A message for World Mental Health Day 2017
I sent a group chat to my best friends from high school at 3 am from my freshman dorm room. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but it upset them enough that they all showed up within the next 12 hours, traveling to Iowa State from various colleges around the Midwest. When I asked them what they told their professors, how they were able to just drop everything, all of their responsibilities and deadlines, and show up here so quickly when they lived hours away, they told me,
“Family emergency.”
They called my mom, helped me find a therapist and make an appointment, and set up a schedule to check in on me over the next couple weeks until we could be together in person again for Thanksgiving.
I was afraid to go to therapy. I’m not sure why, exactly, because I had always believed in therapy, hypothetically. But the thought of talking about the things he had done to me and how out of control I felt inside…it was too much. Everything was too much. I froze every time my appointment approached. So my mom faithfully left work each week and drove me to every therapy appointment, waited outside the office for me, and drove me back.
That was ten years ago. It’s hard to believe that I have spent most of the last decade in weekly therapy appointments, but I have. Ten years ago I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and what at the time was called an Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (EDNOS). When I heard my therapist tell me that I met the qualifications for PTSD, I was confused, but as she read to me out loud the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it was like she was naming things that lived inside me, but I had never had the words for before.
I then did what every perfectionist would do in this situation, which is to go to the library and check out every book I could find, scouring Google for any article or blogpost about these acronyms that I had been assigned. Looking back, its pretty characteristic of how my illnesses manifest — seeking out control in situations in which I feel unsafe or unstable.
For years I thought that if I went to therapy every week, if I said the right answers and did the right things, if I researched enough, I could talk myself out of having a mental illness. As if it was something that I could reason with, a partner I could debate and win.
And still, now I wish so badly that I could write for you a story in which I am triumphant over these things. I wish my story had a linear chronology, a beginning (the trauma), a breaking point (that group chat message), a solution (therapy), and a nice and neat tidy ending. I wish I could graduate from mental illness, see it as part of my story, a thing that I have overcome. I want to be all better. I want to be “better” because my friends love me and invested me, and I want to see them get a good return on that investment. I want to be better because I know my mom sacrificed for me, paying for my therapy copays, driving me to my appointments. I want to be better because I love my spouse and my children, and they deserve someone “better,” someone who doesn’t fall apart near trauma anniversaries, who can tell them a story with a happy ending, who doesn’t start screaming without knowing it when fireworks go off or black out if a man blocks the doorway. And I want to be better, for me, because then maybe all of this was for something. Maybe my suffering had meaning, maybe my abusers don’t get to win. I want that story. I feel angry I’m not better, I feel guilty I’m not better.
I’m learning, slowly, that recovery isn’t like that, though, at least not for me. Recovery isn’t a straight line, where one day I am “all better.” Recovery is a spiral, maybe, hopefully in the right direction, but with twists and turns and ups and downs. Sometimes recovery looks like it getting worse before it gets better. Sometimes recovery means I go months without a symptom and then one day it all rushes back and it feels like starting over. And in those times when it is clear to me that I am not “all better,” where I find myself in old thought patterns or familiar destructive behaviors and rituals, it isn’t because I’m a failure. It’s because that’s how the process works. And in those times I need to hold myself in the same gentle care that my loved ones gave me, remembering that health and wholeness is not a finish line we cross, but a lesson with a lifetime to learn.