Empowering Mental Wellness Through the Development of a Limitless Mindset

A lifetime quest to finding the key to my mental wellness.

Ever since I was born, I have always felt different than most. My mind was in a constant state of chaos and noise with thoughts racing across my mind as if in a mental race against each other to gain my attention. My childhood had been one that occupied family toxicity at levels that could make the sturdiest of systems weak at the knees. The layering of conditioning that took place during those early formative years filled my heart with fears and my mind with ideations I could not understand most of the time. I often felt like I was standing over the edge of a precipice where I could easily tumble into at any time. I was a nervous child, a sensitive soul, a creative that lead my mother to a psychologist at an early age wondering where those “deep thoughts” I was having were coming from. She was worried I might have “mental issues”.

My early childhood was riddled with violent episodes caused by my father’s alcoholism and drug addiction. There was abuse veiled in complicity and denial which did nothing for me but reinforce my inner fears that not much could be controlled in the life of a child and that when the ones who are titled to be caretakers suddenly become your perpetrators, it does something to your psyche that often takes a lifetime to replace into correct perspective. The mind of a child is like a sponge that absorbs not only the words spoken but also the touch, the smells and all that is visual and stores them away into neat little files in their tiny little minds for safe keeping and unravelling at a later date.

Whether we understand it or not, whether we are conscious of it or not, we begin to imprint every single sensation, perception, visual and spoken cues as well as reinforced behaviours as soon as we make our way out of our mother’s womb. Surroundings, events, and people begin to build our outer layers. As we grow, those layers thicken and multiply with every person we encounter and every experience we have. Those layers, with time, begin to weigh us down. They start isolating us from ourselves…till one day, we wake up and feel completely disconnected from the world we believe we belonged to.

I have been on a lifetime quest to discover what it was that made me feel so disconnected from myself and from the world around me. I felt I did not belong anywhere and with anyone. The land was foreign and so were its occupants. I played the role assigned to me depending on who’s presence I was in. Each person in my life had different expectations of me and being the people pleaser that I was, I refused to rock the boat and disappoint and therefore learned to quickly assess other’s projections of me and acquiesce to their beliefs of who they thought I should be in their play of the moment. Doing so only created more chaos in my mind and made me feel not only disconnected to my surroundings but even more so to myself. I became fragmented.

Until I lost my brother to suicide.

That one event rocked my core to such a depth that it rendered me completely devoid of the desire to live.

I had been plagued my entire life with a feeling of disconnectedness and ideations of disappearing but suicide was a distant thought that would transverse my mind only on occasions where my outer world became so chaotic that it filled me with the fear I had no control.

From the moment I realized my brother was gone, as I lay on the hospital gurney next to his frozen body, suicidal thoughts took permanent residence inside my mind. The pain was just too much to bear. I could not fathom a world without him in it. He was my lifeline, my buoy, my silver thread in this world. Without him, how could I even exist?