mental illness can make you feel like you're less than human like you're less than other people maybe even like you're not a human at all and I think it's one of the worst parts of struggling with mental illness and in my opinion it's very underd discussed it is not something I see acknowledged or talked about hardly at all the symptoms of things like mood disorders anxiety disorders neurode Divergence trauma psychotic disorders personality disorders all of these things have something in common which is that they functionally divide you from the rest of the world or most
of it anyway and as humans we generally Define ourselves by our thoughts our feelings and our behaviors or our actions mental illness impacts Us in all three of these domains and so if your thoughts emotions and behaviors are generally unlike those of the people around you you might find yourself wondering if you're even a person at all or whether you belong with the rest of humanity these types of thoughts or questions tend to create what I call a self-perpetuating cycle of alienation and isolation and when you combine them with the symptoms of whatever mental health
condition or conditions you were already experiencing in the first place you end up in a pretty vicious downward spiral because the worse your symptoms become the more disconnected from the world you feel and the more disconnected from the world you feel the worse your symptoms become and there's not a clear way out of this spiral I know this because I felt it many of you have commented on my Blade Runner script behind me I am not a big movie guy I I don't really watch that many movies and of the few that I do watch
I am typically not really passionate about them but the reason I love this movie so much is it really explores our definition of humanity and what exactly it means to be a person I happened to find this movie at a time in my life when I was struggling with those very questions and although the movie itself does not necessarily answer that question just knowing that someone else out there somewhere was asking it or was also unsure about their own status among Humanity I found very reassuring and I think that's part of why I love that
movie so much for years of my life my main goal was to have the bare minimum amount of interaction with the world in general as was possible I tried not to talk to people I tried not to look at them I completely disengaged from having goals or dreams about the future I basically didn't do anything I mostly just sat around waiting to die and the main driver behind this was the feeling that I wasn't really supposed to be here in the first place I am not going to act like I've got this all figured out
because I don't but things have gotten a lot better for me I have discovered little tips and tricks if you will that have helped me feel somewhat of a sense of a connection to the world and my mental health has improved dramatically as a result of that so the point of today's content is to share those strategies with you but before I do that I want to address another question you might be having right now which is should I even want to rejoin the world because I suspect that this world hasn't been terribly kind to
you as it typically isn't to those who are struggling with mental illness so you probably have some mixed feelings about my suggestion that you should even want to rejoin the world at all um if something has rejected you and abandoned you and abused you and just generally treated you terribly you maybe don't want any part of that and I understand those feelings entirely so let's start here let's define what the world is uh CU that's a pretty vague term right there are three things that you could reasonably call the world and I have different feelings
about all three of them one is the physical world as in like nature you know grass trees Sky Lakes animals birds that that's a world the second definition would be your personal world so this is what's the stuff in this big giant space we all inhabit that is personally important to you that include hopefully yourself the people around you like your close personal relationships your hobbies your interests your passions the the space in the world that you call yours and then the third definition of the world would be like Humanity or Society in general I
strongly believe that we do need to feel some sense of connection to the first two definitions of the world in order to enjoy at least decent mental health as living beings we need some sense of connection with the natural world to feel alive sensory deprivation is not good for us that was one of my problems back in the day the fewer sensory inputs you have the more of your inputs are internal meaning the less that's happening outside of you that is interesting or stimulating or engaging the more your mind turns inward for stimuli this is
critical because if you're struggling with mental illness your inner world is not necessarily a pleasant place to be it can be harsh and hostile even abusive in some cases so when you get stuck in this cyclical pattern of not engaging not leaving not interacting and not doing the voice you hear the most even more so then under normal circumstances is your own and your mind becomes this giant Echo chamber of hatred and nihilism and a bunch of other stuff that doesn't help you so we need to be connected to the physical world we need to
be outside we need we need stimuli we need to feel sun and wind and like sea trees moving and all that stuff almost all of us also need some sense of connection to other people some of us need a lot more than others but even the most introverted Among Us probably need to feel some sense of a connection or a relationship ship to at least one or two other people some of us need a lot more than that some of us don't but I think there are very few people who could legitimately be content living
