I want to cry because I don’t want to cry, because something in me got kicked back into place at some point when I wasn’t paying attention and I no longer feel like I’m breaking, because there is no longer this gaping hole in my chest that I couldn’t seem to fill.
Yesterday was the seven-year anniversary of the accident that absolutely destroyed me, and things have changed so much since then that I don’t know how to describe it anymore.
I started writing because it gave me a way to escape what was going on inside of my head—books helped, but they weren’t enough. I had to build my own worlds, my own stories, where people were strong enough to overcome the things I couldn’t, and that’s still how my writing takes shape. If you look hard enough (though sometimes you don’t have to look very hard at all), you will find a piece of me in every single one of my main characters. You’ll find the pieces of me that I love, but also the pieces of me that I’ve struggled with.
I wrote other people’s stories for so long because I didn’t have the words to write my own. I would try, would piece together fragments at two or three in the morning when I was losing my mind, and it wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t be right. There were no words to capture what I was feeling because what I was feeling was beyond any description. It was anger and sadness and heartbreak and pain and so many other things all rolled into one, night after night, and I struggled endlessly to explain it to myself.
I don’t know if I ever quite managed to do that, to be honest. There are a few times where I think I managed to come close, but there is no way to properly describe what was going on in my head. It was a mess that I didn’t know how to contain, and writing down all of the thoughts that were running rampant was just one attempt on a long list to keep myself from losing it completely.
Somewhere along the way, I found my voice. Somewhere along the way, I found a part of me that I didn’t even know I had, the part that wanted to put words together into something more, and so I wrote. I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, and after what is probably more than a million words, I figured out what I sound like. I figured out what makes my writing mine.
It’s there in everything I do, in my prose, in my analytic work. It’s my voice, down on a page or a screen. It’s the result of all of those attempts to get out of my own head, years and years worth of them.
I spent so long running from my own mind, but somehow I managed to find my way back into it.
I used to be terrified of my own thoughts, of the things that would haunt me at all hours of the night when all I wanted to do was sleep. I used to be terrified of who I was and what I was becoming—everyone in high school who didn’t like me because of my cynicism was nowhere near how much I disliked myself. I didn’t like who I was, but I had no idea how to be anyone else. That pain had become my reality and I clung to it because it was the only thing that I was sure of.
And then one day I talked about it, really talked about it, for the first time. I told a member of the history department, and from then on he was the one I went to every time I was starting to slip a little bit too far. He was the one who never pushed me to do anything that I wasn’t ready for, whose steady support was the thing that made me brave enough to finally get a diagnosis, because he made sure that I knew it was all my choice—all of it.
I started getting a little bit better. Autumn of junior year was my absolute lowest point, the point where it nearly broke me, but then it started to get a little easier. I would go a few days, and then I would lose it again, which doesn’t sound like much except for the fact that before that I was losing it every night.
And then over time, a few days turned into a week, and then a week turned into a few weeks, and then weeks turned into months, and this past year I suddenly realized that I’m not falling apart anymore.
I tried to tell myself that before. I thought that if I told myself that I was all right, then I would be, but that’s not how it works. This year’s realization was different. It wasn’t something I told myself. It just hit me.
I would be lying if I said that I don’t have panic attacks anymore. I had one on Tuesday night, one that sent me into a tailspin that I’m still recovering from, but that panic attack was not about anything personal. I don’t panic over my past anymore. I don’t hurt like I used to.
I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know how much of it was me and how much of it was other people, or when it happened, but I went all day yesterday without feeling like I was dying. I went all day without really thinking about what the day meant, aside from a passing thought here or there. I took one minute to stand in front of my bulletin board so that I could look at the pictures of us, and then I looked at the pictures of me with my friends and family, and at the picture of me with one of the horses at the barn, and I smiled.
I have come so far from who I was. One of my friends loves to point out how much I laugh, mainly because he thinks it’s funny, and I just want to look at him and go “Do you know how much of an improvement this is for me?”
My history teacher from my sophomore and junior year of high school used to make a joke out of how impassive I constantly was. He would ask me how I was doing and I would never say “good.” If I said “okay,” that was a good day. If I said “okay,” that meant I didn’t feel like I was completely falling apart, and that was an improvement on most moments of my existence.
I usually wasn’t okay.
I’m okay with who I am now. I’m okay with what I’ve become. I’m okay with the choices that I’ve made, and the things that I’ve faced, and I’ve moved on.
I’ve moved on. I painted my room back in March, and finally succeeded in doing something that I hadn’t been able to do before. I took down my horse’s halters from where they were hanging in plain view and I boxed them up. I boxed them up, and with them I boxed up the anger and the pain and the inability to move forward.
I still miss him. I will always miss him, because he gave me hope and he taught me patience and he made me strong, but I don’t hurt over him anymore.
Even if I did, I have something now that I didn’t have before. I have friends who have told me, of their own volition, to message them if I’m ever upset and want to talk to someone, no matter what it’s about. I doubt I ever will, because I’ve gotten to be very good at dealing with my problems on my own and I still struggle with reaching out, but the fact remains: I am not alone anymore.
That’s not to say that I ever was before, because I’ve had one person stick with me through this entire adventure and I will owe her for the rest of my life, but it felt that way. It doesn’t any longer.
I’m relearning how to trust people and I feel whole again for the first time in years. Seven has always been my lucky number, and I never had a good reason why, but maybe I do now.
Maybe seven means okay.
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