Day 1: Write about your first time trying something
The first thing I learned is that it gets very lonely very quickly.
It's hard to become accustomed to different background noise. You might be used to always hearing your TV from your living room at a certain hour of the night, or being woken up by creaking floorboards in the morning. New noise can be disorienting. Unfamiliar voices yelling through walls are particularly uncomfortable. You start missing the voices you know, you start craving familiar presence. Too many nights alone means too much time alone with your thoughts. It's always been this way, of course, but when there's no one outside of your room to distract you from these thoughts even for a little while, it makes them hit much harder.
Having plants helped me more than I thought it would. Simply having something to take care of made me feel less alone. And friends, of course. Friends are the best medicine an lonely person can have.
The next speed bump comes when figuring out your own routine.
Reality can become altered very quickly if you’re not careful. Waking up and falling asleep at a reasonable time is a much bigger challenge than it seems. With so much independence comes so many options and things to do that it can be easy to forget to do anything at all. Staying on top of things is a juggling match that it can be difficult to master, so take it one step at a time. Don't be afraid to set alarms, even when there's nothing to wake up for. Running errands are more fun when you’re doing it completely for yourself, so do it often. And DON’T forget to tidy every other day. Especially garbage. Take out your garbage often.
The thing that took the longest was regaining my sense of self. I didn’t even realize how out of body I had become until I was a month in, and I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I couldn’t pinpoint what was going wrong. I felt like I was watching every day as if it was a movie. Keeping on top of things wasn’t making me feel any more present and I would feel more real when I was intoxicated then when I was sober. This led to habits that made everything feel much worse, and mornings much harder to get through. It began to get very frustrating. I didn’t want to feel so bad, because for the first time in my life things were exactly as I wanted them to be. I was independent in a big city, following my dreams and spending time with my friends. So why did everything feel so empty? Was I in denial about being let down by something I’d been waiting almost my whole life to do? Or was it finally time for me to accept that bad mental health is not as easily dismissible as new air to breathe and a new place to rest my head?
My moment of realization came when I went back and visited my hometown for the first time since moving. The moment I re-entered my old shoebox bedroom that I grew up in, I realized that THIS is what true emptiness feels like. All of the bad memories that I hadn’t thought about since leaving started flooding back. These walls had, and still have, trauma within their cracks. Trauma of all the things that this old town had done to me, of all the nights I’d come home and cry into the pillow as I fell asleep. I wasn’t feeling empty since leaving, I was feeling lighter. And it wasn’t a feeling I’d ever experienced before, so it scared me. The person I couldn’t recognize in the mirror was simply a changing girl. Change is scary and nauseating, and true change isn't felt as often as one might think. But I got it, then. Things were different, but that's okay.
It's important not to be afraid of new things and new feelings. And of course, that's much easier said than done. Just remember to be busy, keep clean, and focus on yourself always. The hardest pill to swallow is that scary is not always bad. But once you digest it, beautiful, beautiful things will begin to bloom for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment