Where I’ve Been

As much as I’d like to ignore it, the fact of my long absence from this page feels like an elephant I need to address. After all, this blog is primarily about mental health and recovery from abuse, and I don’t think I’d be doing anyone a service by trudging along as if I hadn’t spent a year barely posting at all.

The fact is, I didn’t have an easy transition to California. I so hoped that when I got my first position here so quickly that would mean I could hit the ground running and return to business as usual, just in a new state with more roommates. That is not what happened.

I initially wrote a lot of words about what exactly I went through, and maybe at some point I’ll be far enough removed to produce something more than just a detailed list of events. What it boils down to, though, is that I spent a lot of time in work environments that ranged from truly terrible to simply a bad fit. During that time, I tried push through and make myself write. I wanted so badly to be back at a point where I could safely and meaningfully process on the page, to feel like I was getting any work done toward dealing with what I’ve been through and how it impacts me. I felt like I was wallowing, like the entire issue boiled down to me just sitting in my own bad feelings and triggers instead of addressing the root of the issue. Predictably, that did very little to motivate me. It was tough to get myself to journal, much less hold space for the worst of my experiences and the child I was when I endured them.

I had a lot of shame about my inability to just get up and do it. I was so used to being able to power through, get up at 4 am, and do my writing come hell and high water. Every day that I didn’t felt like a failure scratching at the back of my mind. It wasn’t until I got back to my desk that I realized why it felt so impossible to do for so long.

Now that I have a few essays queued about the things I’ve survived, and am back in the swing of daily writing, I can see what I’ve been missing for the past year. What I need is a sense of stability. At its essence, the work I do here is upheaval. It’s me sitting down with the memories I pushed away for years and finally acknowledging them in a way that allows me to move through them, often for the first time. It’s a messy, draining, and difficult experience. More times than not, I have to stop myself from getting up from my desk and doing anything else but think about those individual, awful moments that have been rotting away at the back of my head.

Trying to do that work while also doing jobs that were either temporary, triggering, or made me actively suicidal was never going to work. I cannot both bleed myself dry trying to stay employed and also bleed out my woundedness onto the page. I just don’t have that much to give.

That’s not to say that I need some magically trigger free life in order to do this work. If anything, journalling before I ever touch an essay is a big part of my process. I very intentionally screech out the day-to-day frustrations in advance, so that there’s nothing in the way of me processing the source of those issues. It’s more that I can’t expect myself to sit with my abuse while my life is actively in upheaval.

I’m sure that sounds obvious, but for me, the big realization isn’t just a re-hashing of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s how badly I was doing mentally up to this point. I am very good at dissociating my way through hardships, and what I’m learning now is that no matter how much I refuse to acknowledge it, no matter how well I can keep it together, having my ability to make a living at risk, and therefore also my ability to maintain food and shelter, deeply fucked up my mental health. Not being able to write was not a failure. It was a sign of how bad things really were.

The job I have now isn’t perfect. We’ve had our fair share of unnecessary corporate drama, and it certainly doesn’t pay enough. That said, it is stable. I picked it up quickly but can still see areas for improvement. I have a clear path to promotion that doesn’t need to involve leadership, and a manager more than happy to help me gain the skills I need to be a good candidate for those positions. I have friends that I chat with at work on a daily basis, and a few that I’ve spent time with outside of work. For the first time in the year and a half since I left California, I have a job that I feel like I can safely stick with long term, and that shift alone has meant that it’s finally possible for me to get back to the work that matters to me.

What I’ve learned is that growth isn’t eternal. Periods of dormancy and recovery are normal and needed, just as the winter is needed for a beautiful spring. If I regret anything over the past year, it’s the guilt I put myself through for not being able to both recover and claw for survival. Those things could never have co-existed, and my shame about it didn’t change a thing.

I’m glad and relieved to be back at my desk and writing at 4 am after such a long absence. This work is important to me, and to my happiness and sense of fulfillment. That doesn’t change the fact that I needed the season of rest I took away from trying to work through my trauma. Now that it’s over, I wish I’d appreciated it more.