The Energized Self: A Journey to Interconnected Healing

By Andrea Medina

"Like a compass guiding me back to my center, these narratives simplified the cyclical nature of healing. Their testimonies of non-linear personal development showed how it was natural to have pitfalls that felt like all progress was lost." 

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Feb 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781637309247

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THE ENERGIZED SELF

THE ENERGIZED SELF

A JOURNEY TO INTERCONNECTED HEALING

ANDREA MEDINA

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Andrea Medina

All rights reserved.

THE ENERGIZED SELF

A Journey to Interconnected Healing

ISBN

978-1-63730-650-5 Paperback

978-1-63730-733-5 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-924-7 Ebook

For my mother, who saw the best in me before I learned to.

Este libro es para ti, mamá. Te debo todo lo que soy y todo en lo que me convertiré.

This book contains sensitive material relating to child abuse, domestic abuse, trauma, and suicide.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I turned twenty-two a couple of months before publishing this book. It was the happiest birthday I’ve ever had. For the first time in my life, how I felt internally matched how I interacted with the world. This brought me peace with who I was, even when my life continued to shift in unforeseen ways, like my mother’s breast cancer diagnosis only three months prior.

Many would say I am too young to write a book about healing from trauma. I used to believe this myself. What I had to learn is I am the key to my healing, not time. A person can live for multiple decades with hurt, trauma, and unhealthy conditioning impacting their emotions and behavior until they decide to go inward. What heals is not time but the resolve to be self-aware, the practice of letting go while embracing compassion for the self, and the adoption of healthier coping mechanisms. This work can be done at any stage of our lives.

This book embraces the younger version of me who went to bed most nights imagining an escape from her reality. When her abusive father finally abandoned her, she again pictured something coming into her life to fix the wounds he left behind. I see now that the pain of my past prepared me to better care for the person I am today. I have given her a platform on which to tell her story.

The Energized Self evolved from an account about the importance of being self-aware to better serve others to being self-aware to better serve ourselves. Ironically, helping ourselves makes us more emotionally mature and empathetic when we help others.

I hope this book will be of service to you. It is for anyone who has ever felt at the mercy of their past, instead of emboldened by it. When you finish reading, may you find that the future needs your authentic voice, even if it may take prioritizing your well-being and healing to uncover it.

INTRODUCTION

I grew up fascinated by the rapper Eminem. I was the obnoxious friend who quoted his songs and suggested you give rap a chance. Ironically, I grew up in Compton, the city that birthed many of the rap artists whom people around the world admire, including Dr. Dre, who signed Eminem. As if this wasn’t enough, my nickname in high school was Dre.

It took me many years to realize I felt at home with rap because it could depict so many different types of stories: tales of poverty, grief, racial injustice, depression, colonization, crime, and many other profound topics. I could learn about somebody’s entire life over the course of a single song and find similarities between my story and theirs. Though the rapper could have been a drug addict who lost his daughter’s custody, the specific event dissolved under universal emotions like frustration, self-hate, and a loss of hope. I connected with these and felt understood without knowing how it made any difference in my everyday challenges. That was until I noticed these songs were the only expressions I had during my childhood.

I am a Latina woman of Mexican and Indigenous ancestry. Though I grew up in a family that prioritized dining together and encouraging their children to live in the home until late into their twenties, we hardly ever spoke about our feelings. We only sat down to do so when a family member died. Even then, the men in my family masked their grief with a bold stance, while the women cried for a day or two and dutifully returned to caring for their families afterward.

I used birthday cards to express to my family any concerns I had about their mental well-being. When my brother turned twenty-six, I cried while writing him a card about how I was convinced he wouldn’t grow up to be like our violent father. My letter had the same impact on my brother; he could not stop sobbing when he read it.

As I grew older, I began to notice our ignorance of our mental health was not only attributable to our culture but also our economic background and generational patterns. The tensest conversations in our home were about money: how much should be spent to save up for rent, whether food stamps would be enough, and for what my mother was allowed to use her savings. My father never justified his expenses and yet demanded an explanation from my mom regarding hers.

My mom worked a nine-to-five factory job that took a significant toll on her well-being. She was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis when I was thirteen; we only went to the hospital because she couldn’t move her hands. This frightened my mom more than being unable to afford medical care. If she could no longer use her hands to work, she wouldn’t be able to support her family; my father was unemployed at the time.

My mom is still in the same factory job that exploits her every day. Her bosses care more about her productivity than her mental and physical health. They resort to intimidating tactics and ultimatums to accomplish this, in turn making the work environment hostile. I have lost count of how many times I’ve told my mother to leave her job.

It is hurting your self-esteem and taking away your peace, I would tell her.

My mom would always respond with the same thing: We can’t afford it.

