what to do when you feel like you choose all the wrong paths?
Dear Amal, Episode 2: on trusting yourself, unlearning schemas, and running wild
Dear Amal,
What do u do when u feel like ur stuck forever. And what do u do when you feel like you choose all the wrong paths for you. And what do you do when you feel like you’ve done nothing but ask all the wrong questions that got you in all the wrong place and what do you do when it really doesn’t matter and you’ll always end up where ur meant to?
With all the love in the world,
rum
My dearest rum,
I have two answers for you. They may sound contradictory, but think of them as parallel lines: moving forward infinitely, side by side.
This feeling will expand and contract but overall, I think a feeling of disorientation, no matter how small, will always remain in our hearts. I think it’s a human thing.
If everything feels wrong where you’re standing, you need to find another place to stand. It sounds painfully simple in writing. I’ll try to explain what I mean. I have a point here, I think.
Waking up for school always felt like waking up for war to me. Some Nights by Fun. on repeat, I spent years forcing myself through the motions, which felt like going in infinite circles - as though I was a dog strapped to a pole, hoping that this next turn might untangle the rope, or that this next bark would grant freedom. Never did. That’s about six years of my life that felt mostly like wasted time, like routine melodrama.
But then, university. It wasn't amazing (I know I have a tendency to romanticize that part of my life on here) nor was it particularly life-changing… it was just easy. Waking up was easy. Getting dressed was easy. Making the drive, despite it being one hour into the countryside at 7:30AM, was easy. I didn't have many friends, nor did I do anything particularly fun. No crazy college stories, no late night parties, no rebellion other than staying out after midnight a few times… but going about my life, at that time, was easy. We really underestimate the power of ease.
In the simplest of terms, I was content, which is surprising considering COVID19 hit on my fourth semester and then I went through a terrible breakup and then I realized I had been sexually abused and I had to deal with that. And those were terrible things. They hurt me deeply. I struggled immensely. But I didn't feel like I had been cursed, or that my life was at a standstill, or that I was going in circles. In fact I felt I had a lot of agency; I knew where I was going, I knew what I wanted to do. Importantly, I had chosen where I was. Something about that… something about having chosen and gotten it right fueled me.
Being alive felt like a progressive thing, something I could take into my own hands: I was moving through time, rather than it forcing me along with it.
I didn't think I’d ever go back to feeling what I did in high school. Really, for many years I thought that was puberty, or bullying. I thought that maybe the difference in my demeanor was because I started studying English Literature and I really loved that and it’s what I wanted. Maybe because I had started therapy, my emotions were streamlining. But then I got my first Big Girl job, and a lot of the feelings returned: my alarm clock was screaming at me, the mere fifteen minute drive to the office felt like hours, and I spent so much time in bathroom stalls just freaking the fuck out for reasons I really can’t discern. The days moved so slow and yet they ended so quickly. I survived on a steady dose of beta-blockers and sleeping pills.
I spent a lot - and I mean a lot - of time in a therapist’s office crying about “going in circles” and “always making the wrong decisions.” I had that feeling - that heavy feeling - just like this feeling you’re describing - and it ate me up inside. I’d ask her for solutions. I’d beg her for a way out of the maze. I’d cry. Everything keeps happening the same. Everything is like before. I am never going to change. What’s the point? What’s the point? What’s the point of anything if I and it and us will always be this way?
And she’d say, much to my dismay, “Where in your body are you feeling this?”1
I wouldn't have noticed the lessons hidden between my feelings about school, uni, and my first job, if not for this small, new experience that I recently had: I drove to my new job the other day after a few months of unemployment. It is nearly an identical distance away from my apartment as my last workplace was. The route uses many of the same streets. And yet: it was easy. Even on the way home, in the middle of rush hour, traffic favored me. My car found its way smoothly through the streets of Amman’s busiest neighborhood.
Maybe I was just becoming more positive. Maybe my meds were just working well. Maybe… I had just been a big baby before. I hadn’t been to therapy in so long. I wasn’t doing anything particular to be better - I just was. And then I wondered if it was some kind of spiritual experience.
Was the universe telling me something?
Jeffrey Young coined the term Schema Therapy2 during the late 1980s, suggesting that our earliest experiences form schemas: deeply held beliefs about the self and the world. These schemas, in turn, create filters through which we interpret events, making different situations feel the same even if they have very little in common.
