I'm Not Ready to Die Yet

I've written briefly about this before, so forgive me my moment of self-indulgence, but what I've been thinking about for the past week is how little time I've spent wanting to be alive. My entire 20s were spent desperately clinging to life when I often didn't want to. I vacillated wildly between wanting to die and not feeling capable of living, which are not quite the same thing, and I was on so many different medications and tried therapy so many times and it's a miracle that my body didn't fuse with my couch. Elijah and my mom did a lot to keep me going during that time, from bringing me food when I had no interest in feeding myself to managing my meds and rationing them out to me when I couldn't be trusted with them to giving me reasons to leave the house and exist in the world.

My early 30s were better, quite a lot better, but they still weren't great. I had to do so much work to pick up the pieces of the past decade and try to assemble them into something I didn't hate. I was in consistent therapy with the same therapist and I was properly medicated until I finally felt like I wanted to try living life without antidepressants and stopped taking them, and I no longer felt my whole being screaming for death, but the thing about the passing of the storm was that I then had to clean up the wreckage. I had to basically rewire my brain and learn new ways of thinking about myself, my place in the universe, my relationships with other people, and my health, both physical and mental. I had to figure out who I was if I wasn't constantly self-sabotaging and self-loathing and refusing every good thing because I knew, deep down in the marrow of my bones, that I didn't deserve good things. I had to forgive myself for the mess I had made and for the reasons why I made that mess.