The Missing Piece Meets The Big O

One of the first guided meditations I listened to after taking up the practice was about relationships.

I remember listening to the guide’s calm voice as she explained the plot of a popular picture book. As I listened, and then later read the book for myself, I was struck by the simplicity of the story and the powerful message behind it.

The book in question was Shel Silverstein’s, The Missing Piece Meets the Big O, and it goes like this:

Once upon a time, there was a missing piece.

The missing piece spent all its time waiting for someone to come find it and take it away. There were many that came along. Some did not fit at all. Some seemed like a good fit at first, but then the missing piece grew and they didn’t fit together anymore.

One day, the missing piece met someone new, that didn’t look like anyone it had met before. It didn’t have any space for a missing piece.

The missing piece told the Big O that it could not roll because it was a triangle and it had sharp edges, and the Big O told it that edges could be worn off and shapes change. The Big O left, and the missing piece found itself all alone.

But then, slowly, it began to move.

Eventually, the missing piece shaved off all its sharp edges and began to roll. It found the Big O and together, they rolled alongside each other.

The full book, which takes no longer than a minute or two to read, is filled with even more beautifully subtle messages about healthy relationships. It should be required reading for all children and adults.

It made me think about my own relationships and what I seek out in them. Back when I first listened to this meditation, I still had this idea that having a partner would be the thing that “completed me.” I depended on men to supply: my happiness, emotional support, my sense of self-worth, a social life.

Luckily, I’ve come a long way since then. I know, now, the importance of being your own, complete person. You can want a relationship, but you shouldn’t ever need one.

Sometimes, I still feel like that little triangle. There are days when my progress feels so slow or I take about ten steps backwards, and I’m certain I’ll never find myself rolling along on my own.

But the important thing is that I’m moving forward. Maybe that’s all we really need to do: take it one step, one day at a time, until there comes a time when we stop to look at our lives and realize we’re not missing any pieces at all.

Shhh

I had something of a revelation recently.

The more I learn about the psychology of happiness, the more I realize how much of our current happiness is influenced by the things that happened in the past. I had a relatively boring upbringing (much to the chagrin of this wannabe writer), so I always figured I’d escaped relatively unscathed. I have friends who were affected by parents’ divorces, distant family members, traumatic incidents, while the worst thing I’d ever experienced were some hormone-driven argument while I was going through puberty.

I don’t blame my parents for any of the decisions they made. After all, they were doing the best they could with the knowledge they had, and they did a pretty great job if I do say so myself. Still, nobody’s perfect.

Maybe this is something you can relate to if you come from a South Asian background. Maybe you can relate even if you don’t. Growing up, whenever anything “negative” happened in our family, we were told to keep it a secret. When someone lost a job, when someone was suffering from health issues, when someone was going through a hard time in their life, it was something that stayed in the family.

When grandparents died, I sometimes didn’t find out until days later. When my dad got laid off, my sister and I were told after several months. My parents’ intentions were good. They didn’t want to us to worry, they thought they could protect us from all the bad things. It didn’t matter how much time they let pass, my sister and I would still be hurt by the news, stung that they could keep something so important from us. We constantly wondered what else they were keeping from us.

When it came to our own issues, the intentions were different. My parents were scared that others would judge us or revel in our misfortune. When I was diagnosed with infertility issues, my mother admonished me when she found out I had confided the news to some close friends.

In the end, it didn’t really matter what my parents’ intentions were, because it all just served to make me view the negative events in my life as shameful. Losing my job was shameful, getting dumped was shameful, being told I might not be able to have children was shameful.

Part of me thinks that’s why I’m always striving so hard for everything in my life to be “perfect.” Anything that goes wrong, even if I have no control over it, is a dark secret that would only draw the judgement of others if they were to find out. When I find myself in these periods of life when everything doesn’t line up, my unhappiness is heightened until I find my way to a place where things look a little better from the outside.

Whenever I go against my parents’ wishes and tell my friends the secrets I’ve been so carefully guarding, it feels like a little act of rebellion. It’s exhilarating and freeing, and always comes as a surprise. My friends and loved one never judge me, only offer their support and kind words. And yet, the instincts have been ingrained so deeply inside of me that I still feel like I’m doing something wrong whenever I do it.

