After trying to heal from post therapy grief for a year and a half, I can confidently say I’m resilient.
It was unclear there for a bit how this was going to end. This was easily the most painful breakup I’ve ever had. I was in a very bad emotional way for much longer than I expected to be.
I’m not happy with how long it took me to make it to this point and I’m unsatisfied with how much pain and confusion I went through just to get here where I can finally feel myself bouncing back from this. I can actually feel a big difference now, like something finally clicked. Whatever it is, I feel like I was trying to get it to click the entire time, and it decided to a few days ago and I can’t explain the timing. I’m annoyed because taking a year and a half to significantly heal from therapy grief over the ending of therapy with a specific therapist (which also lasted a year and a half) seems unnecessary.
But, I’m taking the win.
Am I a better or stronger or wiser or more empathetic person from this journey? I don’t know. It feels like I just got myself back. I can’t tell if I’m better than I was before, but it does feel like an emotional resurrection which might mean I’m better in some ways than I used to be. Either that or I’m weaker and I’m just so happy to feel better than I’ve been feeling that I haven’t yet realized I’m weaker.
I know there might still be low moments. I know grief isn’t always linear. I just know I feel a renewed energy and a weight has been lifted. I’m thinking and making decisions now without having to intentionally move the lens of pain out of my way to focus.
There are probably some cool lessons to take from what I’ve gone through. You therapists are probably going to be better at figuring that out than me right now.
I’m happy to be alive. I’m happy, and this is hard to admit, that I didn’t go through with hurting myself. I really really wanted to some of the time. It was very difficult to want to post about wanting to self harm and know I had to be careful because most of my readers are therapists.
If there’s some purpose to what I’ve been through, I don’t recognize it right now. I’m grateful if anything I’ve gone through helped even one person about one small thing. If some of you read my posts and laughed because they were so damn awful, well I’m counting that as purpose. It sucked so bad, somebody should’ve at least gotten to laugh from it.
I think it’s better to label myself as resilient rather than a survivor. Both are true, but I find resilient to feel more empowering, so that’s what I’m going with.