My journey through pain - 13. Chapter 13 - Okay with not okay

It feels as though each day is so long, yet in retrospect they seem to have gone by so fast. This last week I have been working very hard on changing my perception of something which keeps dragging me down at times: the fact that I don’t feel okay.

I guess the way I explain it to myself is that, before, and for the vast majority of my life, my baseline feeling has always been either okay or good. Even when I was in the darkest depths of my depression, if you had asked me at any random moment how I felt, I would have probably said okay. It didn’t mean I was all right, but it did mean that I was not experiencing horrible anxiety, crawling fear, and the feeling that I needed to do something right away or horrible things would happen – without knowing what that something could possibly be. I had always taken it as a given that what I’m going to call my emotional baseline was either neutral or very close to it for the most part, with variations throughout the day but always going back to that ‘okayness’. An example of that would be that, before, I would lose my ‘okayness’ in anticipation of something stressful – like a social occasion for meeting new people, when I still had very bad social anxiety. Nevertheless, as soon as the stressful event was over, I would go back to baseline. Maybe it was neutral, maybe it was meh, but I could ignore it.

Not so now. The vast majority of the time, if you ask me how I feel I would say bad. It’s like I’m constantly expecting a horribly stressful social situation and the dread never goes away. There’s always this weird combination of anxious, jittery unease combined with bad memories, fear of the future, regrets of the past, and so on and so forth which make me feel bad. It is getting better little by little, even though it may not seem so from where I’m standing, but even though things are progressing, the fact of the matter is that most days, for most of the day, I still feel bad. Uneasy. Anxious.

I have been trying to fight against this feeling and to reach the calm that I have felt for a few precious days since this journey of mine began. In the back of my mind I have been having these nagging thoughts that say that if I don’t feel calm, or good, then I’m not doing something right or there’s something else that needs to be done in order to correct it somehow. It’s not comfortable at all to feel the way I do most of the time. I sometimes liken it to having an ache somewhere in your body that doesn’t go away, like when you’ve been on your feet for way too long and all you want is to sit down and rest your feet and your lower back. Only, with me, I can’t sit down. Ever. I have this emotional ache that demands my attention and I have no way of making it go away. The more I try, the more attention I pay to it, the more difficult it becomes to endure it. A few times I am able to overcome the feeling, sure, and then it’s great – it feels like a victory. But most of the time I can’t because the background reasons for me feeling the way I do are outside of my control and all I can do is learn to accept my life the way it is now and to move forward with that. I have been doing lots of things to help me deal with the negative emotions, but there is no scientific formula that says X plus Y equals calm. I can do everything I have been learning how to do, like being active, reaching out to others, writing down my thoughts, eating well, etc etc etc… And all of these things do work and they add up to something positive, but sometimes, most of the time in fact, I still feel bad afterwards.

I have realized I need to learn to accept that.

I need to learn how to be okay with me not being okay – for the moment, at least. I need to begin to accept that my new emotional baseline is in the ‘bad’ territory for now. It doesn’t mean I’m doing something wrong and it doesn’t mean I won’t ever get better – it just means that, for now and that the very near future, I’m going to feel like crap, maybe most of the time, and I need to be okay with that. For the past few days I’ve tried to apply this to my day to day and I have to say it has helped me. It relieves some of the pressure I was placing on myself to try to reach a good frame of mind as soon as possible, as if this entire situation were a test that I needed to ace. I’ve spoken before of how it feels like a defeat to go back to feeling bad the way I used to feel right at the beginning, when the shock of everything that happened was freshest. I’ve been working on letting go of that sensation, but there was always this expectation I had of myself that everyday should be at least a little better than the last and that I should have an incremental and a noticeable amount of ‘calm’ or ‘good’ time per day if I was doing everything I was supposed to be doing. In retrospect, I realize this is very unrealistic. Emotions are not predictable, and I can’t say that if I do this and this and this, then my calm time per day is going to increase by 30 seconds for every twenty-four hour period or something. That’s just not the way it works. I can be doing everything right and still have a horrible day where I feel like nothing I have done matters and that the future holds nothing but bad things for me and all the usual things that go through my mind when I feel like that. I can try to fight it desperately… Or I can just accept that I feel bad, and that’s okay.