like a Hermit type life where it's just it's just you nobody else nothing else that third world society in general I still have pretty mixed feelings about it to this day I don't feel terribly connected to humanity in general and I'm still not always sure that I want to be I I find Human Society inherently dysfunctional and quite frankly abusive to some degree and I think maintaining some distance from it is actually good for me that's just me that may or may not be you but that being said my compromise I guess is I I
realized I need to be able to navigate human society and at least function in it um because there are very few Life Choices that navigate around that entirely most of them involve The Hermit life like we talked about before um and for quite a while I didn't even know how to navigate Human Society like I literally didn't know what to do so that's my goal for making this video teaching you how I connected to the first two definitions of the world and how I gain the ability to at least be functional if not content in
the third hopefully that makes sense to you hopefully that kind of addresses some of the ambivalence you might feel about like well do I even want to do that so hopefully that makesense sense here's how I did it first I stopped spending so much time inside of myself what I mean by this is when things got really bad for me one of the ways I coped with it is I formed this sort of like protective mental bubble if you will between myself and the world in order to keep myself protected and insulated from the suffering
that I had experienced in the world I started this life you know as as a young person as a kid with an amount of empathy that was functionally disabling I I I couldn't do anything and so I needed to create somewhat of a of a buffer or a boundary between me and the things I saw and heard about and felt in order to just not lay around all day being miserable and that in of itself was was was a good idea but I massively overdid it I got too good at this and I kept my
mind so occupied internally that I was minimally impacted by what was happening outside of me good or bad it was like a near complete cognitive and emotional withdrawal from the world which is what I described in the first chapter of my book up there for when everything is burning I described it as burying myself in my own grave and that's exactly what it felt like for this period of time I would say that roughly 90% of my attention was turned inward whether it was to my own internal dialogue listening to music in my own mind
endlessly making lists and plans and basically just distracting my mind from any external stimuli cuz what was out there just hurt too much and freaked me out too much and I just I only wanted to be in here the music One in particular was big I learned that I could really numb myself out from the world when my life has a constant soundtrack and I even visually imagined and applied sort of a filter like like a visual filter to life almost like an anime or cartoon filter and it helped things feel less serious or less
scary but this had the really unintended side effect of causing my entire life to feel artificial and making me question if I was even existing or or connecting with the world or whether this was some type of simulation um and then the Matrix came out like the same year and that did not help um the disconnect this caused was really bad bad really bad for my mental health and I learned over time that I had to tone down these defense mechanisms and scale back on these practices in order to maintain some sense of connection to
the world in general now I don't know if you use the same mental techniques that I described there to kind of insulate yourself from the world or if you use different ones but whatever you've done to help yourself feel safe from from all the chaos and all the pain that feels like it's just omnipresent in this place all the time maybe there's a happy medium for you between not having them at all and just being miserable 24/7 versus having them to the degree you have now and feeling numbed out or disconnected or just separate and
apart I I think at least for me there there's a place of compromise that I've been able to find uh and and like I said that involved scaling back on these techniques but not rejecting them entirely the second thing I did is I worked on redefining my identity and I stopped mentally separating myself from others in my mind there were people like if you picture a vend diagram you know there's big circle here's people and then there's me I'm just my own little circle over here these ven diagrams don't overlap so to speak I dove
head first into the identity of outcast and reject because these were labels that other people had placed upon me and I thought if I not only accepted them but leaned into them as hard as I could and wore them like a badge of honor and embraced them fully that it would not hurt anymore when people called me those things or treated me like those things and just like the first just like the filter I talked about like it kind of worked you know if someone called me a freak or a weirdo whatever I'd be like
yep that's right and and and so the label itself did didn't didn't really bother me what bothered me was the lifestyle that came along with it everything about the way I looked talked and acted was intentionally countercultural and adversarial I looked for reasons to fight and argue and disagree and and that was my main agenda in the relatively few interactions that I had I was like the most unpleasant person to be around that you could possibly imagine and that was on purpose because I thought that's who I was and I thought that's who I was
