Oh Dear...

I missed a day. On an important storytelling moment such as my date with Pam. Not very blogger professional of me.

 

Well...first of all...I have nothing exciting to say about Pam. The date was rather blah...and while I found her quite attractive and fun, she did not feel the connection and decided we shouldn't have a second date. It only lasted an hour.

 

Anti-climactic if I do say so myself.

 

So, things suck with OAOA...what else is new...things don't exist with Pam...c'est le vie (I don't know if I spelled that right)...and I was still so stuck in my bout of depression, paralyzed in bed, that I called the absolute one person I wanted to but knew I shouldn't since she hadn't responded to my plea for help weeks ago:

 

Firefly.

 

What I received was almost exactly what I expected. A cold, bitter, "I'm not the person you should be talking to anymore. There's nothing I can do for you. I'm sorry."

 

Crash. Burn.

 

Firefly is someone who took up almost a decade of my life, someone whom I define myself and my past by. And if there was ever closure...this was it. It was done. She didn't want to speak to me, not now, not ever, no matter how much I felt like death.

 

So what then? What do you do when you realize you have to let go of almost all of what you've defined yourself as?

 

This morning, I found myself paralyzed in bed once more by my onslaught of terrible thoughts about my life and my past and my future. And the closer it got to the time I needed to get out of bed and go to work, the more my heart started to pound, the more I wanted to scream and cry and just couldn't.

 

That's when I rolled over and grabbed a notebook I had tried writing in yesterday and hadn't. I was going to attempt one of my CBT exercises by draining the thoughts out of me by getting them onto paper. When I opened the notebook, I found a drawing I did yesterday while home by myself, caught up in my feelings…it was rather cartoony. It was me getting real angry and lifting my foot up to stomp on my heart that was laying on the floor, because I was so angry at it for making me feel this way. As gruesome as that sounds, since it was cartoony, it was actually pretty funny, and I thought to myself that I actually did a good job drawing it, and I stopped to think for a moment that I felt pride in my work, even though it wasn't bringing me money or fame.

 

What happened next was pretty incredible.

 

I decided to start writing my CBT exercise, but halfway into it, my thoughts shifted from being negative to being angry. Not angry at someone, or something, or even myself…but like my mother  had said to me many times before.

 

GET ANGRY AT IT.

 

For maybe fifteen to twenty minutes, I wrote, it didn't matter whether it was big or small, scribbled, legible, I wrote however the words felt like coming out, it didn't matter whether there was a rhyme or a reason, whether they were poetic or gibberish, I just kept writing and turning the pages and I felt all my anger and all my frustration leave me. I felt my strength come back, I was getting angry in a way that was good. I declared that I didn't want this anymore, I shouted to the page that this was over, everything was over, and I choose differently for my life, because it's mine, and I'm not living for anyone else.

 

And when it was all said and done, I couldn't believe how I felt. I felt better. I felt capable. And strangely enough, I felt creative and motivated.

 

For the first time, I channeled my energy. I channeled my emotions. I figured out how to get them out of me. And as I got dressed, exhilarated, and walked to work with my head held high, I wondered to myself, "If I can channel my emotions to break a bout of depression…what else can I channel my emotions into to do something great?"

 

My art. My goals. My relationships. My life.

 

My purpose. Which I had cried to my therapist yesterday about having none. If I wasn't loved, and I wasn't needed, then I had no purpose.

 

But that's not true. My purpose is to experience.

 

-Spontaneous K