If you have a failure schema, for example, you may feel that every setback you’ve ever had is the very proof you’re incompetent - even if you have solid evidence otherwise. Confirmation bias could be a term you’re more familiar with, but this is something deeply ingrained in your being, something that shifted and grew alongside you.
Let’s imagine success is the color red and in childhood you put on some red-tinted glasses, because your mom or teacher or friend told you that you were a loser and the glasses suited you. And these lenses you’ve spent your life wearing… they just blur out all your bright red accomplishments. The only thing you’re able to see is all the yellow-white spots of failure, blinding you.
So, me, I relate my ill-fitting job to high-school, because my eyes were blinded with a lens shame, just as they were when I was a teenager. I viewed everything through the eyes of an overwhelmed sixteen-year-old. I felt like an outsider, and comments - whatever they were - would fuel my sense of incompetence - would trigger my schema of shame. Something in those days just jolted me into this state, maybe something someone said, maybe just how I felt, and even in retrospect I can’t quite understand why. But there it was. Here it is.
I was fine during college because, for the most part, I was good at what I did. I wasn’t triggered by personhood - I knew what I wanted, I knew who I was, I knew exactly where I fit in the world. In college my issue was mainly relationships, but the misunderstanding of love isn’t as defeaning as a misunderstanding of the self. Once my self was challenged, once I felt I had to change my self to fit in…
God, I just knew there was something deeper wrong with me, something almost spiritual about how sick the days made me; I regularly asked for help, I was always doing research. It wasn't just the job or school or this or that, but something else. Like a fog. A haunting. Like an intrinsic understanding I was in the wrong place.
Instinct. A sense our bodies have, which we have grown to ignore. You say you feel stuck “forever”, and I tell you, throughout my life I have learned in the hardest of ways that when the spot you’re in feels so bad… you need to find a new spot. You owe it to yourself to find a new spot. No one else will find it for you.
The first time I noticed my schemas was when I was ranting to a friend of mine, and said something overkill, which I don’t remember, but it was along the lines of “this just keeps happening to me” and she said, flatly, “Amal - not everything is something else.” And I had my hand on the wheel and my eyes on the road, and my knuckles went white. It was so simple, but it came like a snap. Oh.
I think backwards, rather than forwards. This is my Achilles heel. It makes me a good writer, but a bad person. I’ve done this ever since I can remember. My relationships have all been wildly different, but my brain categorizes all the issues into little shelves, and then creates patterns. Patterns that are familiar to me. Patterns where I am the source of all the things that went wrong. Many of my friendships fell apart in different ways, but the small similarities glare out at me. “I’m the only common denominator,” I’d always say. And that’s how I am: a pattern-maker, convinced that I have been walking the same road over and over again. But it’s always just been my broken brain trying to prove that what I was told during childhood was true.
So, what to do?
Like all animals, we have certain receptors that signal to us when we’re in danger. Danger here can mean a myriad of things, depending on your context. Depending on where you are in life. Our bodies react in line with our minds, give us clues as to what we’re feeling. Follow that, however wildly you must. In fact, be wild about it. Be unthinking about it.
My friend started therapy recently and asked for advice. I told her, “A big part of getting better mentally, is letting yourself become stupid.” A lot of this applies to everything else. Sometimes, the trick to happiness is immense selfishness and a collection of “bad” choices. Bad, perhaps, to your society, to your family, but they feel right in your heart.
Stop over philosophizing what you do and why you do it. Stop wondering why you want to do it.
My university years were positive because they were bolstered by the fact that I really stood my ground, for the first time in my life. My mom did not want me to study English Literature, but I did, mighty and honest and angry and real. I just knew there was no other place for me, no possible chance I would waste another six years in a classroom studying something I didn’t care for. It was my desperation that forced that explosion. My intense distaste for how my life had turned out. I crawled my way up to the steps of AUM, in the middle of buttfuck nowhere Amman, and sat down in the front of the classroom. I did that. No one chose it for me - in fact they actively tried to stop me, and shamed me for it for the first two years (being valedictorian shut the Arab aunties up, though). That gave me so much power. Even the most annoying, boring classes were bearable: I chose this.
