I'm back

via

I don't know how really "back" I am in this space, but I know that I am back to myself. To the person that I was before I left New York, before my mind began to cause me physical pain, before I received medication and therapy and patience and grace.

I still miss New York but the life that I have built for myself here in Australia, the woman I love who is now my wife, the house we live in together, diligently paying down a mortgage I never thought we would be able to afford - and which we were able to afford thanks to the generosity of my parents and the luck and privilege of a deceased grandparent - is good. That mortgage - thanks to a down payment gifted per the former assistance - has perhaps lessened a good amount of my angst and stress, although in reading this previous posts this morning I think that it was the medication that has helped me most of all.

And I know that is not the case for everyone. That medication helps, and for them I feel heartbroken because thank god it was the case for me. And I am eternally, eternally grateful for feeling like myself again. I have always been a medication-taker, ever since I was put on the pill at 18 for acne. Perhaps it was stopping the pill, due to moving to a new country and not having a doctor for the prescription and not having healthcare coverage, and maybe mostly due to monogamously dating a woman. Perhaps it was stopping that pill and its hormone balancing antics that caused a chemical spiral which led, three years later, to my clearly, crystal clearly, feeling the desire to jump in front of a moving car one day as I walked home from work. Just so that I could feel something. And stop the numbness, and stop the desire to constantly sleep, and stop the wall in front of my eyes and my brain that blocked out all thoughts of future or goals or getting out from under the heavy cloud that sat on my chest and filled my brain and shrouded my eyes.

Perhaps it was that gradual hormonal re-adjusting, entering me into an adulthood totally without medical interference that allowed my brain chemistry to reach the point it may always have been intended to sit.

Perhaps it was leaving the city I had just begun to feel like I was making my own. Leaving the city that part of me always had wondered if I was strong enough to conquer, strong enough to exist in, strong enough to remain in. The ripping away of my long-held dream - and still held-dream - of owning a piece of that city, of knowing that I could always return and have a place to lay my head and have a home base that would be wholly and undeniably my own. In the city I had loved and dreamt of residing in since I was 14 years old. I am sure that leaving New York was part of my sadness and resentment, which festered into something more sinister. The fact that I still miss New York makes me think that surely leaving it was part of my struggle. But by no means was it the reason for my slide into darkness and depression.

Perhaps - and probably - it was a depression brought on by the PTSD-related issue of having been so completely fleeced and robbed by someone with whom I was toxically, intrinsically, irresistibly drawn towards. The first woman I ever felt attracted to, let alone dated and lost myself to, and was infatuated by beyond all reason and based on nothing of value. A woman who possessed an arrogance that I mistook for native New Yorker attitude, and who had the big, loud, loving family that I was probably missing from my native state, or perhaps had always sort of wanted, without the nagging feeling that the pride and love was based on grades and achievements and successes. When she possessed a family that embraced me immediately and was focused - with their blood relatives and life-long friends - on simply the entity before them. Of being their son, their daughter, their cousin, their relation, of that state being enough. The true and literal blood being thicker than water made flesh. Which I know I have always had and very much still have in that  native state of mine, but which I perhaps never possessed the innate confidence to believe and trust. That I was enough as I am, in all the variations and nebulous states that such a human manifests.

Perhaps it was a combination of all of these things. I don't know. And nearly three years after having started medication and therapy I don't care. I'm just glad that I have found a way out of that darkness and that weight.

And perhaps that's one of the reasons I'm hesitant to change anything else in my life right now, and perhaps that is why I have been able to find a sort of contentment in the "now" that I am living. I have never been a very "now" person. I have always been a future person. Do this to get that later on, secure this now in order to have a pathway in the future.

So I'm trying this thing of maintaining stasis. Just focusing on paying down a mortgage, consistently saving for retirement, maintaining my employment that is enjoyable at the moment 90% of the time. And trying to make sure that I remember as often as possible that I am lucky to be in a point of stasis, that I am lucky to be able to stay still. That so many are not so lucky. And so I am working on sitting in the new and maintaining contentment in that space.

And it is hard to bring my mind back when it starts trying to plan future things, but it is good for me to do hard things. So I'll continue.