Engineered Emotion

My journey to wholeness started abruptly with a 3 month leave from the world I knew and mostly understood at work. The world where deliverables were the highest metric disappeared and I was now in a void, face to face with my own body and emotions. I was about to learn things about myself that I hadn't paid attention to before.  The first big lesson for me was to redefine my value and identity. Initially I felt a huge urgency to get well and become productive again, yet each therapist I talked to was in no hurry to move things along. They were all very aware that this was a long game and I was frustrated with that in a big way. When the therapists tried to slow me down I decided to take it on myself to start learning from books, videos, podcasts and any other source of information I could find. What started to become obvious was that I needed to be ok with deconstructing the way I saw myself and rebuilding in a new way. When I got impatient I was told more than once: "How'...

One morning in the office on a pretty normal day in November 2010, I was overcome by an urge to cry out in frustration, literally. This wasn't the first time it happened but it was the tipping point. This wave of emotion was happening more often recently and it was not making sense. There were tears coming to my eyes and I had to duck into an empty office to shut the door so my colleagues wouldn't see me break down. No one had yelled at me. I wasn't in physical pain. At the heart of it, I just couldn't put together the energy to tackle the issues on my desk that day and it felt like I would miss important deadlines because my brain couldn't think.  I'd be ok again in about 30 to 60 minutes but I had no idea when this heavy emotion would hit me again. This new reality is very unsettling for a structured and analytical mind that doesn't enjoy surprises. So much of my success rested on my brain's ability to cut through chaos quickly and identify new options...

The first week of November 2010 changed my life dramatically. There was no car crash. No one died. I had no catastrophic relationship breakdown, except the one  with myself. My behaviour had developed organically without a lot of attention to my own body or feelings and that would need to change. I graduated with an engineering degree long ago and the process of problem identification, analytics and rational solution finding had become a way of life by 2010. In fact I was the leader of a very technical engineering team at Bell Canada because of these abilities. My life's reference framework was pretty black and white. There was reality and there was fluff. I preferred reality.   During that notorious week in 2010 I came to realize that what I was doing wasn't working. This one realization took me on a long journey of discovery. I'm more than 10 years into it now and a lot of things are much clearer. What hasn't changed is the need for further discovery of who I am and h...