Dear October, You Will Not Defeat Me This Year

Dear October,

You will not defeat me this year.

You used to be my favorite month. Everyone who really knows me knows I love designing a good costume. The macabre side of my personality gets to come out and play as you seem to be the only time of year others deem it socially acceptable. Not to mention the candy.

But every year, for the last ten years, the changing of the leaves heralds a change in me; as if the waves of vermillion surrender washing over the trees triggers a shift in the tide. October is my high tide.

I can already feel it happening. I can smell Autumn on the shifting winds, feel the crispness creeping in. And I have to admit, I’m nervous.

October 26, 2020 marks ten years since I was raped at a Halloween party. Since then, you have become unbearable, October. The shapes and sounds of Halloween coming triggers me every year. Where once a well-decorated haunted house would give me butterflies with excitement, I now receive the familiar death moths of triggered PTSD.

Triggering things just seem to happen in October.

In October 2016, tapes were leaked. Tapes containing the voice of a man bragging about sexually assaulting women. A man to whom, a month later, we handed the power over our country as if sexual assault isn’t a crime worthy of pause.

In October 2018, a man was sworn in as Supreme Court Justice after weeks of public allegations of sexual assault topped national headlines.

In October 2019, I was volunteering at a Halloween event in Detroit. I was clearing empty cups off tables. A man twice my size, much more drunk than I, grabbed my hips and attempted to pull me into a dark corner of an empty mezzanine. I never learned his intentions, as the arrival of an angel, dressed like a devil, loosened his grip.

October 29, 2019, I walked into my school social worker’s office and burst into tears. I walked out of the psychiatric hospital two days later.

But October 2020 is going to be different.

Today is September 4th (happy birthday Beyonce) and as always, the Halloween memes have already started. Cider mills are opening. I can see clusters of orange peppering the trees as I walk my dog in the morning. October is on its way, and with it, my preparations.

This year will be different because I am prepared. A major difference between this October and the ten previous is that others know. I finally let others in. I have a support system this year. Until I attempted suicide and decided to make my healing process public, I kept all of this about October locked up deep inside. And every year, I would silently fall apart in solitude while simultaneously gluing a smile to my face for others’ benefit. Not this year, October. Now people know about you.

Also, I have skills now. For better or worse, my mental breakdown forced me to seek help. October 2019 seemed to be the final trigger for real change. After attempting suicide, I had to go to therapy. And not biweekly, for an hour, where I usually chose to talk about work — as that’s from where I was always coming. Real, intense, full time therapy that forced me to confront the shit about October I spent ten years avoiding. And I built skills. Skills that I practice every day, skills that I can use as a buoy as this year’s high tide crashes in around me.

If it sounds to you like I’m reassuring myself, I am. In all honesty, part of me is terrified of you still, October. I was really hoping I’d be more stable than I am by the time you arrived again. But if there’s one thing I’ve proven over the last year it’s that I’m a survivor. And I don’t plan on changing that any time soon.

See you soon, October. I’ll be ready.

Renea

Surviving Suicide: How the Cycle of Healing Sometimes Kicks my Ass

Saturday August 29, 2020 marked 10 months since I almost killed myself. That’s not exactly a significant time marker, I know. Realizing that however, made me start to reflect on all the ways I’ve changed over the last 10 months.

In short, my life looks nothing like it did 10 months ago (considering we’re in the midst of an international pandemic and a social revolution, I’m sure I’m not the only person who can say that). I have healed a lot, learned a lot, and changed a lot. Where I stand currently, I am in a cycle of healing that both: inches me daily towards full remission, and spirals me through such an intense range of emotions I sometimes question if this is healing at all.

I’ve decided to make my healing process public through this post. Suicide is such a weird topic in our media. We publicly grieve suicides of famous people like Robin Williams and Anthony Bourdain. Suicide will take over news and social media cycles for a couple days. There will be some cries for more attention for mental health issues, and then everyone pretty much moves on. But unsuccessful suicide attempts? How often do we publicly grieve those? How often do we give voice to suicide survivors, and ask them what support they need to make sure next time they’re not successful? Since I’ve started being vocal about my suicide attempt, I’ve noticed the hashtag #suicidesurvivor largely brings up content about the surviving family members of successful suicide victims. But what about all those, like me, who struggle with suicidal ideation and suicide attempts? If we can grieve successful suicides and lament the lack of mental health support that produced them, why do those with unsuccessful suicide attempts in their past hide in silence and shame?

I don’t know if there really are answers to these questions. I do know that before October 29, 2019 I believed suicide was inevitable for me. I had been in therapy for 3 years by that point and tried several different psych meds, but still truly believed my loved ones would be better off without me. I had thought about suicide for decades before attempting it. Through my teenage years, undergrad, my marriage, years of love, moments of laughter, and professional successes, suicide stalked me. It surged up the back of my throat like bile, every time something triggered my social anxiety. It danced across the hemispheres of my mind every time I fell short of being perfect. And, it sat like harsh medicine on my tongue after being sexually assaulted a second time; daring me to swallow it.

