It's been a smidgen over seven years since I made an entry in this blog. I could blame it on starting college to get my Masters in January of 2011 while also working part-time. I could blame it on moving to South Carolina in December of 2013 to start my new teaching career and then meeting the man I love in August of 2014. All of that would be true but also, I forgot. You see, when things are going well we forget about the things we did to get to get to that good place. However, as the saying goes, along with the good eventually comes the bad. When things are bad we don't have it within ourselves to think about anything but the circumstances we're in. The pain, the hopelessness, the feelings of being trapped... This leads me to where I have idled the last two years of my life, in the depths of down. Real down. There was even a time I seriously considered leaving this life. I had a plan and I very nearly enacted it but with my last thread of hope I reached for help. I was down, but now, now I feel a rising.
The thing about mental illness is that there is no "fix". No surgery, no medications, no therapy, nothing, to cure it. No, mental illness is like that one person in your life who you try to avoid at all costs but no matter what you do, POP, they eventually find you. You can be nice, you can be mean, you can beg, you can try to trick them, you can even try ignoring them but they've imprinted themselves on you and the only way out is a terminal one. So what do you do if you're not feeling terminally-minded? You make peace.
Making peace isn't easy and sometimes you're going to want to fight and sometimes you're going to want to give in but then again, isn't that what lead you to where you are now? So where do you start if you're like me? By acknowledging you can't fight your mental illness but also refusing to give in. I will make peace with this part of me that I never wanted and I don't deserve but have chosen to accept, nonetheless. It seems like a small thing, making peace and deciding on acceptance. It isn't something you can visibly see happen as it occurs in the head, the heart, and the soul but I assure you, it's enormous. It is with this decision that I begin to rise, like yeast in a oven, from where I was so down to a new beginning. I may stumble, I may even fall, but slowly and surely, I'm going to rise up.
My soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdHFEkNZM9k
