okay

so it is monday and i started this post two thursdays ago and edited on last week’s saturday and have held onto it over the weekend and am now posting on a monday. so the days are everywhere because this is one of the deep, vulnerable ones. you know the ones that i started this blog for yet there’s always this fear of maybe none of it making sense but you know what? i don’t think it actually matters because it makes sense to me and these are just my words that one day i will be able to come back to and who knows? maybe at that time even i will be like “dude this made no sense” nonetheless here is my depression. she was quiet, kind of sneaky and maybe was worsening over time and of course was always brought on by those vicious attacks of grief where you just want the person you lost back, like physically back in your life. like you wish you could just rewind all of life to go back to the part you loved with them. like you just need everything to go back the way it was and stay like that. and as many of you know, it’s fucking impossible to do that and in all the yearning for it it’s as if your very fragile heart is just being constricted. it’s like there’s this machine with a squeezing mechanism that for every attempt it just slowly begins to tighten and tighten until you just give up because it’s not fucking working and then you’re left with this shriveled raisin of a heart that makes you feel like a shell of a person somehow. but also where the fuck does this squeezing machine come from? it’s just like all of a sudden your chest feels like some overstuffed garage that is busting at the seams with entirely too many fucking things. and then it’s all just sooo heavy that you fall right along with all the things and there you are – laying motionless and confused as to when you ended up here again. you think. and i think that again part is the heavy part that you somehow cannot seem to deal with because the last time you were here it was fucking scary and you actually never thought you’d be here again and guess what? hi, here you are again. and you don’t know what will happen. 

this part, this “hello it’s me again” that is always my cue for therapy. it has become this pavlovian response. ping! immediately schedules therapy and then i sit there and we talk for fifty minutes and i kid you fucking not, i leave with epiphanies like my new grief that i am coexisting with right now had triggered my depression. and in all actuality what i was really dealing with was complete sadness but sadness is just so damn close to that familiar space of depression hence the triggering. and with this trigger, i could not help but think of the only depression i’ve ever known – the one that ends with me self harming and then wanting to die and that depression is terrifying. but you see, what i couldn’t pick apart is that my depression was strongly tied to a sixteen year old jessica – the one who had no idea where life was going to go, the one who felt completely unworthy of everything in this life because somehow she was filled with so much uncertainty and fear that life would somehow not be what she wanted, as if the life she was dreaming of was 100% out of her league and it all just felt so damn hard that the only option was to self harm to cope with all the overwhelming feelings. and of course all those feelings seem so small now but at the time they were big. it was all i knew. so the moment i came to realize this in therapy was the moment i was able to approach my grief differently. it came in like a tsunami like it always does. i was driving and i remembered my dad and the feeling started but this time i saw her. i saw sixteen year old jessica TERRIFIED, sitting against a wall, her head on her knees, uncontrollably crying, shoulders shaking, her right hand tightly gripping a razor. and instead of pushing her away and ignoring her, i envisioned sitting next to her and i hugged her. i cried with her and i explained “we are okay. you are okay and you live a beautiful life that we could have never dreamed of and we are so so so lucky but our dad has died and that is really fucking hard right now but you are okay and you are equipped for this. you right now still have your dad and your mom. hug them so tight and love them. tell them thank you. but as for right now, yes it is incredibly hard and we are really fucking sad but we are okay.” this is weird but i swear she dropped her razor, she wiped her tears and she smiled. she fucking smiled, like a happy safe smile. like she knew what it was she needed to do. she just needed to let go because everything works out and i wonder if that jessica becomes someone else. i wonder if there is this other version of jessica walking around simply because i have learned how to look at her. i think for the longest time i couldn’t look at her, which made it difficult to see how far we’ve come. and i think i couldn’t look at her because there was shame in what felt like was a weak point in my life.

i owe my life to two different therapists, one was there for the suicidal thoughts at sixteen and the other i am currently seeing. in these sessions before dad passed, we covered a lot of ground on feelings like shame, unworthiness, regret, and guilt and i will forever be thankful that somehow we covered those hard topics prior to my dad passing. i have a suspicion that if grief had entered at a time when the other feelings were not resolved it would have been pure catastrophe, like an absolutely horrendous scenario that i would never wish on anyone. anyway, now that i am on a face to face level with shame i think i was able to realize that maybe somehow some shame was still lingering in the background in regards to my years of self harm and suicidal thoughts and when i could identify “ahhh i’m embarrassed by this”, i knew that it was okay because these things don’t carry shame for me anymore. shame is no longer this huge feeling that is looking down on me, we are equals and at times, i like to think i’m bigger than my shame and i tell it what to do like “please, leave” and it does now. my therapist is wonderful and she had this way of teaching me to forgive myself and to be kind to myself and to love myself despite the choices i may have made in the past because we are human and we are just doing the best we can with what we know and that’s all i knew at that time. and please remember love is a superpower. especially self-love. we can do anything with love, i swear. thank you for reading. i hope you all are unraveling your things in the safest spaces filled with so much love, kindness and forgiveness for yourselves.

and now i am posting this because i honestly could not stand one more day of editing. i’m certain it could use it but i cannot. also something i have come to realize, nothing will ever seem ready and it will always seem like you could do more editing, more tweaking, more fixing when sometimes all you need to do is just let it be and over time it’s own fixing happens and you realize it was all a part of some process and it’s all actually rather perfect. so here is to letting things be.

l, js