And I finally almost did.

But I survived. And here I am refusing to hide it, refusing to be ashamed. Reflecting on my process of healing reminds me of how far I’ve come. I’m not in full remission yet, but I no longer feel as though suicide is inevitable. I know I can beat it now, which is a paradigm I’ve worked steadfastly to grow and maintain for the last 10 months. Below you will find other important paradigm shifts I’ve experienced throughout this process, and how each continues to fuel my cycle of healing.

I used to think healing was linear, now I know it’s a cycle

Like many, my only frame of reference for healing was physical ailments. When you are sick or injured you go to the doctor, follow the instructions, take the pills, get better, move on with your life. I grew up in a context where mental illness didn’t exist. I didn’t learn what anxiety and depression really were until I was diagnosed with them in my mid-20s. So when I realized I had an illness I did the things. I went to a psychiatrist, I went on meds, I followed the instructions, I tried to kill myself 3 years later.

That’s because mental and emotional healing is not linear, which I have learned through personal experience over the last 10 months. Starting the healing process takes self awareness. You have to understand that your brain is lying to you and identify that a trigger is responsible. Once you identify the trigger, you can start working on the reasons you have triggers in the first place, and start to do the work to make your triggers less powerful.

The thing is, the work you do to make triggers less powerful can often be triggering. Uncovering why certain things trigger me meant uncovering trauma and mental illness that I had no idea were even inside me. Confronting and processing through trauma makes you fragile, sensitive. It can produce new triggers that were never there before. Which starts the cycle over as you confront these new triggers and attempt to heal from them.

This can be exhausting. Some days I have anxiety all day long and I don’t understand why until reflecting before bed that night. Sometimes I get triggered during really inconvenient times and have to abruptly remove myself from situations, often without saying anything. There are still days I can’t get out of bed. Some days I feel amazing, back to normal, ready to get back to work, take on too much, trigger myself, and have to give up responsibilities all over again.

Learning about and embracing this cycle though, has been key to my journey. Once I let go of my expectation of linear healing, I became aware of all my victories. I stopped putting pressure on myself to be “better,” and started celebrating small wins. For example, the ability to notice I’ve taken on too much work, and voluntarily give up responsibilities is brand new. Which leads me to my next paradigm shift since October 2019:

I used to be a perfectionist, now I embrace who I am

I believed for most of my life that anything short of perfect was a failure. This belief came from a fundamental lack of confidence in my own self worth. I really thought that if I let anyone down, or fell short of perfect, everyone would realize they didn’t really need me and I would have no reason to live.

That’s fucking dark, I know. But it kept me working and exceeding expectations. My perfectionism won me several awards, scholarships, and admission into two international honors societies. On paper, I was perfect, so on paper I had worth.

This didn’t stop me from trying to kill myself. I realized that, no matter how perfect I looked, I would never heal unless I started believing I had worth outside of my productivity. This was one of the most difficult paradigm shifts I had to make. It meant giving up everything I knew to be “right” about myself, and embracing everything about me I used to hide from view.

It also meant growing the self awareness necessary to say “no” to people. Perfectionism is the close cousin of people-pleasing. In order to make everyone think I was perfect, I had to change myself to make everyone else happy all the time. In order to change this paradigm, I had to accept that I may sometimes make others unhappy by choosing myself. And that sometimes making others unhappy, does not detract from my worth.

This is one of the most difficult parts for me. The courage to choose myself has enabled me to build more self love than I thought possible. Yet, others’ reactions to choosing myself is triggering as hell. People have a hard time understanding why I would go from bending over backwards to make them happy, to saying no and asserting my needs. I’ve lost people along the way which has been absolutely devastating, and sends me into a spiral of self loathing every time. But I’ve also gained people, and solidified relationships with existing people who have proved they are ride or die on this journey with me.

I have also lost parts of myself that I used to treasure. I’ve had to grieve these losses in order to make way for new growth. That grief unexpectedly became an almost constant fixture in my life.

I used to think we only grieve when someone dies, I now understand grief comes with any loss

The grief I’ve experienced through this process has taken my breath away, hit me like a train, and turned everything upside down. One of the reasons I believe my mental health support wasn’t effective enough to keep me from attempting suicide was because I wasn’t willing to give anything up. I wasn’t willing to give up my high-achieving perfect record and sway with the people in my life who I thought “mattered.”

Once I found myself in a psychiatric hospital, I realized giving these parts of myself up was essential if I was planning to survive. I didn’t realize I would grieve these parts of myself as if they were loved ones who had passed.

Grief accompanies every loss. Humans in general need to cycle through many emotions in order to cope with giving something up. This has been true for every part of myself I’ve had to give up in order to survive. Some days I’m so angry I can’t sit still. Others days I cry a lot. Sometimes I am in such denial, I convince myself every choice I’ve made in the last 10 months was a mistake and desperately want my old life back.

