So…
It's been a few days since I last wrote to you all. I wish I could tell you that things have gotten better, that my anxiety has settled down, and that I've found some peace. Unfortunately, things are much the same as they were in my last post.
I'm still struggling. A lot.
My anxiety continues to be overwhelming, and the thoughts of self-harm have become an almost constant companion. So far, I've managed to keep them as just thoughts, and I'm grateful for that. But lately, keeping them there has become increasingly difficult.
Every day, I find myself wondering if this will be the day when everything becomes too much. The day when the thoughts become actions. The day when I simply don't have the energy to keep fighting them.
And that scares me. Terribly.
I'm doing everything I can to hold myself together, but it takes an extraordinary amount of energy. Energy that I don't always have. Energy that I need for teaching, for my relationships, for the everyday things that make up a life.
Some days, just getting through the day feels like an accomplishment.
And I keep wondering, how long can I keep doing this?
I know I can't continue like this forever. Something has to change. I need to find a way through this, but right now, I'm struggling to figure out what that way looks like.
I think a lot of this goes back to my childhood.
As many of you know, I experienced a number of adverse childhood experiences. Emotional abuse. Physical abuse. Sexual assault. Witnessing a suicide attempt. Things that no child should ever have to experience, let alone try to understand.
That's a whole lot for one little boy to carry.
And carry it I did.
For years and years.
I didn't talk about what happened. I didn't acknowledge it. I certainly didn't allow myself to feel the emotions associated with those experiences. Instead, I buried everything as deeply as I possibly could.
For thirty-three years.
Thirty-three years of pretending that everything was okay. Thirty-three years of convincing myself that what happened was in the past and that I had moved on. Thirty-three years of building walls around feelings I was terrified to experience.
I thought I had it all under control.
Every once in a while, something would slip through. A memory. A feeling. A little piece of the past that refused to stay buried. When that happened, I would do what I had always done.
I would push it back down.
Smush it into a little box, close the lid, and pretend it wasn't there.
It worked.
Until it didn't.
Then January happened.
As many of you know, January was the beginning of an incredibly difficult chapter in my life. I was already struggling emotionally, and a medication change seemed to push me past the point where I could keep everything contained.
The walls I had spent decades building came crashing down.
And everything I had worked so hard to keep hidden came pouring out.
It wasn't a gentle release. It wasn't a carefully controlled process of opening up and working through my feelings.
It was an explosion.
Suddenly, I was confronted with decades of emotions, memories, shame, fear, and pain that I had spent most of my life trying not to experience.
I didn't know what to do with any of it.
And, truthfully, I still don't.
Since January, I've spent months in treatment. Residential treatment, trauma therapy, partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient treatment, and now DBT. I've learned about emotional regulation, distress tolerance, mindfulness, radical acceptance, and so many other skills.
I've learned a tremendous amount about myself.
I've also learned just how much pain I've been carrying.
And sometimes I wonder what I'm supposed to do with all of it.
One of the hardest things for me to accept is that my life has been profoundly affected by the actions of someone else.
Someone hurt me.
Someone took something from me that I can never get back.
And he got away with it.
Meanwhile, here I am, decades later, trying to put the pieces of my life back together.
I'm the one sitting in therapy. I'm the one struggling with anxiety, depression, shame, and thoughts of hurting myself. I'm the one trying to understand why I feel the way I do and why things that happened so long ago continue to have such a powerful hold on me.
It feels terribly unfair.
Because it is unfair.
I know that I can't go back and change what happened. I know that the past is the past, and no amount of wishing, worrying, or wondering will make it different.
But knowing that doesn't make the pain disappear.
I wish it did.
I wish there were some way to take all these memories and emotions and make them hurt a little less.
Maybe that's what recovery is supposed to help me do. Maybe that's what all these months of treatment have been leading toward.
But right now, I still feel lost.
I've spent most of my life protecting myself by not feeling.
Somewhere along the way, I learned that emotions were dangerous. That sharing how I felt made me vulnerable. That vulnerability meant I could be hurt.
So I learned to hide my feelings.
Not just from other people, but from myself.
I became very good at deciding what I would share, who I would share it with, and how much of myself I would allow others to see.
It gave me a sense of control.
And control felt safe.
The problem is that emotions don't really work that way.
You can't simply decide to stop feeling sadness, fear, anger, or shame while continuing to experience happiness, excitement, love, and joy in all their fullness.
