From Mid-Curve to Right (and Left) Curve

My Mental Health Journey

Growing up, I had been conditioned to believe that only weak people had mental health issues. Depression, anxiety, or any other disorder was a way to get attention. I believed that I would never face these issues so long as I chose to be happy. I chose, and chose harder, and chose some more. At 24, I took an action that jeopardized my life and stripped away my ability to “choose”. Only by reaching rock bottom was I finally able to admit that something was wrong.

It wasn't until two years ago that I started to make meaningful improvements to my mental health. The reason why it took so long can be partially summarized by my personal edition of the “midwit” meme¹ below:

Mid-Curve Harrison (2018 - 2022)

After nearly dying, I accepted that I needed to make some changes to my life. However, I was still operating under the belief that only weak people had mental health issues. This made the prospect of asking others for help embarrassing. This meant that going to therapy was not an option. Also, because of my success in school and my career, I believed I was “smart enough” to take on the challenges of mental health on my own.

I began by reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life. Two rules shined a light on my behavioral patterns surrounding my self-esteem:

1. "Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today."

2. "Tell the truth – or, at least, don't lie."

The first revealed that I was living in a constant state of comparison. My self-esteem was dictated by how well I was doing relative to others: my income level, my performance at work, how much weight I could lift, and the attractiveness of the women I dated. The second revealed that I had picked up a habit of lying, both to others and to myself. I often embellished stats or stories to make myself seem more valuable and interesting to others. And lied to myself to justify my relative underperformance in the categories that comprised my self-worth.

Ever since my ex-girlfriend and I had broken up in 2017, I had been struggling immensely in the dating category. From my readings and self-evaluation, I surmised that I would feel much better about myself if I solved the riddle that had been dating. Through these efforts, I stumbled upon Neil Strauss’s “The Game” and his related men’s group called The Society International.

The group took a holistic approach to mental health, starting with a deep dive into our upbringings. The childhood trauma and internal family systems work I did because of the group was valuable, and it felt good to be learning these things. But because I believed that finding a good woman would solve my self-esteem issues, I wasn’t interested in making any real changes that didn’t involve improving my attraction skills.

So, I spent most of my time in the group doing just that. It worked, and I fell in love. I believed I had found my future wife and the mother of my children. My ego was boosted so high that the only music I could relate to was Future. My self-esteem had been artificially inflated. Only a few months later, she cheated on me, and the balloon popped. Back to rock bottom I fell.

I took the next year or so to pick up the pieces. I blamed Neil’s group for getting me into the situation, so I quit. Although I was still embarrassed to tell anyone about it, I gave therapy a shot. I had made some good progress, but I still was struggling to find happiness. I entered into another relationship with a really amazing woman who checked all the right boxes, but ultimately wasn’t right for me. Because I was scared of facing failure again, I stayed in the relationship longer than I should have. If not for Integrated Men, the men’s group I joined in February 2023, I may still be in that relationship wasting both her time and my own.

Right Curve Harrison (2023 - Present)

The group’s focus is on building what the group’s creator calls a “Great Cake of Life”. A woman is seen as the icing on the cake, not one of the ingredients of the batter. This implies that in order to enter into a healthy relationship, you need to have built a good life for yourself. Without this, it makes it more difficult to judge if a woman is right for you or if her presence in your life is to fill a void in your life.

This viewpoint forced me to reassess the prior mental health “work” I had done. I realized that I was operating under the belief that finding a great woman was necessary to find fulfillment. It was what would make me whole. Because most of my self-improvement work leading up to this point was centered around improving my ability to attract women, this was a humbling realization. For the first time, I realized I had been mid-curving my mental health journey.

Joining Integrated Men made me start over from zero. I’ve spent the majority of the last two years working hard to implement the many lessons learned from the group. Some of the lessons are left-curve in nature (long walks, lift heavy rocks, write down sad feelings), while ones like building a great cake of life, are right-curve.

I am liable to drift back to my mid-curve ways of thinking, but I’ve developed a strong enough foundation to get unstuck quickly. As a result, I’ve gained a much healthier relationship with myself, my life, and my approach to women.

1. *Several editions of the “midwit” meme have humbled me, thus making it one of my favorites. I spend a lot of time lurking on Cryptocurrency twitter, where it’s often used to show high IQ and low IQ traders arriving at the same investment thesis. The premise of the meme is that “midwits”, or those that fall under the fat part of the IQ curve, typically overthink their trades and ultimately underperform the outliers on the intelligence distribution curve. By looking at some simple investing data below, you can see how applicable this meme is in the finance world. (If you, too, would like to be humbled, other examples of the meme can be found here)

When it comes to the investing sub-domain, this meme is directionally correct. Over the last 5 years, 90% of active investment managers underperformed the S&P 500. This means that only 10% of trained investment managers were able to outperform someone who simply purchased the index and held it throughout that time period.