In this episode, I share times when I have unknowingly adapted to changes. In the process of reflecting on my experiences with change, I may have stumbled across some hope…
In this episode, I share times when I have unknowingly adapted to changes. In the process of reflecting on my experiences with change, I may have stumbled across some hope…
Living organisms adapt to their environment, hence the how life has sustained on this planet for so long, and I am no exception to that. I tend to adapt, even though I don't believe that I will, and I had set out today to share about an event that happened earlier in the week, but instead was inspired to follow this thread, and so I did, and it led me to talk about some things like my love of writing and other things, and so I hope there's something beneficial in today's episode.
Speaker 2:Hi, this is Amjad, a simple, beautifully broken man living in a complex world. Join me as I navigate the dark and bright spots of life, sharing vulnerably and reflecting deeply along the way. May you find some benefit here that is through me, not from me. I must warn you to enter at your own risk, for in this room my humanity is showing.
Speaker 1:Welcome my fellow humans to episode 49 of my Humanity is Showing. And just a quick note before I get into what happened this week and sharing about the topic. I find it interesting. Well, I guess it's not interesting. It's obvious that every week when I'm sitting and reflecting about what to share on this week's episode, it's usually the same few topics that come to mind Fear, shame, depression, loneliness, body issues like back aching or hair loss or body image issues or feeling like I don't fit in. So a lot of the episodes that I've already shared in the previous 48, it's like those same concepts, same ideas just keep coming up. So what's been happening this week? Well, my back still hurts and I'm still worried about what people think about me, or I'm still dealing with or working through some fear around what's going on and I just it reminds me that human beings and maybe this is just me, this is my theory that human beings are creatures of habit, or at least I am and I adapt to things and there's so many interesting things to talk about with that. Maybe that'll be the episode today. I had another topic in mind, but we'll see if we get to the other one. I'll record it as a separate episode but it reminds me of.
Speaker 1:There's just been like several times this has happened, but the time that I think it really hit me was a couple of years ago, gosh. I think it's like six years ago. Now it feels like it was just a year or two ago. We were in the market for a new car and it's because the kids were getting older and we were going to give my car to the children and let them kind of share it until when I'm decided they wanted to buy their own car or something, and my one son just really not a big fan of driving and just uses the car every once in a while, and the other one Anyway. So we were in the market to get a new car and we started car shopping and my previous car well, I say car we pretty much have exclusively only bought SUVs forever, for a really really long time. So my previous SUV was very spacious inside, like very roomy, very spacious. It was one of our favorite features about it not necessarily the most beautiful vehicle, but just very spacious. As a matter of fact, this is kind of a funny story in our family because we had been shopping for a while for a replacement SUV from our previous one and just felt like we could not find one that was spacious in a while. And when my wife said, oh, let's go look at this one I'm not going to mention any brands, but she said let's go look at this one, and I was, I mean she had to take me kind of kicking and screaming to go look at it because I was like that is the ugliest thing I've ever seen. I don't want to look at it. Why would we drive that?
Speaker 1:And then, as soon as we sat in it and then I went back and sat in the third row, I was like, oh my gosh, this vehicle is so spacious and open and roomy and it feels like you can breathe in here. I mean, this is like the first one of everything we've looked at and we had looked at quite a few at that point that actually is comfortable in the third row. And with the kids, you know, with the boys growing up, we felt like we really needed something as they were getting into their teens and we need something that was going to be spacious enough to accommodate them and their friends and all of that. And yeah, we sure did cart around a lot of kids for a while a lot of teens in the back of that vehicle and even now I mean, we don't drive it that often, but we were driving in the other day because we need to go get some service done on it and who sat down? I was like, wow, forgot how spacious this thing was. But so we're shopping for a vehicle and I really, really, really liked my wife's vehicle, like in terms of how it drove and the comfort and you know just the smooth, silky drive of it and it's got a lot of pep. Again, not mentioning any brands, don't want to, don't want this to turn into a sales commercial, but anyway, just really, really really enjoyed driving her vehicle.