In attempting suicide, I didn’t successfully kill myself, but there were parts of me that died. I’ve had to lean into this grief in order to cope with it. Acknowledging my grief and honoring my emotions allows me the time I need to process through them, and then move on when I’m ready. Some days are harder than others. Most of the time I feel like I’m on a rollercoaster. But each moment spent honoring my grief has pushed me one step further towards acceptance. And that’s what I’m holding onto.

I am only one person who has attempted suicide. I can’t speak for others and their own experiences with their healing cycle. In writing this article I am merely hoping to give voice to a topic we don’t talk about very often. Healing is a difficult journey. My cycle of healing has been surprising, unexpected, difficult, empowering, and luckily steeped in love. I am grateful every day for my support system and the (however small) platform I’ve built to feel seen and heard. And I want that for every survivor, and sincerely hope that sharing my story gives voice to others who may not be ready to share their own.

If you struggle with suicidal ideation or suicide attempts, please know I see you, I love you, I honor you. You are strong, you are worthy, and you are not alone.

How my Triggers Slowly Unravel my Mind: a Metacognitive Case Study

Ok, so here’s how it happens:

The initial trigger is usually a miscommunication or something unexpected that makes me question a relationship.

Then I start over analyzing everything that has happened. I start building walls to “protect” myself.

These walls make me intensely fragile to any and all (even the tiniest of) triggers. And therefore the triggers start to pile up. And I start to get overwhelmed.

I start to question things that I’ve already figured out. I start to take everything personally. I make a career out of over analyzing every interaction to build evidence against myself. I obsessively try to read people’s minds and find all the places I’ve slipped up. I fall into all of the traps I’ve laid out for myself. I second guess all of the steps I’ve taken to guard myself against those traps.

The next step is acting in ways I regret. I lash out at people when I’m really just projecting my own insecurities. I rehash every moment of my life where I’ve failed, or embarrassed myself. I make self destructive choices. I engage in self harm in several ways.

These behaviors, and the realization that I’ve once again lost control, catalyze the synthesis of all my various anxieties into a viscous depression.

Lethargic, apathetic, exhausted. Depression will become my partner, my lover, my identity. I won’t be able to keep my eyes open for very long. I’ll need breaks from social interactions; leaving places early, going silent, wandering off to pet a dog midway through a conversation I lost track of minutes ago. Effort becomes physically taxing, sometimes even painful. Especially if I’ve successfully resisted the temptation to self harm, as the withdrawal gives me body aches.

At which point it takes full time effort and some sincere grit to pull myself out of the hole I’ve dug. The difficult truth is: I do this to myself. This is my brain, and a combination of my genetics, and my trauma. This is me, reacting to triggers that are specific to my experience.

But here’s another truth I’ve learned:

Reacting to those triggers is not a measure of my “success” or “failure” as a good friend, a good partner, a good person.

I’m going to repeat that because I don’t entirely believe it yet.

Reacting to triggers is not a measure of success or failure.

Accepting that means accepting that I am responsible for my own mental health. That the reactions and feelings of others aren’t within my control, and often aren’t a reflection of how they feel about me.

How I’m working towards radical self-acceptance:

First and foremost, in order to accept these important truths about myself, and my mental health, and my strength, and my worth, I have to learn how to love myself. Without self love I’m never going to be able to accept anyone else’s love. Over the previous few months I’ve been slowly unearthing a fathoms deep sinkhole inside me I never knew existed. Each realization has triggered a grieving process that has not made coping with my social anxiety any easier. Each realization has simultaneously helped me recognize when my brain is lying to me because of my trauma. This is a good thing. This means every day I get better at recognizing when I’m projecting my own insecurities onto others. Which helps me catch myself like 80% of the time before I act on my anxious thoughts and become the burden I never want to be on all of my loved ones.

So I guess I need to give myself more credit. Yes, I am a fragile shell of my former self. And at the same time I’m practicing the skills I need to build the good kind of armor back around my soul. The thought patterns I need to trust my loved ones when they say they love me. To trust that their words and actions always come with the best intentions, and rarely reflect their feelings about me.

I think my point, more than anything, is that gratitude is one of the most powerful tools I’ve found in this whole process. I didn’t realize that was the message of this post, until I arrived here myself. But, without the people in my life who are willing to hold me down regardless, I wouldn’t be alive right now.

I’m not exaggerating for once. Suicide is always going to be present for me. A hard reality I’ve had to face is that I’ve traumatized my loved ones. I know that’s where their mind will go when I go off the rails like this. I can sense it in my partner as he starts to hover around me. He’ll become insistent on making plans for what I will do while he’s not home. I’ll get a few more random “I love you” texts than usual throughout the day. I’ll catch him staring at me, trying to hide the anxious look on his face.

And regardless of my guilt, he stays. And so do so many others. Not all of them, but quite a few. That’s what I mean by gratitude. Regardless of my fragility, my neediness, my constant rollercoaster, I have people who stay. Who have stayed. And continue to stay. My inability to fully understand why is part of the problem to begin with, but it doesn’t mean I’m not completely, entirely, utterly grateful for those in my life who continue to carry my heavy-ass-self nevertheless.

Mental Health Maintenance

It’s weird.

