ouroboros

This is from last year. October 12th, to be exact. 

This was way too raw to share then, but I have some healthy distance, and I think I’m ready to release. This ouroboros image is especially relevant because it depicts the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. As we evolve, an old self dies, and a new one is born. The cycle at 23 felt especially potent for me. 

October 12, 2023. Rebirth.

A friend asked me what I’d been up to since our last catch-up (over a year ago), and I responded that it felt like everything and nothing had changed at the same time. 

At the start of this year, I had just relocated to a new city, and my excitement quickly gave way to fear once I realized what a new start really meant: a new routine, a new home, a new area – even a new way of doing my groceries.

Naturally, like most plans, my first month went to absolute shit. I realized my apartment didn’t have a wardrobe, next-door construction was louder than the brokers led on, and I was sick with a mystery illness that would not let up.

I had no furniture, no groceries, and my apartment was freezing. All I had was an air mattress that kept deflating and a thin blanket (all courtesy of my friend; otherwise, I don’t know what I would have done). 

I was too scared to bother anyone, so I silently froze and dismissed it all because soon enough, I’d look back on this time of my life and laugh. The laughter didn’t come for another seven months.

Anxiety has been my middle name for as long as I can remember. I don’t ever really remember a period of not overthinking. Even in childhood, I constantly feared the worst, so I wasn’t even free then.

But this anxiety was like something I’d never known. I’d craved aloneness for so long. Yet, when I was actually alone, I was utterly freaked out by the fact that all I had was me, myself, and I. 

At first, I blamed my loneliness on my lack of a social life. I made plan after (mental) plan on how I would intentionally try to grow my circle and be more active, but you know, we plan, and God laughs.

Astrology had somewhat prepped me for the solitude of the 12th house year (age 23), and most people had said it was their worst year yet. But as I experienced more of it, I thought there is no fucking way anyone made it through this. It’s hard to articulate how painful a period in life it felt.

My usual escapes lacked their effectiveness and my support systems felt so out of reach. Drinking only made me feel worse after I struggled to piece together what had happened in my drunkenness, company made me feel strangely out of body because how was it that I was with others, yet still feeling so alone? I felt like a robot that was glitching and malfunctioning and I just prayed others wouldn’t notice. 

For the first time in my life, it felt like my mind had fully convinced me that no one cared and that I was bothering people by bringing up what was going on. I was convinced that I was too sensitive and paranoid and that I needed to just calm down. 

Every interaction constantly replayed in my mind and I just wondered, can they see through me? Can they see the cracks? Can they sense the tension radiating off me right now? 

The courage I thought I had so carefully built over the last few years had deserted me, and it felt like my voice was slipping away from me—to the point where I couldn’t even express how I was to those closest to me.

In my heart of hearts, I knew if I continued down that road, I would lose myself completely. My mind was wandering to places and things I had never once contemplated. The heart racing, the tears, the constant mental churning — it was incessant, and I remember thinking, if this is what life is going to continue being like for me, I don’t think I have much strength to continue. What is life without peace?

I quietly decided to return to therapy; if I was losing my mind, better to lose it in the company of a stranger, so at least if she thought I was unhinged, it would feel less hurtful than if my friends thought I was. Imagine my surprise to hear that the shortness of breath I was feeling more and more frequently were anxiety attacks?

I wasn’t insane — not yet anyway.

The first few sessions felt like they were gone in the blink of an eye. An hour in therapy is incomparable to an hour in the real world. It felt like each time we chipped away at something and started to unravel and unearth the root cause, it’d be time to go.

The time between sessions felt like being underwater for a long time, finally coming up gasping for air, only to be told you have to go down again and hold your breath for another long while.

Being affirmed was the first step, but I still didn’t feel like I could breathe for a long time. I never really revealed to my therapist the extent of how little energy I felt I had left. I wasn’t actually going to do it, so there was no real cause for concern.

It was a few months before I first cried in therapy. 

I was an expert at analyzing my thought processes and telling you what caused what. I’d come in with a point, evidence and explanation. But when she suggested we shift to feeling through the body, I quickly grew annoyed. So this was the woo-woo shit people were talking about in therapy. I had no clue where I felt things in my body. Other than my heart racing, I wasn’t even aware that I felt things in my body. 

On a nondescript Friday, I was embarrassed to find myself bawling in front of my laptop. I was embarrassed, not because I thought crying was embarrassing, but because I didn’t anticipate the tears. I didn’t expect what triggered me to still be a trigger because I thought I was over it. It started with my eyes misting up, and then it gradually led to ugly crying.

And, of course, in the midst of unearthing something so painful, the session was over. And I had to deal with my tears and emotions and thoughts alone.

In our last few sessions, they were more emotionally detached check-ins—not in a negative way, but in a way that left me no longer engulfed by my emotions. I could be triggered and still be functional. I knew what to anticipate (to a certain degree). I knew what to do and especially what not to do when triggered. It felt like I’d finally learned how to take care of myself.

Change seems to have happened in the blink of an eye. But in retrospect, it was several small, consistent, yet still inconsequential moments that led to that big moment.

It sounds both melodramatic and a little dark when I say I’m so glad I’ve made it to this point because, at the start of 2023, I could not see an existence where I wasn’t swallowed whole and plagued by anxiety each day.

Winter is coming, and it’s almost like my body remembers what last winter was like, and she’s scared. But I’m not the same person that I was then, and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. 

When so much of your change is internal, it’s impossible to articulate what exactly has changed. I can’t and won’t go into the minutiae of how I’ve evolved as a person because I don’t think anyone gives as much of a shit about ourselves as we do.

Someone else can’t really say it to you because no one knows you like you know you, but for all the internal and unseen progress I have made, all the work I have done, all the fear I have moved through, and for the person I’ve grown to become today  — I am so proud of myself. And I am so excited to discover who this new self is.

It’s new to me, but it’s not really new. That self has always been there, I just needed to let her out.