Back in November, I talked about seeing a therapist to help come back from a long and deep depression. I started seeing someone the following week, and recently had my last appointment, leaving the door open for ad-hoc tune-ups as I feel I need them.
Am I cured? No. But I am much, much better. I've gone from having weeks where I could barely get out of bed and spent the majority of the day crying or fighting back tears to having the occasional bad day. And even on those days, I still feel like myself. It's not so much that the circumstances of my life have become less stressful, but rather that I've now got a box full of tools I can pull out when things start to feel overwhelming and I see the blackness beginning to creep into the periphery.
My therapist and I talked a lot about my tendency to give my thoughts paralyzing power. Do I still do that? Sometimes, yes. But now I'm aware of it, and I have coping mechanisms in order to counter and fight back.
I've continued running throughout, and while it took a long time for running to feel therapeutic again and not like just another failure ("That didn't feel as good as it should have." "I should have covered more distance." "My pacing was way off...what a horrible effort."), I still kept at it because it is important to me. Surprisingly, I didn't write. At all. I didn't write about my depression or treatment here on the blog, and I didn't create any new poems. Which is weird because that has always been a very productive time for me as far as writing goes--I guess I just have a better negative vocabulary because writing happy poems has always proved to be 100% more difficult than writing ones detailing dark places. I did, however, write my first poem I consider "real" (as in I really thought about metaphor and theme and those things rather than spewing out a few thoughts and then arranging them on a page), and it was like I shook off the final bits of dust from my old self. It was like remembering a friend from childhood--it was a part of myself I had been walking around without for many months, and it felt amazing to be reconnected.
So here I am, 14 months after the initial onset, and after 7 months of attentive talk therapy. I am grateful to those who supported me when I set out on this journey to get well, and I am thankful still for those who are sticking by me as I continue to shed that old skin and leave it behind.
The tools I've gained in therapy are ones I can take with me in all the challenges I will meet, and ones, too, I can pass along to those who need them for their own battles. 2014 has been an enormously difficult year on personal, professional, and financial levels; it has probably been the most challenging year of my life so far, in fact. I, along with John, have undertaken some huge leaps--home ownership chief among them--and some have paid off, and some have disappointingly been learning experiences. But I feel that I can now handle things that would have broken me a year ago. And that's enough to remind me I have grown, and I will be okay. I am okay.
Thank you to anyone who has cared.
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