That is my default answer here days when the truth is more than the random person asking wants to know. Few people want to hear the truth when they ask how are you. Even the people who are genuinely concerned aren’t prepared to hear the truth.

No no one wants to hear that it is a daily decision to not end my life when I wake up. I am in such a different place, a “better” place than I was a year ago.  How could I possibly want to commit suicide?

I wake up in a bed that is not my own, to a roommate I didn’t know before February, without the sound of my son’s footsteps or his smile. I can’t sing him his good morning song or make him more food for breakfast any 15 year old should be able to eat, yet he somehow eats it all. I can’t tell him that I love him. I am days away from the person I once thought I would spend my life with marrying someone else, which is good in so many ways and wrong in so many others. I have to get permission to do things I should have autonomy to do on my own. When was the last time you had to ask someone for a razor to shave your underarms? Or to wash your hair?

So I say that I am okay. It lets the person off the hook. It lets me off the hook. They don’t have to hear that despite all of the things going relatively well for me that I struggle to it relapse to a position of immobility multiple times a day.

I say that I am okay because it lets me not have to deal with the emotions all of this brings to the front and that is how I cope right now. This is not a long term solution but it is the solution that is keeping me upright so I will ride it until I learn something else that works.

There is no safe place for my emotions. There was one once upon a time, but life most stories that begin that way…..the “real” ending to the story is not they lived happily ever after.

My therapist and I celebrated a milestone Thursday. The point in our therapy where we aren’t putting out fires every week. We celebrated getting to the process where we can start to work on some other shit. She doesn’t know how hard that is gonna be, I do. I was there before. I was there right before Halloween.

It is our – her job my job – to figure this out. I simply don’t know how to explain I have no fucking clue how to operate in a world outside of the only place I was safe in all my 43 years and I have no idea how to create a safe place for me.

There is superficial safety, which allows me to walk upright, and there is real safety. I know how to be that person for others. I fear I am incapable of creating that for myself.

If you ask me though…… I will tell you I am okay.

 

 

Aphrodite Brown