What I regret is that I keep waiting to hit that rock bottom - that immense dissatisfaction - to get moving again. I must drown, it seems, before I learn to swim. I fall into familiar habits, and forget that I have a fire that burns within me. The most vital advice I give you now is to not do that. Don’t wait until its terrible. Clean while it’s still just messy, and not downright dirty.
That job, though. I fell into it, really. I graduated knowing I wanted to go into publishing but received rejection after rejection; rejections I internalized. I had been a big disappointment to my family when I decided to move back to Amman, so I was reliant on the money, and honestly? I wanted the fancy job to prove my worth to them - Look at me! I did it! I did it and I did it great! Look at this lanyard! Look at this paycheck! But my heart was never in it. I wanted it to be, I did. I studied everything I could. I kept asking for advice, for feedback. But there was nothing that could fix the terrible feeling of going around and around that pole I tied myself to. My soul knew I was meant for something else, it just did. But my eyes could only see the tightly knotted rope.
When I left that job, it was after two years of trying to believe what people were telling me: It’s so much money, you’re so lucky, everyone wants this. It’s like they were telling me Sure you’re tied to this pole and limited to this space but isn’t the view so nice? And what a nice pole. What a cool spot. My closest friends… they watched me cry with raised eyebrows. You’re being overdramatic. You have one of the best jobs, Amal. But I didn’t feel it. And it hurt me more that there was no way I could explain it.
When I received an email that was titled Contract Non-renewal, my panic over rent lasted about thirty seconds before my body registered the idea of freedom. I looked over my finances, which gave me about three months of survival. Lucky. Also lucky? That I had already been applying to universities. I had somewhat of a buffer… a skeleton of a plan.
So… I ran. In those days I had a page taped by my mirror: Option 1 MFA in Michigan. Option 2 Just Move to Michigan. Option 3 Write in Jordan. Suddenly, time was moving forward again. And I remember laughing at myself once because my ex boyfriend used to make fun of me for saying I “didn’t care about money”, but the money I got from my last job was of so much importance to everyone around me that I convinced myself that I cared - I changed my entire sense of self because they were all telling me I should. Everything I believed in my whole life (that all I wanted to run towards was words and comfort) was gone, like I was blinded by expectations. I just put the damned glasses on.
You know how they say if everyone stands up and claps at something, you would too?
Despite the stresses that come with unemployment, I was not sick once in those three months… I didn't have insurance but I didn’t need it. It’s funny because anyone who knows me will tell you: I get sick a lot. Too often for it to be a coincidence. Maybe my mother is correct in her idea that I only get sick when I’m upset. But time just went by. Some days I had more money than I needed. My siblings helped me, too, and my mother. My friends invited me to this and that. And it flowed. Like water. People left, I let them.
There are a lot of jokes about girlies being naïve for getting excited over angel numbers, but they’re right about one thing: the universe will give you signs when you’re aligned with yourself. When you know who you are. When you have a sense of agency, an understanding of where you’re going.
Our childhood beliefs and experiences are important things. That’s why you hear about them so often, especially if you’ve fallen into the self-help loop of the 21st century… when you feel like you’re repeating a pattern, think about why this is the pattern you’re seeing. You’re probably just choosing to see it… Are you just wearing those glasses? Are you just seeing your inner child’s limited range? If you feel like a failure, list the times you’ve been successful. If you feel lost, remind yourself how you’ve survived other mazes. Rewire your thoughts. Understand what’s important to you. The better you know yourself, the better you’re able to deal with this heavy, unbelievable, overwhelming thing we call life.
My love. Breathe. Act. I don’t believe things are meant to be; I don’t believe that God wrote your life out and expects you to close your eyes and let the time pass as He willed it. No, if God lives he wants you to prove your independence to him. Your sheer human willpower. The fire he left a spark of in your soul.
My love, you are not cursed to a specific type of life, nor a specific situation, nor a specific ending. No, this life is yours, yours like clay - turn it. Push it. Paint it. Mold it into something you love. You must. You must. Our hands are all we have.
Take your schemas - your hurts, your negative beliefs, your lost dreams, and break the lens the world forced you in. You’re the only one stuck in yourself. So, you’re the only one that matters.
Act like it.
With love,
Amal
Further reading that you may also find helpful:
My therapist changed my life. But if you’re in therapy - you might know how frustrating this question is, because it forces you back into yourself, and you must find the feeling in your being. It is the correct thing. But GOD!!!
its so easy to fall in love with your mind
so authentic, loved this