Mystery solved – Brain Fog

 

So a few years ago, I started losing my mind. I was getting into these states where I felt as if there is a fog cloud in front of my eyes but sort of coming from the frontal lobe of my brain. It was making every thought misty and soon I would totally loose the touch with self, I was merely a pre-programmed robot. It was hard to distinguish if I am really there or if it’s just a dream. A very dull antagonizing and confusing dream-like experience. It is a strange state to describe really, I knew exactly what I was meant to be doing in a day in terms of “get up, get dressed, now eat” and how to “make” my body do it but I lost the tangibility of my sense of personality doing those things. These “cloudy” moments would come and go until finally, few years later, they came to stay. I had no clue what was going on so being a psychologist, I went to get help. My therapist told me maybe I should go and have my head examined, no other ideas of it being psychosomatic. I didn’t (looking back maybe I should have but I was lucky the problem was not a tumor or something horrific like that).

So on I went into my life with this damn cloud in front of my eyes. The feeling is kind of you are in a stuffy room staring at the window and having this disparate craving to open it and breathe in the fresh air, but you simply don’t know how to open it. The agony was devastating at first and then, as any good old hurtful but persistent thing, I got used to it. Occasionally I would totally forget it was there for many months at a time. I didn’t speak about it to people, fearing they will label me as “crazy”. But very occasionally if I valued someone spiritually or psychologically or in any way as “brain-literate” I would burst out and tell them this story about the cloud that lives in my brain. And yes, they too nodded their head in sympathy and confusion, but probably just thought I was crazy. I can’t even blame them, I would probably think the same if the situation was reversed. I mean, after all, I was still seemingly fully functional. Until one day I took a substance with a group of friends, and the mist casually picked itself up and left my brain as if nothing had ever happened. My brain took a deep fucking breath and I was in total awe! The substance is illegal, of course, but it gave me crucial information: it is a condition that can be manipulated! “Ok” – I thought, “I can work with that”.

I suppose different things help different people. After years of experimenting with different diet plans, supplements, exercises, I found that, for me, the most effective hack is a supplement called DMAE, I get it off the internet, legally, it costs £4 and lasts me months.. Clears up my brain fog like a janitor. I can’t believe it took that much time for such a big yet so easily manageable problem to be solved. I am so glad I was persistent in experimenting on myself and grateful for the sharpness of thought I have from the results. There are many other strategies now out there too. The point is, if you feel you could be feeling better, you probably can, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Life is not meant to be suffering. The saddest thing I realized on the way is the number of people who are experiencing the same, but don’t think much of it.

Many many years later, now finally, in the heavily underrated information age, to the thrill of us all, when you type in “brain mist” into your search box, you get hundreds of helpful links and explanations of what is it in fact you are experiencing. It has a name, it’s “brain fog”, and you can finally comfort yourself that you are not bloody crazy. It’s a state of mind that can be easily attended to.

Roll up your sleeves and get that best version of yourself you deserve!!

Love, 

G. 

Please don’t read this post, it is my writing therapy session

Me and my boyfriend broke up after spending 5 years together, and knowing each other for 7. I am not well. It has been 6 days now, and I have just gotten to write about it now because I was booked to work from as soon as I landed back from visiting him to late last night. Working this week was a horror story. For the first time in my life (and for the first time as a symptom of a breakup) I am experiencing some disturbing physical symptoms. I have shortness of breath and chest pain. I keep taking long deep breaths but to no avail. My usual go-to coping mechanism is distraction, but it seems not to help this time. My mind gets distracted, my thoughts are with the present task, but the chest pain is still severe and at some points I get a strong burning sensation in my breast area.. I was so so tired all day every day these last few days, I just wanted to go home and disappear. And even though I had no trouble sleeping at night, getting up in the morning seemed just so repelling. Mornings are the worst, at first when I touch base with being conscious it’s birds chirping and sun shining, and in the next millisecond it hits me – the truth that I am in this s* situation. My chest starts burning and I wish I can just fall back to unconsciousness.

