To Heal

I'm coming to realise now that the hardest part of a childhood filled with mental unrest, hospital stays and therapy, is healing.

Healing is painful. That's not especially a surprise, as it would've been blindly naive and idiotic of me to have assumed otherwise. You expect it to hurt, but only whilst the wound is sealing into a scab, and when the scab finally falls off? The wound should be gone. Sure, leaving behind a pink patch of skin where the scarring lingers, but gone nonetheless.

As it turns out, that's not how it works. If only somebody had warned me; I'd go back in time right now to shake my younger self by the shoulders and implore him to understand, if such a possibility presented itself. However, there's no point in ruminating on fantasy solutions such as time travel. I'm healing now. Why get lost in delusions and fantasy all over again, for the sake of satiating the grief I harbour for my younger, innocent self?

Healing as a young adult after a teenage life robbed by mental illness isn't just waiting for the scab to drop. It's like living with a wound that won't close and all the doctors can offer is a fresh gauze, antibiotics and breathing techniques to think about anything but the pain. Healing is learning to understand that the wound is still there, the wound is still painful, and it likely will be for the rest of your days. Life has a way of throwing things at you to keep the cut open; homelessness, family rifts, money problems, bills, employment or lack thereof. I for one was never prepared for the things as simple and baseline as day to day life to be what stops the wound from healing. The monotony of each morning feeling the same. The frustration of feeling stagnant. The boredom of earning money and promptly spending it on bullshit like rent, fruit and vegetables and phone bills. The world loses it's saturation and now, even the when the skies are blue, they look grey.

It's fine. It's okay. That's all it is — fine and okay. How bleak. I always expected more than fine and okay, always needed some exceptional, glowing future. There's this fear that's been present since I could think in whole goddamn sentences of being unremarkable. It remains now as it took root as a young child; back then, it was dreams of playing music in the Royal Albert Hall. Now, it's dreams of finally finishing that screenplay for a sitcom or publishing the novel gathering dust in my documents. Dreams that my name will be heard, if not remembered, and that when I reach old age I can sit in a patchwork corduroy armchair before a fireplace and think to myself, "Yeah. The suffering was worth it. I can rest easy."

I've still got time. I don't want to get trapped in pitiful pessimisms contemplating whether or not I'll amount to something, as that won't change anything. I'm not blind to the fact that I'm young, not naive to the years I have to dedicate to hypothetical greatness, but when the wound still hasn't healed and likely won't in the foreseeable future, it's easy to get lost in thoughts like a dog chasing its tail.

Tomorrow, I've decided I'm going to wake up at six 'o' clock in the morning. I will have a shower, make a fresh coffee, and stand at the counter as the warm steam from the earthy brew rises beneath my nose. I will feel fine about feeling fine. I will drink my americano, look out into the unkempt garden with apples strewn across the grass from the tree above and feel fine about being mediocre. I may go for a walk. Then again, I may stay inside and work on a project, but nevertheless, I will feel fine about engaging in mediocrity. I won't do great things tomorrow, and I will be fine and okay with that.

I think acceptance of the mundane tribulations of adulthood and day-to-day life may be the ticket to healing the wound. If not healing, then ignoring, and at this point I'll take either. Tomorrow, I will stop getting hung up over life and simply live it.

That is how I will live with healing. To just live.