As my therapist started to tell me the arrangements she had made. A backup plan to safeguard my sanity during her vacation absence, I said don’t worry it’s OK, it will work out. I watched as her composure changed ever so slightly. What she wanted to say but was prevented by simple professional good manners was “What the hell did you say?” Granted she hadn’t heard anything even remotely like that from my lips in almost six months, but today something had changed. I repeated myself and assured her that she had in fact heard me correctly. Breaking into a bigger than usual smile, she grabbed her recorder and asked if I would like to repeat it one more time so she might preserve it digitally for all time. It was an acknowledgement that indeed something was different. It had been only a few days since the last of my classic melt downs. The day when all of my elaborate plans for my near term future simply blew up.

I had melted into a puddle of oh woe is me, what will I do, there is no hope, I had a week to get out of my apartment, I hadn’t finished packing, I had nowhere to move to and my son in law had shown himself to be a transphobic ass. I had also lost two friends that I thought would be lifetime friends but turned out to be moving in a different direction. It was several days filled with one problem after the other but instead of the usual response of let’s see how far down Rachel can go. I decided not to go there.

At a previous therapy session it had been suggested that perhaps I could use additional help for my ongoing mood swings, depression and suicidal thoughts.  It had scared me so badly, that thinking about it makes it hard to catch my breath. In retrospect, it might have been just the wake-up call I needed. I spent hours thinking about where I am and where I had come from, was I making this worse than it needed to be? The events that had struck my life were all real but did I exacerbate the resulting emotional toll? The conclusion I came to was that yes, I was indeed a co-conspirator in this drama. What I’m not sure of is why now, did I wring all the available sympathy out of this misery or could it be as simple as some change in chemical balance? Does it matter, not really unless I want to spend my time worrying when the problem will reappear.

I have decided that I will accept this as a gift, I have had ten days in a row of smiles and positive thoughts and I’m slowly beginning to remember the previous three years. Years where I would tell anyone that would listen how my life was awesome, that some days invariably sucked but that my life was still awesome.

Here’s to a return to awesomeness and acceptance.