It's Not That Deep

“ The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. ” —Elizabeth Bishop, “ One Art ” Does anyone else leave a therapy session drenched in sweat? Every time I leave my therapist’s office, I have almost always sweat through my shirt. In the colder months I’m lucky that a coat or sweater is waiting for me on a hook in the waiting room to quickly cover the wet marks on my shirt, but in the warmer months, I’m screwed. But I try to no longer be self-conscious about it. I walk down to the parking lot afterward thinking, “Yep! I sweat through my shirt! I just came from therapy! Sitting on a couch and allowing and/or forcing myself to feel vulnera...

“ Isn’t that what most of this is about? Something painful in our past? Something breaks or something dies and in living with the pain, we begin to live with ghosts. And by our choices, we either ask the ghosts to leave or we help them make a home … Maybe we begin to ask the ghosts to leave when we begin to ask some other folks to join us in our haunted places. In the broken parts of our stories. Our messes and our questions. To meet us, to know us, to help, to care, to listen. ” —Jamie Tworkowski, If You Feel Too Much Learning to let go is one thing. Digging deep within yourself to find answers to why you are truly feeling the way you are feeling is another thing. But once you think you’ve finally reached some common ground between you and the voices in your head, where do you go from there? Better yet, once you’ve come to demand honesty from the person staring back at you in the mirror AND you’ve finally started to figure out how to let go of insecurities and anxieties that were n...

“ I’ve learned that secrets make you sick. I’m learning how to be a voice and not a victim … I’ve learned that love is necessary, heartbreak is unavoidable, and loneliness is brutal. I’ve learned that the key to being happy is to tell your truth, and to be okay without all the answers. ” —Demi Lovato,  Simply Complicated In the winter of 2018, I was depressed. I tried for a very long time to convince myself that I wasn’t depressed—I couldn’t be depressed—because I had no reason to be. I had done everything I thought I was supposed to do. Sure, my daily schedule was packed tight and I felt overwhelmed, and sure, I held myself to impossibly high standards and forced myself to maintain obsessive-compulsive behaviors since that was only way I could ever believe everything would be okay. But, at the time, these things did not strike me as anything out of the ordinary. In the past, packing my schedule tight and the resulting feeling of being overwhelmed was the only thing that drove ...