Blog Post 4: Envision Your Life
It seems a simple thing. Imagine the life you wish to live, and the person you choose to be.
Yet so few of us do this “little” thing.
For survivors of extreme trauma, envisioning is not only an activity. It’s a necessity. For most of us who yearn to heal from depression, anxiety, loneliness, suicidal longing, self-injury, drugs, alcohol or whatever other pains afflict us, we need to reach for the life we want.
But to reach for it, we have to see it. And believe it’s possible.
This pathway through an oceanside ravine leads to a dark, mysterious and beautiful oceanscape.
To make that monumental effort and take a first step on the long road out of darkness, we often need to feel we’re going somewhere. That we’re on a healing journey.
But what does healing look and feel like?
There is no one answer. Many of us land in the same dark place, but the road out of darkness is as unique to each of us as our fingerprints and faces. And our hearts.
That’s one reason that therapy for trauma survivors is so critically important and lasts so long.
Let’s say that I ask you, “What life do you dream of for yourself? Who are you? Who do you yearn to be? What do you want to do?” Can you answer these questions quickly, with ease?
Try it. Write down your answers. Read them. (I wrote down mine and will include my answers shortly.)
How did you feel as you wrote down your answers?
Did you know that research shows writing down personal goals and objectives can powerfully increase your chances of achieving them? It is also helpful to be specific about what you want. Start with the big picture, then narrow it down to mileposts along the road toward becoming who you are.
Let me give you an example from my own life. I’ll start with my own questions:
“What life do you dream of for yourself? Who are you? Who do you yearn to be? What do you want to do?”
The life I dream of
Here is my own answer. I want to live a life of purpose, meaning and dignity. For my own well-being, it needs to involve writing, beauty and helping trauma survivors. I also need fruitful time with my beloved husband, my adored children and my friends.
I yearn to live surrounded by nature, ideally near the ocean.
Above all, I need to live authentically. To become myself. To live with love and hope and dreams.
What is your answer?
What life do you dream of?
Who are you?
My answer to the question, “Who are you?” is this: I’m the woman who loves God and truth and beauty. I love intimacy and human connection. I love love.
I am also the woman within me who, when I scarcely knew it consciously, once envisioned my future life and made my inner life beautiful and sacred, even though for years I consciously trucked in misery and darkness, trapped in the mire of depression and suicidal ideation, alone, isolated and in despair without even knowing why, or that I had a history of trauma.
My spiritual core made me powerful by hewing to my moral compass, steering me toward light even in the years I lived in darkness and was barely conscious that any inner dimension of my consciousness existed, far less that it held light.
And who are you?
Who do you yearn to be?
Today, I yearn to live my life as who I am.
For me (as for many of us), the mask of my career became the woman. The mask of a competent, almost masculine business owner. Yet that mask surely predates my career, for my first husband, when we separated, scathingly called me “an emasculating woman.”
I was nineteen.
That mask has existed in many ways to hide and protect my vulnerable core. But just as many transgender individuals live years or decades hiding who they really are, and later find joy in becoming and living publicly as their true selves, so I have lived as the shell of myself and find joy today in living as who I am.
In short, I want to speak and act as who I feel myself to be, at the core of me. Don’t we all? Don’t you?
What do you want to do?
I want to publish fiction, be healthy and make The Interpreter of Love Project a true benefit for trauma survivors.
Do you know what you want to do with your life?
Reflections on my answers
Over time, as so many do, I have learned to become more specific about how to achieve the life I want to live. I mentioned that research suggests we should take our long-term goals and break them down. Make them actionable.
Here are examples.
When it comes to what I want to do with my life, here are key ways I found to accomplish my larger goals:
To pursue my physical and mental health and maintain enough equilibrium to pursue my other goals, I took the decision to safeguard my mental health without illicit or prescription drugs (the short reason is the deep need I felt to control my own mind—I do not advise anyone about whether or not to take medication).
My health plan over the years has included:
Exercise and activity.
Exercise needs to be fun for me, or at least rewarding. I set and meet benchmarks that include regular strength training (45 minutes to an hour, four times a week), walking (half an hour to two hours, three or four times a week), biking (at least once a week for an hour or more) and pickleball (several times a week for up to eight hours total). Note that I can only do that much exercise because I am retired.
Adequate sleep.
This is the hardest benchmark for me even now. Nearly all of us need to average seven to eight hours of sleep nightly. Some months of the year, I achieve that easily. Some weeks, I probably average six hours a night. I am still trying.
To achieve my goal of seven hours, I try hard to go to bed and wake up at regular times and avoid screen time at night.
Good food.
Healthy, fun, delicious food is a joy for me. And because of my history of eating disorders, having healthy, balanced, regular and delightful meals is essential for my mental health, not only for my body.
I prioritize time to purchase and prepare delicious meals.
I have clear and specific benchmarks for vegetables, fruit, dairy, protein and whole grains. I adjust them as new research comes out and generally avoid heavily processed food.
Maintaining a healthy weight, not too thin or heavy.
With a history of eating disorders, I learned not to succumb to eating-disordered behavior. Yes, I still have “fat” days, but I realize how silly that notion is. I am fine!
I need other healthy practices, especially:
To meditate and pray, in order to connect with my goals and vision (and to relax enough to reduce crises).
