I’ve been struggling with my mental health for quite some time now, probably about 9 months. As I am wont to do my reaction to this difficulty was to instrospect, and through this introspection I came to some interesting understandings about myself. It occurred as a break-through, and Monday this week I was suddenly back “in control of my life”, and feeling completely back to good mental health, but in reality it was probably mnot such a sudden thing. As a perseptive friend noted: it might have been something like working on a mathematics problem, your subconscious works on it for a long time and then one day you have the “Aha!” moment, but it is actually the acculumated result of your subconscious having been thinking about it for quite some time.

Anyway, aside from the actual actions that turned me around the corner, which mostly had to do with recognising unhealthy behaviours, being mindful of them, and being harder on myself about not allowing myself to partake in them, as well as relying on my own ability to self-reflect in order to determine my own motivations when feeling the urge to engage in them, I thought it would be useful to write down some of my realisations, particularly relating to my purpose in life, goals, needs, wants. Previously, soon after moving to Perth, I categorised my needs into three broad categories:

Fitness,
Relationships, and
Work

and while these seem to cover the things that help make me feel satisfied with my life on a daily basis, they are broad and somewhat unhelpful in determining what would and would not satisfy these criteria. So I have a new parameterisations of my needs/ desires:

Stability,
Health, and
Fullfillment or Satisfaction.

These actually seem somewhat orthogonal to the previous parameterisation in the sense that they seem to describe each of the previous categories. In terms of fitness, I find routine helpful, health is well… goes without saying, eating well, being healthy, etc. and fullfillment or satisfaction, I need to get a feeling of fullfillment or satisfaction from the activity — climbing seems to meet this need nicely for me. In terms of relationships, stability is important to me: I need to be able to know and trust that the people I am close too aren’t going anywhere in a hurry, that they are still going to be there and are still going to want to be with me in the future. Perhaps some abandonment issues attached there, who knows. Health is a somewhat generic term when it comes to relationships, but I guess what I mean by a healthy relationship is one that is not toxic, not abusive, is loving, compassionate, honest, and involves ongoing communication, affection, and a deep level of trust. Fullfillment or satisfaction in a relationship is interesting too, and I’m not actually quite sure I fully understand what my needs are here in terms of what actions/ qualities are needed to evoke those emotions in me, in the context of a relationship, but I can recognise them when I feel them. One thing I have noted is that there seem to be different kinds of fullfillment in relationships, and that perhaps they can be categorised in the way I used to categorise relationship compatability when I was a kid:

Emotional,
Mental/ Intellectual, and
Physical/ Sexual.

Of course these interact strongly, and involve things like trust and communication, as well as chemistry etc. But enough on that, to Work. Stability in work is a no-brainer: I want to be able to rely on having work and not have to worry about where my next source of income is going to come from. Health here has to do with the idea of a non-toxic work culture, this is tricky to nail down as culture always is, but essentially boils down to getting along with my colleagues and there probably being a relatively progressive vibe, good work-life balance encouragement, support and colleagiality, etc. But the main realisation I had was to do with what work I find fullfilling. Because I realised it is not neccessarily teaching vs research, or anything like that — the activity itself is a surface feature, the deeper understanding is what it is about the activity that means it is an activity I find fullfilling, vs. one I don’t. The answer I came up with yesterday/ today is: “Enabling others” is what I find fullfilling in my work. This can take many forms: in teaching it’s reasonably obvious, and explains why I find one-on-one teaching more fullfilling than lecturing. But it equally applies to research: I enjoy doing research where I am enabling someone else (in my experience most often a scientist) to learn something or study something in their area of expertise, by applying my skills to analyse their data. I feel like this is an idea that generalises further: Hacky Hour, consulting work, etc.

So anyway, it’s good to know a little more about what makes me happy, but mostly it’s so nice to not be struggling with my mental health on a daily basis anymore, for now at least. It’s been an ongoing battle for… my entire life, but the past couple of years I’ve managed to flip back and forth which is a good sign as far as I’m concerned. Progress! To mental health! Cheers.