Update: 2 weeks later..

I am a freelancer (thank heavens) so I didn’t book in any work for the following week and I decided to go back home and get some dog therapy from my pooches, the only thing I could think of that would make any healing plausible. It didn’t help much, unfortunately.  Writing about the situation did though. So that’s what I am doing here.

**I decided to (after nearly a year now) publish this, just to be a support to any other broken people out there who are, as I was here, desperately roaming the internet in search of anything that can help them get over a tough breakup.**

Therefore, a disclaimer: This is my therapy session, NOT A BLOG POST per se! It’s purpose is not necessarily to share useful tips and information (although I plan to post another blog where I go through some of the tricks that helped me get over this breakup) or entertain or ..or ..or.. Its sole purpose was in it’s making – the process itself is healing for me. Writing and writing and writing about it is the only (or rather, the best) thing that makes me feel less than totally miserable right now. So pardon my informal language and scattered remarks and my lack of desire to impress by ideas or content, all flaws and stuff on this one.

Here it goes..

It was not even a good relationship. That’s what’s bizarre about this whole thing. When we first met, I liked him because he had a nice sense of humor and some mature guy charm that was just so irresistible to the 25 year old me. But he was not a good man, and not a good fit, quite the opposite –  an anti-fit. He lacked everything magical that makes a man have value for a girl like me – full of fairy dust and delusional optimism. In that sense, he was not even a person yet, he seemed as if he was born as an adult. But I suppose for that particular moment he reflected what I was going through in life. Namely, right about the same time we started seeing each other, my father got ill and soon after passed away, and my whole world of fantasy and cheerfulness went with it. It was a time of nothingness, and he fit right into that.. I see that now, but at the time I didn’t notice there was a theme there.

He was quite intellectually eloquent, I liked that. And the most informed person I have ever met in my entire life, I liked that even more. We could talk for hours. He was very good at explaining things as well and I am super curious and find knowledgeable people super hot. But then when it came to human contact and emotional interaction, things were blunt and horrible. The first time we slept together was by far the worst sex I ever had in my life. And it seemed to me that he is not withholding on purpose, it seemed that he genuinely doesn’t know how to do it, or even worse – that being gentle in bed is a thing. It was zero me and totally him. I remember once (much later on) he was telling me that a good “fu**er” is the one that screws a lot a women for his own satisfaction, not the one that “sucks up to women by aiming to satisfy her”. But I wasn’t really looking for a boyfriend since I lived abroad and had a bucket full of dreams to chase up solo, so I thought, great, this attitude of his will make me emotionally protected from attachment, yet distracted, which was exactly what I needed for a time being. I really just needed “something” not “the thing”. This will do just fine.

Playing with this situation seemed super safe because I would NEVER be with a guy with whom I have zero in common with. It was an emotionally bulletproof scenario. He is 12 years older and I always wanted to be someone’s “25 year old”, so why not flirt with the idea? And he wanted me very much. And that was very attractive.

He was a book example of a “must have control over everything” type of a guy. He was extremely snappy, anything and everything would throw him off balance and he would just snap, shout out that I wasn’t doing something right, and if I protested he would often get even more aggressive and start calling me names ( a total 3 year old tantrum of  “you are stupid, you are a peasant, you are retarded”). Those bursts would last a mere few seconds a few times in a 24 hour day. But he would never do it in front of other people brutally like that.. In front of others he would soften it a bit and make fun of me in a borderline socially acceptable manner.  I hated it. I felt like stuck between not revealing to his “friends” what kind of monster he actually was and keeping up with what I had of my dignity left since they didn’t know me well. He was feeding off of it. I noticed that his behavior with his friends was also very interesting (I am a psychologist by degree so I can say this XD). Since he is not your typical nice guy and his selfishness was preventing him from getting strokes via exchange for giving them, the only way he could get them was to have people laughing AT him. So he would tweak his anti-social behavior in a way to cross into being funny territory so that he would come across as that “funny weird guy”. What a grotesque behavior..