I’ve been falling apart for a while. I almost killed myself in October, but my mental breakdown started far before that. And it came in waves. Honestly, I feel like I’ve been a hot ass mess since I got raped in 2010.

I have a brilliant support system, and everyone in my life has gotten used to my messiness by now. They have realized they can’t really count on me to show to social occasions. They’re familiar with my red, puffy, pale depression face and deadpan responses to small talk. They have come to expect my need to step away from the group to cope my way through panic attacks. They may not completely understand it, but they know. And with that, naturally comes a certain measure of emotional detachment. You see, I am not always the one who is stable enough to listen to their woes or give them advice. I have been the “broken friend” for a while, but I’ve started to own that.

The weird part is, lately I’ve been experiencing a subtle role-reversal.

Since Covid-19 came in and turned the world upside down, I have noticed that I seem better equipped than most of the people I know to handle the anxiety and depression triggered by such a catastrophe. It’s almost like the years I’ve spent in therapy, the roller coaster I’ve been on, the personal trauma I’ve gone through, have prepared me with the skills one needs to maintain mental health through quarantine.

Those who don’t suffer from mental illnesses (or haven’t sought help for them yet) on the other hand, have no idea how to cope with the shared trauma we are experiencing in our current context.

All of a sudden, I have gone from being the “broken” friend to being the friend giving advice about skills that can help everyone survive Covid-19 with their mental health intact.

As of now, our governor is considering extending the quarantine for even longer, and I’ve had 3 of these types of conversations with my friends over a 24 hour period this week. Therefore, I thought others may benefit from some of the materials I’ve made to help myself cope.

The links below are to downloadable google docs with journal pages I originally designed for myself. If you find them helpful, you can print and fill in the blanks, copy the prompts into your own journal, make a copy into your own drive and change it around to suit your own needs, etc.

Scroll down below each worksheet and find a model of how I’ve filled it out for myself.

A note on sources: I created these materials myself based on what I learned by participating in a Partial Hospitalization Program at the University of Michigan Hospital. All of the skills I utilize in the worksheets are based on the work of Dr. Marsha Linehan in developing Dialectical Behavior Therapy.

Worksheet #1 (click here to see downloadable google doc): A set of questions/prompts to journal about over your morning coffee/tea/breakfast. These prompts help me practice Radical Acceptance, help me ground myself in a purpose every day, and give me ideas on how to spend my unstructured time that day.

Worksheet #2 (click here to see downloadable google doc): A worksheet I use for every individual emotion I struggle to cope with. I have made one of these babies for when I’m feeling depressed, anxious, socially anxious, triggered, and panicky. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but I keep my journal with me everywhere I go. And, as juvenile as it feels sometimes, I need to refer back to these pages when I’m overwhelmed with an emotion. It is not always easy to remember all your strategies “in the moment.”

Worksheet #2 is based on a strategy I learned for reframing cognitive distortions. If you have ever gone to a therapist that practices Cognitive Behavior Therapy, examining how your thoughts impact your emotions isn’t unfamiliar to you. While engaging in this kind of therapy, I’ve come to realize that my thoughts make patterns, and specific negative thoughts are recurring. This worksheet allows you to break down the process into a reference tool for dealing with the most common negative thoughts you have.

The Soundtrack of my Trauma

TRIGGER WARNING: The following contains a description of a sexual assault. As much as I try to avoid peddling in trauma, sharing my story is something I’ve realized recently that I need to do. The following traumatic experience was the most formative experience of my young adult life. It has held me stuck, stripped me of my power, kept me from my life, and potentially ended my career.

Well, that chapter officially needs to be over. And my therapist says one way to process through trauma is exposure to it. In other words, sharing my story. Hearing it. Reading it. Discussing it. So my brain can file this information away differently and my body doesn’t have to perpetually live in fight or flight mode. Selective mutism has kept me from speaking these words out loud, even to my therapist. That hasn’t changed. I still can’t speak about these things out loud (like, literally, physically can’t). Which means I’m not going to be able to answer questions associated with this post quite yet either.

So, as usual, I’m using this online space as an experiment in being open and vulnerable, and hopefully therefore, a bridge to healing. My tarot reading this morning gave me the confidence to feel like today is the day for step 1… so here we go…

If you feel like you can’t handle reading the specifics, I see you and I respect you, thanks for stopping by.

I was in college. It was Halloween. I was dressed like a bird. Earlier that week a boy had stopped by my apartment looking for his mail as he had been the previous tenant. I thought he was cute and we flirted a little bit before he took his mail and left. Imagine my sense of it’s-a-small-world surprise when he walked into the Halloween party I was at a few days later. He immediately struck up a conversation with me. He told me I had pretty eyes and fed me a fifth of Bacardi Razz. I, on my college budget and underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, had only eaten white rice that day. The alcohol quickly took control as it traveled through my empty stomach into my bloodstream. I remember talking to him. I remember kissing him. I remember following him upstairs. Then we were in the bathroom and I was sitting on the sink and he slid his hand up my skirt and took off my panties. At that point I had a breathtaking moment of lucidity where my brain cut through the alcohol fog and I realized what was about to happen. And I didn’t want it to happen. I did not want to have sex with this stranger.

