Baton Rouge presented a unique problem. There was a strange dead zone around the city where no campgrounds or state parks were available. Urban sprawl was making available land nearly impossible to find. Compound this with the South's preference of RV Resorts over campsites, and that puts me in my position--a position that I will be stuck in for, potentially, the next few weeks. I had two options:
- Ride only 30 miles to the next campsite
- Push hard and ride 100+ miles to cross the Mississippi and gamble a campsite out there
I instead remembered AirBnB was a thing and found a place for cheap in Baton Rouge. Thinking I had the next day of cycling set, I went to bed feeling good. As my body rest and I stumbled into dream land, my brain came alive.
That night I had an extremely vivid dream involving Cory. In my dream he was not only alive, but just so happened to be at the exact same campsite I was in. I excitedly told him to about my trip so far and how insane this whole thing was. As I rambled on he was uncharacteristically quiet as his big, dumb grin grossed his face. Finally, I asked him to join me on the trip. He agreed. At no point did I question the insanity of the situation. The fact that my brother was alive and well and had "coincidentally" bumped into me at a campsite in a state he had never been to, never made me consider I was in a dream. In fact, as my brother and I spoke, insane images dredged up from my subconscious dotted the background. I so enthusiastically believed what was happening that I was bordering into delusion. And as my brother and I mounted our bikes as a waning evening suddenly turned into a sunrise, I woke up.
And I was still excited and elated for him to join me. As I shook the cobwebs of sleep from my brain and came out of my dopamine haze, reality set back in. Cory was not going to be joining me on this ride. I was still on this trip, alone. My brain had lied to me. It hurts, but it's an unfortunate thing I've had to learn to deal with. While I've been able to better control and handle such mental health road bumps, it doesn't make them hurt any less. But there's something else in that idea I want to discuss. Something that I try to hammer into people's, and more often than not my own, heads when they ask me about mental health: You do not control your brain, it controls you.
I often refer to the one organ in our skull bucket by two different names. There is the "brain," the portion of the brain that focuses on pure survival. Everything from heart rate, breathing, fight-or-flight, bathroom usage, etc are controlled in this part. It is sometimes also called "the lizard part" of our brains. Then there's "You." You are the logical, rational portion of your brain that creates the thoughts in your head. The part that makes active decisions and keeps us up at night worrying about our own existence. More complex thoughts reside, for the most part, in this part of our head. These two parts may cooperate with your consciousness for the most part, but that's only because the processes that allow them to are functioning as intended. When they fail or have a hiccup, reality and logic are stripped away from one another. The funny thing is, we may not realize it because our brain creates those logics and realities. I mean, I spent a year and a half being miserable in Colorado because my brain was convincing me I wasn't. This happens to all of us on some level. We're all human and flawed and its quite easy to convince ourselves of anything. But for some with serious mental health issues, the constant shredding of their reality takes a toll psychologically and can have major physical and/or psychological repercussions. Fortunately, for me today, this delusion was only an annoyance.
For the whole day I had to sit in my saddle and try to battle the crushing, irrational sadness of realizing no one was waiting for me in Baton Rouge. It hurt and it still hurts. Part of me wishes I could stay in the delusion I woke up in, just to remember what it was like not to miss my brother. A brain's desperate grab at false happiness.
But that's not healthy nor safe. So I had to do battle with my brain all day.
I am fortunate enough to have insurance coverage, for now at least, that allows me to go to therapy regularly. In those therapy sessions I was given a series of tools that make doing such battle easier. These tools allow me realize a problem--because often your brain will lie to you to protect itself/your ego, analyze the problem, and then either repair the issue or hunker down as I wait for the neurochemicals in my head to re-balance.
This is something I try to make a point of when talking about mental health with the people I meet. Therapy will give anyone a special set of tools to do proper mental maintenance on themselves. While I would love to give help by offering my tools, the problems we all face are unique. What problem may require a hammer in my head may require a screwdriver in theirs or may require a chemical fix in the form of medicine. The only advice I can give, that I wish we all dispensed more often, is: it's okay to go to therapy.
Therapy does not mean you are crazy, that you are broken, or anything else. It only means you are paying someone to listen to you so they can hand you a set of tools. It doesn't matter to the professionals what kind of issues you have, they want to help and are getting paid to do so. Even if you want to go to therapy because you just need to unload on someone or are worried about something minor, go. We take our cars in for major and minor problems, maintenance checks, and the occasional questions. Why do we have such a problem doing so with our brains?
I apologize for the tangent as I know these posts are about what happened to me during the day; but, I think it's imperative I make it clear:
You don't control your brain, it's okay to go to therapy.
Otherwise, I can't say much about today.