During nights was a completely different story though. During nights I was hugged as a teddy bear, squeezed and snuggled and never let go.. and at first I was confused but later I thought ok, that is the stuff that matters, right? Trusting someone next to you while going unconsciousness and wanting them so close, I considered that to represent the truth about his feelings for me and it felt good to have that honor. So I stayed. I stayed because of the nights and the squeeze. Stupid me. It was a trap. Nights never failed. Even during the day, between those tantrums, he was utterly and completely dedicated to us. And he always wanted me more, again and again, year after year. He was always there waiting for me at the airport, every next meeting was already scheduled, sometimes half a year down the calendar, he would spend days after days cooking for me, taking initiative for fun date nights, we traveled quite a bit too. But then I would do something wrong, and he would explode, and then I would get upset, and then he would get upset that I got upset and so on and so forth until it ended up that we waged a freaking war over the fact that I haven’t shaken the toothbrush enough before putting it back into the cup. So in a way, it was like leading this double relationship where we were being totally emotionally dependent on our worst enemy. We had a very well organized, super fun charged relationship parallel to bursting out into utter war 78 times a day.  I swear, now looking back to it all, he is bloody Jareth from the Labyrinth!

How do we get tangled into these bizarre situations??  I have a perfectly functioning brain!

Potential explanation? Flashback to my first ever relationship:

My first boyfriend told me “I love you but you are crazy” as he was leaving me forever. That sentence resonated with me through the future years.. And I suppose I found a partner that I deemed to be even crazier than me, one that can then handle my crazy (and reinforce that statement). I know I can be difficult sometimes, and in our early days I would notice that he would either stop me or completely ignore these glitches. Wow, I thought, I am safe here, I can be free of monitoring non-stop what I say and how I say it and just be myself, freely. It sounded like just what I need. So we will be just like one of those ” because of my mental disability I out up with your mental disability” cases. We often laughed about how “crazy” we both are. A play of broken people. Joke is on us now.

That is one side of the whole analysis as seen by me. There is the other one too. O.O (you don’t have to keep reading.. just a reminder).

Namely, I have an in-born tendency to create this “emotional safety zone” around people when I spend time with them, my game is to set up an emotional playground and start running around it. One has never refused to join me. I find it incredibly effortless to feel carefree and it turned out it is sort of contagious. I am also very sensitive to someone needing love and support. I can’t help paying attention to it when I notice it and the urge to help is just out of my power zone, I do it automatically.  And this man… this man screamed of the need to be loved. And like a child to a candy cone there I was, flying to the rescue. Idiot. From the outside he seemed totally sorted. Career, home, hobbies, friends, steady, responsible, organized, successful, serious, a proper (perfect even) human. But those people are usually the fishiest, aren’t they? Society made, afraid to be tweaked by own personality. And I was first squinting at that with suspicion and once I noticed the horror underneath, I ran toward it like a lunatic.

And here I am now. Sad, exhausted, angry and pathetic.

Let me tell you just one of the anecdotes from our last day together. We are in Berlin, I flew there to visit him on his business trip. We are walking down the street towards the metro, and as we are getting closer we see a train coming in. “Do you wanna hurry so we can catch this one?” he asks. “Yes, let’s go.” I say. So we start running and when we enter the station we pass through a hallway and run up the stairs. As we were getting up the stairs I take out my ticket that I have to validate on a machine that was, up until that point, always on the actual platform. However, as we arrive to the platform, there are no ticket validation points.. so I start panicking realizing I can not enter the train because I don’t have a validated ticket. By that time he is already on the train as he has a monthly pass and no need to validate. So I am now caught in this situation where I have to choose to either stay alone on the station or enter the train without a valid ticket. As he doesn’t have roaming on his phone, and I know his temper, I enter the train. And as I tell him that I didn’t validate the ticket..he just… explodes.. “You f*ing moron, the ticket machines were in the hallway, we passed them by!!!” – “Why did’t you tell me as we were passing them by??” – “It’s not my f*ing problem to worry about your f*ing ticket, you idiot, you have no brains, I can’t believe what an imbecile you are!!” he is shouting at me in front of a train full of people.. This was THE moment for me.. it was the n-th time that day he snapped at me, after telling me stuff like that I am too cheerful when I say hello entering coffee shops and that I am a retard because I make coffee in a coffee press at home “like no normal people do”.. that was the moment where, after 5 years I finally felt defeated. Up to this point I was always ready to take on the fight, to either argue, argument, chill and re-try, nicely, appealing to reason. But this time I just felt that’s it. I can’t do it anymore.. you win. And that night he told me he wants us to end. I am looking back now at this situation from a year later and I am shocked probably as much as you are now reading this..

