A thought is just a thought

I told my therapist that I’ve been having some great wins lately but also dwelling on the lows. Freelancing and entrepreneurship are gigantic roller coasters that can only be empathized with if you’ve gone through them yourself. In many moments of the day, I feel like I’ve accomplished one thing while failing in other parts of my life (e.g., I booked a new client and also have three days’ worth of dirty dishes in my sink).

We have been working on mindfulness, which is not a task I’m particularly good at. I don’t do well in complete silence. My brain likes to wander around and explore tangents. Trying to sit and focus on my breath and observe my thoughts without judgment (and recognize when my brain is wandering) is supremely uncomfortable for me.

So back to the part where I said I felt like I was failing. She pointed it out as a great example of incorporating mindfulness. My brain says, “I feel like I’m failing in parts of my life.”

And I’m supposed to separate this for my brain into a thought and a feeling. The thought is: “I am failing in parts of my life.” But anxiety brains like to make sense of thoughts by identifying reasons for them, which is why my brain skips to “I feel like I’m failing.” If you compare “I am failing in parts of my life” to “I have some great wins,” both are thoughts, but one is self-critical, and the other is positive. One does not hold more truth than the other, and I can choose the positive one.

She also said that, with time, I would be able to observe my thoughts without automatically attaching feelings to them—not to be confused with disassociation, which is a reaction to a stressful situation and something I'm familiar with.

Her full nugget of wisdom was, "A thought is just a thought, and it holds no truths." Just because I think I’m failing doesn’t mean that I am.

In an extremely unrelated topic, I have been obsessed (a word I pretty much never use) with this Disney album that features Disney classics, redone by millennial 2000s bands. A+ effort on hitting the millennial nostalgia. I've been telling everyone I know about it.

etc.

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