A Healthy Restart

I’m In a really good place right now.

But getting here hasn’t been easy. While I have been independent most of three years, it doesn’t mean that it has been at all easy. It has been more bumpy than smooth. Finally after nearly three years I am in a good place with everything, despite still being in a global pandemic.

Give or take, it has been three years. Three years of living and learning. Lessons I feel that I needed to learn. Things that I needed to hear. To learn that we don’t always get the things we want or things will always be there.

Those who love and care for me have seen me relapse at my near breaking point. It’s a wonder that I am even writing this on a December evening in a home I have had for 13 months. After learning from a prior experience that turned sour. Not totally because of my fault, But things were contributing to the need to take care of some things.

I had to with little notice the first opportunity that I had for what I would think would be a month. Then COVID hit and the world shut down and the situation with my first home didnt get better. Then I became unwell because I became careless and the dark side of me that I had been masking so well came out to my parents. I became out of control. My mother was working at home and the dynamic was very on edge to say the best.

I remember two interventions where she had to call the therapist to intervene and attempt to interject me from being in an Emergency Room and in an Inpatient Behavioral Health Unit. I call many of my supporters “one in a million” because they are just that. They have shown me to reach for the stars and specifically, my therapist on several occasions has been able to bring me down from when I am in a state of meltdown and de-escalate me. I am forever thankful as I don’t know where I would be if she wasn’t able to do that.

I got back on my feet when others thought I needed more time. But I knew I needed to do it and the chance of finding my home came up by pure luck. That’s how things usually work for me.  I always believe that the big man upstairs has a plan for us and he knows when that will be.

I got settled in my new digs, continuing to do some of the same preemptive behavior to a degree that I genuinely knew was unhealthy. I always thought I could mask myself through until the next point I could recharge and do it again. But I was wrong.

I noticed that I needed to get back where I was before I went off course. I needed to do things I knew worked and debunk myths that I thought were true. They weren’t. I was doing just fine. Part of getting back on track was realizing that my association with others was just for minimal validation and the needing of attention, when getting back on track, I simply realized that I didn’t need that attention to be recognized. I just need to be my genuine self and stay the course I left three years ago.

There were some good things that happened out of those three years not to invalidate them, but I knew I needed to evaluate everything in my life and weed the garden and grow the good and deadhead the bad and regrow it. 

By doing this I realize that when I am in a good place, people see me for who I really want to be and can be. They appreciate all the work I do because I am focused on doing good things and being there for others and supporting them through whatever they are facing.

You see, our actions, whether positive or negative, can make others follow and carry whatever we are feeling with them too. By them doing this it causes sort of a chain effect like some of the fellow bloggers that shared a poem that I wrote this week. Being of a sound mind, I can give a clear sounding of what I am truly feeling without having to mask what I know I shouldn;t be feeling. I know I am in a good place because I feel in control and can do what I enjoy instead of having to be exhausted by limiting it to just doing the bare minimum.

You as a person, whatever challenges you are facing have to determine what you need to get at your good place. Only you know what works for you. I do not have the answers. For me, there were many things that were in place, but I decided not to follow them and couldn’t accept the fact those things were needed and that what I thought they caused was a total myth. Again, Be creative, do what works for you. It may take time for me to explore. There were a number of factors that made me want to veer off course. I have, finally, after three years realized that it isn NEVER a healthy place to be and I had to accept that on my own terms. Now that I did and it took until I saw the writing clearly, I am ready to move on.

Here’s to a healthy restart.