Climbing out of a pit

and there's still a ways to go

CW: Mental illness

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It’s been a long while.

I hope you’ll forgive the long absence, and accommodate the heaviness of what I am about to share. Things have been bad for me recently. The descent was slow and then fast, with illnesses, deaths, a breakup, and many reckonings bringing me here. Luckily, all of it was punctuated by moments of joy and love. It’s strange, though, knowing that many of you who will read this are friends of mine. I haven’t been very forthright, and I hope you’ll understand that this manner of update is easier for me and only possible now that I have a little distance from the bottom of the pit I was in. I don’t share every single detail and piece of context (and if you know me you can ask), but I think I arrive at some important truths.

I have always been humbled by the ways in which these personal PSAs have facilitated conversations and vulnerability. But this is a reflection from a dark time, and I understand if that’s not what you want to read about. Perhaps, though, something here will resonate and you’ll feel less alone. That’s more than enough reason for me to show my ass (metaphorically this time) on the internet.

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I recently completed a six-week intensive outpatient program for obsessive-compulsive disorder and panic disorder. For hours a day, five days a week, I practiced exposure response prevention, essentially a personalized therapeutic torture regimen. 

In order to prove to myself that I could handle it, I repeatedly placed myself in situations I was convinced would kill me while forcing myself away from the people, behaviors, and objects that could provide comfort. It ran counter to everything any therapist has ever told me. And it worked. I survived. 

As awful as this may sound, the alternative was truly unlivable. I was withdrawn, succumbing to frequent, florid panic attacks, calling people in the middle of the night in the throes of a feeling that must have been death, must have been my utter disintegration. I became incapable of being alone. I couldn’t walk two blocks without a knife of anxiety twisting in my belly, hot and sickening. I developed vertigo, lost weight, gained weight, wept multiple times daily, and tried fitfully to occupy a body I felt betrayed by. 

I didn’t have the language to ask for what I needed, so I leaned too hard on the very few people who have seen me at my worst, and I hated myself for it. I felt profoundly helpless. I was something other than myself. I didn’t know what to trust, so I trusted nothing.

I’m on the other side now. I confronted things I was convinced I could never confront and came out the other side. I am exhausted, and full of insight. I believed this paralyzing, all-consuming anxiety came upon me because I had reached an inflection point and, at the apex of that pain, was broken by grief, by dissatisfaction with life, by trauma. But I have come to realize that I had been broken for quite some time already. I was moving through the world with wounds invisible to all except those closest to me, and even then I sublimated and redirected the pain of those wounds to throw them off the scent, no doubt hurting them and myself in the process. To be witnessed in the fullness of my wounds would be to admit the reality of them. This, I erroneously believed, would kill me.  

This period of acuity, akin to a fever, a crisis, was the result of finally having the time, space, resources, and community for my body and mind to know that I could withstand the process of healing. I now feel more broken than ever, and I have come to believe this is a good sign. I am aware, achingly, of the growth that has occurred and the vast expanse that remains to be bridged. I don’t think I was willing to look at these things before. I felt too much shame. Well, I am now either too tired or too resolute to be ashamed. 

I now feel like a completely different person. I have shed so much as to feel blank, I’m quite broke, and I’m fundamentally dissatisfied with most domains of my life. And, perhaps because of all this, I have never felt so alive. 

I’m learning for the first time what it means to be embodied. I’m learning how to have an adult emotional range that welcomes the simultaneity of gratitude and frustration, health and illness, grief and joy. I’m learning how to feel safe setting goals for myself because I know that I am now strong enough to survive disappointment. 

I feel ambivalent about sharing this with you all in this way, but if I don’t throw light on my experience now, I worry I never will. Besides, now that I’ve stared into my own void maybe I can be of support to you, if and when it comes time for you to stare into yours.