Speaker 1:But I always felt like it was claustrophobic. It's just so small, it's claustrophobic you can't breathe in here, especially compared to the one I had been driving. So I get out of that one, I climb into the other one. On the weekends, you know I'm driving, we're driving around and I'm driving and I'm just like gosh, I love driving this car, but it's just so, so crowded and claustrophobic. And so, even though part of me was like, oh, this is the type of vehicle I want to get, and I actually had one picked out that I really, really had my eye on, but I was like I can't because I just it's too tight, it's too claustrophobic. So I ended up going with a larger vehicle, even though I didn't enjoy the drive that much. And so my SUV now that's six years old, it's a good vehicle.
Speaker 1:One of the biggest differences between the two, even though they're both the same price, my wife's and mine. They're almost the same price as that. Mine has a third row and my wife's does not. But over time what has happened is I have it and it's not as spacious. It's far smaller than my previous vehicle, the one we gave to the boys, but it is more spacious than my wife's Boy. I sound like I'm dragging this out.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let me wrap it up, this particular discussion. The thing is and here's the part, the take home message I wanted to build this up to this, and that is that I now, when I drive my wife's car, like I think mine was, there was some reason, oh, during COVID and things, that my wife's vehicle didn't get any mileage for a while because she was just working solely from home. So she encouraged me to start taking hers instead of mine to get my car some break from the mileage. So I started driving her vehicle more regularly and over time felt like it wasn't that claustrophobic and it wasn't that crowded and that it was fine and it was comfortable and it just loved the drive. And to the point now where we kind of, you know, like wrestle for who gets to drive her car because it's just such a smoother drive than mine and we only take mine, like I take mine when hers is not available or if we need that third row. Otherwise we're both kind of sharing her car more.
Speaker 1:And my point is that what the message that I got to me is how adaptable I am and how over time, I just the things that I thought. The vehicle that I thought I would never be able to comfortably sit in and drive and not complain about for being claustrophobic is now perfectly fine. And it made me reflect back on my life, on all the times that a change happened, and I thought, oh my gosh, this is going to be rough. This is going to be years of me dealing with this particular thing. Whatever that is. You know, a new school, a new town, a new job, you know whatever.
Speaker 1:It is Like another standing joke in our family that if there is a product for sale that we like it is guaranteed to go off the market. Like that is. I don't know if that happens to anybody else, but that is a common theme in our life. Like, for example, there's a seasoning that I absolutely love, like it's my favorite seasoning again not mentioning any brands, but my favorite seasoning. I used it in everything. I've got a little bit left that I've been holding on to for a while because, guess what, they stopped making it and it was no surprise to me because I made the mistake of liking it and but you know, so I've kind of adapted to using some other seasonings.
Speaker 1:But whatever those changes are that occur, whatever those things that are happening, like you know, moving from one vehicle to a smaller vehicle, or when we moved during in 2020, the we shifted and ended up in a much smaller house and it is tighter and it is much smaller, and we've been working hard to start to declutter our lives and and remove things, and maybe that's another discussion for another day, but the point is it is a much smaller place. It's about half half the size, maybe a little bit more than half, of our previous house, because the you know the price differential, because we got the other one for a great deal and you know, the plan at that time was that my parents were going to move in with us and my grandmother, so we got something a little bit larger than what we needed just to accommodate the extra family members. And that ended up not happening. But so we had this like really large, spacious house Again went from a spacious house to a not so spacious house, a much smaller setup, bigger bathrooms, smaller rooms, that kind of a thing. And I was thinking about that this morning, about how this because now we're kind of back in the market again, looking for another place that's maybe a little closer to where my wife works, and you know, and and with this house one of the biggest downsides of being smaller is that family is not visiting as much because it, you know, there's just not a whole lot of space for for guests in this place.