I don’t want to live my life with shame anymore. It’s not shameful to get laid-off or get your heart broken or to discover your body isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do. These are things that everyone experiences. It’s all just part of the motions of life. If someone judges you for these things, that’s a reflection on them, not you.

So I’m making a promise to myself. The next time I find myself hurting, I won’t keep it to myself. I’ll reach out all the people who care about me, because as it turns out, the only thing that can combat shame is love.

The First Date

When I got dumped last year, the transition back into dating wasn’t exactly the most fun time in my life. Men would ghost me, stop responding, act flaky—and this was all before even meeting. I managed to schedule a date with a foot doctor, who even picked the place and time for our date, and then called me while I was waiting for him at the bar to tell me he wouldn’t be coming. I was pretty much ready to throw in the towel, so when I chatted with a random guy a few days later to set up another date, I was prepared for it to go terribly or for him to stand me up. It ended up being one of the best first dates of my life. We continued to date for the next 14 months. until he told me he didn’t want to see me anymore last Sunday.

Today, exactly one week to the hour that I had The Talk with my ex, I went on my first date with someone else. And it was actually kind of nice?

I did question whether I should hold off on dating, but to be honest I was ready to jump back into things pretty quickly. I’m glad I did, because there’s this huge worry that I think plagues everyone when you start dating again after things end with someone you really liked. You worry you’ll never meet someone who will make you feel the same way, that there’s no one in the whole wide world who is as attractive, charming, kind, funny, as the person you lost. Deep down you know you’re being ridiculous, but the problem with dating is that the jerky, emotion-driven side of your brain takes over and that little guy does not listen to logic.

Anyway, back to the date. I tried to go in with as little expectations as possible, because high expectations have screwed me over time and time again. We met at Central Park, and spent the next few hours walking and chatting. He was nice and funny, and we had a good time together. At the end of the date, we ended up going to Trader Joe’s because we both had to buy groceries. That part of the date was kind of awkward because we would both see each other randomly around the store while shopping, but it felt weird to acknowledge the other person. So yeah, maybe not the most romantic ending but hey, for a date in the winter during a pandemic, I’d say it was a good time overall. The most promising sign was that I didn’t think of my ex even once while I was out today.

I don’t know where things will go. I told him I would send him my phone number on the app where we met so we could text. I’m not the best at reading interest in other people, but whether or not it goes anywhere, I’m really glad I put myself back out there. This date reminded me that I can feel something for other people, and that dating in general can be fun and not this horrible, draining thing, especially when you don’t invest all your emotions in someone even before meeting them.

In the past, I’d probably stop dating other people altogether and pin all my hopes on this one guy working out. Luckily, I’m a little more experienced and wiser now, so I’ll keep putting myself out there and trying to connect with others. If this continues to go somewhere, great! If it doesn’t, all I’ll have invested is a few hours in the park.

For the first time in my life, I’m dating for the enjoyment of it, rather than the fear of being alone. It’s a great feeling, and I can’t wait to see what the future has in store for me.

Rewiring Your Brain

In Christine Hassler’s book Expectation Hangover, the author explains:

Repetitive thoughts form what are called neural nets in our brain, which are clusters of chemically connected or functionally associated neurons. What that means is that if you think the same thought or type of thought over and over, it forms an actual physical cluster of neurons in your brain. Over time these neural nets create “grooves” in your brain that your thoughts gravitate toward. For instance, if you repeatedly think, “I’m not good enough,” you create a neural net around that limiting pattern of thought. Once the neural net is formed, it becomes habitual to think in the direction of “I’m not good enough.” Thus you will tend to see things that occur in your life through the lens of “I’m not good enough.

This idea of neural nets fascinated me, and it also offered me great comfort. If the brain can be trained to think negative thoughts, that means it can also be trained to do the opposite.

