Identity and Control

Abstract

Identity has been a concept that has been strongly intertwined with my mental health. When I’ve thought of myself as a good person, it’s alleviated a number of symptoms whereas when I didn’t have this same perception, it immensely amplified them. I wrestled with identity for many years until I finally was able to establish a better sense of who I am. In the beginning of my mental health struggles, I was having a mental awakening and I wasn’t really sure about who I was or who I wanted to be. During my first episode of psychosis, there were some things I did wrong that I couldn’t control that made me feel terrible about myself. I remember trying as hard as I could to do the right thing, but schizoaffective disorder was so entrenched within me that I couldn’t control those situations. In years after, I really wrestled with the things that had gone wrong quite frequently. When my life wasn’t going as well, I remembered those things, blamed myself for the illness, and looked for causality that directly related to my actions, thus positing control to myself. For years I tried identifying the things I did wrong on the spectrum of morality. I was within a spectrum trying to identify myself in those moments in terms of good and bad and right and wrong, and these parameters for conceptualizing these moments didn’t work. In later years, I finally realized I didn’t have control over those situations; therefore, they can’t be things I can blame myself for. I learned to step outside of the parameters of morality, realizing these things were not a reflection of who I was. During these moments, I was trying as hard as I possibly could to control what was happening. However, when you try to control your thoughts and emotions and especially primal thoughts and emotions, you lose control at times. In later years, I disentangled the thought webs and I regained complete control over myself and I realized that the things I did wrong had nothing to do with who I was. Those moments were a question of psychology and were not within the binary parameters of good and bad morality. No matter how good a person I was trying to be, losing control in those moments was purely psychological and had to do with the way I had conceptualized meaning within my mind. It was an existential question, not a moral one. This was a tremendous alleviation. Another helpful component to realizing this was working on relinquishing control. I had spent a number of years trying to control anything and everything about myself for fear of repeating my mistakes. The thing I realized when I disentangled these thoughts webs of control was that the things I had done weren’t that bad. Most of the fear I had over the years was from the constant fear that I would lose control when I didn’t want to. It was terrifying to be having impulses to do things I didn’t want to while trying to do anything and everything I could to prevent myself from doing them. The irony of the situation was that the very measures I was taking to establish control over myself were the very reasons I was losing the ability to have control and I was getting impulses to do things I didn’t want to. I had felt if I controlled all my thoughts and emotions that would help me to control all my actions. However, learning that letting go of control over my thoughts and emotions in a myriad of ways actually gives me back control over myself. For several years after my episodes, I always felt afraid I was going to lose control and that was caused by trying to control anything and everything I was thinking. However, when I alleviated this fear, I felt far safer and I realized the things I had done non-volitionally during episodes were not my fault. However, there was still a time where I struggled with constructing and maintaining a positive and healthy identity. If I had done bad things, I felt I must have been a bad person. On the contrary, I knew I had done so many good things; therefore, I must have been a good person. The first thing I had to realize was that even if you were the one doing the bad things, and you didn’t have control over yourself, you can’t really blame yourself for those actions. The things that went wrong were truly non-volitional, and those moments were terrifying for me. However, in terms of conceptualizing those bad moments, it didn’t help to consider myself a good person during those times, because I was not necessarily being good or doing good either. It also didn’t help to think I was a bad person either, because I kept reminding myself of all the good things I had done and of all the people I had helped throughout my life. I wavered back and forth for a while and it was an identity struggle where some days I thought of myself as a very good person, and on others, I thought of myself as bad. It was difficult vacillating between these two extremes and it created extreme highs and lows emotionally from day to day. When I learned more about thinking in grayer terms, I realized I