I still struggle with this piece. My goal is setting aside 15 minutes or more each morning for meditation. In some periods I am faithful to this practice; others not.
Time with family and friends, including my adored husband.
Lovely, intimate connections feed and sustain me.
Retirement has made it easier to find time for connection.
Retiring to a small island town has provided countless opportunities to connect with others. My husband and I eat dinner together nicely, go out at least once a week and typically have at least one or two social events per week not counting pickleball (which we both do several times a week).
A healthy place to live
It’s important for me to live in beautiful places filled with nature that are not too cold.
I also need environments that are not dense, crowded or polluted in order to breathe and live freely.
A remote place would not be healthy for me, however. I need human networks with shared interests to connect in sustained ways with many people.
My husband and I found the perfect Florida island that meets all these needs for us.
I need to write fiction and nonfiction regularly.
For me, not to write is not to live. For seven years in my teens and twenties, trauma robbed me of the ability to write. I determined through experimentation that I need to average a minimum of 12 to 20 hours a week on writing for my mental health. (More is better!)
I need my writing to focus on positive achievements and outcomes, but it cannot be simplistic or saccharine.
The literature of alienation is anathema to my mental health. Writing or reading it. I have to “write to light”—that is, write with a sense of purpose, vision and meaning.
I could continue, but I hope my point is clear. Visions for your life can be beautiful, but they are not (at first) specific. They need details.
For your own vision of the life you want to live, write it out any way you wish. But later, once you hold that vision in mind and on paper, flesh out the practical details that make it real. Make your vision come true. A vision must be actionable to help you fashion your life the way you choose it.
How do you do that—mold your life to your vision?
I have come through two long depressions successfully, mostly without drugs, so I have some experience. Let me share it.
I had two periods of depression at age twelve and fourteen. Both were situational, caused by a family move and my parents’ divorce. They resolved on their own.
I plowed my way through my first long depression by trial and error. I was sixteen: this depression of eleven years began with anorexia and anxiety. I knew I had to fight for my physical health to support my mental health—an astonishingly lucid observation for a near-psychotic teen in the 1970s.
Understanding how to protect my physical and mental health wasn’t easy. It took time. Over a decade of trial and error brought me to a series of good practices. Meditation and prayer were my foundation, followed by exercise, socializing, stabilizing my eating patterns, getting an education and much more.
Today, extensive research has extensively corroborated what I learned on my own in my teens and twenties. Healthy practices—activity and exercise, balanced food, social connection, sleep, relaxation and meaningful activities—are the foundation of our physical and mental health. I wish there were shortcuts. There are not.
But each and every one of these practices is worth fighting for. The rewards are stunning.
My second depression lasted about three years, from ages 39 to 42. This was the period when I consciously processed my buried trauma, which launched with dramatic flashbacks. I experience surreal, catastrophic, suicidal PTSD.
It was, by far, the worst period of all life.
Given the many years of suicidal darkness in my teens and twenties, I could not have imagined anything worse. But at least by the second time around, I knew the drill. Knew what worked.
Immediately, I dropped everything I could to focus on honing the healthy practices I’ve listed above.
Here is one example. Exercise. I had mostly stopped exercising for a decade when the second depression began. How did I restart physical activity in the midst of suicidal anguish caused by facing decades of serial sexual trauma I’d somehow never “noticed” before?
The answer: slowly. I set realistic goals according to what I often call the “pea principle.”
Here is the story of the pea principle. Our younger child hated vegetables so much that at first he wouldn’t eat them. When that little boy was three, I made him eat peas—starting with one pea for dinner
The next night I gave him two peas.
The third night, three peas. Immediately, he vomited all three.
Back to one pea! (Welcome to parenting.) But over time, that darling little boy ate his vegetables, reached a normal intake for his age and is today a healthy, vibrant adult who delights in vegetables!
So with exercise. When my second extreme depression launched, I set myself, a modest objective: in our small town in Maryland, I would walk for 15 to 20 minutes, two or three times a week, in the woods or around local lakes.
Does that sound small? Over three years, because I loved the walking and it helped so much, I built up my activity slowly to my long-term goal of walking for one hour a day.
Later, at fifty, I did the same for strength training. I began with 15 to 20 minutes twice a week at our local gym and built up to my long-term goal of four one-hour sessions a week. That took years.
Nowadays I do two to three hours of exercise a day, almost without effort. Strength training, walking, biking and pickleball. It’s built into my habits and routines. (Also: pickleball is crazy fun!) I set goals and benchmarks. I achieved them all.
Note the specificity. The different types of exercise. How many minutes or hours I planned as short- and long-term goals. How often per week I would perform them.
In this game of an actionable vision for our lives and healing, specificity wins. In the research on how to achieve goals and objectives, writing them down with specifics about how you’ll perform them is the gold standard in succeeding at exercise and other healthy practices. Look it up.
Dearest reader, fellow survivor, please understand I am not prescribing anything! I am no therapist, no doctor. I am sharing my own self-help strategies as an illustration, to help you become specific about what you want to be and do to realize your own vision. Everyone is different. Each path to healing is unique.
You can build your life too. Piece by piece, step by step, I found happiness and healing. Surely you can too. I wish you that joy.
Love and kisses,
Amira
