I spend most of my time in my room. Which, at 22, is less than ideal. And since I’ve had so much time on my hands, I’ve been thinking a lot. And I tend to write these thoughts down, privately, but recently a few friends suggested to me that I should start blogging, or writing advice columns – it would give me something to do, give me some sense of purpose, and maybe a few people will stumble across this page and find that it helps them with something. The time that I’ve had has allowed me to reflect on my past, who I was as a person, and who I want to be in the future. If anything, this time that I’ve spent in unplanned medical confinement has allowed me to recognize my faults and flaws, and it’s proven to me that I want to be a better person in the future than I ever was in the past.
I don’t necessarily have a theme for this blog – it will very much work as a diary or journal. I don’t have a set schedule of when I’m going to post, or what I’m going to post for that matter. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that the best laid plans always go askew. Especially mine.
I don’t have much going for myself lately. Which is not something I ever thought I’d say. I was driven, determined, passionate. I had fire. I had plans to be unstoppable. So, you can imagine my surprise when I started realizing I couldn’t stand for long, that I started passing out while brushing my teeth, that I didn’t have enough energy or stamina to grocery shop for myself anymore. Imagine my surprise when I realized I had to drop out of college because I was physically too ill to keep going. That was a blow to my ego, if anything.
And now, it’s been almost two years since I got to live my life. I’ve missed out on more than I thought would be possible. I didn’t get the 21st birthday party that I thought I would have, nor the 22nd birthday. I spent both of those birthdays in bed, unable to even sit up for more than a few minutes. Hell, I barely was able to enjoy my 20th birthday because I kept sneaking off to the bathroom or the living room so I could sit and catch my breath, so that I didn’t pass out. And I’m a birthday person. I’m a celebration person. It was… rather difficult to watch everyone else celebrate their 21st that year. And 20, 21, and 22 are such romanticized ages. It’s your early 20’s! I’m supposed to be getting obnoxiously drunk at bars and make bad decisions and kiss guys who I think are cute and then realize the next morning that maybe they really aren’t. I’m supposed to go on road trips with my friends, take graduation photos with them, move to a new city and sit on the floor and eat ramen noodles every night until I earn my first paycheck. I am supposed to be starting my life right now, and instead, I am wasting away. I thought I was supposed to have become someone by now. Instead, I spend every day in bed. I use a walker in my own home, when I can get up. I have already missed out on the prime years of my life – and I will never get that time back. And it just continues to happen everyday. It’s like one of those bad dreams where you’re stuck on this spinning carousel and you just can’t get off.
But I want a chance to be a person. I want a chance to be a better person than I was, and I thought maybe if I couldn’t do that physically in person, then I could do it online. I have a lot of regrets about who I was, things I said, how I handled things in the past. And the problem is, I have all this time to just sit and think and ruminate on it. And one thing leads to another and suddenly I’m thinking about the most minuscule things I’ve ever said or done to someone (even things I said innocently by mistake, or things I didn’t mean to say), and all I can think about is that they hate me, or they think I’m a horrible person who doesn’t deserve good things to happen to them. Not having anything to do or occupy your time is a recipe for disaster for someone with anxiety. I’ve been working on forgiving myself and letting go of who I was in the past, and letting go of what happened in the past. I’m a different person now than I was four years ago, even two years ago. I wouldn’t handle everything the same way, or react to things the same way now. I may have thought I was doing the right thing at the time, and I probably thought I was handling it the best I could at the time. But now I realize that I was wrong, about so many things. It’s almost laughable at how wrong I really was about things. Or just how stupid I was. But I feel like I’ll never get the chance to show anyone that I’ve grown and changed. So I have to let it go. I’ve acknowledged that I did stupid things, said stupid things, and now I have to leave it be. I was a teenager once, and I feel like most teenagers should be allowed to be awful, for just a little while, so that maybe they won’t be awful adults. And being a teenager is so much more confusing than you think. And I have to forgive myself for the mistakes I made as a teenager. I have to give my younger self some kind of grace when it comes to messing up. You don’t know who you are, but you think you do, so you latch onto anything that could give you a sense of identity. And then you fall down this rabbit hole of who you think you’re supposed to be, and then you wake up one day, you really wake up, and it’s like someone has dumped a cold bucket of water over your head and you can finally feel your lungs and you can suddenly see every little indentation on the leaves. And you just know. You know it’s okay to not know who you are, but you know just the same that you’re not the same person anymore. But even knowing this, I still have a lot of regrets and I sit with them everyday. They’re there when I wake up, they’re there when I eat breakfast, when I’m watching Netflix, when I’m trying to close my eyes at night to sleep. And I’m working on it. But it’s a slow process. So I thought maybe I would just start writing about it – how I feel, what I think, what I know now. And for now, that will be enough.
My posts will probably be disorganized, chaotic, and work as stream-of-consciousness. I’m hoping this experience will also be cathartic for me, like my own version of therapy.
The Elephant in the Room 