sae
03-07-2016, 08:35 AM
.. for perhaps the strangest reason. A few months back I started with a counseling center run by college students at the local big name university. Those students worked hard and diligently with me and I wasn't dissatisfied at all with their techniques. My problem stemmed from something entirely different that had me feeling like a real asshole.
March is hell month for me. That's the month my thoughts unwittingly reopen old wounds concern my late husband and our marriage. The trouble came when I found myself sitting across the room from a girl likely barely 20 years old. Chances are my story is not wholly unique, really, but I couldn't shake the fear that just retelling old stories was like opening a Pandora's box of all the evil shut the world is made of.
At 20 I didn't want to be reminded that people hurt others because they hurt, or out of mental illness, addiction and anger. It just didn't seem fair, you know, to share these kinds of truths, the pain of being helpless under the bruising grasp of another, or the mental anguish that comes with losing someone to addiction over a number of years.
I looked in that woman's eyes and found an innocence and naiveté that I had lost so long ago. Truth is something that can never be unlearned and a small part of me thinks that my anxiety and obsessive maladaptive behaviors are in part at least manifestations of learning so many hard truths.
I am a cheerful person, yet the cheer hides an angry bitterness that lends a curiously conflicting quality to my speech. I can tell the story of hard days with a low, uneasy chuckle. To me these incidents are funny because I will never admit that I have already cried over them.
In counselling I could only say so much before I watched the expression change on my counselors face. There are some truths better left unspoken; unfortunately they are the same truths that haunt me still. They are like a communicable disease, infecting everyone it comes in contact with. Is it right or fair for me to spread them?
Likely not, and that's okay. If it is one thing I have learned in this whole ordeal it is that my anxiety won't kill me, just exhaust me.
March is hell month for me. That's the month my thoughts unwittingly reopen old wounds concern my late husband and our marriage. The trouble came when I found myself sitting across the room from a girl likely barely 20 years old. Chances are my story is not wholly unique, really, but I couldn't shake the fear that just retelling old stories was like opening a Pandora's box of all the evil shut the world is made of.
At 20 I didn't want to be reminded that people hurt others because they hurt, or out of mental illness, addiction and anger. It just didn't seem fair, you know, to share these kinds of truths, the pain of being helpless under the bruising grasp of another, or the mental anguish that comes with losing someone to addiction over a number of years.
I looked in that woman's eyes and found an innocence and naiveté that I had lost so long ago. Truth is something that can never be unlearned and a small part of me thinks that my anxiety and obsessive maladaptive behaviors are in part at least manifestations of learning so many hard truths.
I am a cheerful person, yet the cheer hides an angry bitterness that lends a curiously conflicting quality to my speech. I can tell the story of hard days with a low, uneasy chuckle. To me these incidents are funny because I will never admit that I have already cried over them.
In counselling I could only say so much before I watched the expression change on my counselors face. There are some truths better left unspoken; unfortunately they are the same truths that haunt me still. They are like a communicable disease, infecting everyone it comes in contact with. Is it right or fair for me to spread them?
Likely not, and that's okay. If it is one thing I have learned in this whole ordeal it is that my anxiety won't kill me, just exhaust me.