In fact, the author went on to make this very point, revealing a technique called self-directed neuroplasticity. There are a few ways you can rewire the brain, and it starts by imagining your runaway thoughts as a wild horse. It’s much easier to control this horse when you’re riding it and maneuvering the reins. One way of getting the horse/your thoughts under control is by saying “whoa” to yourself whenever you feel your mind drifting into territory you don’t want it go. This helps you bring yourself back to the present moment. Another similar technique is carrying a childhood picture of yourself in your wallet or on your phone. Anytime you feel negative thoughts starting to rise up, pull up that picture and imagine saying those negative things to the little boy or girl staring back at you. It’s much harder to be mean to sweet baby you with those big eyes and chubby cheeks, isn’t it?

It’s important to rein in these harmful ideas, because what you think about yourself sets the course for your life. I spent many years thinking I wasn’t good enough and dealing with a total lack of self-confidence. I thought I was lucky to receive any attention from men, so I chose people who were unavailable—men who had just gotten out of serious relationships or who lived all the way across the country. When they rejected me, it only served to validate my beliefs. Now that I’ve learned to love myself more and reject these ideas, I added a note to my dating profile making it clear that I’m not looking up for hookups or casual dating but to connect with someone in a meaningful way in the hopes of it leading to a long-term relationship. I plan on asking dates about their intentions early on, communicating my wants and needs often, and not investing in people before they invest in me. I imagine my dating experience will be much different this time around.

After learning about this bit of neuroscience, I’m not as surprised to find myself constantly trapped in negative thought cycles. I always thought there wasn’t much harm in lingering in these thoughts, but now I know better. Now I’m determined to rewire my brain so positive thinking becomes more natural to me.

I know my life isn’t a movie or anything, but this morning I woke up to gloomy, downcast weather. Rather than letting it get me down, I tried thinking about how thankful I was to be alive, to exist in this world, to have this rainy weather so I could appreciate the coziness of my apartment. And I kid you not, just like that the sky cleared up.

Okay, it wasn’t an instant thing or anything but it was supposed to rain all day, and instead the sun came out and shone brighter than it had in weeks. I don’t usually believe in signs, but in the interest of being a more positive thinker, I’m interpreting this one as a sign that I’m headed in the right direction.

Round and Round My Thoughts Go

You know what sucks the most after you stop seeing someone? You’ll be perfectly fine, and then you’ll see the most random thing that triggers a memory. Oh, there’s that restaurant we went to once. Look, it’s that movie we watched together on Netflix. There’s my couch that we used to sit on together.

Okay, that last one’s a stretch, but you get where I’m going with this. When I go through a hard time in my life, I tend to pick it apart like I’m picking at a newly-healed wound. It’s painful and messy, and logically I know I should stop if I know what’s good for me, but no. I’m going to keep digging my nail in there until I’m bleeding again and I have to start the healing process all over again.

That’s what it feels like when I’m plagued by negative thoughts. If they were new thoughts or served me in some way, I would accept them. You can’t ignore painful feelings, accepting and working through them is healthy. What isn’t healthy is having the same few thoughts circle around your brain over and over and over again, like vultures.

I’ve since learned there’s a word for this: rumination. I always just assumed everyone experienced this, but I’ve talked to people in my life after having hard conversations and they might spend a day or two thinking about something and then they’ll move on. When my previous relationship ended last year, the guy I’d been dating broke up with me over a phone call that lasted less than a minute. I replayed that phone call in my head for the next week. I heard it in my head while watching TV, while working, while spending time with other people. The only thing that broke the cycle was meeting up with him in person, so I could say all the things I felt like I didn’t get to say.

That’s what’s really at the root of all my negative thoughts. All these words and actions that have no outlet so they just sit stagnating in my mind and making me feel like I’m going a bit mad.

It’s still something I struggle with, but I’ve since learned some techniques that help me cope with them. Journaling is a huge help. If you can’t say what you need to say to someone, you can at least get the words out of your brain and onto paper. When I’m working through something, I’ll sometimes write pages and pages in a single day. It’s a lot easier to untangle a problem, when you can actually see what you’re working with.

The other practice that has made a huge change in my life is meditation. I’m still very much a novice in this area. I started by listening to guided meditations on YouTube, before deciding to try out a paid subscription of the Calm app. I’m not the greatest at sticking to things, but I’ve been pretty good about doing my daily guided meditations for the last few months. I’m also convinced that Tamara Levitt has the most soothing voice on the planet.

