Once, the first time I was in a mental hospital, I remember sitting in a group of women who were all discussing their situations, the gravity of them, and feeling quite out of place. One mentioned how her husband threatened to leave her. Another told how her kids were afraid of her and had never been the same after the morning they found her on the bathroom floor in her own vomit and blood. And yet another talked about how she didn’t think she could manage life on the outside and she hoped they never sent her home.

I remember looking around the room at these women who were sharing their secrets and fears and feeling like a fish out of water. In that moment I saw no connection between myself and them. I could find no similarities between me and the woman who had just intentionally crashed her car into a tree and had been brought in, tied up in a straitjacket, just the night before. And more than that, I didn’t want to.

It’s a scary thing to open yourself up to the possibility that you might be the same on some level as the people locked in a mental facility. But I’m still amazed it took me over a week to realize that I was locked in there with them. If someone had something in common with them, it was me. I just hadn’t dared realize it yet. I’m not suggesting everyone’s reality is that extreme but to some extent, most of us keep hiding from ourselves until our Selves demand to be seen.

Our minds are amazing things. They are able to shade things, change things, shatter events into pieces for storage and to forget entire events all together. My mind has done all of those things and so has yours to some extent. We humans are fragile enough that we sometimes have to rewrite history just so we can keep living. And that is all fine and as it should be.

But when we reach the point in our lives where it’s time to stop, take stock and our biggest wish is to live a life as full as possible, nothing barred, we must make a choice – to keep seeing what we wish were so or to accept the reality of the situation. It takes a very brave person indeed to choose to look at their reality square on. And it takes a braver person still to look, plan and then keep moving forward.

On the day I realized I was the same as the women surrounding me, I felt as if my entire world collapsed. It was worse than the times I had tried to kill myself. It was worse than the day my husband told me he wasn’t sure if he could stay married to me. It was worse than the morning my son saw the deep cut marks along the insides of my arms after an intense night of self-inflicted torture and stood shocked in the doorway. It was worse because I let reality in and really looked at what was happening around me. This was the moment I started saving my life.

You probably have someone in your life that you think of as stronger than you. You might rely on them for wisdom in most situations that you bump into. You may go to them and ask their advice, hardly ever thinking for yourself because you trust them that much. You’ve learned to do this over the years and it’s the only way you know. And in most cases, this person, whomever they are in your life, has most likely saved you a time or two or five hundred. And as with most of the coping skills you’ve had to learn to survive, this one is no exception in that it carries with it some good.

However, part of looking hard at the reality that is your life, is learning that your best advocate must, at some point, be yourself. Getting there can take as long as you want it to, but ultimately, you must become your biggest cheerleader. There is no hurry to get there. No need to try to jump to the end right away. But keep that morsel of truth tucked in your pocket with the other Truths you know and start asking yourself, along with your trusted advisors, what you think you should be doing. Your heart and soul know, but you may have no idea how to hear them. Start keeping notes in a notebook or a diary and see how your advice compares to others and maybe you’ll find that you can start trusting your instincts a little more.

One way to start really looking at reality is to do a grounding exercise. Grounding exercises can be done anywhere, anytime. Start by putting both feet on the ground. Next, say out loud that your feet are on the ground. You just said a true statement! Follow this by stating accurately other things about how you are positioned (on a chair or couch, with a blanket etc.) and how other items are laid out in your room. This may seem like a very simple, small or silly thing, but once you’ve done it a few times, you’ll start noticing things you’ve been not looking at for weeks or years. Like the books stacked behind the chair or the cobwebs in the corner window. From there you can move on to things about yourself that you might not have been looking at. Like how your nails are long or you are wearing your favorite pants and before long, you’re able to accurately list how you’re feeling, when it’s possible you didn’t even know it just a few days ago.

One thing to look out for is assigning labels to the accurate grounding items. For example, saying ‘my feet are on the ground,’ is different than saying ‘my ugly feet are on the ground.’ Ugly is a subjective term, and although you may feel that way, it’s not a fact – it’s an opinion. Because the goal is to state the facts, try your very best to keep out all your opinions, pervasive as they may be. And believe me, I have quite a bit of experience in pervasive opinions. Just keep practicing and you’ll get better and better at it.

Once you’re good at grounding yourself whenever you wish to, you can use this as a coping mechanism to help immediately bring yourself back to reality. Some people use it to help get through panic attacks. They may be fearing for their lives and stuck in the ‘What Ifs’ in their mind, but by putting their feet on the ground and stating the obvious, they bring their minds back to reality and leave things that haven’t happened and may not ever happen in favor of what is real and in this moment. They move from ‘my feet are on the ground’ to ‘the sky is blue’ to ‘I heard a car drive by just now’ to ‘I’m using this grounding technique to keep me from the What Ifs,’ which is a true statement in and of itself and therefore qualifies to be included in the grounding exercise. This is different than stating, ‘I’m using this grounding technique to pull my head out of my ass because I am a freak!’ See the difference? The latter won’t work towards your goal of living an authentic life. Factual truths are the goal.

That day in the mental hospital, the day I started really looking at my reality and stopped pretending that my life was different than it was? It all started by my saying out loud, ‘I’m sitting in a green chair in a mental hospital and I’m supposed to be here.’ From there, everything changed for the better.