Up and Down and Spinning All Around

Note: * All quotations in this column are from Brother Ali, “Rain Water”, off the Champion Album. Get it, it’s sick!

If there’s anything I’ve learned, its that success comes in so many shapes and forms that we should finally put to rest the fallacy that there is only one method of being successful. To get more specific, I’m talking about the seemingly-unwritten rule that many self-help authors follow, which is that in order to be successful one must be happy, active, and always thinking positively. Anything else is viewed with disdain, as if to ignore the very real fact that for some (most?) people, our motivation levels often move in cycles. Sometimes we’re up, sometimes we’re down. Sometimes we’re more energetic, and sometimes we’re more pessimistic about our opportunities or chances. While I think too much pessimism can be unhealthy, too much optimism can also be unrealistic and unhealthy. Sometimes you need to allow yourself to sink so low in order to get fed up enough to climb out again. I challenge the conventional thinking that we should always be striving and positive. The path to success is different for everyone. Why can’t an introverted, overly-critical, pessimistic-at-times, self-doubting person find success as well? In order to call myself a self-help author, I’m not allowed to write anything angry or sarcastic? Am I really to believe that the only people who can help you are these authors who are always happy and positive?

A question was raised to me the other day
Why I seem to always have joy?
Well I’d like to take time to set the record straight

All the joy I’ve ever known has disappeared
in the motherfuckin thin air
like its never even been there
my joy done left me ya’ll”

Lets get real – the reality is that you don’t have to always be positive to be successful. In fact, some people need to indulge in their unhappiness or periods of pessimism. Ever heard of being so fed up with your life that you finally find the power to change? That power doesn’t come magically by self-hyping yourself up. Sometimes it only comes when your life is so incredibly terrible, when your soul and spirit are so degraded and so low that you really have no other choice but to choose to go up – your spirit finally got so fed up and decided to fight back, drawing the strength from somewhere. You have no direction to go but towards the sky, you’re so far underground already.

I’ve gone through periods of ups and downs. So far, it seems that my cycles have moved in 3 year phases. Three years up, three years down. During the “up” years, boy are things great. My mindset is mostly positive, opportunity-driven, and optimistic about the future. I look for reasons to be happy and enjoy life, and I have a zest for tackling challenges. But like all good things in life, sometimes they must come to an end in order to restore some balance. Sometimes I get too complacent and too happy with things. I’ll stop learning and lose my focus if life gets too easy and having too much fun. During my last upswing, I was so successful and confident from all the small victories I’d scored in the 3 year upswing that my ego started to get out of control. I was losing touch with reality and losing the ability to feel other people’s pain. Not only that but, despite all my success, something was still missing. I’d wake up some days depressed, emotionless – even though everything seemed to be going great. I hadn’t cried and felt genuine sadness or pain in several years, and that was a problem. Sometimes your intuition knows when you’re heading too far in the wrong direction and when you need a course adjustment.

They telling me we got nothing to fear but fear itself
But I fear I have no human fear left
Some day I’m gonna want to peel back these calluses
And really feel life again, and that’s where my challenge is

I don’t know if what eventually happened to me was divine intervention, or whether my subconscious intentionally sabotaged my life in order to teach my conscious mind the lesson it needed to learn. I do know that something felt off – something wasn’t right, despite my success. I knew something had to change, but I just wasn’t sure what. So what eventually happened?
Although I don’t get too specific, you can get the general idea from my article Setback – My Story. A multitude of events came together to form the perfect storm – consecutive heartbreaks and disasters, one after another. I was knocked down and beaten into the ground, and I stayed down. Turned out I wasn’t strong enough after all, and that I wasn’t as strong as I had thought I was. This is why I feel so strongly that self-hype doesn’t work – I’m a testament to that fact. Millions of people worldwide are testament to that. If being successful and finding happiness was so easy then the world wouldn’t be the way it is. There wouldn’t be any unhappy people – they’d just visit the nearest self-help website and apply the latest “guide to happiness and success”. Setback and pain, for some of us, is part of our path to success. To rob those of us who need it is to ignore the unique and individual story each of us is given.

Gotta stay brave brother, keep your lip stiff, keep your fist clenched
At times you gotta kick your way through this bitch

If you’re currently in an up-cycle, then I’m happy for you. I hope success continues to find you and that you continue to find success. If you’re in a down-cycle, I hope that you are seeking help and trying your best to climb your way out (and that might include professional help or even anti-depression pills). And if you’re so far down now that you’re close to giving up, then I’ll just let you know that I feel your pain. I don’t have anything life-changing to offer you – sometimes these things are just out of our hands, and I’ll admit that. I just hope that you stay alive, and keep scraping by. As long as you keep the will to live and stay breathing, you’re still in the game. You’re still a player, and your story isn’t over yet. In time, I hope you find the strength to pick yourself up off the ground, dust yourself off, and give life another go.

I been kicking and biting for so long
And when they throw me a rescue rope
ill be too weary to hold on and see the light
So I sing through the tears and the key of life the way a wounded ego might