avatarTrinity Ellis, Author

Summary

Trinity Ellis shares a personal journey of self-discovery and transformation, reflecting on existential questions and the struggle with mental illness, ultimately finding meaning and healing in life.

Abstract

In a profound and introspective piece, Trinity Ellis delves into the quest for life's meaning amid personal suffering, particularly during a pivotal moment in 2021. Ellis explores the realization of life's brevity and the universal search for purpose, drawing on personal experiences and the wisdom of Confucius. The author confronts ennui, a state of boredom and lack of motivation, which is deeply rooted in feelings of insignificance within the family unit. Through self-reflection and a series of unconventional experiments, Ellis embarks on a journey of self-improvement, challenging the reader to engage in the painful yet necessary process of self-editing. The narrative emphasizes the importance of facing one's own soul, akin to a battle, to achieve personal growth and transformation. Ellis's journey leads to the rediscovery of love and the repair of a broken marriage, demonstrating the power of change and the potential for redemption. The essay concludes with an invitation to readers to share their own stories and an introduction to Ellis's other works and social media presence.

Opinions

  • The author believes that self-improvement requires more than just reading inspirational content; it demands genuine self-confrontation and change.
  • Ellis suggests that the process of self-improvement is inherently painful and involves a deep examination of one's own psyche.
  • The concept of 'ennui' is presented as a significant obstacle to personal fulfillment, characterized by a lack of interest and motivation in life.
  • The author emphasizes the importance of humility and the willingness to experience legitimate suffering as part of personal growth.
  • Ellis posits that mental illness can be a fundamental truth that one may avoid confronting, yet it is integral to the process of healing and transformation.
  • The idea that one must be willing to 'edit' oneself, much like editing a manuscript, is a central theme, implying that personal growth involves significant

A Second Chance

Finding My Own Life’s Meaning in My Own Soul’s Suffering

The Intensive Search for the Intrusive Disease

IMAGE: DeviantArt

Who Am I? Why Am I Here? What Does All of this Even Mean?

Like many of you, I went through a moment in 2021 where I had begun questioning what my “purpose” in this life was. I’m not quite clear on whether this question is synonymous with finding “the meaning of life.” I would be interested in what you think?

Confucius said that we all have two lives. The second one begins when we realize we only have one.

How true is this? If I had to guess, being that all of us do live in the same world together and are the same species, at least, that all of you have asked or are presently asking one or both of these questions. Or something similar.

If you’re still young (in body, not mind) then you may not have reached this point yet. You will. For those of us that are middle-aged, you’re probably clearly picking up what I’m laying down here. When we realize we have fewer years ahead than the ones we have behind. That if we keep looking back, we will never see what’s ahead. No novel revelations here. I’m not claiming to have answers when I’m not even sure of the questions. Maybe AI can do that. I hear it’s incredibly useful.

For those of you past middle-age, did you find the answers? Because all of us who aren’t there yet are eager to know.

While going through the notes on my iPhone at the beginning of 2023, I found little notes, writings that I had made over the years. I’m an avid documenter so I have notebooks and journals full of my life. All over the place. On my phone, iPad, and laptop too.

Words are literally covering my bathroom mirrors, the shower doors, the vanities. I’m not kidding.

Both vanities & our shower doors are covered, too. PHOTO: Jack Miller, Trinity Ellis, Author

A note on my phone that I wrote over six years ago stood out amongst the others:

My “profound,” thought-invoking note, Trinity Ellis, Author

“So, I woke wringing my hands together, wanting to crawl out of my skin. But where would I go if I got out?”

That’s a really good question. And it invokes a lot of thought, particularly for people that deal with any type of mental illness, like me. Those with neuroses of any kind, for that matter. Mental illness or not. You know who you are. I have a message for you. You’ve somehow gotten onto my blog and landed yourself right here. Don’t dismiss it. Synchronicity.

Defining Perpetuity.

Somehow, I came across a singular word that described exactly the state I was in: Ennui. I was in a perpetual state of ennui. While I’m sure most of you are educated and already know what this word means (and how to pronounce it), it had never entered my vocabulary. Let me summarize from a variety of sources for which I don’t want to quote verbatim. This isn’t a college paper, and it isn’t in APA format.

