movement

Forward & Back

~ storm257 ~ 3 Comments

It’s a dance on the edge of a cliff I cannot trust will stay beneath my feet and yet I do nothing to move back.

Yesterday I had a deeply dissatisfying first session with a therapist who realized, due to a conflict of interest (we know people in common), that we wouldn’t be a suitable match. I had, even without the added knowledge, figured out it wasn’t going to work for me. Because therapy is like dating – it is generally evident in the first 5-10 minutes if there will be a point in moving forward. For me, if the therapist is either too stiff or regimented, or conversely too saccharin, things are going to come to a halt pretty quickly. Better to just move on and waste no more time on niceties.

And this point is important for a few reasons: These things happen. We are humans and there are only so many ways we can communicate which are satisfying and honest. When we are depressed, or like me currently, in an upswing – feeling better, cautiously optimistic about recent changes to employment and in the best season of the year- it is important to keep the momentum going. Because stumbling is a real possibility and stumbling leads to falling. So that’s the edge I am talking about. It is always there, sometimes easier to ignore, but there, and I remain at varying distances, nearby.

The fear of moving too close, coupled with the inevitable approach of winter (sorry to say, but we all know), can be easier to manage when one feels secure. Security comes in many forms – work, love, family, friends, routines, medication, meditation, exercise, practice – also in our society – reliable access to mental health services.

I am fortunate to have some of these things. I am fortunate to be working toward strengthening some of these things. I have been in a position of greater access to mental health services before (read as: private insurance) and I know how good access can look and feel.

I am not currently in that place. Being reliant on Medicaid is limiting in two ways.

First, had I not ended up in crisis, I would not be in the position I am now, hoping to find a therapist within the practice where I was referred with no other current option.

Second, had I not spent two months trying to access mental health services when my depression symptoms were more debilitating and I had just found out I had Medicaid; had I not been told by every provider’s office I contacted that they were not taking new clients, to call back next month, I would not have ended up in crisis. I know this. I know this to the core of my being.

This thin line I walk is not new to me – I have been here before – I can be trusted to know when I need help. There are many of us here, dancing along this tenuous edge, frustrated by the obstacles which seem to force us closer to being unable to control our descent. Many will not survive. Please let that sink in. We are not alone and we are all struggling. We can make this better for those who are so close to falling. But not with this current system. This is me today:FullSizeRender(4)

Deadline

~ storm257 ~ 1 Comment

Sometimes it is necessary to set a deadline in life. We spend a good deal of time anticipating “the moment” when we will be ready for something to happen: new work, new space to live, children, love. We expect, perhaps foolishly, that when that arbitrary time arrives we will be ready. For example, when I was in my early twenties, I thought that by the time I was in my late twenties I would be ready to have children. Never mind that my romantic relationships had been less than healthy, or that I was still quite clueless about what I wanted to do for work, I felt that twenty-six seemed like a perfect age to become a mother. Fortunately for me and my maybe baby, nothing lined up to make that a reality.  I was ending a damaging relationship that had dragged on several years too long, beginning graduate school, and moving to a new city. More than that, I was starting to change the way I viewed my life and I was reasonably happy with those changes. The happiness factor, turns out, was the essential part of transforming the right time into the not quite yet time.

It has been more than ten years since I was that young woman and I realize I could stand to take a lesson from her. She called off an engagement because her gut told her it was the right thing to do. She applied to a graduate program at a school she had always longed to attend because her gut told her it was the right thing to do. She moved to a city she had loved from the first moment she visited because…well, you see where this is going. In the space of one year, she transformed her life, which had not been a happy one for some time, into doing and being something she felt proud of and safe within. She took a risk that her body did not reject and that her mind and heart responded to with joy and excitement. She was smart back then and I am proud of her now.

When I made the decision to move from Maine to New Jersey it was the hardest decision I have made since I was twenty-six. No joke. I have moved cross-country in the intervening years, been diagnosed with depression and attended therapy, left all of my closest friends on the west coast, been alone in a life I never expected to have in Maine, but the several months leading up to moving from Maine to New Jersey were harder than any of that. What made this decision so hard was that I tried to let my heart lead and chose to pay less attention to my gut. Sometimes what our guts say feels like fear and does not feel particularly trust-worthy. Sometimes we want to believe that we’ve had so much to fear, been hurt so many times, that our gut is just reacting to all that baggage. I think that may be a mistake; guts care less about our history than we think. And hearts are hopeful in ways both endearing and dangerous. Sometimes we end up with our guts in a knot because of all the acrobatics they have been doing trying to get us to listen. This is problematic for anyone, but coupled with depression brain, it can be downright sickening.

I am making a promise to my twenty-six year old self and to my gut. I am setting a deadline. You are going to hear about this probably more than you’d like in the next two months, because aside from the friends I talk to on the phone and through social media, you are what I’ve got for a daily companion. Which is perhaps better than nothing. I am trying to see the good in being here. I am trying to remember what it is that made me think moving here would be something I could feel good about. I am trying to find a way to be proud of myself again. I am trying.