[Day 149] Done, like yesterday is done.

Today was my last therapy session. Hopefully, forever, but who knows. I feel like I’ve had enough mental breakdowns for a lifetime, but my emotional stability will be questionable for as long as I live.

Now that I’m done, it’s weird to look back. I really didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to be one of those kids. One of the kids that needed therapy, that needed to “see a shrink”. I wanted to be normal. Can you believe that? The one time in my life that I wanted to be normal.

Therapy and I have been doing that “awkward hallway dance” for years. The awkward hallway dance is the dance you do when you accidentally run into someone and have to dodge back and forth to get by, smiling and mumbling gracelessly. That’s how I think of my journey that lead me into therapy.

It started in 7th or 8th grade. Middle school was rough, and I was, for the first time in my life, truly unhappy. I wrote a poem about the color black, and after that, my parents asked, only partially kidding, whether or not they needed to sign me up for therapy. Of course, at the time, I was offended. Me? Therapy? No way! I don’t need it. I’m fine. And I honestly believed this. I honestly believed that I was fine. That all the feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing would just go away.

But they didn’t. The problems escalated over the years, and because of my people-pleasing lifestyle, I avoided the issue. I held it inside. I cried, but only when I was locked in my room where no one could hear me. I isolated myself because I was ashamed that I, of all people, was feeling this way. What about the kids in Africa? I heckled myself. You’re nothing special. This feeling is nothing special. You’re fine. F.I.N.E.

I wasn’t fine. Last year, at the peak of Sean/Dylan crisis, I broke down in front of my parents. Big time. I don’t think I’ve ever fallen apart in front of someone that much. I just started screaming and crying about how awful I felt, how useless I was, how I must be doing something wrong because “that many people wouldn’t just hurt me for fun”.

So it was decided that I needed therapy. When I walked through those doors for the first time, I was expecting a long couch, where I would be told to lie down and talk about my feelings. Then, my tall, glamourous therapist would tell me something inspirational, and my life would be changed forever.

What I got was a short, middle aged woman in a room with some chairs and stuffed animals. She didn’t talk much that first appointment; the Dylan and Sean stories were too long to fit into one session, so it actually ended up carrying over. That means it took me two whole hours to lay out what was wrong with me. And that was just the beginning.

After I got over the “she isn’t telling me inspirational things” expectation, I started expecting at least some answers. Why am I like this. How can I fix this. Tell me what to do!

But she didn’t. Her biggest surface contribution was an ear paid to care and breathing exercises that were supposed to calm my anger problems but instead caused me to hyperventilate.

Then I started second-guessing the whole thing. Is this really helping? Is talking and complaining to someone for an hour each week actually going to do anything? But I kept going, because something told me that I needed just a little more time.

And I was right. Because tonight, as I sat before my beaming therapist, I got to tell her about telling off Dylan and Sean. I got to reveal how strong I’d become, and I realized something. By not giving me specific suggestions, she’d completely turned my life around.

If my therapist had told me, three months ago, that I should walk up to Dylan and demand answers, I probably would have done it. I might have gotten an earlier resolution to the whole incident, but would it have helped? No. See, if I had been given that instruction and had gone through with it, I would have learned nothing. Because I would have been standing up for myself to save face with my therapist. I would have been conquering my problems for someone else.

Because my therapist was always vague about how I should behave and how I should change my life, I learned to do things for myself. No one told me to reach out to Dylan and get answers. No one told me to tell Sean the truth, even if it meant losing a friendship I valued very highly. I did those things. There’s no such this as standing up for myself too much. There’s no such thing as being too proud of myself.

This isn’t to say that therapy didn’t help; it did. By having an hour a week- and later, a month- to just talk, I learned a lot about myself. I never considered Zach such a large portion of my insecurities before. I never really examined how deep of a hole I’d dug myself. Those one-hour sessions weren’t life changing, they were life saving.

I needed to get this stuff out. I needed to hear myself say the things I’d held back for so long. I needed to open up; if not to anyone else at first, to myself. I needed to talk through all the pain, all the weakness, all the heartbreak, before I could find myself again.

And here I am, six months later. I got back up from two of the most traumatizing prolonged events of my life, and I am feeling more powerful than ever.

Thank you, Mary, and thank you to all the people who stood by my decision and didn’t make fun of the fact that I needed a “shrink”. It may sound stupid at first, but if you’ve never tried it, you have no room to talk. Therapy helped me understand myself, and that is something that I will carry with me forever.