Learning the Shape of My Own Mind

Learning the Shape of My Own Mind

I used to believe my mind was a locked room. I lived inside it, but I did not understand it. Thoughts arrived with the force of weather: dark, sudden, and impossible to stop. When suicidal thoughts came, they did not feel like thoughts at all. They felt like truths. They sounded final. They told me that pain would never end, that I had already failed, that I was too damaged to belong anywhere. For a long time, it never occurred to me that I might have a choice, or that I could play an active role in my own well-being. I thought suffering was something that happened to me, and survival was something I either managed by accident or failed at completely.

When I first began learning about psychology, I expected to find explanations that would label me and maybe contain me. Instead, I found language that made me less afraid of myself. Existential psychology introduced me to the idea of the Eigenwelt, the inner world of the human being: the private landscape of thoughts, feelings, values, memories, fears, and meanings. I had spent years trying to escape that inner world because it felt hostile, but the concept helped me see that psychotherapy and self-awareness were not about proving I was broken. They were opportunities to reconnect with myself. My mind was not an enemy country. It was a place I had never been taught how to inhabit.

That realization was painful. To look inward honestly meant admitting how often I had rejected parts of my own humanity. I wanted to be calm, rational, grateful, resilient, and easy to love. I did not want to be frightened, angry, ashamed, needy, or overwhelmed. But psychology taught me that rejecting those parts of myself did not make them disappear. It made me feel empty, alienated, and detached from myself and from other people. If I could not accept that suffering was part of being human, I could not accept myself as human either. Slowly, I began to understand that I was “normal” in the deepest sense: like every other person, I shared the common experience of suffering.

My suicidal thoughts had never been about drama, revenge, or manipulation. They were not a strategy to control anyone. They were a desperate response to intolerable pain that appeared to have no end. In those moments, I was flooded by emotion and numb at the same time. Whatever state dominated me felt permanent. I could not remember that I had ever felt differently, and I could not imagine a future in which healing was possible. I was unable to draw from the past for evidence that pain changes, or from the future for hope that life might become bearable. The crisis narrowed everything until the only thing I could understand was the present intensity of my suffering.

Looking back, I can see that the suicidal part of me was not asking for death as much as it was begging for relief. The message underneath was, “I’m drowning. I can’t swim. Save me.” I wanted somebody to hear the panic beneath my silence, the plea beneath my anger, the terror beneath my withdrawal. But because I did not understand my own mind, I often misread myself too. I believed the thoughts because they were loud. I believed the despair because it filled the room. I did not yet know that a thought could be powerful without being accurate, or that an emotional state could be overwhelming without being permanent.

One of the most important distinctions I learned was the difference between accepting that life experiences can be victimizing and accepting the life role of victim. The experiences that wounded me were not choices. The pain they left behind was real. But over time I began to see that building an identity entirely around victimhood kept me trapped inside the wound. Today, I do not need to deny what happened in order to refuse to be defined by it. My lived experiences with victimization are part of my story, but they are not the whole of who I am.

This did not mean blaming myself for my suffering. It meant discovering responsibility in a different sense: the ability to respond. I could not choose every thought that appeared, but I could learn to notice it. I could not erase every memory, but I could learn how to hold it with more compassion. I could not guarantee that despair would never return, but I could prepare for it. This was the beginning of agency. It was also the beginning of meaning. The phrase “to live is to suffer; to survive is to find meaning in the suffering” stopped sounding like a harsh sentence and began to feel like an invitation. If suffering was part of life, then meaning was not the absence of pain. Meaning was something I could practice finding, even in pain.

I learned that my mind had habits. One of them was catastrophic thinking. A painful interaction became proof that everyone would leave. A mistake became evidence that I was worthless. A bad day became a prediction about the rest of my life. Psychology gave me a name for this pattern, and naming it gave me a little space from it. To retrain my mind toward learned optimism, I had to become a skilled disputer of my own despair. I began asking questions that once felt impossible: Is this thought true, or is it familiar? What evidence do I have? What would I say to someone I loved if they believed this about themselves? What else might be possible?

At first, these questions did not cure anything. Sometimes they felt artificial, almost insulting, beside the force of my feelings. But baby steps mattered. I kept a record of moments I survived. I wrote down mornings when I got out of bed, conversations I did not avoid, appointments I attended, meals I ate, walks I took, apologies I made, boundaries I practiced, and nights when I chose to wait rather than act on the urgency of pain. Hopefulness came from these small successes, not because they were dramatic, but because I could not deny them. They were evidence. They proved that the story my despair told was incomplete.

I also began telling my life differently. For years my memories had felt chaotic, like scattered pieces of a broken object. Through reflection, therapy, and writing, I started arranging them into a narrative. I was not inventing a false positive version of my life. I was distilling and discovering a trajectory. I could see pain, but I could also see endurance. I could see helplessness, but I could also see moments of choice. I could see the child who adapted, the younger self who survived, the adult who was learning to listen inwardly instead of abandoning herself. Telling the story gave me a sense of agency rather than victimhood.

My real recovery began when I made an honest commitment to transforming my life, but I could not make that commitment until I believed transformation might be possible. That belief did not arrive all at once. It came cautiously, almost reluctantly. I had to admit that maybe my core beliefs were distorted. Maybe hopelessness was not wisdom. Maybe shame was not truth. Maybe the part of me that wanted to die was also the part of me that most desperately wanted life to hurt less. That was my unprecedented leap of faith: not the certainty that I would heal, but the willingness to behave as if healing was possible.

Over time, I learned to build a life around practices that made survival less accidental. I learned to pause when my thoughts became absolute. I learned to reach out before the crisis became a sealed room. I learned to treat my body as part of my mind: sleeping, eating, moving, breathing, and resting not as chores, but as acts of care. I learned that coping is not one heroic decision. It is a series of ordinary returns to life. It is drinking water. It is answering a message. It is telling the truth to someone safe. It is remembering that emotions move, even when they swear they will stay forever. 

I still have an inner world, and it is still complicated. I still meet fear there, and grief, and old beliefs that speak in urgent voices. But I no longer believe every voice is a command. I can enter my Eigenwelt with more curiosity now. I can ask what a thought is trying to protect, what a feeling remembers, what choice still exists inside a moment that feels choice-less. I have learned that freedom does not always feel like triumph. Sometimes it feels like one breath between an impulse and an action. Sometimes it feels like staying.

The life I am building is not perfect, but it is more honest. I am no longer only the person who suffered. I am also the person who studies the suffering, questions it, learns from it, and chooses what to do next. I am not a victim, though victimizing experiences are part of my story. I am not my suicidal thoughts, though I have had to learn their language. I am a human being, which means I suffer, choose, fail, begin again, and make meaning. The hope I have now is quieter than the rescue I once imagined, but it is steadier. It comes from knowing my mind more deeply and trusting that, even in pain, there is still a self within me capable of turning toward life.

Source:

Critical Suicidology
Jennifer White, Ian Marsh, Michael J. Kral, and Jonathan Morris