Currently winning at life

This morning I caused both my therapist and I to have a happy-cry session while talking about my personal growth and mental recovery and that's quite literally my greatest life achievement so far!✨ This whole time the ongoing greatest achievement had been that I was even still alive but now I'm truly getting somewhere and for so long it felt like I never would but I am. 

I described it to her as feeling like I actually got to the "it gets better" part. When you're stuck in the middle of everything and you hear that it honestly feels like they're just slapping a "fixed" sticker on something broken and giving themselves a pat on the back for fixing it. I resented hearing people say that for so long. It's really weird to be at that stage because I really understand the other perspective now even though I still disagree to a certain extent and definitely wouldn't console someone that way. 

When everything is collapsing around you and you can't see any escape, hearing someone who doesn't truly know what's going on in your head (esp a stranger) promise that there is an escape when they have no control over your situation nor can they help you, it doesn't suddenly give you the ability to see the escape it just feels like you're being dismissed. I fully understand that the sentiment is pure and that it actually does help some people, I just wish it was a little more normalized to ask a distressed person how to help them because not all distressed people want to hear that. 

It's also a matter of perception I guess. Hearing "it gets better" said to me as if it's an objective statement does feel incorrect. Many of the problems that depress me are problems that won't simply go away because they're caused by me being marginalized. Even the part of my depression fueled by trauma that no longer exists in my life doesn't just get better. I have to work really really hard to heal, and recovery is not linear nor is it permanent without effort. 

Part of recovery is slipups, downward hills, relapses, etc. It inevitably will not stay better because life doesn't work like that, and there's this misconceived idea that recovery is a cure rather than a skill. That misconception is what made me feel like I was never going to make progress for so long and what caused me to give up on recovery several times. Every time that I slipped I thought it meant I was failing at recovery even though I was trying my hardest to do everything right and it made me feel like I was just so broken that nothing I did would work. Now I know to be more gracious with myself when I slip up, because slipping up is not resetting your progress it's a natural part of your progress that you need to and CAN overcome, even if it doesn't feel possible. 

Learning this actually makes the worst of my depressed episodes and relapses a lot less painful surprisingly. It's obviously still frustrating but it doesn't feel like the end of the world anymore and I don't hate myself for it. When I was first struggling to accept the idea that recovery is a lifelong process it was because it sounds so overwhelming. I didn't want to have to do the hard work to fix something that isn't my fault and that I didn't deserve. I wanted a cure, something I could do once and then get it over with, be "normal." And it can still be quite exhausting and overwhelming sometimes. I basically have to babysit my inner child constantly and mindfulness certainly isn't easy when combined with Alexithymia. But honestly the more you do it the more you realize it's not as daunting of a task as it sounds. 

I told my therapist that up until recently it felt like recovery was climbing an infinite mountain, so tall I couldn't see the top and therefore had no motivation to climb because I had no proof there was a top. But if you just keep going there is a top. Once you get to that top you'll find that you made it past the worst of it and that the rest of the trail is barely steep and you now have the experience of climbing that huge mountain which will easily help you get over these little bumps. It's not like you won't be exerting yourself doing it but you've built up resilience and strength getting here and you can keep going. You can learn to master mindfulness, healthy coping, interrupting negative self-talk, setting boundaries, self-care, or whatever it is that you need to do to respect yourself and keep yourself physically and emotionally safe and healthy.

 And I don't mean that in a "your trauma makes you stronger" way because it also gives me an ick when people say that. The way I see it if I didn't make myself strong then I wouldn't have survived my trauma. My trauma hasn't done anything but traumatize me. I'm the one that kept going and worked hard. I've built up an endurance so that the ongoing effort of recovery isn't so bad anymore. 

I've also really been able to take a lot more joy in things now. For a long time I truly didn't realize just how much the hate in my mind was bogging down everything I do. Now I'm really fully feeling things when I enjoy my free time and it's a little easier to notice the joy in little things. That trade-off makes all the difference when I feel like I can't take another day of dealing with my feelings like I'm caring for a child. It feels less like I'm doing a job that I always hated but have to do and more like I'm doing a job that I love but just get a little stressed from sometimes and I know that the stress will pass and I will keep loving my job. 

And for literally the first time ever in my life I actually feel proud of something I did :)