I slid off the counter.

I gently pushed him away from me.

I said I needed to find my friends.

I said I was sorry

I said I had to go

I said please stop

I said I was sorry

I pushed him away a little harder

I reached around him for the doorknob he grabbed my wrist he turned me around he pinned me against the counter he pushed up my skirt.

From the moment of penetration on I don’t remember feeling him inside me. I remember numbness. I remember hearing his breathing in my left ear. I remember staring into my own eyes in the mirror over the dirty sink.

The next thing I remember I was waking up on the couch in my friends’ dark apartment and my friend-with-benefits-hook-up-buddy-who-really-wanted-to-be-my-boyfriend came to get me. As I descended the exterior stairs down from the third floor apartment – riding fireman style on my fwb’s shoulder – I vomited white rice everywhere. I remember looking at it and thinking “no one will even know this is vomit, it just looks like someone spilled some rice.” I laughed about it to myself.

The next morning I remembered nothing. My brain had initially blacked out everything that had taken place once the fifth of Bacardi was empty. It wasn’t until a days-later conversation with a friend who was at the party that it all came rushing back to me. You see, she revealed my rapist had come down from the bathroom that night, and told everyone in attendance we had had sex.

I went to Planned Parenthood. When they asked if there had been a recent occurrence that made me want to get tested for all STDs including HIV I told them “no.” I stopped going out with my friends and practically moved in with my fwb who was rapidly becoming my partner. I stopped eating. I cried every night. I convinced everyone it was because I missed high-school-boyfriend with whom I had broken up a couple months before. People thought I was just conflicted over my feelings for new boy. People had no idea I was falling apart. People had no idea I was going back to Planned Parenthood every 3 months to get tested for HIV. People had no idea because I never told them. I never told anyone until 2 years later after then-friend-with-benefits had turned into boyfriend and I realized that I loved him and that I was safe with him. I felt guilty keeping this secret from him, like I was damaged goods and he didn’t even know. Like keeping it from him was duping him into falling in love with someone who wasn’t worth any more than what he could get from her body.

Please Don’t Pop my Bubble

Until further notice, I’m on vacation.

Va•ca•tion.

I am on medical leave from work. What that means is, the status of my mental health is so extreme it poses a significant risk to my wellbeing. My medical leave became effective 3/9, and it ends 6/12/2020.

That means, from now until mid-June, my only job, and I mean only job, is to heal.

Even if I wanted to work at another job between now and June, I legally couldn’t (why would I want to though, really?).

I felt the need to clarify this on the record. As is natural when someone suddenly leaves their job (after several false starts), people ask questions. I have no problem being honest about the circumstances of my mental health. I will proudly defend my assertion that mental health is a worthwhile reason to take leave from work. But there is one specific “type” of question that is exhausting me.

When I say “type” of question, I am referring to the fact that in my head I’ve been lumping questions I’ve been getting into genres based on the type of information the questioner is seeking.

The “type” of question that is exhausting me is any question having to do with one of the following categories: school, work (past or future), next school year, my students (past or future), job searching and/or applications, next steps, salaries, insurance, my “purpose.”

Questions like: “Are you returning to teach next school year?”

And, “If you don’t end up wanting to teach anymore, what’s next?”

So this post is my manifesto. My final statement of employment and social status for AT LEAST the next three months of my medical leave:

I am on vacation. From everything.

Literally everything.

For the next 3 months, please, please, please expect nothing but the bare minimum from me.

I need therapy. Lots of therapy.

And cuddles. Lots of cuddles.

I need entire afternoons spent fully mentally and emotionally present. In a room where words and music become limbs of the same tree. A room pregnant with natural light filtering through the cloudy vibrations of combined emotional and creative energy (but like, on a spaceship).

I need new experiences that both scare and excite me. And a wide open calendar that has room for spontaneity. I need to be able to get up in the middle of the night and take a bath in the light of the full moon filtering through the west-facing windows at the back of our house.

I need to pay my bills on time, make sure we have money to eat, and not give a damn about retirement for a hot second.

This is what I need. And I have the time to take it. My job is still mine after this leave. No one needs me to commit one way or another to teaching next school year until June. I still feel lots of love and lots of stress about my teaching position. I really have no idea what else I want to do after teaching.

Or what kind of work I will value.

Or what kind of lifestyle I will want.

This is the first time I have ever been off the conveyor belt. This is the first time I have the freedom to not give a fuck about any of that right now because I have the privilege of working for a set of administrators willing to support their employees.

No one is relying on me to get it done.

No one needs me to meet a deadline.

There are no qualifications I need to earn.

And I apologize in advance if in the next three months I become flaky. If I won’t commit to plans ahead of time. If I become forgetful, or oversleep, or take too long to respond to a text. I promise to my loved ones that I will respond. I will do you the respect and the dignity of not ghosting. I will always provide explanations for why I can’t or won’t do things, but I will never expect these explanations to be good excuses.

