this is what happens when my therapist takes a leave of absence.

This morning I saw an image of the following poem:

"I stopped looking at / plane tickets to the forest / we used to promise / to name our children after. / All the trees have fallen. / I still hear them echo / your laugh." -- Desiree Dallagiacomo

 It hit me harder than I would like to admit, but here we are.

In recent times, I have lived full days without thoughts of them or us or what broke me. Alas, the ball in the box of grief still hits the button sometimes. That poem pushed it today.

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Sometimes I forget that I am 22. I introduced myself as 23 two weeks ago. I laughed when I found out that it surprised the leadership team at work that I was not carded at our casino-held staff meeting. When I think about it, I feel much older. Dozens of traumatic events, 26 moves and counting, and mysterious amounts of personal failure & growth can't have happened in just 22 years. Right? No.

But when I thought about it today, I shook my head.

I was 21 when I planned my life with someone else--our life. I was barely a legal adult. I'd only graduated college a few months prior--and a year early, for that matter! I'd only started a "real job" as part of my career path a few months prior. I'd only told them how madly I was crushing on them (starting two years before) a few months prior. 

I just shook my head again.

See, that poem hit me hard because I can't look at the plane tickets anymore. I transferred the flight credit from Vermont to DC, and I'm visiting old friends there in a few weeks. I erased names on my Future Kids list because they were for our future kids. The ones we planned to take on picnics, and have tea parties with, and play hide-and-seek with, and share a home with--we had plans. And like the trees, they have fallen apart because they were nothing but lies...to them.

The fault I find is that I always see things coming, but I never saw this. I never saw anything wrong with planning to follow another human across mountains or rivers or hills or oceans. I never saw anything wrong with calling each other at midnight and talking until 4am. I never saw anything wrong with not telling our friends for the sake of not shattering the world we had created, the world that they might not approve of--better not risk it, right? 

Oh how wrong I was.

At 21, I planned to alter my life plans to follow someone else around while they chased theirs, all for the chance of one day having a family together--and the worst part is, at the time, I told myself and the friends who knew about it that I would still pursue my plans. I believed that. I believed so much.

To me, it was all true. Now the truth is that I fell for a lie--despite them telling me, "I'm not a good person."

Why didn't I listen?

---

When I miss signs or ignore warnings, I end up sitting with my good friend Guilt. They exist as a constant in all points of my life, and I find a strange comfort in that. It's the type of comfort that only those who understand this will relate to: it took me five-and-a-half days to complete a load of laundry, from the start of tossing it in the machine to the end of slipping it all onto hangers despite its pile blocking my daily path. Depression, they say, is a mysterious form of unhappiness.

I disagree. It's not that I lack happiness. It's that I lack the desire to hold as tightly to that as I do Guilt, Grief, Blame, Disgust, or the constant reminder from the Dark Side of my brain that people likely kick me from the curbs of their lives for the same reason they keep me on them: "it's probably because I'm crazy."

It's hard to listen to what others say--and accept it as truth--when I can't listen to my own thoughts without questioning whether I actually thought them or if the mailman of an illness stopped by, again.

I often ask myself now, "would I think this way, or is this because of something someone or something else taught me to believe?"

Still, I often don't listen. I know what to expect when I make that decision, and consistency is comforting

Still, I am fighting to change that.

Still, I am strong.