Speaker 1:But it was what we could find during the post pandemic housing boom and you know just the the mad dash for everybody buying things up, and I mean houses were staying on the market for like a day or two, and you know. So we we just grabbed what we could and we said, okay, we'll just take this for now and then we'll figure out later. And this has become very comfortable, like everything in here that I thought was different, weird, not so cool, is now become normal and you know that's. It's just how the adaptability and I guess that's the topic of the thread that I'm sort of pulling on is like how human beings adapt and how I adapt. Same thing with new jobs. You know, start a new job, I think, oh my gosh, this is gonna be so difficult. Change in life, whatever that is, and how I adapt. And I guess the lesson in this for me is it just a reminder I'm kind of following that thread is you know this idea that there's a lot of things that I tell myself I can't do, that I often wonder if that's true. That's actually true or is that just the current state?
Speaker 1:So, for example, I am very much an extrovert. I enjoy being with people, I get my energy from people. If you're familiar with the Myers-Briggs type inventory the definition of introversion and extroversion where you know, most people think of it as being outgoing or being quiet, and I actually know some very quiet extroverts. They don't speak much but they just like being in the presence of people and they get a lot of energy from that. And I know some very outspoken, personable public speakers who are very much introverts and so, in case you're not familiar, just quick definition or quick explanation of that that introversion, extroversion in the Myers-Briggs, which is where it comes from is based on energy. So it's where's the energy source.
Speaker 1:And an introvert, a hard, and it's a spectrum, it's a gradient, it's not like a black and white. You either are or you're not. I know some people that and I consider this as superpower who are right around in the middle and they can do both. They can be in a group of people and get a lot of energy from that, and they can be by themselves and get a lot of energy from that as well, and they're fine in either condition and they have just as much energy in either condition. I, unfortunately, and so in. Well, I'll just go into the introversion a little bit more an introvert and so often, the way I explain it to people who don't know it, because people usually just say like you know, oh, I bet so and so is an extrovert, and they're like no, I'm an introvert. It's like wait, how can you be? I've seen you in public. I've seen how you interact with others and it really has nothing to do with that. Has nothing to do with that.
Speaker 1:So an introvert gets their energy by being alone. It's an internal source of energy that they're able to sit down in a quiet place. It's kind of like, at the end of the day, when somebody says, okay, I need to go recharge, I need me time, and they, you know, they rush home, lock themselves in a room, grab a book and just they just need that quiet, alone time to be able to recharge. Well, I'm the exact opposite. If I'm feeling weak and tired, I phone a friend and at the end of the day, after a long kind of exhausting day, the last thing I want to be is alone. I, you know, love having my family around at minimum, or I'll go see some friends, something to get that energy boost back up.
Speaker 1:Now there are times when I've been overstimulated, like shopping on a Sunday afternoon at a wholesale club I won't mention which ones, but you pick the store of your choice. Sunday afternoon just seemed to be where everybody's the mad dash, everybody's going to get all the stuff for the week ahead, and there have been times where I've gone in there and I felt like people are crawling over each other. It's like being in an ant hill to try to get to the milk or the whatever, and I've come out and just been overstimulated, like overcharged. It's like a battery being overcharged, doing like I'm just shaking because I'm just so overstimulated. So that has happened to me too.
Speaker 1:But in general, you know, it's this idea of introversion, extroversion. So because of that, because of being such a hard core extrovert and what I tell people is, I think I broke the Myers-Briggs scale. I don't think it goes out far enough to capture how truly extroverted I am. Because of that, the story I tell myself and it may be true and it might not be true is that I will never truly be able to be a writer, because I just don't enjoy sitting for hours by myself and writing. I love writing and I used to be pretty decent at it when I was younger and then I kind of moved away from it as I was going through a lot of my post-depression recovery phase, you know, I would say like 2008, 2009 and beyond, where I was really working hard on addressing some of the core issues in my life that I still have to deal with on a daily basis today. So I don't want to pretend like all of that's gone.
Speaker 1:I know that it could come back in an instant and I could slip back into that default way of thinking very quickly and once again end up in a situation where I'm in deep depression or having manic episodes or dealing with suicidal thoughts or plans. So and in my case, attempts. So I know I could slip back into that very quickly. I know that very vividly. I remind myself of that daily. So I have to maintain the work to keep that health level.
