Reclaiming my right to exist.

As I start typing this article, I feel a wave of shame wash over me. Have I talked too much about my recovery from narcissistic upbringing? Have I crossed the faithed line from authenticity into complacency? How many blog posts am I allowed to speak on this topic before I can’t stand myself?

Questions for another day…

I often tell people stuck in binging behaviours “you can’t go from where you are, to where you want to be, you need a third option to start”. Today, I realized I wasn’t taking this advice for myself. For some reason, I had decided that healing my chronic depression would look like joy, but I feel like I skipped a step; before being present with joy, I will need to be present with pain. I am still crumbling under decades of being told that my feelings are just WRONG. Any awareness of depression, hopelessness, is immediately redirected in going to “healing” tools, masking or distraction. I have not been present with my pain, especially in front of other people, in way too long.

This is not only because of my upbringing, I have also been shamed by many friends in my past. One specific instance where a close friend told me that “not everyone wants to endure my gloom and doom everyday”. I’ve also had other friends and exes who just tell me I wasn’t doing enough. Imagine having the ability to be happy and shitting on someone because they don’t. That’s like asking someone who’s getting tortured to be quieter please because your wailing is interrupting cocktail hour.

Today, I was riding a boat between Belize city and Caye Caulker. If there has ever been a place where one should be happy, I think a boat over the Caribbean sea should qualify! But as I was thinking of all the reasons I’m here, thinking of my mom, thinking of my career, thinking of how lame it is to be stuck thinking uncontrollably… I started to cry, and I did not stop. I did not wipe my tears, I did not regulate, I did not pretend to be a happy traveler. I just cried silently for no reason other than I felt like it. It felt like reclaiming my right to exist as I am; a chronically depressed person. Reclaiming my right to exist in public shamelessly. Giving myself permission to trust that my emotions have a purpose and a meaning and don’t deserve to be constantly suppressed so they don’t inconvenience happy people who like their happiness untainted, thank you.

I think I’m getting there, the third place. The place where I’m not who or where I want to be, but I am someone and somewhere else than where I was also. It’s that place where if someone told me I was being a drag for being depressed, I’d very calmly point at the door. I know it’s a heavy burden, not everyone is built to hear a loved one say they want to die, but if you don’t have the empathy to understand how incredibly harder it is to live that experience from the inside, I don’t need your jugement.

Earlier this evening, I stopped to grab a margarita at the bar, the bar tender said “why do you look so sad and tired?” and I just said “because I am” 🙂 .