By Sara Cagarelli
On August 18th, the world celebrates “Never Give Up Day,” a day dedicated to resilience, perseverance, and the creative human spirit.
What does “Never Give Up” have to do with maladaptive daydreaming?
Climbing out of our inclination to daydream is a personal fight that must not be taken lightly. We have to commit to constant and rational work before it becomes natural. According to the phase in the journey to healing, never giving up takes on multiple meanings.
When Daydreams are Out of Control
As maladaptive daydreamers still in the hands of our fantasies, we struggle to stay focused on our daily tasks, to not fail in our endeavours, to not let our time be consumed in daydreaming.
Sometimes the reality is so far from who we are in our fantasies that it seems impossible to find a way out. Or something happened, that led us far from the acceptance in our community, and we ourselves slid in feelings of self-loathing and lack of self-empathy, finishing up seeking comfort in our parallel worlds.
MD really spirals out of control when we feel estranged from this world and we feel we cannot explain ourselves to others.
Not giving up
Asking for help, knowing there are others on the same boat as you, connecting to them, lets a ray of light enter your life, a glimpse of hope that there is room for you and your dreams, so leaving this life-consuming habit behind is possible.
Not giving up in trying out the variety of tricks and tips that those who have been through MD eagerly share is the beginning of accepting the ray of light inside you. The creativity that we MDers use to patch up real-life situations endangered by our MD will now come in handy to adjust the trick or a combination of them to your routine and your nature.
When we have identified and customized our tool, we struggle to be perseverant. We dedicate time to it and we defend it even if it looks quirky, because internal and external judgement is the last of our concerns. Emerging from MD is a two-way path: tricks and tips are not enough. We are walking up the road of self-compassion. If we cannot forgive ourselves, as soon as there’s a glitch and we stumble, we would not stand up.
The meaning of perseverance
Being perseverant in this phase means not giving up your journey. Find your own pace, do not rush it. It unveils skills and strength/energy you did not know you had.
Eventually, you get the vibe that the dissonance is fading away, that the situations you avoided to not leave your comfort zone are narrowing down. It’s as if the ‘potential’ you turns into the you ‘in action’. The need to slide in your parallel world drifts away, you do not recognize yourself in the projection you had made of yourself and do not need to turn to it to feel a sort of satisfaction, because you have found your shape in the real world.
Someone can experience that as a sudden perception, someone else as a perception that grows little by little in every fibre of their body and mind.
At one point, you are looking at the world around you with different eyes, no more as an estranged phenomenon, but as the space and time that need you for a specific purpose.
How to deal with setbacks
We are emerging stronger from our daymares because we have gotten to know ourselves better and we have overcome the shame.
Moreover, we have built a network of significant relationships we can turn to if we start feeling the earth shaking beneath our feet. The achievement of our goals is now worth more than ever.
We have now grown resilient out of MD. Let’s all be aware: MD is not solved once and for all. Yes, along the way we have learnt how to master the tools to face adversities, but life will hit hard again. Nonetheless, we, with our heads high, can face and overcome them.
We may – and are allowed to – have setbacks, but the points in time when we realized our purpose are hardly points of return.
We are not oaks that are torn down with the strong wind; we are bamboos that gently bend to eventually come back heads high.
Together, we can then become advocates for others,
– shattering the misconceptions that revolve around MD and that lead to a harmful social stigma,
– fostering a culture that embraces imperfection
– inspiring those like us to not feel limited by their MD, to join the journey, because what is going to come out of it is unexpected. You deserve to thrive.
“When we learn how to become resilient, we learn how to embrace the beautifully broad spectrum of the human experience.”
Jaeda Dewalt
“Resilience is based on compassion for ourselves as well as compassion for others.”
Sharon Salzberg