Let Go

What (or Whom) have you let go of?
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Well, damn.  These prompts are getting difficult.

My first thought was that I haven't let go of anything, or anyone.  At least, not entirely.  That whatever things, people, concepts, ideas, I might describe as having "let go" of are things that I'm still actively attempting to hold onto in some regard, even if only subconsciously.  But that's not really true.  It's just that what I have let go of is so tangentially related to all the bullshit I've gone through, and took place slowly enough, that I don't think I even realized I was letting go of it.  Not until now, when I really stopped to think about it.

I have, for the vast majority of my life, struggled with "emotional stability".  I have bipolar disorder and complex PTSD.  Being "normal" when it comes to emotional responses to situations is not something I've ever really been capable of.

I tried.  Oh god how I tried.  I went to therapist after therapist, took medication after medication, went through behavior modification training, cognitive therapy... All trying to be "normal", trying to get my range of emotions to fit into the range that "everyone else's" do.

And when none of those things worked, when the medications and the "therapy" just made things worse, I faked it, or avoided it, or distracted myself from it.  I tried to convince myself that if I could just pretend hard enough to be happy, I would be.  Eventually.  So I forced the smile, forced the laughter, pushed away every "bad" feeling I could manage to for as long as I could manage.  I was going to be "normal", dammit, even if I had to destroy myself doing it.

[Aw hell.  Anyone noticing a theme for me here?  I sure as heck am, and I don't think I like it very much.  Aren't I the person who always said that normal was boring?  Didn't I always pride myself on being different, and special, and going against the grain?  wtf happened here?]

But I couldn't keep it up.  Especially with the added stresses of the past year or three.  I finally had to let it show to the people around me.  I was shocked when they didn't run screaming from the amount of "crazy" (I thought it was "crazy" in any case) that I dumped in their laps.  But not only did they not run screaming, they seemed to like me more for it, trust me more, open up to me more.

When M's mom was starting to move up here is, I think, the point when I finally gave up trying to hide the fact that I felt badly about stuff.  She's a hoarder, and her house... Her living situation... Was... Too gruesome to really go into.  And her financial situation was fucked beyond belief.  And I was bending over backwards, tying my own life into knots, to help her (through M) get things figured out so she could get out of her mess.  Right when my life had gotten just that much more difficult, with my kid moving in with me again.  It was a breaking point for me.  I simply was feeling too much hurt, anger, frustration, to hold it in any more.  And so I found myself sitting at my favorite distraction (World of Warcraft) one afternoon, and it all just boiled over.  I dumped it all into guild chat when someone gave me the opening by asking how I was.  And nothing bad happened.  The world did not implode.  No one died.  Instead I got a song written just for me, to cheer me up a bit, and one of my best friends out of the deal too.

So I let go of the impenetrable front I'd been putting up (admittedly, I wasn't putting it up very well) of "nothing phases me, I'm happy."

I'm still deprogramming myself though.  So while I've let go of the idea that I need to be a "shining happy people" all the time, I'm still working on how exactly showing the rest of my emotions to other people (people who aren't M -- he sees a fair amount of my insanity, and always has) is supposed to work.  It seems that, between hiding my inner self and my outer self being so isolated, I've forgotten a lot of the nuances.  Most specifically the ones about what level of honesty is appropriate when.  So I fuck up.  A lot.  Especially when alcohol gets involved.

Yeah... Oops.