Speaker 1:But I bring you know, so I bring up one of the things that I had to do during that period, or that I did during that period of recovery was Really become more comfortable with reality. Because part of what was driving my manic, depressive sort of Discomfort or, you know, dysfunction I think that's what I'm looking for Was that I Did, could not deal with reality. There was a real world around me and I didn't. I didn't, wasn't comfortable in it. I felt out of my skin in it. I felt like I didn't fit in.
Speaker 1:When I walked around I saw all these happy, laughing people. You know what's that REM song, right? Happy, shiny, happy people. That's what I'm looking for. You know shiny, happy people running around and I kept thinking like I don't know what, where, how. Why is it that these people have such wonderful luck and that they have such wonderful lives and I don't? And one of the phrases I was taught during the recovery phase was that my insides don't match what I see on the outsides of others. And so, you know, it's just helpful for that reminder for me to say, okay, what I'm seeing is the outside of people. I don't know what their inside life looks like. They may be dealing with some of the same things I am. If people looked at my outsides, they might have thought the same thing oh, look at that guy. He's so shiny, happy and just so wonderful, and not even known. I don't know why I'm bobbing my head back and forth you can't even see that, but anyway, I.
Speaker 1:Need help anyway. The you know they might have thought I was one of those shiny, happy people and had no idea the struggles that I was dealing with in and you know, when I wasn't out and about and and getting my extraversion feed. You know my extraversion supply of being with people, because when I was with people I was fine, but as soon as I was alone, the minute I was alone I would just fall apart. Fall apart, which is probably one of the reasons why I'm so extroverted, because the it's a Wow. I don't know if I've really thought about that before. It's interesting how, on these weekly episodes Like I just have these moments where it's like huh, I don't think I've ever connected that dot before. I think same thing happened last week. I connected a dot I'd never connected before. But yeah, in some ways that may be what drives my extraversion is that when I'm alone, I have this fear that I'm gonna de-escalate and I'm gonna. I will go back to some of my old ways of thinking and behaving and so I keep myself Surrounded by people as much as possible, and when I can't physically find people, I call them, I, facetime them. I, you know, join online Groups, support groups, different things through zoom. So I, you know, I just try to keep myself Surrounded by people, and so the reason I bring that up is because, going back to the whole writing thing, I still loved her, I mean ever since I was young.
Speaker 1:I remember as a young teenager my dad bought me. My first computer was an Apple 2e. And you know, the Apple 2e, I was like I don't know what was that, like late 80s, mid to late 80s, because I remember I was in ninth, 10th grade and I had this computer. And so what, what age range would that have been? 14, 15, 16, kind of that range? When I had that computer and I would go home at night I would quickly finish my homework so that I could write, and I would write these little short stories and I would throw my friends names in them and their characters and and then I would print it out on my dot matrix printer and then I would take the next two or three pages to school the next day and Distribute you know, distribute them among my friends so they could read what their characters were doing in my story the next day. And you know, I loved writing for school and you know, if I got a writing assignment, I would go home and and write it. I would. I had to keep a notepad next to my bed because I would get so many ideas. I still there's still some of these ideas floating around in my head today, that, and I remember so vividly, so vividly that you know I even have some old writings of mine from when I was younger that are handwritten, and I Felt like I was getting better at it, even up into high school, when I first started working in low on, kind of early in in After grad school and grad school.
Speaker 1:The second time and I started working again, there was this one December and I guess, as we're getting close to December, it's it's an apt time to talk about it. It was December 2003. What is this? 2023? Yeah, exactly 20 years ago.
