When I was in Grade 1, I walked to school - a distance of maybe 20 blocks. On one winter day, the temperature well below zero, I got snow in my mitts. It melted, they got wet and my hands got cold, so I took them off. When I arrived at the portable and tried to untie my boots, I found I couldn't move my hands. They had frozen.
I announced this to my teacher, more puzzled than scared, and she took me in to see the school nurse. The nurse had me hold my hands under cold running water. At first there was no sensation. Then, slowly, a burning pain began to build. By the time my hands started thawing and coming back to life, tears were streaming down my face. If you've ever had frost-bitten toes, you have an inkling of what it's like. It's a brutal ache that goes right to the bone. My hands peeled for weeks afterwards.
Eighteen weeks of therapy is a long time. Four and a half months. 90 days. 549 hours. It took me most of the first six weeks to begin to crack. In the next six I began to hear, if not understand, some of what the therapists were trying to tell me. There were a few times I broke down in tears, some insights into the whys behind my social difficulties, and some general truths that started to sink in. It was also when, through a group called 'Vocational' (focussed on work relationships and behaviours), I began to gain confidence again in my strengths, abilities, and skills, an area that I had allowed to be badly eroded in the last couple of years.
In the last six weeks, I thought I began to actually feel some of the emotions that I had been discussing intellectually, though only in brief flashes that I wished I could maintain. In my last week in the program, faced with my final days and having to say good-bye to all of the people who had formed the backbone of my life for the last few months, I was granted my wish and realized what it meant.
As I began to say my good-byes, the therapists refused to let me off easily. Every single time I addressed anyone, they forced me to examine why that relationship had been important to me and to put it in honest, simple words, denying me the flowery speech that is my common defense. Suddenly emotions began welling out of me that I hadn't even realized were there. If I had been managing to skate nimbly on the thin ice over the river of my emotions,
this was the therapists breaking out the pickaxes and sending me plunging in. I got one good-bye out in large group Wednesday morning, and two more out in small group that afternoon. Every single time they made me work, stopping me in my tracks and forcing me to be honest with myself. Tears flowed freely and hurt ran deep.
I got a few more out on Thursday in Large Group and Re-entry. They continued to be every bit as painful and hard to say. I found myself struggling for words to express the meaning of attachments and relationships I had given no thought to. I could have mouthed some easy platitudes, but the therapists blocked me at every turn. I began to realize that I had attached deeply to many people around me, but refused to recognize the fact or verbalize it, and being forced to do so and feel the weight of those attachements just before they would be severed for good left me in a world of hurt.
Friday was the hardest day. Good-byes have to be said in group and since I'd been challenged every step of the way all week, I had several left to say and the other woman who was leaving had left all hers until the last day. Add to that the number of people who wanted to say good-bye to me, and it made for the most emotionally exhausting hour and a half I've ever experienced.
I spent the rest of Friday and most of the weekend curled up in bed with a tension headache and an aching heart. Periods of complete numbness were interspersed with uncontrollable tears, and pain was always just below the surface.
I have come to realize that I have spent the majority of my life with a huge part of myself frozen and cut off. Emotions were never something I had considered. They were for people weaker than me. They were something I read about, talked about, saw films and wrote songs about, but personally was above. I was special somehow - totally removed.
Last week I felt the pain of that part of me beginning to thaw, the pain of lost opportunities, of friendships offered and spurned, of care held out and rebuffed - the utter emptiness and futility of the pain and bitterness I have clung to and defended for thirty odd years. I saw with heart-rending clarity all that had been offered to me in the last 18 weeks and how little I had allowed in. I saw how different my life might have been if I had been able to let go, slow down, and allow myself to see that people had cared about me and tried to reach me, but I had shut them out. I realized that so much of what I had been desperately trying to find I had had all along. My worst enemy has been myself.
This week I'm back in the routine of trying to put a life together. I'm looking into job options, booking new work at other studios, and going about the mundane business of organizing my time. This becomes a distraction at times, but that pain is never far from me, and I'm trying to learn to allow that. The term they used in therapy was learning to tolerate the pain - not fight it, mask it, reject it, or bury it, but tolerate it; to allow it to be and accept that it's there.
Thankfully I have some resources still to help me learn to cope. They offered and I accepted a regular support group that meets Tuesdays 3:30-5. It's a more in-depth group that allows me to keep working on issues that I need to resolve, and I'm committed to it for a year. I'm also going to be doing work therapy which allows me to ease back into the work environment (and hopefully gain some new experience) by allowing to intern/volunteer in a position while still collecting benefits with a weekly group to talk about it.
There's a lot more to be said about my time in therapy. It's not even a week since I was discharged, so there's still a lot to process and let settle, and I'll be doing some of that here. It hurts. I hurt. I will continue to hurt. It means I'm alive.
