I used to keep a journal about my daily struggles; dark thoughts, emotional pain, how far I had fallen from where I wanted to be. My first journal entry I wrote is from November 2006. We had just found out my dad needed quadruple bypass surgery. I write all of my journals as stream of consciousness, whatever is there, I pour it into my journal. For a long time my journal helped me, but it was inevitable my illness would grow too large to confront, to fit into the spiral notebooks I’ve grown to love.
My journal entries became a record of my illness rather than a purposeful instrument of therapy. They helped, but as I review them now, I see a pattern of feelings and topics that formed. My brain was skipping, like a record that skips over and over in the same spot from a deep scratch…a wound. My brain was going back over and over to the same pain and trauma from the past, and each time it did, my anxiety and depression would pounce.
I don’t write in my journal much anymore. I don’t see much reason to keep going back to the well of despair and heartbreak. Most of the time it just ends up causing more pain and trapping me in feelings I don’t want to have. Instead, I go to counseling, I take my medications, and I redirect or radically accept each emotion and situation as they rise to the surface. By facing them head on and coping with them, my anxiety and depression don’t win.
I’m not saying nothing in my life sucks, believe me, there is plenty of suckiness in my life, and some days the suck wins, that’s just reality, but at the end of the day, I have to cross that one thing off my list above all others, and that is “Survive”.
I can’t survive by myself. On the worst days, I have to tell Michelle, or Dominic, or even my dog, Sully, “I just can’t do this alone. I can’t be alone today.” It’s terrifying to be that honest with the ones I love, to let them know I can’t exist in my own skin on a given day, but for me I have to let go of control, let people help, let people care, let people see me broken.
Some times, that’s the only way I can put the pieces back together, by asking them to help me pick the fragments up and put them back together.
Uncommon Karma 