Finding My Peace
A couple years ago, I was at a music festival with a huge group of friends, and towards the end of the evening, I engaged in a heart-to heart with one of them. I was in a pretty bad place around this time- I was working for minimum wage (and trying to live on that in Brooklyn), my best friend was dating a girl who hated me, and all of my friends were in happy relationships. I felt alone so often, like I was drowning, and it seemed like I would never recover.
The friend I was talking to was someone I looked up to, someone I thought really had her shit together, and she just looked at me, put her arms around me, and told me that someday I would find my peace.
My roommate thinks this is basically the most offensive thing you could say to a person but it’s stuck with me ever since as a strange sort of goal that’s hidden at the back of my brain. The last three years have been some kind of roller coaster, with each hill being larger and harder to climb than the last, but I’ve managed to get off that ride and finally, if I dare say, find my peace. I wish I could tell you how it happened but I can’t. What I can tell you is what finding your peace feels like, at least to me.
I used to wake up anxious every single day. Each morning, I’d force myself out of bed and automatically be angry or upset, or mad at my life. I always felt like that ugly little black cloud was hanging over my head, no matter how hard I tried to shake it. Of course, there were great days, ones where I had the money to go do something fun with the people I love, but sadly they were the minority.
Then I got a real job and real health insurance, and I started going to therapy. For those that say therapy is only for sick people, I challenge you. You don’t need to be suffering to go to therapy. It’s like getting your oil changed in your car- you don’t wait for something horrible to happen, you change it as a preventative measure, to make sure nothing does happen. That’s what therapy is. You’re just taking care of your brain to protect yourself if/when something goes south.
Each week I’d work through my anxieties and my fears with my therapist, and the more I came to understand them, the easier it became to overcome them. I can tell you this- the human brain is one seriously weird place, and we are not equipped to handle it on our own. Going to therapy also allowed me to actually value my friendships.
In my dark times, I used my friends as a sounding board over and over again but it was always the same sound- me being self-deprecatingly angry about my life. After these bouts of obnoxious complaining, I’d look at the word vomit I had just spewed all over my friend, I’d see myself and how I didn’t feel any better from it, and then I’d feel even worse for letting all that icky blackness from my insides get thrown onto the outside. It was this heinous cycle that repeated itself almost every single day.
I won’t lie and say that therapy was the only thing that helped me work through things- I was finally receiving a paycheck that allowed me to afford the life I hoped for when I moved to New York. Being able to live more comfortably helped to satisfy my basic needs which allowed me to focus on my mental and physical health. The new paycheck also allowed for a gym membership, which gave me a fantastic outlet to release those anxieties and fears in a healthy way, instead of heaving them onto whoever was in my vicinity.
It’s not like there’s some magical formula that can get you out of your dark times, and maybe my path isn’t what someone else’s path will look like. But what I can say is that peace can and will come, you just have to allow yourself to get there. I had to give myself a whole lot of grace as I bumped and crashed through my rickety roller coaster but I look back at it, and I know that I’m not the same without that complicated and painful journey.
I think that’s what peace feels like. Knowing that the dark clouds will come, and they definitely still do, but also knowing that the clouds will pass and the light will shine again. And the only reason I know this is because my history tells me so. I’ve already gone through it, and I’ve come out the other side, which means I will again.
