An Undeniable Breakthrough

I have this habit, that when I wake up on a day where my mind feels heavy and my emotional scale is teetering towards the darker side, where I will pull up Pinterest and click the "Quotes" category. On that page, the first quote that I see will be the leading mantra that I will tell myself throughout the day to bring me back down to the ground. So, the other day I clicked on said category, and the first quote that emerged was something that hit me to my core. 

Woah, thats a statement. When I read this laying in my bed, about to face the world and all the demons thats occupy my mind, I was hit with a feeling of notice; noticing that my breakdown had stretched over the span of years and it left me wondering where my breakthrough was. Most of the people that I surround myself with know that I am the first one to admit that I am always a mess. Whether it be the fact that I can never remember to put a phone charger in my bag, or that I will forget to put hairspray in my hair and I look like Doc from Back to the Future; safe to say that I am human and don't function on the perfection spectrum. However, the mess that I have been in the past two years is a different story. 

So here goes...

Lets start this story with the fact that I have always been busy. Busy with school, busy with work, busy with my social life, and the list goes on. This business kept me occupied and distracted. I was able to focus my mind on the motions that my body was so used to going through. When I say "staying busy", I mean that by wanting to keep my mind distracted from the emptiness that I felt, the pain and soul-sucking feeling of incompletion. I could feel the pressures of not only my mind and own insecurities pressing down on my shoulders, but also could feel the pressure and expectations of others around me pushing me back into the hole that I was so afraid to be in. When I refer to "the hole", that would be the reference that I use when I am speaking about the emotional hole that I dug myself when I was actively participating in my eating disorder. My therapist was always really keen on visualization, and I had trained myself to see a hole; a hole where I liked to live out of the light and away from view of others in fear they would see my true self: a damaged and broken soul. This hole was the place where the darkness comforted me, it taught me the ability to press all of those unwanted emotions into a small corner and find comfort in avoidance. The feelings of ugliness, being unwanted, insignificant and alone was what the hole kept secret. 

Now when I was a junior in high school, my family saved me from an attempted suicide. Upon the realization of how emotionally broken I had become, I was thrust into therapy to fix and heal what my soul felt. This therapy was something that I will always be thankful for because it gave me the opportunity to function; the ability to act like I was ok. This merely put a pice of plywood over the top of the hole. It still existed in the close corners of my mind as a place where I could seek comfort when times really got bad. I could still peer under that plywood and make sure that my feelings were safeguarded by the darkness and invisibility the wood gave it. 

Flash forward a couple of years, and I felt the emptiness creep up behind me, and embrace me like an old friend that had been watching in the shadows, and saw that I needed a familiar face. And as I had done in the past, I welcomed the darkness with a hug and gave it a home in my heart. That emptiness became my norm. I felt like a piece of my soul had been stolen or missing, and that my soul was defective and that happiness was something I would never understand or obtain. It was when I was sorting through my closet, trying to downsize, when I stumbled upon the journals that I kept from high school that documented the primal and base thoughts that I had about myself and my life. The writings of a girl whose pain was so unbearable. And for an instant, that thought crossed my mind. You know, the thought. About whether my life was really worth still existing. 

And then I felt it: my heart, my soul and all its emptiness. 

In that moment, all of the emotions that I had kept safe in the dark hole came flooding up and I was forced to face the one thing that had always felt broken and empty: Myself. I like to think that that day was my "overwhelming breakdown" because I looked directly into the face of the person that knew me the best; that knew what made me crumple from anxiety and pain, that knew what made me feel insignificant. I wish that I could say that it was like in the movies where the girl picks herself up off her closet floor and conquers her demons in the remaining 45 minutes of the movie; because unfortunatly thats not how life functions, especially mine. In fact, I didn't seek help until about two weeks after said breakdown and it was through therapy. To me, talking about something and finding a way to verbalize what I was feeling was a way to force me to face it instead of surpassing it. My mom made a good point when we talked about my going back to therapy because my initial therapy sessions that I went to, and lasted a good 4 years, were something that I was intiaiilly forced into out of desperation because of my teenage emotional fragility, but it was my way of bandaging the problem, not sucking out the poison and starting clean. In continued for years in therapy because it gave me an excuse to say, "I'm ok because I go to therapy," all the while not doing the work or believing what my therapist told me.

My decision to go back to therapy was the first decision that I independently made in order to pull me back down to the ground. Now, you would think that this post would conclude with my big revelation that I am healed and fixed my broken soul, but the truth is that I am nowhere near the end to my journey. I am just getting started. I have been going to therapy for about two months now, once a week, and have been able to face the thoughts that I had and hold myself accountable to how I treat myself. 

This blog will be my little corner of sunshine where I can talk about those things that we as women and human beings face daily in our twisted and warped society. This blog will be an outlet where I can express who I am, and share my truth with those who want to read. This blog will be a hodgepodge of the things that bring a smile to my face, and hopefully yours. This blog is my undeniable breakthrough.