Necessary Roughness

We all have so many more choices then we realize.
It’s not should I live or should I die?
Am I moving forward or going backward?
Should I take meds or not?
How do I stop suffering?
It is not what do I do.
It is one second feeling awful and at the edge
and the next second feeling so in love with what is going on in front of you
and knowing there is no way to quickly get rid of the awful
and to get the joy to stay.
This disease.
Is it a disease, a malfunction,
a misunderstanding between different parts of my brain?
I don’t know.
I am trying to solve, to define, to understand.
But its about living in the problem, acknowledging it,
being okay with suffering, and shit, and pain
without having solutions, or tools, or answers
Answers are never as permanent or meaningful as they seem.
They make it feel like something is taken care of, they make others comfortable with your pain.
But pain is uncomfortable, uncertain, and moving slowly through it sometimes not moving at all, it is necessary.
And it feels awful.

Let Go

 Anger turned inward is depression,
anger turned sideways is Hawkeye”
– Dr Sidney Freedman, MASH
Let go of it. Be at peace.
These words have been said to me a lot in life and I bristle every time. Fuck you, I wanna say.
How do you let go, what’s the magic recipe for being at peace?
I ask and ask.
I am a do-er. A doctor, a friend, someone gives me advice and I will try it.
I beg this doctor to tell me what to do. She won’t.
“You are filled with a lifetime of anger,” she tells me “and the only person you let it out on is yourself.”
“SO WHAT DO I DO?”
No answer.
So I have been trying to figure it out on my own. Last night I was angry and I said to myself what do I do this. I chose to express it with sarcasm and humor, with some passive aggressiveness for good measure. It felt good for a moment, I’m not gonna lie. And then I felt like shit. (I’m sure there is some sort of food metaphor I could put in here but I’m gonna skip it.)
So then the regret and self-blame sank in, all in this big feeling I have  a lot in life:
I am uncomfortable and I can’t change this and I want to kill myself.
As you can probably guess, it’s the last part that causes some problems, so I sat there frustrated, thinking, how do I let this go, how do I feel at peace.
And what I assume many others have figured out in life, and maybe I even had heard before, hit me differently and helped me.
I realized letting go, making peace, doesn’t mean you get rid of the uncomfortable, it doesn’t mean not being angry or not being in pain. It means being okay with feeling all that awful shit and knowing there is not one fucking thing you can do about it, and like a fucking wound, over time, the negative feelings will lessen, but they will always be part of you, so you better fill yourself with the good shit, the fun, the wonderful people who lift you up cause the scars from the wounds will always be there and, joy and good, that’s the only way for them to feel less a part of you, that and admitting they’re there, and it sucks, and you can’t fucking change that.
And that is what hit me last night, and man, I wish that meant all is good, but anything better is better, and I’m liking the idea of exploring what this all means for me.

Hope Springs/Spring Hopes

What do I hope for when I talk about mental illness?
I know what I don’t hope for.
I don’t hope that people will think I’m saying my life is harder than theirs.
It is not.
It is a different struggle, one that I want to help demystify.

I hope that by sharing my struggles it will help me to understand what is going on even more.
I hope that it will make those embarrassed to live with mental illness, feel a little more comfortable.
I hope that it will make those who don’t fully get it, get it a little bit more.
I hope it will make people ask questions, reach out, reach into themselves.
I hope it will remind myself that we don’t need permission to be vulnerable, that it is not a deficit, that being vulnerable doesn’t mean you’re being a victim.

I hope that people will understand while it is nothing I’m ashamed of (most of the time,) it does not define who I am, and I can’t wait till it is less a focus of my life.

I hope that people get that mental illness is not a personality trait, that it is a disease, cause as personality traits go, I’m a pretty fun time.

And for myself, I hope that I can believe all of this, that I can let go of people not getting it or opportunities lost because of my openness, because there is so, so, so much more in the win column of sharing

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