I’ve returned to therapy last week. I had a mental breakdown in November leading into early December, one that from the outside would appear to be a rupture caused by one collapsing event but in truth was a series of stress fractures extending back quite a while. I’ve never mastered the will to exist; I drag myself through life in order to love, even if I am learning now that the intensity of that love I show sometimes functionally acts as lovebombing whether I intend it to or not. I take seriously the parting words of people I love; even if we are unable in time to reconcile, I owe them based on the true love I have felt to take their words seriously and act on them. I am imperfect and caught between the perpetual paralytic overthought of OCD and the impetuousness that is often the only saber that can cut through, but my love is true. I will listen to you, even if it is the last thing I manage, even if you are, for now, heading out the door.

It’s therapy a long time overdue. I have bonded with someone over having to be strong for others, to bury weakness to be the pillar they need. It’s painful but, frankly, necessary. Just like the intensity of love that I share, that I must learn now to control, it is born out of having been graveside before, seeing my name on the stone, and knowing in my heart what I needed to be dragged back toward life. This is something we bonded over, a learnable skill even if it’s often frustratingly learned only by extreme pain. You can kneel by someone struggling to live and listen without expectation. You can cradle their heart in your hand until the breath of life returns to their lungs. Maybe they will remember and maybe not; you don’t help people for ego. It’s because you too were once saved by grace and, knowing the sanctity of the human lives of good and bad souls both, you now too must act through grace.

I have an awful time holding on to anger. This is not because I was not programmed, between my boyhood foisted upon me due to being AMAB to the incandescent and hyper violent rage that propagated through my house like wild fires to the PTSD that still traces my brain in a gridwork of scars, in the measures of anger. It’s because I once nearly drove my brother, who had been a monster to me in ways I can’t describe comfortable, to kill hinder at his kitchen table with a gun, unwittingly mirroring my own struggle. I faced in his panicked voice when he called me to find some anchor back to the real the fruit that clinging tight to my anger was bringing to bear and I couldn’t stand it. I will not become the vile thing within me I have the potential to be. I will not remain in adorant awe of my own anger and pain. I cannot be that thing.

But as a result I struggle sometimes to understand anger, to see through the eyes of someone whose life hasn’t led them to the same decision point on those questions. This same person once called this my Christ-like behavior, not in accusation or praise but mere description. At the time, I took it with a mark of pride. Even the briefness of my current therapy, three sessions in seven days due to the excessive weight inside of my skull, it’s becoming easier to see how that was a disfiguring standard I wielded. It came true from my own experience with pain, anger, PTSD and the person I could easily become if I gave in to those bleak and burned-black impulses I keep in check. This does make them endemic with others, at least not necessarily.

See, I find therapy for my own sake difficult to perform. Having not mastered the will to exist, the notion of healing myself for myself is a solipsistic nowhere thought, something I also hope to address. (My own difficulty accepting love caused me to not commit to love offered sincerely to me in a way that still stings me as an obvious failure.) But I can heal for others. I can bear witness to what my actions have done, regardless of my intent, often in fact through good intent, and weigh them against my heart. When I say I love you and I miss you and it winds up suffocating, being selfish and insensitive rather than consoling when I know you are enmeshed in pain both from the intensity of stress laid upon you and grief crossing your heart, I have to take stock of that. I would have lied when I talked about love if I did not. Maybe it’s the last words that get said to me, but god damn it, I will listen and I will change. You owe the people you love that much.

My breakdown was caused by, as always, a generalized lack of faith in my human value, a sense that I am a waste, a dead-end, unworthy of love or protection and thus better off exiting stage left. This happens to me intermittently; such is the nature of the porosity of my brain. I told my spouse not to blame this on others, to remind as kind and graceful as I know them to be, no matter the pain I might be twisted up in. It really, really isn’t the fault of others, especially this time. This is damage that predates these events and people, wounds that throb even on good days. If my agony causes those I love to love others less, to extend with less heart the grace that we all need to show better to each other, I would be a bitter ghost. No; instead, it was my task to heal myself. How do you reconcile without true effort on your own part? How do you say you’re sorry if you haven’t done anything to meaningfully change? You can’t. I find so much difficult, but that kind of strenuous discipline comes easy for me.

I want the love I show to be warm air beneath the wing and not suffocating wind. I want my affection to be nourishing, a sheltering home, not a hailstorm. I don’t try to heal myself with the expectation of reconciliations. But I have to cling to that hope. Until I learn to exist, to no long release the attachment of being, I have to believe I can be wanted again, loved again, in some capacity if not others. I have to believe I can return to life if I mend my heart. Believing this, I can do so much. Sans hope, I have learned that I wither and die. We take humility as a sacrament.