I just need this vacation. I need to take a break from responsibilities and expectations. I need to learn, and explore passions, and take risks that I’ve never been willing to take before.

Please, please don’t pop my bubble.

29 and alive af

On Saturday February 22, I turn 29. I haven’t historically been a huge “birthday person,” but this is going to be a big one. Not only will it be the last year of my 20s, but I wasn’t even sure I would make it to 29, so I’m fairly excited it’s happening.

My 20s were a hard fucking decade. I think that phenomenon is pretty common for people in general. During my 20s, I: survived sexual assault, married my partner, earned 2 degrees, got my first big girl job, bought and renovated a house, was inducted into three academic honors societies, won an award for educational excellence from the MEA, got diagnosed with anxiety, and depression, and PTSD, and ADHD, and endometriosis. I traveled the world, became an aunt twice over, helped my sister through a divorce, stood as a bridesmaid a million times, got at least 25 tattoos (I’ve honestly lost count), made friends, lost friends, survived suicide, fell in love with New Orleans jazz, started a blog, and came out as bisexual.

I’ve been so low I didn’t think I would make it out. I’ve had adventures. I’ve accomplished goals. I’ve coped with failure, death, and pain.

Those were my 20s. Doubtlessly the most formative decade of the three I’ve been alive.

And standing here, looking down the barrel of my last year of my 20s, it is difficult how to adequately express the extent of my happiness that I am still alive.

The knowledge and understanding that I almost committed suiced in October has weighed on my mind in interesting ways over the last four-ish months. Considering I had no plans to wake up on October 30, 2019, I could have never predicted the ways that fact would ultimately bring an end to many chapters of my life, and a beginning to many others.

What I can no longer do is…

Look, I made a suicide plan and scheduled a time to follow-through on it. We have a detached garage, and I therefore knew my Subaru and I could poison myself with carbon monoxide without harming my dog and cats in the process. But, on the day I was planning on doing it, I went to the hospital instead. And here I am.

I consider this event a “mental breakdown” in the very purest sense of the term. I survived my 20s by gathering up all of my symptoms from PTSD, anxiety, and depression, all of my endometriosis pain, all of my emotional needs, and shoving them deep into a well in the pit of my stomach. Within me lies a Mariana Trench packed with the ghosts of my past I refused to acknowledge. And it totally worked. I had everyone convinced that I was “normal.” Better than normal, actually. Ask my bosses and/or teachers from this time period and they would describe me as high achieving, exceeding expectations.

But as I tried to keep them captive, those ghosts fused together like the Power Rangers once they transform into that robot thing. They became stronger, angrier. A demonic beast that ate me alive and almost killed me.

And now that I’ve fought that demon, and won, I can’t lock it back up anymore. Like, I literally can’t. My brain has literally lost the ability to perform that function. I think about mental health every single day. I talk about mental health every single day. I have to. My near-suicide didn’t kill me, but it did kill my ability to suppress. I have completely lost my ability to pretend. I can no longer “fake it til I make it.”

This means I acknowledge and work through every thought distortion, every distressing emotion, and every trigger as it comes. This is exhausting. Some days it feels like all I am capable of is surviving. It also means that there are lots of things I was able to do well before, that I can’t do at all anymore.

For instance, I can’t commit to plans. I hate myself for it, but I’ve bailed kind of a lot lately. I usually make plans with someone ahead of time, and will spend the intervening days fully committed to going. But if something triggers me on the day of said plans, I bail. I have to. Because I learned the hard way that, if I don’t put my mental health first, it could kill me.

I also can’t take control in chaotic situations. Honestly, most large crowds give me anxiety right now. But, if I don’t have to be in control, if I don’t have to be the one that makes sure everyone gets home safely and nothing gets lost, I can relax. On the other hand, if I am given any kind of responsibility in chaotic situations, I completely shut down. This has made doing my job almost impossible. I don’t know how many of you have spent time in middle school lately, but it’s a pretty chaotic place. Teachers constantly need to be on guard and in control or everything will fall apart. Everything often falls apart anyway, even if we teachers think we are in control. And I cannot handle it anymore. Luckily, my coworkers and administration have been incredibly supportive. But still, every day is an uphill climb. Every morning I start back at the bottom of the hill.

What I can do now that I couldn’t before…

I can be honest. I can be the most honest version of myself possible now. This is momentous for me. I no longer have the energy to try to “get” people to like me, or impress anyone, so I don’t anymore. Obviously, I still have low self esteem. It will take much longer than four-ish months for me to topple that mountain. That being said, I no longer let it change my behavior. I no longer let my low self esteem stop me from asserting exactly what I want and need.

And I can assert myself now. My long history of perfectionism made it impossible for me to ask for help. Both in and outside of my school career, I limped my way through many things I could have made easier for myself if I would have just asked. Then, asking for help literally saved my life. I was self-aware enough to realize what I was going through was an emergency, and I reached out to a coworker who took me to the hospital. More than anything else in my life, this event made me realize it is OK to ask for help. I would love to say that asking for help is easy for me now, but that would be a lie. Still, I can ask for help now, and that is a triumph. I can assert my existence and validate my own needs. I can lean on the people in my life who have been desperate for me to do so in the face of my lifetime of fierce independence.

