2016, like 2009, has been for me personally “the year of therapy.”
Not that therapy is always something so neatly boxed up with start and end dates — the therapy of 2009 started in mid 2008 and ended in late 2010, for instance. Even then I knew it was not a “done deal”, over and out, all fixed and moving on.
No, it was a pause. I knew it at the time, but I was doing much better and I was post-divorce and in graduate school and living alone for the first time in 15 years. I was not ready to delve deeper into some of the core issues, emotionally or financially, so I decided to hit pause and come back later when I was ready.
Likewise, I started this year of therapy in fall of 2015. But no matter, 2016 has been marked by me as another year of therapy. I was not ready for it, honestly, but work stress and personal issues I had tried to compartmentalize crawled out of the ooze and swamped me. I started on anti-anxiety meds, which were very helpful, and then got back on board the therapy train.
And it continues into 2017.
The news that I’m a broken human being is not revelatory, let’s be honest. You only have to read my story in Grieving Futures to know I’m a little messed up.
Aren’t we all, though? And isn’t that part of what makes us human?
I grew up in an era where mental illness was considered a moral failing, when it was considered at all, as the daughter of a woman with severe bipolarism and man who was an alcoholic with PTSD. The shame and heartbreak and fear in our house could fill buckets on a daily basis.
Yet, my parents were not that unusual. Neither am I. We’ve all got our issues — to different degrees and in different ways, but we got ’em. Me. You. All of us. So I refuse to continue ye olde family tradition of being quiet about it in hopes that it will never be seen and will not impact those around me. I will not pretend, as my parents did, that my flaws do not define me.
Therapy has not “fixed me up” or changed me, not at the deep level of identity. Therapy has served as a form of kintsukuroi/kintsugi, mending me enough to hold myself together. There is no pretense that being broken isn’t a fundamental part of my psychological construction. Those breaks and cracks, though, make me unique, and can be as much a part of my beauty and function as any other aspect of my personality.
I’m still gluing and gilding, as I go along. At this point I’m not even sure of the shape of my soul, only that it still has value.
