Keep Showing Up For Yourself
I was sitting next to a really good friend, my back against a window that looked onto the Empire State Building, when she asked me about therapy.
My legs were tucked under me and I smiled.
I was tired, my phone was vibrating off the table and I’d just had an up and down day with anxiety, but this was a good moment.
Almost three years ago I decided to go to therapy for the same reason that someone checks into rehab when they feel they’re going to relapse — I wanted to show up for myself. While some would excuse where I could potentially go in 6 months time, when graduation hit and I was left noticing all I didn’t have, I couldn’t do that to myself.
I didn’t know how, or to what extent, therapy would give me tools, but I knew I had to give myself my best chance. Back then, it was one call and the lifeline of a scheduled appointment for January.
Three birthdays ago, I’d learned that to show up for yourself means that you have to do a lot of hard work. It hurts and you’re picking at scabs you didn’t know were even there. Then once you’ve picked at them and they’re healing, you find more.
I explained this to my therapist 5 days before my 24th birthday. I told her that I’d been reflecting on how my life has played out since 20 and that if there’s one thing that I could tell my 20-year-old self it would be that therapy makes you feel safe enough to unlearn and untangle the negative relationships you, your body and your mind exist in.
But for as much as you feel safe, you still have to wrestle.
In ways that therapy demands it also gives. It lifts you to a place where you can appreciate the positives in your life.
For me, those positives will always be people. I’m anchored in them. I take from them. They’re Tyler, Mileva, Mabel, Carlee, Jineen, Stephanie, Molly, Emily, Amanda, Caitlyn, Barbara, Holly, Q, Lily…
All people who have walked into my life in the last 3 years and taught me by example what it means to show up.
Three years of therapy taught me that you learn by doing. You learn to breathe by taking a single breath at a time. You learn to love by finding ways to let people love you.
If you pay attention to how you show up for others, you learn to show up for yourself.
I show up for people in small, meaningful ways. It’s in the way I hold their hand when we’re on the couch. Or in the way that I hold up a mirror to how their strengths and weaknesses make them the people I love.
Which is why, the biggest gift I could ever give myself isn’t the 45 minutes I sit in a chair by my therapist and talk to her, it’s the 5–10 minutes when I dig deep enough to tell her about the corner of my mind that I’ve been ignoring for the sake of surviving in a world without tools.
It’s in the small, meaningful moment when I honor my humanity enough not to hate it.
It was the 2 minutes in the session right after Mother’s Day when in between sobs, I told her that I didn’t want to think of myself when I thought of the word obligation.
It was the sentence punctuated by gasps of air when I told her that I didn’t just come into therapy because I wanted to be ready for graduation, I came because I was scared to love after loss. I told her that I knew this because I was scared to love my dog.
It was the way I clenched It’s Kind Of A Funny Story in my hand as I told her all the reasons I was pissed at Craig, the protagonist. Top of my list? He wasn’t okay at the end of the book, I knew it, he knew it, and still he walked out of the psych ward because he’d done what I knew I was more than capable of doing — he’d used his words to burrow his way out.
But instead of using his words to make way for more truths and better chances, he’d used them as a way to convince those around him that he was okay.
During that session, after I made it clear that I knew I was capable of what Craig had mastered, my reprieve came in the length of time it took me to answer my therapist’s question:
“Why don’t you then? Why don’t you tell me what I want to hear so that we’re not here weekly?”
“Because I know that I wouldn’t be okay no matter how nice the words would sound.”
It’s those 5–10 minutes of truth in every session that free me.
So, when my friend asked me about therapy because she was thinking about trying it. I told her that I’m a fan.
I find value in sitting in a room for 45 minutes because for 5–10 of those, when I’m vulnerability personified, I get the chance to show up for the kid I was, the adult I’m becoming, the person I want to be.
Life doesn’t stop being hard just because you go to therapy. People still die. Hospitals are still places you have to step foot in. Relationships with families are still minefields.
But for 5–10 minutes you’re reminded that you have the tools to talk to the elephant in the room and find a way to get through to it.
Those 5–10 minutes of extreme truth remind you that you’re worth showing up for yourself when the next moment comes around.
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I’m the founder of toodamnyoung.com. I’m a writer, editor and entrepreneur. You can find my personal essays on Medium + other writing on MTV, Forbes and PopSugar Latina. I also host Creating Espacios, podcast for the next generation of Latina trailblazers.
Follow along as I condense essays into 140 characters: https://twitter.com/vivnunez
