Progress

When I wake in the morning, as I slowly come to, I wait and feel until something tells me how I am. What is today? Am I well, am I iffy, am I off? You’d think that a person wakes up the same everyday, that you get out of bed fine and as the day progresses you know how you are. Something happens that can shift it, but I don’t get to do that. Life has a hand in how I feel, for sure, but, first, I check in with my head.

I’ve said before that meds are a band-aid for a disease, that after time, and often without warning, the adhesive gives and something has to change. You either rip it off or you try with all you have to make it stay on. My band aid started to give last October, and despite all of my encouragement for it to stick, I ripped that fucker off.

I did what I think a lot of people (probably) do. You decide that you’re done with this. “This” isn’t working for you any longer and that you can handle it on your own. I had a lot of reasons to stop my meds, but the biggest one was I hoped, the tiniest bit of hope, that I could survive on my own. That I could fight. I could win.

Well, we know how that turned out.

It’s been just 2 weeks since I’ve been back on the pharmaceutical wagon and when I check in with myself in the morning, it’s iffy. I’m still moody, a little on edge and a lot fragile. But I’m getting better, again.

Being well is such hard work.

I wish I could just pop a few pills in the morning and be done. It should be that easy, right? Here’s your RX go sing with the birds. I wish. I wish I didn’t have to unravel once a week on my therapists couch. That I didn’t have to take a depression and anxiety assessment every night before bed. I wish that I didn’t have an actual happiness handbook, but I do. I do, and I have to use the book, and do the homework my therapist assigns me and I have to dust myself off and hope I have it in me to keep going.

This is exhausting. To fight with your head and to change your own mind. That’s what cognitive behavioral therapy is. And it works, and I love it, but hot ham it pisses me off and I hate it. I love that I can change my mind, I hate that I have a mind that requires changing. That I have to talk myself down so many times a day, I have to remind myself not to catastrophise. To take life at face value and not with how it’s making me “feel”- It hurts, and I’m raw but I’m fighting.

I’m fighting, and it’s not how I wanted to win, but I still can so I will keep moving.