When I started my M.F.A. program, I wanted it to and hoped it would allow me to rebuild my life and myself. Ten years married to an emotionally and psychologically abusive spouse put me in an extremely dark place. Knowing that writing had saved my life once before, I intended for it to do the same again. And it did.
Now, as I’m nearing the ever looming end of my M.F.A., I’m seeing that there are things I genuinely want to leave behind in this chapter, things I do not want to carry over into the next. Some of it I can’t even write about openly yet, and some of it is residual trauma from my marriage. I had a consultation with a new therapist about two weeks ago. It went really well and I made a series of appointments with her afterward that begin in May. She’s a solutions-based therapist, as well as a trauma specialist, which means she focuses on ways to process through the deeper wounds we carry. Therapy where you talk through the issues can take years before any real healing occurs, and since that’s the only kind of therapy I’ve had before, I think I’m just done with it. There are too many wounds here, some that are a decade or more old, and others that are still really fresh, for me to talk through them.
I don’t know how long solutions-based therapy is supposed to take, and one of my closest friends who recommended this therapist to me said that the process can be really intense and difficult, but that it really does make huge strides in the healing process. And that is what I want. Because sure, I could keep putting bandages on these wounds and I’d probably be okay for a while, but I don’t want to be “okay.” Rebuilding myself was and is a desire to entirely remake who I am and how I treat myself. I’ve done some of that work already, but there is so much more to do, and the wounds I still have to heal from are the ones that sting the most. More too because I have never received acknowledgement or apologies from the people responsible for those wounds. And I don’t expect I ever will.
I refuse to allow myself to be held hostage to pain I didn’t ask for and didn’t deserve. If I can’t receive real closure on those experiences, then it’s up to me to give that closure to myself. And this treatment plan is something that I think will help me charge and activate that healing process.
Something else that has been weighing on me for some time now is the realization that mental illness is a valid form of disability. I’ve known that this is true for other people, but I didn’t see it as a truth for myself. Too many people have invalidated my trauma, my mental illness, my PTSD, that I’ve internalized a lot of that doubt and disconnect from my own mental illness. This is the other part of why I decided to seek treatment for my trauma. Mental illness – anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and other forms of mental illness – are forms of disability. Having that language to identify our personal struggles is a huge step towards understanding what we need to take care of ourselves. My mental illness is not something that comes and goes, but I have often seen it that way based on the way others have made me feel about it. My ex was one of those people, among others.
Accepting every part of myself is another goal in this endeavor towards treating and healing from my trauma. I will always have anxiety and depression. I will always be on medication. But my hope is that I can begin to lessen the triggers that make my anxiety and depression nearly impossible to live with. One thing I have learned since leaving my ex is that I deserve love, belonging, acceptance, and happiness. It’s a truth that applies to all of us. Sometimes, though, we have to learn to give ourselves love, belonging, acceptance, and happiness. And I don’t mean this in the really cliche way it’s often said. I mean it in the ways we treat ourselves, the ways we see ourselves, the ways he talk to ourselves, and the things we allow ourselves to be subjected to. For too long I have seen myself through everyone else’s eyes but my own. This is a behavior I’ve had since I was a kid. Even really well intentioned people have tried to tell me who I am without really listening to my thoughts on the subject.
And then, of course, there’s the churches I was in growing up. The idea of “god’s specific destiny for our lives” and even the Bible verse of how we’re “fearfully and wonderfully made” were all ways of taking individuality away and placing us at the center of this massive amalgamation of the “right” kind of Christian. I lived most of my life not even knowing who I was deep down because, of course, I didn’t need to know who I was; god knew, and that was enough.
It was this that lead me to live in a relationship that whittled me down even more still, stripping me of everything that I knew to be my identity. I knew I was smart. I knew I was funny. I knew I was creative. I knew I had potential beyond what people saw in my exterior. And my parents knew these things, too. But so many other people, my ex and his family included, saw me as ditzy, as incapable, as a burden. My ex didn’t think I was funny at all, which lead me to lose all trust in my sense of humor. And while he acknowledged I was smart in regards to literature and writing, pretty much everything else was “beyond me.” (Even though I was a straight A student in every subject except for Biology, in which I got Bs.)
All of this has been on my mind lately. I have believed a lot of the things I’ve heard people say about me over my entire life, even if I knew it wasn’t true at the time. I’ve internalized them. Accepted that I must be wrong about myself. And this is one of the biggest tragedies of my life.
Who I am is up to no one else but me.
People can say what they want about me, it doesn’t make it true. People can see what they want to see, it doesn’t mean that’s who I am or the way I behave. And in the end, I don’t have to prove myself to anyone but myself. I know that in principal. Believing these things and practicing them are different. Because of all I’ve been through, I’ve forgotten and lost whole sections of my identity. I have pieces, but not the whole. I want to learn about myself again. I want to piece myself back together into the human being I have always been, but not always seen or listened to. And that doesn’t mean that I will ignore my experiences or pretend they didn’t happen. I have written about them and will continue to do so. But I want to do that with the confidence and the self-love I haven’t quite reached yet.
The best revenge is a life well lived. And I intend to live an enormously well lived, happy, loving, creative life. I’m the only one who can give myself that life, though. I started that process when I left my ex. I will continue that process by healing from these wounds that have held me back and made me doubt myself.
Self-love is radical. But it also requires radical action to unlearn the things that have made us feel small and insignificant. I’m choosing to be radical.
