This is a hard thing to admit. It's an ugly thing to admit. But that doesn't make it any less true. Part of me doesn't want to get better. Or more accurately, part of me doesn't believe that I can get better.
I started 2020 deep in crisis. I wanted to die, I found myself regretting not taking my life back in April when I started self harming again, and I was not okay.
I started noticing that thinking about my future gave me intense anxiety, and I would have panic attacks thinking about really mundane things because they reminded me of not only my mortality, but how insufferably long a human life can feel. It took me a while to identify why I was feeling so intensely panicked about my life, my future, even my eventual death, but it finally occurred to me.
The future scares me because I have never really felt like I had one. I still don't really feel like I have one, and thinking about it too much triggers panic attacks.
The truth is, I feel irreparably broken. I don't feel like a happy, healthy future is possible for me, and the prospect of living another sixty years drowning in my own misery is unfathomable. I can't find joy or hope in looking towards my future, it just looks empty and bleak to me.
I want someone to fix me. I want to be a person who was never hurt in the first place. I want someone to undo what was done to me, and that's simply impossible. It's not that I'm unwilling to do the work it takes to process these things and heal, I've been working at that diligently ever since I discovered that there's a name for what I've been going through. I'm just incredibly bitter that I have to take the responsibility of fixing something I didn't even break.
The unfortunate truth is, no one is going to fix me. It's going to take a lot of time for me to heal, and for the most part I am okay with that, but part of me still doesn't believe that I can get better, and that this entire struggle has no fucking point. It's that part of me that's road blocking my recovery and I've felt so completely alone with it.
For anyone reading this who doesn't know me, my sister is my fucking hero. She's got more issues than vogue, but she has not only kicked ass at her own healing and recovery work, but she's helped so many other people (myself included) by talking about the journey. She's also a great friend, an incredible advocate and mother to her kids, and the absolute brightest sunflower of a person that I've ever had the good fortune of knowing. We're not related, but she is the person who taught me what family is supposed to feel like, so she is my sister.
She's inspired me and pushed me, and in the process of watching her grow, I sort of came to idolize her for how strong she is, and I forgot that she hasn't always had her shit together. I turned to her recently about how I've been struggling and how I feel like there's nothing more than this cycle of suffering for me, and she said something that really hit me.
She told me that she felt exactly the way I do before she started therapy. She didn't want to go, she didn't see the point, and she believed that she could not get better. It seems so silly to me now, but it never occurred to me that any part of the work she's done was actually hard for her - she makes it look so easy! Maybe I'm inherently selfish, or maybe I've just been drowning so deeply in my trauma and depression that I couldn't see beyond the face value, but that one little sentence opened my eyes so damn wide. She's not strong because her fight is easy, she's strong because people love her and got her past the point of believing she couldn't get better, so she could fight for the life she deserves to live, and she fights so fucking hard.
All this to say, I'm starting to believe that maybe there's more for me. Maybe I can get better, maybe I can have a life that's more than just surviving. Maybe I can get better.
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