The Journey to Healing Feels Like Falling of the Edge off a Cliff Without Anyone There to Catch You

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The Journey to Healing Feels Like Falling of the Edge off a Cliff Without Anyone There to Catch You

Because the hardest part of recovery is realizing nobody can walk through it for you

Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash

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My sister and I were fighting. I don’t even remember what it started over.

At some point she stopped, looked at me, and said: “That’s the reason you’re rotting in here. Because you don’t have the guts to face reality.”

I was 23. I hadn’t left the house in a year.

My dad had lost his job. My mom was holding the house together on nothing. My brother was finishing his masters. My sister was on a full scholarship at acting school. And me — doing distance learning, unemployed, inside every single day, watching everyone else carry something while I carried nothing.

She said it and I felt my whole chest go hot.

I grabbed my phone and walked out.

It was 10:53 pm. I know because I checked my phone right before I left and that number is the only thing my brain kept from that entire night.

I walked past the gas station at the corner. Past the elementary school. Past the little creek where kids fished in the summer. My phone buzzed twice. I didn’t look at it.

I just kept walking.

I was just so furious that the fear didn’t get a turn.

Rage, it turns out, is a very effective anesthetic. The problem is it wears off. And then you’re just standing somewhere past a creek at 11pm and you have to walk back.

When I got home, my mom was in the kitchen with the light on. She didn’t say anything, but her posture said everything.

My dad looked up at me from his chair, then went back to the TV.

He wasn’t worried. He knew I wouldn’t do anything stupid.

That kind of confidence in me — from a man who never said it out loud — mattered more than I knew how to say at the time.

My dad is not a man who talks about feelings. He’s the kind of father who sits next to you, not across from you, and talks to you like you’re already an adult even when you’re not acting like one.

That year, he had lost his job. I had lost my ability to leave the house. We were both, quietly, failing at things that mattered. And somehow that made him easier to be around than anyone.

He told me once, not as advice — just as something he was saying — “The world doesn’t care if you’re ready. It just keeps going. So you might as well go with it.”

Then he changed the channel.

I’ve thought about that sentence for five years.

That walk didn’t fix me. I want to say that clearly.

The next morning the room was still the same room. My brain was still the same brain. The only thing that changed was I now had one piece of evidence, under sufficient fury, I could open the door.

So I started using that. Just enough internal noise to drown out the fear for 30 seconds. Enough to get my shoes on.

Some days I’d sit with my shoes on for 40 minutes and then take them off. That was the attempt. Shoes on, shoes off, try again tomorrow.

Nobody was keeping score. Nobody knew.

Recovery isn’t a moment. It’s a hundred embarrassing private attempts that nobody sees and nobody claps for.

Year two I started taking buses. Always near the door. Bag on my lap, both hands on it, counting stops to the exit in my head. Thirty other people reading their phones and I’m running calculations like it’s a hostage situation.

I took the same bus every Tuesday for six months.

One Tuesday in November — raining, cold, I was on the upper deck which I’d never managed before — I realized I hadn’t counted a stop in twenty minutes. I was just looking out the window.

I didn’t tell anyone. There was no one to tell who would have understood without the whole backstory, and I wasn’t ready to hand out the backstory.

So I just held it.

By year four I had a job. Colleagues. A route to work I didn’t have to think about. A coffee shop with a seat I always took — near the wall, sight line to the door, that part I’ll probably never fully lose.

Nobody in any of those places knew what it cost to build those ordinary coordinates.

Hard weeks still came. Weeks where everything shrank again and it would be exhausting in the specific way that only something you thought you’d outgrown can be exhausting.

But here’s what was different at 28 versus 23. At 23, I didn’t know I could survive it. At 28, I had evidence.

My sister and I talked about that night eventually.

She said: “I didn’t know what else to say to you.”

I understood that. I was hard to say things to that year. Sometimes people say the sharp thing because the soft thing bounced off too many times.

She wasn’t trying to break me open. She was just frustrated. But it broke me open anyway.

That’s the whole story.

The world doesn’t care if you’re ready.

Turns out, neither did I — eventually.

[embed]The Change If my mother had not asked for the toolbox, this story would not existmedium.com

Craig

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