When you spend years trying to numb the painful emotions, you can end up numbing the good ones, too.
And I think that's exactly what happened to me.
Somewhere along the way, I became emotionally numb.
I could function. I could teach. I could paint. I could laugh and smile and do all the things I was supposed to do.
But underneath it all, there was a disconnect.
I was living my life, but I wasn't always allowing myself to fully experience it.
The strange thing is that even now, knowing what I know, I still find myself trying to control my emotions.
I still want to push away the painful feelings.
I still want to close the box.
I still want to pretend that everything is okay.
Because feeling everything is frightening.
And sometimes, feeling nothing seems so much easier.
But the feelings refuse to stay hidden anymore.
The harder I try to push them down, the harder they seem to fight their way back.
January taught me that I can't keep everything locked away forever. Eventually, the pressure becomes too great.
And when everything came pouring out, I didn't just feel overwhelmed.
I felt ashamed.
I still do.
There is a part of me that believes I should have been able to prevent what happened to me. That somehow I was responsible. That I should have done something differently.
Intellectually, I know those thoughts aren't true.
I was a child.
I didn't deserve what happened.
I wasn't responsible for another person's actions.
But knowing something intellectually and believing it emotionally are two very different things.
That's one of the things I've been working on in therapy.
Trying to reconcile what I know with what I feel.
Trying to understand why shame continues to have such a powerful hold on me.
Trying to believe that I don't deserve to be punished for something someone else did.
And that's especially difficult when my mind turns against me.
Sometimes the shame becomes so intense that I start believing I deserve to suffer. That I should be punished. That somehow hurting myself would make things right.
Other times, I just want the pain to stop.
I don't necessarily have the words to explain how exhausting that is.
To be afraid of your own thoughts.
To spend so much energy trying to keep yourself safe.
To desperately want relief while also being frightened by the ways your mind suggests finding it.
I wish it weren't this way.
But right now, it is.
And then there's the grief.
I don't think I've talked enough about that.
I find myself wondering what my life might have looked like if those things had never happened.
What kind of person would I have become?
Would I have been happier?
Would I have been less anxious?
Would I have been able to experience emotions without being so afraid of them?
Would I have spent so many years believing that there was something fundamentally wrong with me?
Would I have been able to love myself a little more easily?
I wonder about those things a lot.
And I know there aren't any answers.
There's no alternate version of my life that I can visit to see how things might have turned out.
There's just this life.
The one I have.
The one that includes all the wonderful things I've experienced AND all the terrible things I've endured.
There's that word again.
AND.
A little word that has become such an important part of my recovery.
I can be grateful for the life I've built AND grieve the childhood I lost.
I can love my work, my family, my husband, my friends, and my art AND still struggle with overwhelming sadness and anxiety.
I can understand that what happened wasn't my fault AND still have difficulty believing it.
I can want to get better AND be absolutely terrified of what getting better might require me to feel.
Both things can be true.
Maybe that's something I need to keep reminding myself.
I've spent so much of my life trying to control what I feel that perhaps part of recovery is learning that I don't have to control everything.
Maybe I can learn to experience an emotion without being consumed by it.
Maybe I can learn to acknowledge the pain without punishing myself for having it.
Maybe I can learn that being vulnerable doesn't always mean being unsafe.
And maybe, someday, I can look back at that little boy who experienced so much and feel compassion for him instead of shame.
I want that for him.
I want that for me.
I don't know how to get there yet.
Right now, I'm tired. I'm frightened. I'm overwhelmed. And there are moments when I wonder whether I have the strength to keep doing this work.
But I'm still here.
I'm still trying.
I'm still going to therapy, learning skills, asking questions, and doing my best to make sense of things that never should have happened.
I don't have a tidy conclusion for this post. I don't have some grand revelation that suddenly makes everything okay.
I wish I did.
What I have is a lot of pain, a lot of unanswered questions, and a desire to find a way to live without feeling as though I'm constantly fighting myself.
I want to feel joy without being afraid of losing it.
I want to feel sadness without believing it will destroy me.
I want to stop blaming myself for things that were never mine to carry.
Most of all, I want to find some peace.
I don't know exactly what that looks like yet.
But I hope it's possible.
And for tonight, maybe that's where I'll leave things.
Still struggling.
Still learning.
Still here.
AND still hoping.