Today, I tried doing my longest meditation yet. I sat for a full 30 minutes, listening to my app’s nature noises and a bell that rang every minute to keep me focused. Of course, I live in New York, so I also had the wonderful noises of construction, honking horns, loudly-conversing passerby, and slamming doors to contend with, but I just thought of it as ambient background music.

I definitely didn’t do a perfect job, but after, my mind felt like it had slowed down a bit. When intrusive thoughts tried to push their way into my brain, I gently shoved them right back out. It didn’t matter how many times it happened, the important thing was I didn’t give myself time to dwell on these thoughts.

My hope is that with continued meditation practice, there will be fewer intrusive thoughts each day and I can finally stop focusing on everything but the present. I can’t change the past or predict what will happen in the future, but I have the power to shape my present. I’ve realized lately that the present is the only place where true happiness is found.

It’s a lot of work—and sometimes it feels impossible—but it’s also worth it, because those moments where my brain finally quiets down? It feels like a long-needed rest, and it’s pure bliss.

The Wisdom of the Stoics

Lately, I’ve been thinking about setbacks. In yesterday’s post, I shared a list of setbacks I encountered throughout the year. I’d like to share that list again, but this time with updates or actions I’m taking to overcome them.

-My mom fell and broke her wrist and elbow. Update: she texted me today to tell me she got the all-clear from the doctor and she’s fully healed.

-My uncle went into a coma. Update: he continues to show signs of progress every day.

-At 29 years old, I was diagnosed with a diminished ovarian reserve. Update: I decided to freeze my eggs and have been reading up on all the latest research and making lifestyle changes to increase my odds of success.

-The person I’ve been dating for the last 14 months ended things with me. Update: I’ve already started putting myself out there again and have a few dates lined up.

Not everything is where I want it to be, but having a plan and taking action instead of sitting on my couch and wallowing in my own sadness brings me a lot more happiness than doing nothing. Even if I haven’t reached all my goals, I’m at least moving forward and that’s what’s important.

I listened to an episode of The Happiness Lab yesterday, where the guest was Professor William B. Irvine, the author of The Stoic Challenge. After listening to the podcast, I immediately checked out the book and devoured the whole thing in one sitting.

The Stoics were a group of ancient philosophers, who came up with a way of dealing with setbacks in a way that minimizes negatives emotions. At the core of this strategy are two important techniques: anchoring and framing.

Anchoring involves practicing negative visualization to better appreciate your life. For example, this morning I took a few seconds to visualize going to take a shower and having no running water. I visualized being thirsty and going to take a drink of water, only to find the faucet running dry. Even though I only spent a few seconds doing this exercise, you better believe I was more grateful to step into my warm shower that morning and take my first sip of water of the day.

Framing involves casting your situation in a different context. There are a few different frames you can use. One might be humor, so instead of getting angry about a setback, you can find a way to laugh about it. Another is storytelling, which means you go through the situation thinking about how you will tell the story later, but to have a good story you have to come up with a better resolution than just stomping your feet and getting angry, because that’s not a very good story at all.

My favorite framing technique, however, is pretending you’re being tested by the imaginary Stoic Gods. Whenever an obstacle presents itself in your life, pretend it’s these mischievous beings meddling in your life. They’re testing you with this obstacle because they think you’re capable of handling it (so really, you should be flattered) and also to help make you even stronger and more resilient. Afterwards, you can grade yourself on how well you reacted emotionally and the efficiency of your solution to the problem.

I tried practicing this technique when I had a very minor setback today. Someone I’d had a good conversation with on a dating app and planned to meet up with suddenly unmatched with me (welcome to the world of online dating!) I got a little upset, before I remembered the wisdom of the ancient philosophers. I laughed and thought to myself, good one, Stoic Gods!

Admittedly, I did wallow for a few minutes before I enacted the technique, but I imagine with more practice it’ll become more of a habit.

The thing about setbacks in life is that they’re unavoidable. They’re also costly. They can cost us our time, our money, our health, our relationships, among other things. But when I think back to some of my biggest setbacks, I realized that what followed was always better. When I got laid off from my last job, I got hired at a company I liked more where I got a significant pay raise and was happier overall. After my last relationship ended, I met someone I connected with more and who dating helped me grow considerably as a person. I mean, isn’t that what happens when you go through hard times? Good times almost always follow.