IMAGE: DeviantArt

Ennui means boredom. Lack of interest in anything. Lack of drive or motivation. Liken it to Eeyore of sorts. This began with my home life. My family. Not necessarily feeling like I was the cause of problems as much as I wasn’t even a consideration in their lives at all. Just an extraneous person in the house. A ghost. So, not only was I unimportant to myself, but I was also insignificant to others. To me, I interpreted the word to mean stasis and hollowness. Because that was how I felt. I felt listless. Two-dimensional. There were plenty of things to do. I simply had no drive to do them.

I had begun doing very odd things. One of which was to start doing experiments. This extended into my career. The Employment Theory: If You Don’t Actually Work, They Will Actually Fire You.

(There is way more to the story here but I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole. Not just yet.)

Edit Yourself. Make it Bleed.

For people to really improve themselves, it requires way more than self-improvement books, blogs, and inspirational quotes and/or posts. More than following umpteen people on Medium that promote these topics. Not that these aren’t helpful (and we all need followers). They absolutely are. Especially success stories. We want to be inspired so we seek inspiration. Motivation comes from inspiration.

IMAGR: DeviantArt

Yeah, let’s just say, I wasn’t exactly inspired at that time, nor was I looking for it. I don’t know if I expected clear answers to my vague questions to fall from the sky or reveal themselves in my dreams that I didn’t know how to interpret. All I know is that I was drinking a lot and not doing things I should. I was binge-watching seasons of Nip/Tuck and Desperate Housewives on Netflix. Jotting down the exact minutes of particularly interesting things during the shows so I could tell Jack all about it when he got home. Riveting. Was I expecting to gain some insight or inspiration from Christian or Gabby?

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” -Jung

IMAGE: DeviantArt

My point here is that to really improve, you must first face-off with yourself. This means you will have to change. I would warrant to say that most of you would say that you know you need to change, and you sincerely believe you’re truly committed to it. But, how much of you are you willing to change? How deep are you willing to go? I hate to break it to you, but it means you will be edited and none of us likes to be edited. Pages soaked with the red correction pen that bleeds all the way through. Symbols and illegible notes. There’s meaning there.

And who does the editing for the stories that we are apparently writing for ourselves? Well, my friend, we do. Consider it self-publishing on Amazon. But, unlike Amazon, there are only a select few to grade you on your performance. They’re the only ones that will give you any stars out of five and they’re biased. You don’t necessarily want to read those written reviews. “Mom is never right. She has only started listening 15% more than last month.” “Wife is still batshit crazy, but she has improved by greater than 55%. She got off the couch long enough to grab a box of crackers today.” Baby steps. She’s a real go-getter. Your Fitbit won’t even tell you that you’ve reached your step goal for the day. Inspiration, motivation, and answers won’t exactly fall from the sky.

Unless they do…Now that’s another story. Plenty more to blog about.

Point is that only you can edit yourself and judge where you are in the editing process. You know what needs to be added, removed, altered. Only you.

Shirley from “Bump in the Night,” Trinity Ellis, Author

If it Doesn’t Hurt, it Doesn’t Count.

I want to make this clear. This process should hurt. It shouldn’t feel good. To pluck out the problems. Pull up the weeds. You gotta dig, scrape, and pull really hard to get to the things buried deep. Harder than you have ever pulled anything in your life. It is, after all, a tug-of-war. For your life.

If you’re not hurting while trying to find yourself, then you’re doing it wrong.

“Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and apathy into movement without emotion.” — Jung

For myself, I found one particular thing in my psyche. It had been insidious. Consistently persistent virtually my entire adult life. It was dedicated to my demise with the façade of fulfillment. It had been a part of me for so long, it had taken root and removed the vacancy sign before I had even graduated high school. It had no intention of going anywhere. Ever. It blocked me from moving forward. Affected my perception, perspective on virtually everything.

According to Jung, “Your perception will become clear only when you can look into your own soul.”

And I had known it was there. I had ignored it. While thinking I had successfully tackled this darkness in me, I was merely prolonging an unnecessary suffering. This fundamental truth about me that I had avoided. It was a black cancer embedded in my unconscious. The one with very few windows and very little light.