Finally, I can talk about and work through my emotions, rather than letting them conquer me. That demonic beast of suppressed needs that almost killed me in October? I calmed it. I gave it the validation it so desperately needed. I gave it a home in my life, and my heart, and my brain.

I shake hands with the symptoms of my PTSD, and my anxiety, and my depression. I acknowledge their existence. I acknowledge their importance. And I allow myself to walk away.

I ask myself what I’m feeling regularly. I allow myself the time to define my emotions. I am compassionate with myself. I utilize my skills and my support system to fulfill the needs of my emotions. And I put them to bed.

Then, there’s grief…

I don’t know about anyone else, but I was never told that humans can experience grief for many types of loss; only one of which is the death of a loved-one. I have cycled through many different and unexpected iterations of the five stages of grief over and over again since October.

I’ve had to grieve my former, “perfect,” self. As I mentioned above, my ability to exceed everyone’s expectations was fueled by my ability to suppress all of my trauma, emotions, and needs. Therefore, my inability to suppress those things has resulted in a considerable drop in performance. I can no longer do the things I once did, to the standard to which I once did them. And this is really difficult for me to handle.

Releasing myself from needing to be perfect has not taken away my feelings of failure every time I fall short. I relied on my former perfection to prove my self worth to the world. I derived self esteem from my productivity. I am currently in a time of life where self esteem and feelings of worth are running in short supply. Additionally, I no longer have my perfect performance to draw from. I therefore am experiencing an intense loss.

A loss of identity (as the “best” at whatever I’m doing). A loss of confidence in whether or not I’m still meeting expectations. A loss of confidence in how my bosses and colleagues feel about me.

Furthermore, I am daily coming to new understandings of the roots and consequences of my mental health. I have a lifetime’s worth of connections being forged in my brain as I truly analyze my emotions for the first time. These connections often result in epiphanies, often that knock me on my ass.

I’ll give you an example: while talking to my partner about something unrelated the other day, it hit me that I have spent the last decade of our relationship truly believing that I was unworthy of his love. I literally believed that I had nothing to offer a partner. I believed that, in order to keep his love, I had to prove myself worthy over and over again. I lived my life in an intense state of anxiety that, at any moment, I was under threat of losing the love of my life once he realized I couldn’t maintain the standard of domestic excellence that I was pretending I could.

That’s fucking depressing.

My self esteem was so low, I wasted an entire decade of life refusing to allow myself to feel loved, when I had an overabundance of love available to me.

Please tell me I don’t have to illustrate for you what I lost in this scenario.

Happy Birthday to Me

My point is that my 29th birthday is a big deal to me. This year, I will shamelessly celebrate myself to the fullest. I will be loud, outrageous, and silly. I will overdress for the bar I’m going to.

And everywhere I go, I will let everyone know that it’s my birthday.

Because it is not just a birthday.

It is more than an anniversary of the year I was born.

It is a symbol of the hellfire I walked through.

It is a trophy forged out of the ashes of my old life, and reborn in the phoenix of my new.

My Coworkers Found Out that I Love Celine Dion Last Night, and I’m Not Even Embarrassed

How long has it been since you’ve danced?

Full on

Every limb engaged

Breathless

Dancing?

I don’t mean the kind of dancing we are told we need to do in order to attract a mate.

I mean the kind of dancing we did when we were toddlers. And the familiar song from our favorite Disney movie came on in the car on the way home from daycare.

I mean the dancing where you are nothing

but yourself

and the beat

and off-key repetition of the lyrics.

and every ounce of

your energy

your spirit

your self

is fully invested in this kinesthetic expression of the sheer euphoria achieved by being fully, totally, and inescapably present.

At what age do we stop dancing?

Not competitive, structured, dancing.

With methods, and rules, and schools, and choreography.

The kind of dancing where you move based

on instinct

on emotion

on vibe

Your limbs writhing on

(or off)

rhythm

each with a life of its own

performing movements

and making shapes

never before seen by humans.

Let’s make a promise to each other.

Let’s dance more.

And think less.

And in the Middle of the Chaos, a Love Story [pt II]

I love my husband. I think the feeling that I am the most excited about right now is how much I love my husband. I don’t think he gets enough credit for holding me together. So I’m gonna tell the whole world the extent to which he deserves some credit.

My husband and I met in college. Right around my sophomore, his junior year we were really starting to develop actual real feelings for each other (beyond the “let’s get drunk and try to get laid” attitude inherent in American university life).

That fall I also got raped.

And I didn’t tell him.

But I went crazy.

I capital H, Hate when we call women crazy. And I can’t find a more accurate adjective for what I was.

I entered into a period of severe mental and emotional instability that impacted my relationships with everyone in my life. I reflect on this and I wonder why no one in my life told me about myself back then. Were they that scared of me? Or was I as good at hiding my inner chaos as I thought I was?

