Hi frankoceanisbae
Life sounds like such a torturous experience for you and my heart goes out to you as you try to make sense of it all. It's so incredibly tough when we're looking for answers that will begin to make all the difference for us and we just can't seem to find them.
I used to think I'd feel so happy and zen-like once I started to become a more conscious gal but with 'waking up' to the deeper more soulful questions in life I found the problem is it can involve a really disorientating 'Where am I? Who am I really? Why am I here?' factor. Some would describe this feeling of 'waking up' or becoming more conscious as 'the state between being asleep and being fully conscious' if that makes sense. It can become a surreal kind of experience for some.
While I'm now a 53yo gal, I can recall back when I was 35 and going through one hell of a time. It was when I first came out of long term depression and my brain did some seriously weird 'rewiring' thing. In the process there were days that felt mind blowing, where I felt 'one with the world', had massive amounts of energy and felt like I had all the answers to life or at least access to them and then there were days where my reality looked and felt depressing. The only way I can think to describe it is it felt like I was swinging back and forward between 2 different realities. I felt like I was going insane and I appeared to others that way too. It went on for about 6 weeks until I started to develop 'grounding' strategies and found a sense of balance that led me out of that period.
Wasn't until some years later that I came across an article that described perfectly how that period in my life felt. For the first time, I'd found a different way of looking at what the world of psychiatry would call 'psychotic episodes'. Of course, this is not everyone's cup of tea but simply a different or interesting way of looking at the '2 different realities' factor...Whatever people wish to call it (that which follows the dark night of the soul, spiritual awakening, spiritual emergency or whatever), I wish I'd known about it at the time, as there are a lot of tips for managing it from that perspective.
Whether what we experience at times is due to tricks or glitches of the brain or soulful kinds of experiences, who knows. What I do know though, from my own experience, it's the avenue of research we choose to go down that determines how we manage whatever it is we're facing. Sometimes I'll research how the mind works, sometimes how the body works and sometimes how some natural element of us work.
Around the age of 16 or so, is a seriously tough age. It's a stage where we may be triggered to begin seriously questioning who we really are, why we're here (what's our purpose) and the direction we most need to head in. It's a stage in life where the most guidance may be needed. Identifying the best guides is one of the many keys/skills we can begin collecting. 'A collector of keys/skills' is a positive identity.