The most important change I’ve had to my mindset recently is that you won’t be magically happier after accomplishing x, y, and z. You might be happier for a time, but then there will be more obstacles and setbacks. Good times and bad times go hand in hand, and it’s the bad times that make you really appreciate how great the good times are. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use the wisdom of the Stoics to make the bad times feel a lot less bad.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Stoic philosophy, I highly recommend checking out The Stoic Challenge.

And if you’re going through a hard time right now: good luck, and don’t let those Stoic Gods get the best of you!

Finding Happy

So I think we can all agree that 2020 has been A YEAR. Besides all the general yuckiness of the last twelve months, here are some other things that happened in my life:

-My mom fell and broke her wrist and elbow

-My uncle went into a coma

-At 29 years old, I was diagnosed with a diminished ovarian reserve

-The person I’ve been dating for the last 14 months ended things with me

That last one happened about three days ago, and you know what? I feel fine.

Don’t get me wrong, I was definitely disappointed. I cried when he came over to talk, I cried on the phone to my friend for an hour after, but by the time I hung up I felt mostly okay.

That’s not because I didn’t care about him or I didn’t want to be with him. I did, and wanting to be with him had been one of my greatest desires for the last year. To give you a little context, we met three weeks after I just had stopped seeing someone else. I lived in New York and he lived in San Francisco. We met up and I was smitten from the start. We ended up spending the whole day together and then he flew back home. We stayed in touch, texting and occasionally talking on the phone. I saw him two more times over the next ten months when he came to visit the city, and then he finally moved here. I was so certain everything was going to fall in place when we were in the same city, but it just never worked. He was always busy with work or other obligations, we discovered we weren’t on the same page with our intentions, we didn’t communicate our needs often enough.

When he came over for The Talk, I wasn’t exactly surprised. I’d hoped I would be wrong, but things more or less ended the way I’d expected. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things I should have done differently, the things I could have done if only we had more time together.

When my last relationship ended, I fell into an unexpected depression. I didn’t get any sleep, negative thoughts cycled through my head all day and night, I didn’t have an appetite or motivation to do the things I loved. My family got so concerned they encouraged me to sign up for virtual therapy.

For a long time, the fear of falling into that depression again was the main reason I didn’t end things, even when I started to think that maybe I should. I cared about him and I wanted to be with him, but I spent a lot of time unhappy.

I recently started reading Expectation Hangover by Christine Hassler, and it made me realize that it wasn’t the circumstances or the other person who’d caused my unhappiness. It had been my own expectations.

During our talk, he said to me, “we’ve only hung out a few times over several months and there’d be weeks we didn’t even talk to each other or know what was going on in each other’s lives.” That just sounded all wrong to me, until I took off the rose-colored glasses and realized, it was true, we hadn’t spent much time together at all. I had dedicated so much of my mental space towards my expectations—imagining what a relationship together would be like, introducing him to friends and family—that he’d been this constant presence in my head every day for 14 months. Meanwhile, he’d been focusing on his work, his friends and family, hobbies, dating other people. He had a whole and fulfilling life outside the two of us, something I had neglected because I’d unfairly pinned all my hopes for happiness on him.

Luckily, a few months earlier, I started taking active steps towards focusing on my own happiness. I started meditating, practicing gratitude, took Dr. Laurie Santos’ online course on happiness, started listening to podcasts like The Happiness Lab and Hidden Brain, that focus on the psychology of happiness, and because of those things, I didn’t fall into a deep depression this week.

In the past, a disappointment like this would have devastated me, but here I am. Still full of hope, going through my regular routine, and able to find the joy in the everyday.

The experience opened my eyes to how much our happiness comes from within. In my previous entries, I documented my progress towards goals that I thought would bring me happiness, but if this year has taught me anything, it’s that happiness isn’t something to chase, but a thing that’s there all along if we can open our eyes to it.

As I learn more about happiness and the psychology behind it, I find myself wanting to share my experiences and lessons with others, so that’s what the main focus of this blog will be going forward. I hope you’ll join me on this journey and that together we can all learn how to be a little bit happier.