Speaker 1:Exactly 20 years ago this December, it was a really slow period at work. I was brand new, so I didn't really know anybody. I didn't have a whole lot of projects I was working on and I was actually I was a trainee at that point. I was going through an residency and or, you know, fellowship kind of thing, and I remember just sitting there and not knowing what to do because a lot of people that I was working with had taken off for the holidays and I had a few weeks where I just literally had nothing to do and I was just sitting there reading some articles and trying to familiarize myself and I had an idea for a story and I started working on it and it was about a surgeon in the future. And so I had this idea and I want to give away because I might one day really pursue this and for the last 20 years I've been working on this book that I want to write and I've gone through several iterations.
Speaker 1:The first time I wrote it, I wrote it as a short story and I got part way through, didn't enjoy it, deleted it, started over several. I've started over multiple times on this story and it's evolved over time multiple times. And I took it to a writing guild like our local writing guild and had them read it as a short story and just about everyone in the room said we really like the way the story's going. However, we do not feel that this is a short story material. This is not short story material. This needs to be a full novel Like this, needs to be written out and fleshed out, and I said I don't know how to do that. I think in bullets I write in short, quick. I don't have the patience to write out a long drawn out story. I mean I'm like I wanna get to the next action sequence and all right, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go and be done with it. And I always imagine myself as writing maybe young adult stories, because they're much shorter and faster and lighter and in nature, and just never imagined that like a full adult fiction novel.
Speaker 1:I really into science fiction and fantasy. Obviously I mentioned the search in the future. I think my first idea which I don't know if I'm ever will pursue this has something to do with, like this, how the surgeon found out that there was someone that had been like a serial killer, that had been murdering people in the hospital and hiding their bodies in the walls of the hospital or something. That's how it first started, and then through that he came across some sort of portal. Anyway, that was like the initial idea. I have since moved far away from that. So where am I at with it today, 20 years later that I've been working on this book, and where am I at today?
Speaker 1:I think I have about a page and a half written, and one of the reasons I never work on it and I think about it often, because I recently went to a book signing, slash talk of one of my favorite authors in the fantasy genre and like sci-fi, fantasy kind of thing, and I, author, I'm getting tired. She talked a lot about her writing technique and gave me some ideas about ways that I might be able to expand the story and write, but the thought of sitting alone for several hours and writing, it's just, it's kind of daunting and scary to me because I'm such an extrovert. So, going full circle, the question that I have for myself is is that really true? Or is it another one of those situations where, oh, I've got this big car, I'm never gonna be comfortable in a smaller car, but then I go to the smaller one and I drive it for a while and I'm like, oh, I'm actually comfortable in it now.
Speaker 1:And is it the same thing where I just need to work, you know, introduce myself to maybe write for five minutes every day and just see how that goes? And you know because the author even mentioned this about the discipline of writing something every day, and just I've heard that from multiple authors, read that in multiple articles, this idea of you know, like riding on a recurring basis, like keeping that habit up and that if you stop that it's very easy to slip out of that, and being very disciplined about riding on a daily basis. So I mean I could literally, if I wanted I could set a timer for five minutes and just write for five minutes and just do that every day and see how it goes and see what happens, and then maybe over time that five turns into 10 and the 10 turns into 15. I know this happened to me before because I've done something similar where I was working on this project that was just overwhelming me and a friend of mine suggested, like why don't you just work on it for five minutes? And I sat down to work on it for five minutes and an hour and a half later I was done. I literally set a timer for five minutes and I kept snoozing it because I was like, okay, I'll just go for a little bit more, I'm on a roll here. And an hour and a half later I was done with the project and so I can see myself, like just over time, becoming adjusted and comfortable with the idea of sitting alone and writing Same thing with reading.
Speaker 1:Like I don't read as much as I used to anymore and I have so many books that I'm like first chapter, second chapter in, or I'm skimming, because I just don't want to sit for hours and read and the excuse I use is I'm brain dead, I'm just too tired. I've been using my brain all day and now it's too tired, but I don't know if that's true either. What if I just set a timer for five minutes and read for five minutes and see what happened, and maybe I would become more comfortable with reading and maybe move away from so much? Disney plus Okay, I mentioned a brand, but I'm just a. I like to watch things that are just really lighthearted, and so I end up watching a lot of children shows and things like that. And I'm a 51 year old man and I watch animated movies all the time. But that's an alarm going off. So I'll wrap up with that. I mean, that's kind of.
