What It Feels Like To Reset

When someone dies, you learn to fill gaps quickly. You learn to put something, anything, in the place of where that person was. It’s like a plug that fills the bathtub up — the water rising is warm and wonderful at first, exactly what you need it to be, but after a while, when you’re sitting there long enough, it gets cold and it overflows and it becomes less of where you want to be.

That’s how I can best describe a good chunk of my life until now. I wanted and tried so badly to keep the tub from overflowing and to believe that I was enjoying the cold water because I’d filled it with my own persistence, but I couldn’t and I wasn’t. I was drowning in an adulthood I stepped into too soon. I was drowning in a career I constantly had to hustle for. I was brought under water time and time again by a city that made me anxious and a role as the “responsible” one that made it impossible to breathe life into who I am when I’m not serving someone else or something bigger than myself.

I like being driven by mission but I’ve learned that if you get too clouded up by it, your mission begins to drive you until you realize you haven’t stopped for gas in a really long time.

I’m leaning on so many metaphors and analogies because sometimes it’s easier to hear and relate to the abstract than it is to blunt words, and maybe because it’s also easier to write them than it is to say — I needed to reset because living like you only have one reason to live for isn’t sustainable or nourishing.

I want more in my life than projects (both of people and of things) that leave me asking “what’s the meaning of my life now?” once they’re done, fixed, or very apparently no longer manageable by me. Portland was my answer to a different question, one I hadn’t formulated until right now. “What can life look like when I live for me?”

To nourish me.

To strengthen me.

To exist for me. And for what’s important to me.

I don’t know what the answer will be over time, but this week in therapy my therapist asked me to think about what about Portland exactly had created this shift in me. During our session, I’d rambled on and listed one or seven things. Now, I’ve settled on one — Portland did nothing, but I did a lot.

I gave myself permission to stop living in the shadows and to step around the shame I feel when I make decisions for just me and no one else. This doesn’t mean the guilt of not solving everyone else’s problems isn’t still there, it’s there and it’s heavy. The feeling is circular — I constantly feel like I’m failing at what I was conditioned to believe was my purpose in life and that feeling then triggers my anxiety which then makes feel like a failure. I try to interrupt the circle, or the bathtub from overflowing, with different tactics now. I say to myself, I’m not a failure and if you’re working to live life for yourself, neither are you.

It’s nice to have more to live for now than I have ever had. Pouring into all parts of my life equally because that’s what actually serves and nourishes me feels good. My reason to be for so long existed in a tunnel vision and suddenly now, it’s an open horizon of me, and my little family, and my career, and my writing, and my friends.

I have anchors that I prayed for after one of my earliest therapy sessions.

“Like an octopus, you need to find multiple arms and things you can hold onto when you feel at your lowest,” my therapist said to me.

I was 21 years old then. I hadn’t met my boyfriend yet. I was friends with people who would go on to use me, hurt me, or who I would hurt because I didn’t know better. My grandmother had just died. There were so many open secrets in my family that had made it feel impossible to not live in shame. Yet, I kept showing up to therapy and slowly I kept carving out other octopus tentacles and finding things they could hold onto.

Living in Portland for the last two weeks has been one of the most peace-giving experiences of my life. It’s not a cure-all to the parts of my life that will probably always be hard to live with, but it’s given me a different environment and setting to learn to set boundaries and to understand what I actually want my life to consist of. Turns out, I don’t want to voluntarily submit myself to a life of anxiety just because I know how to exist in it. Walking outside of our apartment in Portland, I feel so much peace. It’s what made me realize that walking into overstimulation and anxiety any time I walked onto a New York City was a choice.

I could choose differently. I am choosing differently and I’m learning a lot so far.

To listen to more about the behind the scenes of our move, check out the latest episode on my podcast, What Happened After? — The Mental Health Impact Of A Big Move