It is heartbreaking to realize that we still can’t afford it. My mother doesn’t speak English and dropped out in the third grade to support her family financially. She has always been convinced there is no better option for her than this factory position. Over time, the rest of our family stopped trying to convince her otherwise. My brothers and I used school to picture a better outcome for ourselves. We felt the pressure to succeed academically and support my mother. Her job visibly added to her mental distress, and the hostility at home only worsened things. Though our hands were tied, my siblings and I also hoped to help my mom leave my dad. His verbal and emotional abuse heightened our conviction in the importance of making a separate life from him.

These were only unspoken thoughts, though. My mother was self-sacrificial until the day my father abandoned us. Everything my mom said and did was to create a feeling of normalcy in our home. She suppressed her sadness, distress, and anger. In turn, my brothers and I did the same. While I sat with my emotions in those moments I could no longer push them aside, I used substances, people, and expectations to lessen the discomfort.

I grew up surrounded by people who never gave back to themselves and with a narcissistic father. The former religiously gave to an external person, idea, or thing, while the latter unhealthily placed his needs before anybody else’s. For those who hardly cared for themselves, the concept of understanding their own needs eluded them. It was easier and quicker to only process these thoughts at surface level.

My brothers did not want to attend therapy after my dad left because they believed struggling with depression was a sign of weakness; both the paternal figure in their life and society’s toxic masculinity convinced them of this. Though there have been great strides in dismantling the belief that men do not face mental distress, there is still work to be done in normalizing the need for help and treatment. There is also still a necessity for more effective resources to inform a man, for instance, of how conditions like depression can manifest themselves in his daily life. Whereas a mainstream understanding of depression indicates symptoms like sadness and a loss of interest, Amardeep Grewal suggests in his project The Impact of Toxic Masculinity on Men’s Mental Health that depression often reveals itself as anger, irritability, and aggressive behavior in men.

Similarly, people can belittle their emotional health because they don’t think it has an important stake in other facets of their lives. The start of a global pandemic showed me how I fell into this dynamic. I was in my third year of college at the time, working both an on-campus and restaurant job. My weekends were purely extensions of my workweek. As I started accepting longer shifts on Saturdays, I also stopped visiting home. I would be surrounded by people around the clock, whether they were customers or fellow students. It seemed that the busier and more crowded my days became, the lonelier they felt.

I was in a depression, but I did not have enough time or energy to address the cause. I simply assumed the sadness I felt most nights was a byproduct of burnout. That was until I returned home because of the coronavirus restrictions at my college; I realized that being home aggravated the loneliness I’d felt before. My sadness was not from my long shifts at work and school assignments; it was from the repressed trauma of my father’s abuse, no longer ignorable in the home that it happened for fifteen years.

Everybody, regardless of culture, upbringing, socioeconomic status, race, and any other grouping, can encounter trauma and a need for emotional release. The word trauma, like abuse, carries a heavy connotation that often dissuades people from applying it to their situation. I struggled to use both words for years. While the common definition for trauma is a deeply distressing or disturbing experience, the measurement of distress and disturbance can only be measured and felt by the sufferer and not an outsider looking in. The same can be said about abuse. Though it is loosely defined as violent treatment, this violence can manifest itself not only physically but also verbally, emotionally, and spiritually.

The bottom line is that your inner knowing and unique situation supersedes any attributable terms and formal categories. Understanding this was my first step in acknowledging where my emotional well-being suffered. Though my economic background, culture, and generational patterns didn’t disappear, they stopped being barriers toward getting better. I have been on and off professional therapy for two years due to the high cost of treatment. My family is still not comfortable speaking about our mental health, nor how we walked on eggshells for years to prevent a violent outburst from my father. Nonetheless, I have committed myself to find the tools and space for me to express my emotions and uncover the effect of my past on myself and my family. This search has not cost me a single penny. Best of all, writing this book has been a crucial part of this individual pursuit to prioritize my emotional health.

I have come full circle with my love of rap in choosing to write The Energized Self. The storytelling in the music genre that was a safe place for me as a child has now enchanted me again as an adult. This time, it has come in the form of sitting down and listening to the stories of nine individuals who like the songs I grew up hearing, reflect universal topics like depression, dealing with childhood trauma, living according to somebody else’s expectations, losing faith, mental health disorders, distrusting the self, being alone, and more. These narratives have been a powerful reminder of the simplicity with which healing can come when one is unsure what the concept entails or at least why one should try to attain it.

I’ve had my cynical moments in which I questioned the point of being self-aware and compassionate with myself. Unfair things will still happen, and the world won’t adapt to prioritizing my emotions. This reality is a hard pill to swallow, but it’s even harder to accept the idea that I am now the one actively keeping myself from feeling free and at peace. When we become mindful, we can empower ourselves to live beyond self-made, family, and societal pressures, plus illusions.

Being mindful has empowered me to work through my trauma. I have chosen to do so through storytelling. I