I had a sheltered childhood, and I believed anything was possible if I put my mind to it. During my teen and young adult years I lived through experiences that taught me things can’t change no matter what I do, or so I interpreted them. My conclusion was that my choices didn’t matter. What would the solution have been? Being a less hopeful child? Or taking my experiences less seriously? But most importantly, how do Iget rid of this learned helplessness that I carry, so heavy inside me that it’s drowning me even when the water is shallow now? 

 

I grew up in Mexico, in a very happy home. And I was raised thinking the world worked a certain way: everyone has a good heart deep down, and all injustices get settled in the end.

I graduated with my bachelor’s at 21 years old and started working at age 22. This is when the world I thought I lived in started crumbling around me.

 

I began working as a writer for an educational company. They told us: what matters the most is that we deliver the best possible product to children, and never be scared of speaking our mind whenever we see a problem. More experienced people could have seen the mouse trap in this statement. Not me, of course, I was a sheltered 22-year-old. I had no idea some people were so insecure that you couldn’t give them the slightest criticism, even if it were polite and professional. 

 

My boss was supposed to be in charge of handling the workload and helping us meet deadlines, but he went to work every day to do nothing. We, leaderless, tried to keep the work moving the best we could. When I told him, based on the “to-do’s”, the deadline, and the number of writers, I didn’t think we could finish the current project on time, he went ballistic. He got angry at me, saying I should never talk like that (especially not via email). A couple of weeks later, I got fired. And, as I found out later, he blamed me for the project’s delay. 

 

That’s when my hope for a good world was shattered. And I guess my mistake was that I made generalizations. If the company worked like this, it meant the world worked like this:

 

• You can´t speak the truth.

• Those who praise you for your work will stab you in the back for doing it right.

• You can’t show people how good you are at doing your job, they’ll feel threatened.

But at the same time, I told myself that the whole world couldn’t be like that. If I believed that, all hope would be lost, and we humans want to have something to believe in. There was a place where, in my mind, these things didn’t happen: North America.

 

Another side to my learned helplessness is related to false expectations. It happened almost at the same time as my job disappointment.

 

I had two projects: writing and selling a book, and starting a blog. There’s a quote from the movie The Princess Bride that reads “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” Becoming a writer is not easy, and whoever tells otherwise is trying to sell you online courses. I read about how to write and publishyour novel, and how to create a web blog that would make you thousands of dollars every month. The promises were always exorbitant: you will become number one. I didn’t know anybody in my small city who was doing the things I wanted to do, so I had nobody to curb my expectations.

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Of course, I didn’t become number one, and I made no significant money from selling my books, or from my blog.

 

These two life experiences, which happened almost simultaneously, made me feel helpless in a way I haven’t been able to shake off ever since. I am now in a state many would call learned helplessness. Strangely, that helplessness has manifested in me constantly biting more than I can chew, and becoming a workaholic, overwhelmed mess. How come? 

Learned helplessness is when you are convinced that your choices don’t matter. We think this means depression, and being paralyzed, unable to choose, but this isn’t always the case. In his book Essentialism, Greg McKeown explains helplessness can show up as an “I’ll do it all” mentality. This attitude is just as desperate as beingparalyzed. It means that, because you believe you can’t control where your life goes, you must take every opportunity presented to you, in case one of these will take you in the right direction.

 

This behaviour is counterproductive and sinks you deeper into hopelessness. Because I am not choosing, I don’t make any meaningful advancements in the things that matter to me, and this reinforces the idea that there’s no hope for me: I can’t do the things I want to do, and never will be able to. And we aren’t concerned about this because capitalism praises this “do it all” mentality.

 

McKeown says the antidote to learned helplessness is learning that you have choices, and your preferences matter. I’d add that, in the absence of choices (which is the case for a lot of immigrants), you need to learn to trust yourself, trust you can identify the things in which you have a choice, no matter how small, and that you have the tools to navigate the situations where you can’t choose.

 

Also, we need to reframe failure. Failure isn’t real. Mistakes are part of absolutely everything. As a culture, we need to acknowledge that and stop expecting flawlessness.

 

I am currently working on reframing the meaning of the things that have happened in my life. I wanted to be number one, and this blinded me to what a wonderful thing it was that I was in the position to write and self-publish books, or I couldn’t enjoy the small but steady amount of readers that my website was getting, because I wanted to have a million readers overnight. People were reading my blog posts, and I wasn’t able to enjoy this at all! How sad.

 

Whereas for my bad boss, my helplessness came from trying to be as careful as possible with this person and still getting screwed over. Next time, I want to be completely honest and true to myself so that, if I get fired, I’ll know it was because I spoke up, not despite my not speaking up.

 

Now, I am in North America. I moved to Vancouver, Canada, three years ago, and it has been the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. Vancouver is definitely not a safe haven, nor are things perfect here. Many things are easier, and it’s beautiful to see that so many people here don’t have learned helplessness (a lot do, and sadly they’re not very visible or heard). I used to believe that, by removing myself from the place where my limitations were, I’d be free. But it turns out that the limitations live inside me now. My current journey is trying to free myself from them.