if GetReal never happened.

IT JUST SUCKED SO MUCH. There were tears. I felt so much pain. That night I sat in the dark of my apartment, thinking suicide.

Lessons Learned

In the morning, I woke up and recounted what I learned from this emotional freakout. Here is what I took away from this moment:

The scariest thing I’ve learned: “Getting” a relationship with a woman is a desire that guides my dominant purpose, rather than becoming the man of my dreams. In short, I’m wanting to become the man of my dreams so I can get freedom FROM my desire to make women the central focus of my life. But, in doing this, I am precisely making my desire for women (i.e., for them to provide me happiness) the dominant purpose of my life. They, however, are only a part of my purpose and not the sole and only pathway to living my edge.

As I continue to do what needs to be done to create the life I want, and as I continue to experience more positivity in my life born of freedom, I have to remember successes are no more in my control than are failures. It all begins with accepting that shit is going to happen, failures are going to happen, sadness is going to happen, loneliness is going to happen. Acceptance is important, then actions are next. What happened that night was that I did not accept my pain, I fought it against it. And furthermore, I allowed it to influence my actions, I left the bar early, went home, and just wallowed in self-pity. And, moreover, I even started to fight this too, telling myself: “I should not feel this way” etc… As EndGame well observes: Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. I was suffering, rather than just feeling the pain. Both acceptance and actions are necessary, have one without the other and you have impotence and frustration.

Related to this acceptance/action is the ability to accept that both success and failures are not in your control, in most cases when dealing with feeling “connection.” I really have started to question the “success/failure” paradigm, or way of making sense of my actions. For instance, when it comes to my desire for connection, if I am able to sense connection with others through my freedom, then I tend to attribute that to me being successful. I get all prideful and confuse “pride” for “empowerment.” Said another way, when I attribute my success to myself, then I open the possibility of making myself responsible for when things go shitty. And, while it is certainly the case that my reality is a manifestation of my purpose, focus, and desires, that it is all about me, attributing my successes in connection with others to only my efforts and not contextual circumstances that may also contribute to that success, means I reinforce the possibility that when things go shitty I will blame myself and the other person for failures in connection.

So, feeling a bit foolish for my breakdown in hindsight, I realized how important such freakouts are.  I learned that it was a manifestation of 1. not accepting my desires 2. framing my actions in terms of success and failures 3. blaming myself or others for the outcomes of my attempt to find connection to others.

In the end, this whole event reminded me of this quote from the Stoic Epictetus:

“It is the action of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has been instructed, to lay blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another nor himself.”