How I felt? Something like..

How dare you want to break my shine, how dare you want to kill in me my love for life. I wanted to give you some of my light, to share with you how great it is to be excited to be alive, and you wanted to kill that in me, turn me into a dull corpse. I hate you for it. I know it’s wrong but I will repeat it.. I hate you for it. Go to hell, and me too, for being into my fantasies and fictional happy endings so much that I actually believed you have the capacity to become an actual person with actual friends and human contact and get a destiny you deserve if only someone just showed you they believe in you. But you are officially a lost cause..  not by birth, but by choice, and THAT is what makes you a loser.

Ok, now that I got that out of the way..

The getting over phase:

Heart clings to stupid things. I have been here before so I know the tricks and sneaky moves of a broken heart. Hope is the worst. Hope is what prologues the suffering. Even if your reason is telling you that this is a good thing and that life holds more for you beyond this milestone, your heart somehow digs hope up from the back of your mind and sneakily clings to it.. you only notice all of a sudden these weird comfort feelings swelling up from within and when you inspect it, you see that you have run that movie in your mind where he calls you, or you ran into him in the world where he regrets his decision and you find yourself in his arms again. Its a killer getting rid of that comfort, of that imagination, because you are essentially getting rid of the only thing that feels good. It is cruel, and your heart will hate you for it.

I was convinced for a long time that what I felt for him was not love.. more like liking and comfort that through time created a habit, and what I have now is actually only  a withdrawal crisis. It’s incredible how we can miss someone who we don’t love. Is the need for belonging (for someone to need us, to miss us) so reckless..? Such a scoundrel brain..

I think about it sometimes.. how dangerous it is to be loved by bad men.

After retrospective analysis I have realized that this is a real trap. We seek validation and if we don’t get it by good people, we will, often unaware, gravitate towards whoever offers it, and ignore the alarms. It’s like candy from strangers, you begin to realize (or even worse, not) that in order to get validation you seek you have to pay with putting up with abuse. But how did I get into this.. That’s a really hard thing for me to admit, but I am just throwing this out there in an attempt to empty the space under the carpet that may have been tripping me. I had an ok upbringing, loving parents, solid education, I am seemingly stable, successful by some so-called society standards. Maybe my strength was actually my weakness. My desire for more reliability, stability and discipline and better intellectual stimulation gave me a man that was a rarity in being able to provide me that, and not such a rarity in coming with a predator behavior towards a woman.

“Sometimes when you win, you lose.

And sometimes when you lose, you win. :)” – What dreams may come 

 

Update: it’s a year later now.. It took me a good 4 months to get rid of the heartache. After the breakup we went on a trip together that we had already paid for, and after he still wrote to me a few times seemingly about practicalities but I think he was just lonely. I went to therapy and after I did as my therapist recommended and cut all contact with him I finally felt liberated and getting over was so much easier. 4 months is a pretty good time to get over a 5 year thing, I’d say.. but I really put a lot of effort into it. Like, I went full on, youtube videos, therapy, new projects, got my life coaching qualification sorted (woho) .. I shall conjure up a bullet point blog on what I found most effective when wanting to get over someone..at some point. 😀 Until then, stay strong ladies. “If we are all alone, we are together in that too!!” – P.S. I love you

*

Love, G.

