How do I even begin to fully let myself process the last three years. I had just found the most profound peace and direction in February of 2020. I had been doing therapy for two and half years working endlessly on practicing the skills necessary to overcome the BPD behaviors and emotions that had brought so much pain to my life. March 1, 2020 came in with the most amazing miracles and I felt that nothing would be able to stop me from experiencing the most splendid life worth living complete with the ups and downs. Two weeks later I was separated from my support systems and being able to attend my therapy sessions in person. I was still working at my "muggle job" at a call center captioning calls for the hard of hearing. I ended up working massive amounts of overtime and figuring out how to teach all of my students online. A performance that I was so excited to start rehearsing was cancelled. I didn't have church, therapy, activities, rehearsals, or random get together's with friends. I was separated from the man I'd been dating and it became clear that all the miracles that had helped me overcome some of my biggest life hurtles and help me find my way back to this human that I loved were slowly unraveling as the skills I had arduously practiced for two and half years couldn't stop the division that was happening worldwide or in my personal life.
The longest relationship I've ever had ended for the second time two months into the pandemic. I kept working, picking up extra hours nearly every day, teaching voice lessons, going on walks, attending therapy online, attending everything online really, and trying to practice skills to help me cope with the onslaught of emotions. Sometime around July I decided that I needed to find a muggle job that had benefits as it became clear that this pandemic was not going to end anytime soon and I became increasingly worried about what would happen if I contracted covid and was unable to fight it off without any permanent affects. I'd managed without any health insurance for several years, but now that I'd lost all my performing opportunities and a giant chunk of my income with it, I felt a change was needed. I had also started trying to focus on going back to school in hopes of getting a degree in social work and decided that working at the Huntsman Cancer Institute would be very helpful in moving me toward all of those goals. I started in August of 2020.
The job was really great and it was a wonderful institution to be working for. I started to enjoy seeing all the patients coming in for their appointments and treatments. I also felt the overwhelming sadness when I no longer saw them coming back for their appointments and learned of their passing. I got to celebrate with them when they had days where the news indicated progress and was even asked to sing for a patient after she'd received her hoped for news. The people I worked with were strong and amazing at what they did to care for these patients. It also came with better pay and benefits, which was a new adventure for me.
When 2021 came rolling in, I felt that more changes were coming and in January was asked to move out of my current residence. I'd lived there for several years and knew a change was needed, but was hoping for a few more months before the move. I'd been longing for a place of my own for a while and since my timeline was moved up, I didn't spend much time investigating my options before I found a place that was within my budget and had an opening for me to move in at the beginning of February. The move went quickly and before long I was in my one bedroom apartment. Shortly after the move I realized why the apartment was in my budget as I constantly lost sleep from the skunky smell of marijuana and the neighbors who didn't care about the noise ordinances. (No judgements to the lovely people out there who partake in marijuana. But also, you are making the air stink. Much love.) After trying expensive air purifiers and smelly candles (which I also find equally offensive to my nose because they give me headaches) I decided it was time to move so that I could just get some sleep.
And since the changes just never seemed to stop, I was also promoted shortly before moving into my new house. I took a job with more hours and a pay increase where I would be working directly with the Melanoma Oncology team and I was terrified. It was an unexpected change and my debilitating doubt in myself made me doing all the deep breathing exercises during this transition. I found a beautiful house on the east side of Salt Lake that I would be sharing with three other girls. Since the housing prices dramatically increased, I decided that living with other people would be ok for a little while until I could recover some of the lost money from all the moving costs. The lease was only going to be for a year as it was a family who was renting out their home while they were waiting out the pandemic in Australia. It seemed like a dream and the women all appeared to be lovely individuals. Appeared being the operative word here.
