Happy Birthday TO THE GROUND!
A cartoon of me, looking hunched and scrungly, stalking across a kitchen after a hot cup of coffee.
I didn’t expect to be alive this long.
13 years ago I was in a tremendous amount of pain. What is now a diagnosis of CPTSD at the time was a crippling depression that left me sobbing any time I was alone with my thoughts. On the bus, while quietly working at my desk, and definitely while in my room, where I was holed up every hour that I wasn’t dragging myself into the office. I often didn’t drag myself into the office, chewing through my paid time off and then just taking unpaid after unpaid day off as I struggled.
What a hook for a happy birthday post, eh? Any creature in enough pain will become absolutely desperate to make it stop, by any means necessary. I never fell into addiction to treat my pain, largely because just about every drug or medication I take makes me instantly and bone-achingly nauseated, long before I took a dose high enough for any kind of palliative effect. By a trick of biology I kept off drugs, but that left me with little else I could do about the unending, unceasing, marrow-melting pain I was in. And so I landed on what my therapist would eventually call a very long-term solution to a short-term problem.
I only had one clue that it was the wrong solution at the time, and that’s the fact that I immediately felt better. The more time I spent thinking about how to carry out my plan, the more pain relief I felt and the more normal I could act. At the time that struck a note of discord with me — all I knew about that act was what I had seen in movies and TV, and shouldn’t I be even more distraught, standing on a ledge weeping, gnashing my teeth, pulling my hair out as I scream into the void? But no, I felt calmer than I had ever felt. Relaxed, finally, with a way out mapped to be done with this pain forever.
So I called in some friends to keep an eye on me while I tried out therapy instead, because the math was not mathing for me.
It was hardly an instant fix, and it took a few tries to find a therapist that I actually clicked with, but even the slow and painstaking progress I made from the few initial therapists who were a bad fit give me hope that I could actually find a way out of this that wasn’t quite so….final.
”It gets better” has always felt like a trite deferment of responsibility now, irritating to hear when you’re in crisis and need help, but that doesn’t make it wrong, either. These days I have drug therapies to assist with the worst of the depression, and between that and therapy I no longer want to kill myself, and only occasionally think about laying down in the woods and letting the worms do their work. I don’t begrudge myself an escapist fantasy now and again as a healthy coping skill, as a little treat if you will, so long as I continue to do the right thing and reach out to friends and a therapist to actually help.
The worst of this went down when I turned 30. I’m 43 today, and while I often still struggle with believing anyone could love me, sometimes I actually do believe it, and that feeling is worth chasing and holding onto. I dunno if it really does get better for everyone, but I can pretty confidently say that I got better. For me.
xoxoxoxo,
J.
P.S: as a birthday present to me, reject fascism, deny AI, be in love with the world around you and the people in it, and maybe buy some dice ;)