Speaker 1:I was not planning to talk about that. I was just going to mention something in the beginning and then go into a whole nother topic, but I guess that'll be for another episode, but as I started talking about it, ended up on this one, and it's not the first time that's happened either and as always, you know, my hope is that, as I'm sharing these things that are truly is not from me, but more of something that's channeled through me from a source higher than me and a source of good, positive energy in the universe, and that being kind of my inspiration, rather than this idea that I'm going to think of what to share and I'm going to come up with this beautifully elaborate plan and share something out of my own brain and I'm going to impress you. That's one of the reasons why I don't use so. I mentioned this in earlier episode.
Speaker 1:I'm an AI generator now in my podcast hosting site and it comes up with all these topic ideas like the name, title ideas, and then it does like a draft of the description of the episode based on what you've shared, and so I kind of share the episode. It transcribes it for me, which it doesn't do a perfect job, but it's good enough for me for now. And then it says, oh, here's what your intro should be, and it's so flowery and beautifully written and it's like, oh, do you want to solve all your problems today? Join me as I talk about how to navigate life and it's you know, I'm going to fix everything for you and I just delete the whole thing and say and just write like a sentence or two in there, and maybe that's one of the reasons why I don't get a whole lot of hits, but I'm that's not. That's not what this is about. It's not about like I'm going to solve all your problems. It's just me sharing whatever I'm inspired to share that day, and so, okay, I've gone long again.
Speaker 1:Let's switch to the random message of the day. And I'm just noting that. Okay, reach into the bucket. So, for those of you who are new to the podcast, if this is the first time you're listening, I have a bucket full of fortune cookie fortunes, but they're not really fortunes. I throw those away and I just keep the ones that are more inspirational quotes or thought provoking quotes, and sometimes I agree with them and sometimes I don't. So let's see what today says, and I just whip one of these out at the very end of the episode. So those of you who've been coming back know that this is an interesting one Today. Give control over to someone else. That is really interesting. There's a few things that I really like in this actually One, and it's the first word today. I love that. For me, that's a beautiful reminder to just just for today I don't have to worry about.
Speaker 1:For the rest of my life I don't have to worry about. You know? Oh my gosh, I'm relinquishing control. It's just for today.
Speaker 1:Can I be okay letting go of something and letting either someone else and it just reminds me, like, for example, last night we were driving somewhere and I was really hungry and I had a granola bar with me and I handed it to my wife and said do you mind opening this for me? And she was opening the package and it was giving her a little bit of a hard time, because some of those packages are really difficult to open, and I had this inclination to just take it back and open it myself because I was like, oh, give that to me, I'll open it, because I have control issues, I just wanna. It's like I know how to do this. And I've caught myself doing that several times with her and with others, and I don't like it when people do it to me, if they hand something to me and then they're like, just give that back to me, I'll do it, or if they just hover over me while I'm trying to do it. I hate that. Yet I do that to other people. And so I just stayed quiet and I let her take her time and very shortly after that she opened it and handed it over to me. I said thank you, and so I did exactly this last night or yesterday evening, where I had I wanted the control and something very simple like that.
Speaker 1:But I do it on bigger things too. But I released the control, I gave my control over to her for that moment to say, okay, just open it. However you wanna open it, whatever you wanna do, take your time. And it's a good reminder because it is very helpful for me. It's actually a healthy behavior for me to release control. There's a saying in the recovery circles where we talk about let go and let God, and I find that really, really helpful for me to just let go. I just imagine myself taking these really deep breaths, opening my palms, opening my hands, palms up, and just letting go, just releasing whatever it is that I'm grabbing onto, gripping and crushing so tightly, just letting it go. All right, that was a good one. I liked that one. Thanks for joining today and, as always, I'll just say that if you're finding something of benefit here, I hope that you come back and well wishes to everyone and go enjoy your humanity, thanks.