Unfck Thyself
The hidden path to mental freedom.
As a child, I was never able to understand people or make sense of the world. And I guess that’s probably what a lot of people get in their early lives, but of course, I didn’t know that back then. I used to see the world only through my own eyes, and oh boy that world seemed quite hostile from my point of view. You see my dad was not the best guy in the world, or at the very least he was not ready to have children.
His dad was abusive from what I learned later on, and he kind of continued the same behavior. I was kind of lucky, there was no physical abuse, but still, the first few years of my life made almost no sense at all, and I can assure you it wasn’t the best time of my life. Sometimes my dad was nice to me and other times he wasn’t, there were mood swings that I couldn’t understand. Sometimes something I did was okay, and other times it was a bad thing and I had to be punished.
When I was about 5 years old, my parents eventually got divorced, I stayed with my mom and my dad would have me for every other weekend. What I would’ve never anticipated is that after a few months, my dad would call my mom, saying that he didn’t want to see me anymore and that he would go on with his life, and have other children.
But of course, to protect me, my mom and my family only told me that he didn’t want to see me anymore. Kind of an honest answer, but left me with so many questions. And the main question was Why?
Was it something I did, was it something my mom did? I couldn’t understand it. I was a sad, angry, and confused boy.
This fueled my confusion as to how people think, what is right, and what is wrong. Thankfully my mom was very loving and caring, she helped me as much as she could, being a single mom, trying to balance work life and a child was no easy task, I can assure you though, she did a great job.
Still, I spent years and years growing up, trying to figure people out. Those first few years are very important for the development of the child’s brain and creating a mental model of society and the world.
The next years leading up to my teenage years were tough, and the fact that the educational system is the way it is didn’t help at all. I hated school, it was hard for me to socialize and I spent most of my free time alone.
I entered a state of permanent grief, one inch away from depression, but somehow I managed to redirect the pain towards arts. Still to this day, I believe that I managed to come up with an internal mechanism that helped me cope with everything, a combination of meditation and self-therapy. Of course, I didn’t have any idea what these things are back then.
As the years went by it became hard for me to trust people feeling that there’s always gonna be someone who is going to hurt me down the line. So as you can imagine, this impacted my relationships. How can I trust another person with my love if my own father hurt me and abandoned me?
I became a perfectionist, a workaholic, and a very tighten-up person. Trying to secure myself from pain was my brain’s main goal. It took years of therapy, meditation, reading, and all sorts of internal introspection for me to get to the point to break down the walls that I had been building, and remove the heavy armor of pain and grief that I’ve been wearing for ages.
What now
When you have gone through a lot of pain and you make it out alive and well, you have this internal fire to give back. So I wanted to combine the skills that I had developed over time through my work and art, to create something that could maybe one day help at least another person, realize a couple of things about life, and how to manage all sorts of mental obstacles one might have.
The problem is that sometimes we don’t even know what’s wrong, we don’t have the tools to understand ourselves and what is wrong inside. All those unconscious behaviors that we develop over the years cover pain, anxiety, or any other feeling and emotional state we are trying to fight or avoid.
There are times that you know that something is wrong, or you even know what the cause is, what the problem is, maybe you are aware of those unhealthy behaviors and tricks that your brain has developed to hide from reality. But what you don’t know is what to do about it, and no one around you talks about any of that.
Living in denial
We live in a society that is fundamentally broken and very few people around us speak openly about emotional health. Almost everyone is dealing with something inside, but only a few want to acknowledge it. It’s better to just Netflix and chill through life, numbing ourselves with consumption, rather than talk or face those inner demons right? Is this what life is about though?
We, as humans, have almost become insane. We go to school, go to college, get a job, get a car, a house, a bigger house, have kids, retire and die. And throughout this time, consume as much as we can. Consume food, products, drugs, content, even the ecosystem that keeps us alive. Anything to make us avoid pain and face the truth.
The only way to break out of this insanity is to go within. Take an honest look within ourselves, face the pain, see the destruction that our unconscious mind has created and do the work.
What is “Unfck Thyself”
Figuring out that kind of stuff takes a lot of time, a lot of research, and a lot of work. What I am aiming for with this project is not to provide you with a shortcut in this process, there’s isn’t one anyway, but to explain certain concepts that took me years to understand. Not only because they are hard for our minds to grasp, but because they are also scattered and hidden between different sources. From psychology books to spiritual teachings, everyone has been trying to explain the same things but in a way that is tough to understand.
I wanted to provide an easy and beautiful, almost meditative, way to present some wisdom, and this is how Unfck Thyself was born. At the intersection of pretty and positive Instagram posts, and the heavy spiritual and psychology knowledge and wisdom that is out there. Whether or not this will be useful for someone remains to be seen.
Visit: https://www.instagram.com/unfckthyself/
Written by: Yannis Abelas