What do we compromise for being loved? It does’t matter..

I have just dug up a goodbye letter I wrote to my first boyfriend after we broke up (8 years ago). And I was shocked what I read in the first sentence.

To give some context and summarize the backstory: he made me believe I was behaving like a crazy person, told me he loved me, then went his merry way. I was devastated, of course, so I put together a massive letter that summarized my flaws and confessions about my wrongdoings (*what I judged were my wrongdoings), and it helped me give some closure to the whole thing.

I am looking at that letter now and the first sentence reads:

“… and then I found you, I snuggled up on your chest and refused to grow further as a person. This is the price I now have to pay.. ” Meaning he judged me for putting him into the center of my universe and did’t pursue my own dreams. And later he left me because I didn’t do much in life. I was being punished for staying put. (This sounds so silly when I read it now).

That breakup left me traumatized for years. Aside from completely immobilizing my plans, it put my hopes and dreams on hold. I swore then that I would NEVER ever neglect my self-growth for a man and that whatever good feelings I was receiving from that relationship, whatever needs that filled, I will just have to find them out in the world. So I did.

Fast forward 8 years, my boyfriend left me. We had a beautiful fun stable long-distance 5 year relationship, and then all of a sudden he decided that he cannot date someone who is still finding her way around life, because he misses me 3 weeks a month and I am just all over the place trying to put my life together while doing a PhD, a coaching qualification, caring about my grandparents and traveling the world, while trying to break into the creative industry and having a long distance relationship.

…?!

I must admit, this gave a wee bit of comfort, because however you turn your cards, someone will reject you for one reason or the other.. At least, after this breakup, I have seen the world.

You will be rejected at some point in life.. maybe many times, reasons of choice vary in many colorful ways. They all hurt. Sometimes like hell*. Seems like there is no right path to take, no right decision to make to guarantee yourself that intoxicating majesty of all feelings of “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, Is just to love and be loved in return“. 

The End

-H.

*sometimes like all meaning of life has been sucked into oblivion and the world is now gray forever more.

P.S. “…if we’re all alone, then we’re all together in that too.” –  from P.S. I Love You

After living in London for a year..

One year into living in London I was this, as the internet says, “permanently exhausted pigeon”, from all the work, stress, confusion and toxic life that I neither had the time nor motivation to write blogs. So I am writing this one retrospectively, looking backwards through memory, so I will keep it short and sweet.

Even though I was technically making enough money daily so I could spin a barely dignified lifestyle, I was still going home every month for few days which considerably cut my work days per month, which in turn lowered my monthly budget. In addition to going home, traveling around seemed to impose itself as priority so I was out traveling a lot (could have been that I saw it as an escape from the misery as well as actually being productive for my bucket list which is the only thing I seemed to be good at.. or thought I was good at), I was impuls-buying plain tickets and not budgeting properly, and as a result  often experienced a lot of stress due to not having enough money to buy healthy food, pay rent (I always did pay rent on time but managed to earn the money very very last minute, sometimes quite literally), and let alone socialize.

I experienced my first ever anxiety attack and had fatigue and unusual blackouts on the tube coming back from work, frequently. Work was miserable. I worked for a catering agency that introduced me to this whole new world of hospitality, which is nothing short of a bloody horror story. I HATE waitressing. More about that later.

I lived in this non-isolated room in east London where nothing ever happened. My room was freezing, it was moldy and there was seldom hot water in the shower. But it was cheap and the people were nice, so I stayed there for.. nearly 2 years actually. This was a very bad choice now looking back. The cold air (and it was as low as 6°C at times due to heating problems) was making me depressed, and the moldy walls ill. I was getting colds every couple of months. I spent all my time off work being tucked in bed with an electric blanket not having the spirits to do anything else. I couldn’t think straight, and it was frustrating. I was not doing the things I came to London for, not even one, not even started. So what was the point of it all? I wasn’t even exposing myself to information because I was not meeting new people. I haven’t made a single friend my first year in London. I simply couldn’t afford to go out. And even when I could, I was feeling so tired and down that I just couldn’t torture myself longer to go out.

