If there’s one person it’s important to know, it’s yourself. It’s astounding, though, how little self-reflection we tend to engage in. To know oneself is a vital aspect of making informed decisions regarding what you do and what you abstain from doing.
In general, though not always the case, I would say I’m more reflective than most. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes bad. It gives me insights into my tendencies and quirks that allow for a greater degree of self-understanding, but also contributes to my propensity for overthinking.
I analyze just about everything I think, say, and do, for better or worse. I ask the questions: why did I say that to him? Why did I react to her statement the way I did? How do I reconcile my sensitivities with these actions? What was my real motivation there?
And so on.
An example: in March, when I worked as script supervisor on an independent film, I had an incredibly unpleasant and, in some ways, frightening experience. I’ve mentioned this in a previous blog post, so I’ll just summarize here.
It was a rough day of shooting. It was a crucial day as far as scheduling goes. We had to get a specific amount of shots and those scenes we were shooting were our most difficult of the shoot so far.
Due to several factors outside anyone’s control, I overclocked my brain in a way I had never experienced previously. I actually broke my brain. I developed the physical symptoms of a panic attack, but there was no panic precipitating this physiological response. It was purely the result of a brain with far too many tabs open at one time, as it were.
This effectively incapacitated me for about forty-eight hours. I had people worried, myself included. Never before had I experienced anything like it. All throughout that night and the next day (and multiple times since), I thought about the events of the day leading up to my mental break. Once the situation passed, I could have simply moved on and put it out of my mind, but I wanted to understand it.
Through this questioning, I discovered a few preventable measures I could have taken. The thing is, though, without this experience, I couldn’t have known what those measure might have been…nor even that they were necessary.
I noted them and we moved on with the shoot without further similar event.
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Fast forward to this past Saturday. I went to work with a mission. I won’t bore you with the all the details, but I’ll just say I had a specific goal for the day, about a half a dozen things I had to get done before I could get started working on that goal, and we were down a person so the sales floor was crazy.
Throughout the day, I had to put all of my backroom tasks on hold to assist with customers. It was a crazy busy day (welcome to Saturday’s in retail). Because of this, I had to keep track of what I was doing in the backroom, whilst working to get the customers the best possible footwear for their goals.
Toward the end of the day, I noticed the beginning stages of that same mental breakdown I experienced two months prior on the set of Drawing Near (now raising funds on Indiegogo, shameless plug). As soon as I noticed these symptoms beginning to assert themselves, I made a few adjustments. The last thing any of us needed was for me to have a panic attack on the sales floor.
I managed to stave off mental ruin and make it through the end of the day and blew off some steam later with a lightning fast run.
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The point of all this is simple. If I hadn’t thought about that unpleasant experience in March, if I hadn’t analyzed it and asked the questions, if I hadn’t been present enough to notice the resurgence of those symptoms, I could easily have had a repeat performance, which might have had some severe mental and emotional consequences.
Asking the questions is an important part of being human, but so often we simply amble aimlessly through life and wonder why things happen the way they do without taking the time to actually dig a little deeper. It’s in that digging that we might just learn a thing or two about ourselves and others.
Let’s attempt to live more intentional and balanced lives.