The Craziest Idea
I'm not used to being old enough to say that I've had 20 years of experience in anything.
I still live within blocks from my high school, like I'm neighbors with myself from a different life, and I visit myself there in dreams regularly. The dreams always exaggerate the hard parts, like struggling to carry a bag that's filled with infinite pounds of books or scurrying up and down flights of stairs to find an illusively placed locker before the time between classes runs out.
Yet my dream-self always knows I'm in a dream and wishes my waking-self could really be back there. You know, when I was young and fresh with nothing but fun on my mind, opportunities ahead of me, and excitment about becoming whomever I wanted to become.
And, you know, then I discovered it wasn't all up to me.
My anxiety disorder emerged 20 years ago now. We've all got our complexes from those first boyfriends, those infuriating ways our parents treated us, those crushing times of self-consciousness about our bodies and social skills - but the anxiety is what sent me to the E.R., that put me in therapy, that erased me.
It's been 20 years of fear and panic controlled by meds and the illusion of control that my many, many obsessive behaviors lend. I started out free and living in sweet ignorance of what prison is like, but it's been 20 years of vascillating incarceration and parole, so I've learned.
It was definitely the hand attached to me that signed the papers to leave college and move home, even though it wasn't mine anymore. It had been left inside with my all my other parts that used to function for me instead of to me. I don't actually know who that apparition was crying on the couch, floating through new classes in new buildings, getting the job done. I'm not sure it was me leading the way as I ambled into a relationship and then a marriage. I watched myself buy a car and a house and I saw someone create cover letter after cover letter, but they never really got me and I never became any of the things I was going to become.
Through the last 20 years of inside time and outside time, while someone's been living my life, I've been practicing control so that I can stay outside and slowly join with them. I've been washing and watching and, before I understood that I was confusing faith with superstition, praying. For 20 years, professionals have presented me with ideas to bring me back. Good, rational ideas, crazy in their simplicity. The idea that although I sometimes feel defeated, I have done hard things and I am strong. The idea that fearing a terrible future does nothing but ruin the present. The crazy idea that if hard times emerge, they will also recede.
And still, still. I still have the craziest idea that I'll never be free again because this is the only me who's been around this whole time.
Challenge of the Week CLXXX