Thinking like this is helping me change the way I view my daily activities. I tend to imbue emotion into everything I do. For example, I went to work and that’s good. It should make me feel good. Sometimes it does, and it’s great. I come home after work and I feel productive and less anxious than usual. Some other times, though, I don’t. And I need to learn that’s okay. I still did what needed to be done and that should be enough, regardless of the emotional reward there is for good behavior - or the lack thereof. By accepting that I may feel bad for an entire day even, but that this doesn’t necessarily mean I am giving up or anything like it, I have discovered a way to allow myself to begin to live my days in a more normal way and do everything I need to do despite feeling the way I do. I have been able to start doing things I kept putting off because I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to do, things like chores or going to certain places or leaving the house at certain times, or cooking something nice for myself. Now, I am discovering a new way to be able to do all of these things despite not feeling my best emotionally. The end result is that I am having fuller days, days I can look back on later with satisfaction even though right then, as I was living it, I was just thinking of making it through the next hour or the next minute or the next few seconds.

Thinking like this has helped me do some things that a couple of weeks ago I would have thought I wasn’t able to do at all. A good example of this happened a couple days ago. I went out for coffee with a friend, and then he suggested going to the movies afterwards. It was already evening, though, and I have developed a fairly strong fear of leaving my house after dark. It makes me feel vulnerable and unsteady, and so I avoid it as much as I can. The only thing outside my home I do after the sun has set is take my dog out for a quick walk around the neighborhood, but anything else, like being out and about in town after dark, was completely out of the picture for me. I don’t know why I have developed this fear, although I suspect that it’s because my mind interprets it as threatening. There is also the fact that, as I work through all of these emotional issues, I am beginning to develop good habits that help me deal with many of the situations that arise, and I am developing a new life routine to follow day-to-day. The flipside of this is that anything that deviates from my new routine is highly disturbing to me. If I have not scheduled time beforehand for whatever activity, then it makes me feel bad or anxious or both. That night, I strongly considered telling my friend that I wasn’t comfortable being out so late at night because I wasn’t feeling great. But then I remembered that, at least for now, maybe not feeling great is just the way I’m going to be for however long, and if all I do is hole up in my house adhering to a strict routine that allows for no deviation whatsoever, then that’s not healthy. I need to try and cultivate flexibility along with discipline. I need to always be prepared to deal with unexpected events, particularly good ones, like an invitation to the movies. If I look at it from the outside it might even seem silly, how I went into this entire internal debate over something which might appear so small… But it wasn’t small to me. It felt like a titanic decision and I made it in the end by erring on the side of bravery. I decided to go. During the film I was fidgety and anxious, but I also enjoyed it. Afterwards, my friend offered to walk me home, something for which I was very thankful because it meant that I didn’t have to face the city at night on my own, which scared me. As we were walking home together, I still wasn’t sure whether what I had done had been the right decision, and my friend actually apologized profusely because he knows what my emotional state is nowadays and he thought he had pushed me to doing something I wasn’t ready to do… But it’s been a couple days now and I’m actually glad I took that step. I need to begin conquering my fears at the same time I am rebuilding my life. If I wait until everything is perfect before I start living again, I might be left waiting until the day I die. I need to reclaim my life, little by little. These weeks, I have been focusing very heavily on healing, on just surviving day to day, but I think it might be a sign of how far I’ve come that now I’m starting to think about what comes next. How do I want my life to be? Do I want it to be governed by fear again? Do I want to be terrified of doing anything that strays from my carefully built, perfectly planned and thoroughly reviewed day? Or do I want to find a healthy balance between foresight and spontaneity, a way to structure my life but at the same time have space for happy things, good things, unforeseen things?

I made a good decision that night. Today, remembering that day, I feel stronger for having watched that movie. I spent time with someone who cares about me and did something fun despite not being at 100 or even 70 percent, emotionally speaking, and it did me good. It all goes back to the fact that I can’t expect to have perfectly linear incremental improvements to my emotional state as I go through this journey, and I need to learn to accept the fact that I will feel bad for a while. It doesn’t mean I’m giving up, quite the contrary. It means I’m beginning to trust that, slowly, I’m making progress and moving towards my ultimate goal, which is to regain my inner peace. It means that I’m already thinking of life beyond this crisis. It means that I’m beginning to have thoughts that aren’t solely focused on surviving, but on living and enjoying my life. It’s still too early for me to know whether I’ll ever be ‘fine’ again, whether I’ll ever regain my neutral or even positive default emotional state, but if I can learn to be okay with feeling the way I do now, then when I do improve, I will have built a solid foundation for my future going forward.

And, besides – nighttime in the city has its own beauty, a beauty I had been missing for the longest time.