This is a foreign feeling. What is it like to stop automatically hitting the self destruct button? To choose to breathe instead of letting impulse and survival mode rule your actions.. where the fuck am I? It’s like options? Wha? I can CHOOSE happiness?? Like I had never been given that before. When you are rooting for yourself and you join your own team. It is a bizarre tone. I’ve only recently decided to help myself.. maybeeee a year-ish? A year or so of full throttle. -insert guy fieri’s face- before that it was month after month of indecision and doubt.. I never before took a hard look at where I was and where I am today. This moment.. in bed with hello kitty pajama pants and chickpea tacos in my belly. Paint on my hands from dicking around with new paints and a stillness in every room. I dug my way out of chaos.. ducking my head low and weaving around life’s corners.. being bombarded with toxicity and trauma and wondering if at any point I’d find peace or if it would know where to find me. Keep moving.
I think I’ve found a quiet place to recover for now. I am in it and I accept that I have had to give up what I’ve known inside and out to find this place. It’s like I’ve stumbled into another world and I’m relearning the basics. What are the rules here? Who do I want in this new world? What am I like? Do I still hurt? Or is there a new threshold for pain.. how does coping work here? Recovery is a wild space. Each day here I am slowly getting better.. I don’t sit with that often enough. Like my god, you can relax and stop fighting with the air. Like it’s somehow plotted against you. The initial reaction is to go up in arms or deconstruct at the slight memory of the last world. I hope to never forget that place I came from. I do have hope that I will leave it in my memory though.. I find myself pulling it to the present like pulling out a photo album and inserting yourself into the slots. You have no way of putting yourself in those photos again.. but your brain pulls you there. Like when I think about the days I spent just so fucking tired of ripping myself apart that I couldn’t even try to go to work. I missed school. I didn’t find any reason to pull anything together. I just laid there in bed. I think it scares me now.. staying in bed or relaxing in my room. It gives me this ramped up fear-feeling like JESUS FUCK, no.. I can’t lay here like I used to.. I can’t go back to letting it consume me.. I cannot miss work… I can’t afford to back slide.. but it’s different now. I have favorable circumstances, but that fear still flickers. I’m not in danger, but it feels like it used to when I would retreat into myself. Recovery takes getting used to.. an adjustment period. Sitting with those things that you blocked out to survive. You revisit them with a stronger mind.. it’s still scary though. Like visiting hour in your brain’s monster-jail. You know it’s secured but my god it is STILL haunting to look at each of them in the eyes and acknowledge it. You are afraid that it will escape and tear up your brain again. That it’ll become loose and destroy the beauty you’ve crafted from chaos and all evidence of recovery will be wiped away. It’s precious now.. how protective I’ve become over my space and my heart. I’m still renovating in there, my brain. It’s coming along slowly but surely.
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