“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.” — Jung

I was too afraid to look at it head-on. Didn’t want to admit it was even there. Didn’t want to fight those demons. After all, by this time, it had become part of my very foundation. I felt it was an integral part of who I was. We shared a brain, a body. Why would I want to fundamentally change who I was as a person? Why should I have to? What would be left of me if it weren’t there?

If It’s Not Worth a Fight, It’s Worthless.

For me, my process really started with the determination that I was not going to walk out of my fourth failed marriage, like I had done the other three. I was gonna put my head in the game and I was not gonna play nice. Not with myself. And that’s who I had to wrestle. So, I focused on me. Me.

I studied and I studied. And there were a lot of tears. I had to learn so many new things and unlearn just as many.

I hunted and hunted for it. I needed a super strong flashlight to find it. And when I finally found it, finally shone a light in its face, it didn’t even flinch.

It laughed at me. Dared me.

IMAGE: DeviantArt

I don’t like to play games. I’m not competitive. I lose almost anything I play. But over the past two years, all the really weird shit, my sudden incessant need to test some well-known “theories,” and becoming a conduit for what the universe was saying, literally, I had every bit of confidence that I could win this. And I needed all of me to fix me. So, this deep, blackened mass had to go. Failure was simply not an option. I am a survivor, and I will be damned if I let me lose. I couldn’t set myself up for failure anymore. We are our own worst enemy, right?

While dredging the murky waters, the first to surface were humility and shame. Overdue apologies. It began reclamation of a damaged conscious and mending of broken hearts. Healing.

And it brought him back to me. Just the way I had left him. My transformation caused a chain reaction that engulfed both of us and wiped the slate clean. We got a second chance.

Read about our new relationship with the same old partners: A Typical Friday Night: My Life for the Past 19 Months

Pria & Ethan from “Pria’s Prophecies,” PHOTO: Jack Miller, @Trinity Author

Change is Necessary to Grow.

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.” — Nietzsche

IMAGE: DeviantArt

Sacrifice. Patience. Hope. If I had to describe where I began and where I am today, those three words would be a start. The manuscript that I’m working on is called “The Power of the Ellipsis: How Listening to Voices and Playing Fictional Characters Transformed My Life.” I’m not trying to be sneaky by promoting myself here. I’m not too proud to admit it. It’s a three-part manuscript that outlines the approach I took that not only fixed my marriage — it fixed me. I fixed me.

I t wasn’t intended to be a memoir at all. But in recollecting the specific things I had done to share them with the world, I couldn’t bypass the very inception of my neurosis. Things I had to face to move forward. There was no one to fight my own battle. No one but me. And it worked. Against all reason, it worked.

Remember those “experiments”? Yeah, here were the results of the most important one of all: Loving the Unlovely — Loving Someone You Hate — My Own Experiment

Transformation. Transcendence. Individuation.

O r the closest we will ever get. No “state” of completion. No one ever actually “achieves” these things. At least not the Johnny Depp kind. My message for you is that there is life on the other side of your life. Don’t lose sight of what you have trying to get what you don’t. It’s a process. It’s slow and it’s painful but if you stay the course, it will be worth it.

IMAGE” DeviantArt

We are merely unfinished books. Written or read. Perched on the bookshelf with a worn dog-ear. Or buried in a computer somewhere. Maybe the ones we break then we replace but we still keep the old ones. We never do anything with them. Words captured on phones, too. I have decades of them. Written or read, the words fall on deaf ears if left unfinished.

Start By Saying.

Words both harm and heal. This is a good place to start your journey for self -improvement. You can pick some up and lay some down. You should most definitely leave some behind while on this journey that you’ve laid out for yourself. You have a really good story.

12-Month Wrap-Up Presentation, Trinity Ellis, Author

Hi, my name is Trinity. It is my pleasure to make your acquaintance. I’ve shared a bit of my story. Please, share a bit of yours.

IMAGE: DeviantArt

Please see some more of my stories:

Follow me on Twitter (X) and connect with me on LinkedIn!

I also have a website: www.thepoweroftheellipsis.com

Self Improvement
Relationships
This Happened To Me
Life
Mental Illness
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