All of this combined made me age a lot. I always had good skin and looked younger than my age. Then one day I woke up and realized I looked like hell; I touched my arm and realized my skin is saggy… It was such a shock for me. My skin was always to tight and perfect. I had aged in that one year in London more than I did in the previous 5 years!!

Back to work. I counted down every minute of every damn shift. The type of work was not the problem, it was the treatment from middle management that was very challenging to my personality. I spent my whole life being good at stuff, and, for the first time now I had to make mistakes, just because someone decided that on a whim. It. Was. Torture. Yet I take pride in not caving right there and finding a 9-5 happy slavery position  in a company, with my masters degree. That would have then put my moving to UK simply obsolete. So I kept on it, hoping for a better freelance lifestyle in the future.  

Then one day I met a girl that told me I was crazy for waiting and gave me a list of promo and hostessing agencies that both paid better and a had a more dignified position in the labor chain. She changed my life. A few months into it, I slowly started getting hosting and promo jobs and couldn’t wait for the moment when I would leave catering forever behind and finally have more money and time to live, not survive.

All was not so dark though. Interestingly enough, in between those long dark periods I was getting such highly rewarding experiences both professionally and joy-wise from the life in this epicenter. I was storming through my coaching qualification process and started seeing clients which was very exhilarating and I was happy to discover that more I coached, more I enjoyed it. Also I got bits and pieces of working in the art world which is the sole 100% meaningful experience you can have. So life in London seemed to show a lot of potential.. just very veeeery slowly.

Then came year two…

Moving to London

Spring 2015.

It was always the plan to move to London “for a while”. Don’t ask me why, it was just a must. And, 26 years into my life, I made it happen. Was not really that difficult, I just bought a ticket, packed a bag and jumped on a plane.

Hardest thing was leaving my dog (I am completely aware of how this sounds to those who have no dogs). But I somehow managed to compromise in a way that I will be frequently visiting. This time I have something to come to aside from family (dogs included) and that just makes it exciting on both sides of the road.

All other crap like finding an apartment was a technicality.

It was my second move to London, or rather I like to say I finally decided it was time to go continue the life I started last year.

 

I had a ticket to a Hozier concert, that I treated myself with as a celebration for moving, as well as a motivation to sit on that plane. It was my first taste of London – the Round house. What a true delight. I need these things to feed my soul.

I had enough money to pay for rent/deposit and one more month’s rent while I already imagined having to start some work immediately in order to have enough to pay next month.. and the wheel to start spinning. I had no clear plan, and no help. All by me, start from the scratch. There was something strangely exciting about it. I always imagine myself as able to create. This time it was a life.

 

 

Behold the marvelous options you have when looking for a 350 pound per month room in London!

The British culture seems polite at first and a promise of a better life style messes with your vision of the future. The cultural shock was anything but pleasant. When you are in trouble instead of “how can I help” you are greeted with “I don’t give a damn”. After Serbia, Spain and Portugal this seems like a totally different atmosphere. Robocop land..  world of “was it in the contract?”

When my ex-roommate decided not to return my last year’s deposit, my budgeting totally collapsed. From a planned 250 first aid money I had literally 30 pounds to live on for the next month. Well, I was thinking, except stooping to that level of a sleazy small person to get back at a sleazy small person, and getting back the deposit by force, there really is no other option. 30 pounds will have to do.

 

But then out of the blue, from no opportunity at all, one suddenly popped up! (we are so limited in our imaginations sometimes). I moved to a new apartment (not the one from the picture 😀 ) and by a crazy line-up of events I found a job that pays on a weekly basis and my one month mini budget transformed into a two week budget. It was my first small win.

Then right before I was seated on a plane to go home, I landed the big paycheck, the one, the spinning one! Right about enough money to cover one more month of rent. The wheel was spinning. The game was on!!

The Beginning