But during it all, there was my friend. So caring. So stable. So funny. So sexy. So god damn laid back. So absolutely in love with me.

So naturally my friend turned into my boyfriend. And then my live-in boyfriend. And I was still unstable. But I had the grounding force of my boyfriend containing my chaos within its shores.

And I continued to function. Regardless of the chaos.

And then we got engaged. And we took a nice long time to plan what was still the most fun wedding I’ve ever been to or heard of in my life.

And then I became a wife. And a wife is something different. A wife has weight to it. A wife has a standard to live up to in the role model of both her own, and his own mothers. And the standard is very high among these women.

Let me be clear, this being held to a standard? It wasn’t something my mother, nor my mother in law, ever held me to. This came from my brain and my brain only. And it was due to my feeling of just being “different” *cough*queer* that stressed me out. My mother and mother in law were both good mothers. And their style of mothering were both traditional in the sense of being caretakers and child rearers in the home.

This would not be my style of motherhood. In fact, I don’t actually want to be a mother. I feel that way for a lot of reasons, but one of them is the fact that I do not have a caretaker personality. And my mother figures both had stellar caretaker personalities.

I cannot cook. My ADHD makes it difficult for me to stay clean. My husband annoys me when he’s sick (sorry babe).

No, I want to engage in a deeply emotional and/or reasoned discussion. I want to connect on interests and vibes and creative sparks. I want to help you grow emotionally and spiritually. I am such a fucking Pisces.

But I’m no good at helping anyone – like not even myself – maintain physical well-being.

So my inability to reach this standard I saw before me started eating me alive. And my anxiety started peaking like never before. And I entered my blue period. This was a period of depression of which I had no idea the magnitude until I was able to look back in hindsight.

Then between 2015, the year we got married, and October 29, 2019, the day I almost committed suicide, my trauma got triggered. Over and over again.

At first it was a few small triggers. Being alone with a strange male on an elevator. At a gas station. Dropping off donations at Goodwill.

Then a rapist got elected president.

Then Harvey Weinstein and Larry Nassar and Brock Turner and #metoo.

And then Brett Kavanaugh.

And then I watched a boy choke a girl in my classroom.

Then a girl got raped in my school.

Then I got assaulted at a Halloween event in Detroit.

Then I almost committed suicide.

And then I took a leave from work, did the best and most intense therapy I’d ever done, increased my dosage of medication, started to love myself again.

And the whole time?

My husband was there. Working on our communication. Working on his own mental health so he could better support me. Developing himself through education and starting a business. Having respect. Being an ally. An ally to me. To women in general. To anyone over whom he has any privilege. To plants. To animals. To the earth.

He helped me develop my understanding of my own sexuality. And didn’t feel challenged by it a single god. damned. second.

He broke himself out of the binary. Became willing to accept the depth of human beings on many grey levels so utterly terrifying for a Taurus.

He pulled us together after a terrible year and turned into the support system for his whole family.

He dug down literal roots into the soil of his own creation, and made the sexiest vegetable garden possible, that was able to feed our family for months.

He has big dick energy in literal droves (with his nose piercing, and painted nails + personal trainer physique, manly beard, and canine teeth that are just a tad wolffish).

He is the ultimate caretaker. The ultimate support system. The ultimately perfectly designed partner to me on this wild ride of a decade we’ve spent together.

I know you will say you don’t need it. But CREDIT babe. Take every single drop of credit I can ring out of my poor mangled heart.

Stay grateful for your support system.

And in the Middle of the Chaos, a Love Story [pt I]

I started work again on Monday. And just like that, it feels like I never left. It was a good week, an uneventful week. Even with that being so, my feet are swollen and sore, my knees are killing me from being on my feet all day. I’m exhausted, I’m breaking out, and I’m realizing how difficult it is to take care of yourself when you are a teacher. Most of all though, I hate what it’s done to my relationships.

I’m the kind of person that will do what it takes to do my job well. Unfortunately, teaching is the kind of job with an infinite to-do list. If you’re like me, and you have to be perfect, there will be an unending list of demands to keep you busy and distant from everyone in your life but your students.

My initial concept for this blog post was a detailed assessment of the aspects of being a teacher that makes this the reality. But I quickly got bored. As shocking as the details are (or should be) to everyone else, they are the mundane reality of my day to day. Instead, I ended up daydreaming about my husband.

You see, on Sunday before I went back to work, my husband admitted to me he had anxiety over me going back to work. He was anxious because he felt like he was losing me. Since I would be going back to work. And he had gotten used to having me around.

I have to admit, this crushed me. And it’s all my fault. I started reflecting on my and my husbands relationship, and really realizing how much my mental health and my job has had an impact on it.

I realized how much I had put my husband through.

I realized how badly I needed to make changes, so my work life could no longer suck the life force out of my physical, mental, and relational health.

So on that note, I will be following up tomorrow with a poetic narration of my own reflections in this vein that ended up in a love story of epic proportions.

And as it goes for everything else, I’m kind of starting to lean into this theme of freeing myself from the mold of how I thought my life should go. So who knows…