My job continued to be a new challenge everyday as I figured out my own way of managing the demands of my team with the demands of the front desk. And while I've listed a great many changes that happened within the first year of the pandemic, I feel that it's worth pointing out that I wasn't actually dealing with any of the emotions as they came. I know why I wasn't and I found excuses at every turn as to why I couldn't deal with them at that very moment. Needless to say, one day I found myself sad. The kind of sad that doesn't feel like it will ever go away. The kind of sad that I thought I had vanquished. The kind of sad that needed to be faced and instead I just kept ignoring it most of the time and sharing with others that I felt stuck in the sadness at other times. Turns out that sharing with people that you just moved in with as you're trying to connect to each other also gives them an opportunity to use your weaknesses to manipulate you and bully you when you don't do everything they want you to do. (It was one specific person.) And I must say that I never thought that I would find myself in my 30's being bullied by a roommate.
Much drama later and the scary roommate moved out. Our house was left with the peacemakers again and I breathed a deep sigh of relief. I decided that I wanted to do something for myself that I'd only ever dreamed about and had corrective surgery on my eyes! I felt like giving myself the gift of contact/glasses-free sight was the perfect way to celebrate making it through a few months of terror. I thought I could finally find some time to deal with the ever-growing stack of emotions that I just kept shoving into that closet that no one ever looks in. And then........ the owners of the house contacted me and informed me that they decided to come back to the States sooner than expected and wondered if we would be willing to break our lease and move out within two months. Which is not the news I was hoping to hear just when I was starting to feel better. I was running again and doing pie nights and cooking and enjoying my roommates and going on vacations and spending time with family. For two beautiful months I got to feel like things were about to turn a corner and now I was facing another move with moving expenses.
Thankfully, I found a little place all my own. ShaRee's shack, if you will. It isn't perfect and there was an adjustment period, but it's become my home. Once I got settled, that sadness that I was only starting to deal with hit me like a ton of bricks. I started to notice that, while I generally enjoyed my job, I didn't feel that it was challenging me creatively. I missed performing. I missed the joy of sharing my talents and the excitement of finding the exact way I wanted to approach a character or the mastery of a difficult musical passage. My job had many wonderful aspects, but it also had many frustrating things about it that I kept finding it harder and harder to cope with and I think my body couldn't handle all of the emotions that I wasn't dealing with. 2022 began my year of physical decline.
In January I came down with a flu-like virus that knocked me off my feet for two weeks. I tested for everything under the sun, including six tests for covid and everything came back negative. With a prescription for dizziness and instructions to rest and let it run its course I was sent home to isolate for two weeks. And yes, it did take the full two weeks to recover. I thought I was starting to feel well enough to start trying to heal, but as soon as I started gradually increasing my walks to running I soon found that part way through my work day I would be completely drained of all energy and could barely muster enough will power to get my body to move enough to get me home. I thought it was just a one time fluke, but throughout the spring and summer I would experience this phenomena quite frequently. One unfortunate weekend in July I felt all my energy drained and then my mouth and tongue went numb. I went to the nearest urgent care where I was told that everything looked fine and to just rest. I went home and proceeded to sleep for 18 hours. I couldn't wake up. Once I did finally wake up it was almost time for bed so I spent a few hours awake trying to get some food and water in me and then proceeded to sleep another nine hours through the night. A doctor later told me that he thought that I was experiencing some form of long-haulers from whatever virus I had in January.
I continued to try and be as active as my body would allow, but that sadness that I kept ignoring kept creeping back in. With the energy zaps making unable to exercise as much as I was used to thus losing a coping skill that works wonders for managing my emotions and the stress from my job I decided it was time to get a little bit of help to pick me up enough until I was ready to start dealing with everything. I did the one thing that I swore I would never do because of the pain this choice brought me several years prior to the pandemic - I went on medication. It helped a little bit and I was thankfully not experiencing any massive side effects with this new medication. Well, except for weight gain. Actually, I can only partially blame the pills. You see, I had also returned to a previous ineffective behavior that contributed to the weight gain. Which is another sign that I was just trying to avoid my emotions.
