TheBanyanTree: Still Recovering

[Jim Miller]

YOU ARE WANTED!!

You are wanted; not for being wonderful, not for what you look like, not
for what you do for me.

You are wanted because . . . . .  YOU ARE YOU . . . . . PERIOD.

On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 9:53 AM, Monique Colver <monique.colver at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Man, depression sucks. Majorly sucks. I’ve had my setbacks, and I’ve had my
> moments of pure joy, and I’ve cried at the aloneness of it all, and I’ve
> cried with happiness because of everything I do have.
>
> And while I’ve made great progress this these past few months I still have
> those pesky issues cropping up now and then, bad songs in my head that spin
> around, like I’m circling the drain on my way to nowhere.
>
> Sometimes I feel disconnected, from people mostly, from a rich social life.
> I would say I’ve forgotten how to interact with people, but it’s not like I
> ever really knew. It’s not as if I have superior social skills that cause
> others to seek me out. I have adequate social skills, but I’m not
> charismatic, I’m not a leader, I’m not wanted.
>
> That last word just snuck in there when I wasn’t looking, like the
> suspicious character hanging around the entrance who waits for someone who
> isn’t paying attention to leave the door ajar when they enter. He grabs the
> door handle before the door whooshes shut, and he creeps inside, where he
> can take whatever he wants, break whatever he wants.
>
> The past being what it is, gone, I like to stay away from it, but in my
> treatment I’ve had to face some of the things from my past that I tried to
> hide away in the dark corners of my memory, corners that I don’t want to go
> into, areas of concentrated pain. These are the things that I need to let
> go of, because even though I put them away, they’re still trying to get out
> and hurt me. Pain is like that. There isn’t anyone who is familiar with my
> past who can or will either confirm nor deny what happened, so it’s pretty
> much up to me to and my admittedly inferior memory to recall and dispense
> with them.
>
> Or, they will confirm parts of what happened, but then they laugh so much
> because, to them, it was funny, it was all a good joke played on me. They
> mostly have nothing to do with me anymore though. They want nothing to do
> with me, my family of origin, because we have nothing in common, because
> I’m too far away, because I’m nothing to them.
>
> I have my friends and my family of choice, and they love me despite who I
> am. Mostly.
>
> It’s been a battle this year, an epic battle, similar to the battles many
> people face every day. I know there is nothing unique about me, or my
> battles, I am just like so many others struggling to come to terms with who
> we are and how we got here. Trying to make sense of it.
>
> I’m so tired of talking about myself, but at the moment it’s all I have.
> I’m mostly happy these days, mostly on top of things, mostly looking at a
> future instead of a past. But. Still.
>
> When I shattered earlier this year, like a piece of fragile glass toppling
> off a high shelf, I went looking for glue to put things back together. But
> when I tried to put the pieces back together, I found that some of them
> didn’t fit. I can’t get all the pieces back like they were before, and
> that’s probably a good thing because I was carrying around too much
> self-loathing, too much regret. It’s better that I throw some pieces out
> and remake something new, something I couldn’t have imagined before.
>
> And that’s where I’m at, and what I’m trying to do. Make something new that
> I couldn’t imagine before. It just takes time.
>