With only a month left to go, my year-long commitment to weekly DBT group and individual sessions is nearing an end. Part of me is desperate to be finished. I am eager to have more time to do the things I want instead of devoting it to therapy twice a week. I'll read tons more books, see more friends, go to movies, do more puzzles. However, that is where the excitement ends.
Depression and anxiety have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. The therapy, the pills, the hospitalizations, the panic attacks are all constants that have followed me through life. They are this big squishy teddy bear that I keep near me everywhere I go. I feel comfortable with it in my arms. I don't know life without it. I don't understand how my life could ever be without it. What does that look like? Who does that make me? I wish it was clear cut: you either have cancer or you don't. There's no such thing as "sort of" having cancer. The ambiguity of mental illness frustrates and confuses me.
I've returned to weeping through therapy sessions, scared and unsure of the future. Desperate to have control over something in my life, I've amped-up my skin picking. Driving to therapy today, blood dripped a steady stream down my cheek, after I gouged out the sores that had barely begun to scab over from the last picking session. Then before going in to my therapy session, I doused on the make-up to hide the aftermath. This version of ME I know and understand. I know how to pick and cry and panic and rage and alienate and sleep. Being a happy, healthy, awake, independent, active, involved individual is foreign and I am scared of it. I'm not sure if I can handle it. What if I try to take on too much and end up suicidal, back in the hospital, and starting again at square one? I am afraid that I will always be one step away from total destruction, but I don't know which step will hold the landmine.
If I take a higher level position in my career, will I crack under the pressure? If I start playing bass again and join an orchestra, will I feel crushed by the weight of the commitment? What am I capable of? Why should I believe that NOW I can handle life's challenges, that NOW will be different than the past?
Maybe I've gained more life skills than I give myself credit for. I know I need to trust in the skills I've been taught. I often chuckle to myself after a coworker faces a bitchy customer and I say something along the lines of, "You can't control other people's reactions, only yourself." I find myself parroting the life lessons I've acquired through this whole mental health journey.
I guess I don't have to figure it all out now. I still have a month left. And even after that, it's not like I have to quit cold turkey. I'll be able to hold on to the security blanket of periodic individual sessions for a while. I'm not sure how it's going to happen, but I need to let go of "mental illness" feeling like a defining feature of who I am, and allow myself to move on from that. If I didn't hold on to that label, what would I replace it with? Who would I want to be?
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