Once you tell people exactly what you will and won’t do, it’s amazing how they’ll adjust. Or they won’t. And then an opportunity or relationship goes away. And that’s okay.
Once I got my body on the right track, slowly but surely healing, day by day, I started working to repair my mind. It was not easy, because everything felt shattered into a thousand-piece puzzle. But I finally sat down and tried to put those pieces back together, one by one.
I started with months of self-involved and semi-crazed journaling. I filled five notebooks with every insecurity and rage and sadness I could think of. I wrote down everything I felt, including terrible things about people I loved, in order to move through and get to the TRUTH of what I couldn’t see through my fogged state of mind. And I hate to say it, but the more ruthless I got, the better I felt.
“I hate X’s face! I’ve hated him for years!”
Working through my initial reaction always got me to understand what was really going on.
“Okay, I don’t really hate him. I really feel upset about that one time he forgot to invite me to his birthday party. I mean, everyone we knew was posting so many fun Instagram pictures, and I pressed a heart on all of them even though the whole time I was curled up in my bed sobbing!”
Also, deeper and less funny stuff than that.
I dug and dug and kept digging. All that introspection helped me get perspective and realize, This thing I’m feeling, it might NOT be the TRUTH . . .
There’s a great Eleanor Roosevelt quote, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Well, I discovered that, even though the feeling had ruled me my entire life, no one could make me be anxious without my consent. It was an amazing realization.
And yes, I did seek professional mental help. But avoidant habits die hard. So instead of going directly to a certified specialist, first I decided to try the softball approach and hired a “creativity life coach.” Boy, did this woman embrace the clichés of her profession hard. She wore a lot of tie-dye. I had to carry crystals to “ward off the negative spirits.” Just entering her office every week gave my sinus cavities aromatherapy seizures. Oh, and she loved the hypnosis.
“You are a tree. You are the trunk. You have to cut off the branches that are draining you and concentrate on that part before you can reach outside yourself again. Repeat after me, I am a trunk.”
“I feel stupid, but I am a trunk. I am a trunk.”
Talking to a real objective human who was a captive audience (since I was paying her) was a good first step. But when she wanted to move on to some strange rebirth regression therapy with screaming and stuff, it occurred to me that she wasn’t accredited and could legally blog about how weird I was later. So FINALLY I moved on and got my very own certified psychologist. With a lying-down couch and everything!
Showing up each week and having someone to complain to without the fear of someone tweeting about it was spectacular. I would recommend ANYONE try it. We’re all a garbage dump of dysfunction, but if you get in there and churn the problems, they turn to mulch faster so new things can grow out of them. (I have no idea how to mulch, so I hope that analogy is accurate.)
Even with all those efforts, recovery was slow. A few months in, I was ready to give myself an Olympic gold medal for minuscule things. Like mustering the effort to refill an empty toilet paper roll. Look at you taking initiative. Go, girl!
But after a while, and I mean MONTHS of learning how to be a real human and attending several new-wave ’80s concerts (hearing “The Safety Dance” in person can be incredibly healing), the pressure I’d put on myself my whole life . . . lightened. Eventually, I emerged from my own private Hades. And I used the time to re-form my brain to be less anxious, live in the present, and not panic about the future or regret the past. (As much as I could, having installed so much messed-up hard-wiring before.)
I started getting creative ideas for the company again. I got motivated to throw out my old stretched-out bras that hung open at the top like a pocket. During that time of self-care, I became a different person. But it was fine. Everyone adjusted to the “new me,” including me.
Eleven months later, during the summer of 2014, I was eating a burrito in my car before a Geek & Sundry meeting I was super excited about. I thought about all the people in my life who’d helped me through the horrible year and a half before, and realized, Wow, it must have been really hard on my boyfriend/business partner/friends for me to be so unhappy for so long. And I started crying. Because it felt like I had finally recovered enough to be able to think about other people again. (There was also a Mumford & Sons song playing at the time. Banjo + Black Beans = Waterworks.)