I want to keep this blog post brief because one, it’s late and almost bedtime for me and two, I don’t think I have anything profound to say about this topic. All I want to write about is the coping skills that have helped me in the past week or so.
The past week has been a challenging one. There is, first of all, the prospect of starting my first postgrad job amidst growing uncertainties about international students’ ability to obtain and retain temporary employment authorization. Then there is the pressure I feel to continue growing through a breakup while planning to relocate to another part of the country later this year.
The more I reflect on these things the more I experience what I perceive to be a complete loss of control, a lack of agency over my life circumstances. It is as if this year has been the year where I find out that everything I want in life could be taken away in the blink of an eye and against my will (as always, my mind has a taste for dramatizing things). And these experiences have led to a great deal of obsessive rumination, wrestling with reality and, for lack of a better term, general depression about where I’m at in life.
What have helped me the most are the following practices. The first has been to catch my negative thought patterns and reframe them one by one, CBT-style. The second involves the mindfulness practice known as “radical acceptance” (here is a New York Times article written by clinical psychologist and assistant professor in psychiatry Jenny Taitz that delves into the five steps of radical acceptance).
The point of radical acceptance is to accept reality as it is and to accept any feelings that might arise in response to it. Too often I hold judgements not only about the reality that confront me but also about my feelings about said reality – be it the more “socially acceptable” emotions like sadness and fear or the supposedly “unacceptable” and presumably “secondary” ones like anger, envy, and jealousy. But to hold judgements in this way, I think, is a sort of defense against experiencing what is disagreeable to me, an avoidance strategy that amounts to a refusal to process and work with what I am actually given. There are moments when such refusal is necessary, but more often than not, I’m willing to say, it achieves little other than holding me back from living life in the present and causing me unnecessary suffering.
It has been my experience this past week that I am most receptive to happy moments – and things I ought to be grateful for – when I am simultaneously most open to the realities of anxiety and pain. This has been an odd but ultimately hopeful lesson.
Billy Cao 