I’m traveling. It’s the same trip I took last fall just before my suicide attempt, just in the other direction. It has given me so much to think about from the past nine months. Hospitalization. Semicolon. A second round of electroconvulsive therapy. Ketamine therapy. Surgical implant of a Vagus Nerve Stimulator. Hours of therapy. So many meds and the good and bad that they do.
Bright flashes of forgetting what’s hurting inside me. Long stretches of being mired in those feelings and that despair. So many things I’ve forgotten, and others I’ll never be able to forget. The support my wife gives me with so much love I can’t find any adjectives strong enough to describe it.
When I’m in travel mode I am on a mission and follow a schedule, getting to the right places at the right time and acting and looking like just another passenger. I’m good at it, but when things get quiet I can stop, breathe, and remember myself. 3,000 miles this month so far either driving or being driven. When I got here I was so tired. It was the numb yet also painful tired you feel that shuts everything else down until you sleep. But standing in a train station on a fresh air break, waiting to reboard I fell to my thoughts. It was a difficult time, and I have now decided that I can’t be that tired anymore. It’s the same reason I stopped drinking. The effect is a horrible one, and it pushes me toward unsafe.
I had a perfect night of sleep, and spent the day with my daughter. The evening with my brother, his wife and her parents as well as my toddler-niece. I was social. We are a family of stories, and I told many of my own, making people laugh and smile. I’ve trimmed down a bit, I’m trying to dress well. Fashionably, even. If I can’t feel good I want to look good. But when you peel back the tinfoil on the dish you find the hot mess that’s my mind just beneath the surface.
When I see someone after a long time, they say I’m looking so great, my demeanor and animation show how well I’m doing. For those who know what’s happened in the last year they think how much I’ve improved. I’ll never know what to say to those comments. Because some things have changed, but it’s still pretty bad in here.
It is very nice to see family I don’t get to see often, and to spend time with my daughter. The trip is something I’ve looked forward to for a long time, and it is going well in many respects.
a Scarlet D 