Editing, curating and protecting become the actionable pieces of ensuring that coping continuum conditions, or any chronic condition, are not exclusively framed as deficits and failures.
Flickr.com: Ivo Dimitrov
Editing, Curating and Protecting
As a recap:
Editing is the correction and condensing of things.
Curation is the selection and organizing of things.
Protection is the process of keeping something safe from harm.
Editing really should be the very first thing we attend to when diagnosed with any chronic condition, but we are very rarely in the headspace to actually take this on at the outset. A new diagnosis, as I brought up at some length in Knowing and Nudging Terroir, means you will likely need some amount of time trying to even uncover a lifetime’s worth of assumptions and comparators that underpin your existence before you can begin to edit.
And then you have to face the fact that editing cannot occur without loss. Many cannot go there.
Losing family members, spouses and partners, friends, careers often involves a profound conundrum: at a time of increased vulnerability, to purposefully remove emotional and financial supports seems ludicrous and self-sabotaging. However, when there are coping continuum issues at hand, then it will have you profoundly trapped if you think that you can keep all of those clamping comparators on you and yet be able to continue to pretend that this is not, by definition, editing self to placate others. The tragedy of editing self in this way is that it will usually result in the very insecurity and increased vulnerability that you thought you were mitigating by continuing to stay with that partner, or that job, or those family members and friends. Clamping comparators maim and kill and it is better to proactively edit them out that to have them edit you out.
Editing needs to excise from your life the spaces, roles, interactions and people that reinforce health and wellness comparators. If they cannot be removed entirely, they need to be pushed far away from your centre. The earlier the better. You condense your centre to be the spaces, roles, interactions and people that better support your mastery of your new life and what is most important to you. That does not mean that at the periphery you may not still deal with clamping comparators but they cannot get close enough anymore to your core that it will actually impact the way you think and behave, nor will it impact what you believe.
Curation, once you have condensed and improved what is close to you, is when you then carefully choose and cultivate the spaces, roles, interactions and people that enhance your mastery of self and what is important and meaningful to you. This is a process of brightening and amplifying your value to yourself.
While editing and curation tend to be quite intensive efforts early on in the adjustment to a diagnosis of any of the coping continuum conditions, or chronic condition, protection is a practice that is ongoing. New people, circumstances, roles, interactions and career choices will come up as you move along in life, and protection is that conscious assessment of whether these new things and people are worthy of being part of your centre or not.
Growth and Moving Beyond
As we wrap up this treatise on shifting mental illness and disorder to a series of chronic conditions that are woven into human complexity and existence, it is important to note that early on in any diagnosis when you discover the cluster of your symptoms and behaviours are a) common and b) have a name/a label, it is normal to want to be connected to “your kind.”
The validation and understanding from those that have experienced what you are experiencing is the opposite of those clamping comparators that have made you feel “less than.” Eventually, as you go about your editing and curating, this intense connection and identification will wane and that is also normal. Individuals you connect with in that early phase of diagnosis may or may not remain close to you for life, some will and some will not.
While there is no timeline for when or how this shift occurs, you will want to watch to see that you are moving along a path that is lowering the label-connection intensity of the early days. Why? Because the catch with having a diagnosis is that, while it is part of you, it cannot define all of who you are forever. If it does, then it becomes a clamping comparator in its turn.