I got real

A few days ago I told you guys that it was probably time for me to start having a conversation with someone about how difficult things have gotten for me and then like everything else I put it off. I was unwilling to give a voice to the words “I need help. I’m scared of myself and of who I am becoming again. I don’t think I can keep keeping myself safe for much longer”. Instead I let the words roll around in my head and wondered when they would wear themselves out, because surely they eventually would right? Well they might, but I don’t think I have the time for that and that is why I got myself into therapy this morning, stopped faking my smile and finally let something real into the space that we were in.

Mostly I cried, tried to explain, tried to make it make sense and when I couldn’t I cried some more. I wasn’t expecting anything from her. I wasn’t expecting her to make it better or be in possession of some magic words that were going to take my pain away. I think I just needed to be heard without someone feeling the need to tell me that it’s just a bad week or that I will get through it because I don’t know if that’s true right now and neither do they. There are only two people in my life who know me from the worst of those days and who I never had to censor myself with, and they too do not know if I’m strong enough to get through this because I haven’t always been strong enough. Sure I survived it but mainly it was because I got lucky. Someone was there to pick me up or patch me and when that failed they locked me up. I’m fully aware that one of the only reasons I am still alive is because I had my freedom taken away. As much as it destroyed me internally, it was the thing that saved my physical body. Quite clearly being contained again is not something that I’m looking to experience again at any point in the future. I neither have the time, patience or heart for it. Which is why I am trying to do something that comes so unnatural to me and let someone in before it gets to the point where I am no longer capable of being able to think clearly at all. I don’t want to feel like I need to strip life away from me again, don’t want to tear myself down until the only thing I can think of is not how to get through but how to get out.

I haven’t got anything figured out right now. All I know is that there is at least a space where I can just stop pretending because that in itself is exhausting. However I do have to think about how I want to proceed in my treatment. I have two options. I can either carry on doing my trauma work, stop dancing around what happened and just tell her everything in the hope that I will begin to see if from a different perspective and I can stop hating myself so much for it. Or, we can stop and focus on how I keep myself safe right now and try to manage what is going on in the present. I want the latter but I think it’s because I’m scared of the other option. The thing is I know that I am going to have to do it at some point. I am too far in now to be able to put the lid back on that box even if I wanted to. It is demanding me to pay attention to it and it isn’t going to leave me alone until I do. I know that but it is so fucking hard! I’m undecided at this point.

Through all this I am still getting my meals in and I am still eating. I realise that it’s ok for me to hate that, to hate that I am continuing to feed my body despite everything that screams at me to stop. It is ok for me to hate recovery and the process right now. Yet I also know that I cannot listen to that, to even give it an inch would be the only invitation it would need in order to derail even more of my life. I am just doing it because I have to and so what if that is not a sustainable reason, for now it will be enough because it has to be.

Today hasn’t been good but it was necessary. It needed to happen and now that it has, maybe I can consider letting other people in too. Maybe just not having to pretend all the time that I’m fine will take away some of the exhaustion and despair. It’s hard to be hopeful at the moment but I do hope for that at the very least.