supposed to be and shockingly I didn't have a super rewarding social life or a strong sense of connection to other people when I acted that way I made my entire I intentionally made my entire appearance off-putting I just I wanted people to look at me and just be like nope don't want any part of that and it worked I figured out how to do it I got people to leave me alone and then I was cripplingly disconnected and lonely socer just to give you an example of what I'm talking about um I like I wanted
every fiber of my being to scream to everyone around me I hate you I had this shirt this I had so many shirts that I could have used for this example but those of you who are my age might know what I'm talking about so abber cromie was really popular around the time I was in high school right so of course I had to go buy the shirt that said anti cromi and obviously the a of course was the Anarchy logo cuz I had to let everyone know I hate you and what you're about and
I like chaos and Anarchy even though I didn't that wasn't even totally true but that that was me embracing what they were treating me like and and people took it at face value they wanted nothing to do with me and and quite frankly looking back on it now that was reasonable and even though I was purposely pushing people away I was still hurt by it I still felt lonely I still felt rejected I still felt disconnected and I got so sick of the constant sense of isolation that I decided to just try to be a
person again just to see what happened so like I I'm probably oversimplifying this a little bit but I I took those ven diagrams I took the little me bubble and then the humanity bubble and I just mentally I put myself back in I put myself back in the human category and I decided to just work on presenting as being a more approachable and a more agreeable person and a big part of this for me probably the thing that helped the most was finding some relatively mainstream things that were at least somewhat interesting to me just
so I could hold basic conversations with people about common topics it's hard to connect with people if you don't like any of the things that they like and a lot of my interactions with people this is going to be obviously an oversimplified paraphrase but the rare times when someone would try to every now and then someone like got the courage to be like I'm going to try to reach him I'm going to try to help that guy and it did not go well for them because the conversation would be something like hey man did you
watch the game last night and I'd respond with something like let me give you five reasons why fearfactory is the greatest industrial metal band of all time you can see how that's not going to work out super well now to this day I'm not a huge fan of like football or reality TV or whatever but I know enough about about them to hold a basic conversation with a person and that's actually helped me tremendously I don't purposely my my co-workers might be skeptical of this I don't purposely maintain ignorance of Pop Culture because I want
to be different or because I want to be edgy I I used to I don't anymore without at least a surface level understanding of things that most people are into it literally feels like you're living in a country where you don't speak the language you you don't know how to talk to people about the things they're talking about and it's extremely isolating so if you just just have a basic level of knowledge about things that most people might might want to talk about even if you don't totally love them it will help you feel a
sense of connection to the world and the third thing I did is I practiced my social skills that one might seem really like basic and not interesting compared to the other two but do not underestimate the importance of this I never made eye contact I didn't shake hands I barely spoke I always looked down if someone was walking towards me I would like look away or even walk like I would take long winding twisting paths around where people were like like the most antisocial thing you can imagine I technically knew what I should do in
those situations I I understood what social engagement is but I was so uncomfortable that I almost never did those things and that's because I did anything and everything it it's a self-perpetuating problem I did anything and everything to avoid social interaction and all of this sends and reinforces a very problematic internal message I treated myself like I didn't belong in human society like I was less important or less capable than other people so once again it should be no surprise that the net result of all that was that I did indeed feel less important less
capable and on the outside of humanity looking in because treating yourself that way and behaving in that way is exactly what that's going to do if you have little or no Comfort interacting with people you will not feel like you're a part of this world because we interact with one another we are social beings we have entire parts of our brain that are built for engagement and they literally start to shrink and Decay when we don't use them and that's what happened to me my social skills development was halted and honestly probably regressed by depression
and anxiety by my mental health and I basically had to start over I was like a 20-year-old with the social skills of a 10-year-old and that's really off-putting to people and and there's no way to close that Gap other than practicing and it's really awkward and it's really uncomfortable and it's so frustrating but there's no way around it you you just have to become semi-comfortable doing the basic human stuff because that's how you get back into the world that's how you regain these connections and ultimately that's how you learn to navigate the craziness and the
chaos that we're all thrown into and like I said in the beginning I still don't love it I still don't always feel like a part of it but I can at least survive and for a long time I didn't even know if I'd be able to do that I hope that something I have shared with you today helps you do the same I will see you next time take care