I was able to start performing again, but with my mental health in the toilet I must say that I wasn't as dedicated or as happy to be doing what I loved. Even with the medication, I wasn't really experiencing joy, but I wasn't crying as much. So.....progress? I also tried dating off and on with little success. You see, relationships are, let's say, a challenge for me. They scare the living daylights out of me on my best days. After having been dumped for a second time at the beginning of the pandemic by the man I was dating, all those old beliefs about myself came creeping back into my mind. I had a hard time not replaying all the mistakes I had made in the relationship over and over in my head and thinking that maybe what everyone believes about people with BPD is true and applies to me - that I'm a monster to be avoided. That I will ruin the lives of anyone I enter into a relationship with. Oh, and remember that roommate that was bullying me? Yeah, she took it upon herself to confirm that for me frequently. I remember one day getting on a dating app and coming across my ex. His profile listed attributes in a woman that he would like to avoid and I couldn't help interpreting that those negative attributes were because that's what he thought he'd experienced with me. I started to be afraid of myself and who I was in relation to other people. I was overwhelmed with my inadequacies of not being good enough, unlovable, a monster, a burden. In short, someone that the internet would tell the rest of the world to avoid at all costs.
Those few times that I tried to date didn't really go anywhere. Dating sucks. It truly does. I think I went on more dates in the last few years than I did in the three years prior to meeting my ex. And I couldn't let myself connect with anyone. I don't know why I kept trying. I guess it's that need to be accepted or feel like I belong somewhere. And, if I'm being honest, the hope that if there was anyone out there that would want to try being in a relationship with me it would somehow make all the beliefs that had been going through my brain for the last three years somehow disappear or make them untrue. Spoiler: that didn't happen. Yes, I know better. As I sit hear finally typing out all these feelings and events, I recognize that the pandemic and the events that followed triggered a lot of old thought patterns and behaviors as well as creating some new, equally ineffective thought patterns and behaviors. Fear has been influencing many of my decisions. Including the decision to stop using the skills that are most effective for my well-being. I was afraid that they wouldn't work anymore and equally afraid that they would. I know it doesn't make sense, but those are actual fears that I experience.
Listen, the last few years weren't all doom and gloom. I had many wonderful moments as well. Memories that I treasure reconnecting with my family. Going boating and having cookouts. Going on 5K's with friends and laughing my head off. Having one of my nephews trying to figure out my name by starting with "that one" which eventually morphed into "nursery" and is now to the point where I'm "Aunt ShaRee." My name is a challenge for the littles. Haha. Getting a video of a niece brushing her hair upside down and when asked by her father why she was doing it like that hearing her exclaim, "Tecause I love it that way." That mispronunciation kills me every time. Hearing my nephew talk about his adventures in running and how his friends in church asked him to hold some sheet music up for all of them to see by saying, "Go go gadget arms!" Watching endless hours of Matt's Off Road Recovery with literally everyone in my family. It's an actual obsession and I love it. The youngest of us calls it, "The cars that are really stuck." Singing with my family again has brought me tremendous joy. Whether sitting around the piano singing with my nieces, performing a duet with my sister in church, or giving my voice a workout by going to my "like unto" family's house and singing classical/musical theater music. Reconnecting with friends I haven't seen in a while and being able to spend more time with the friends who live near. One of those friends is getting married soon and I can't wait! Making new friends who I get to go out to brunch with regularly and becoming closer friends with my opera peeps. So many wonderful memories that I will treasure.
It's just that personally, I miss myself. I miss that person that I finally found in myself that could work through her emotions and found so much joy and peace in doing so. I miss the person who started to see the good in herself and in the world. I miss the person who enjoyed getting up early so she could spend some time running in nature and pushing herself to go faster. I miss the person who was ready to take on the world and go after more degrees and performance opportunities. I miss the person who was ready to share herself with the world. I miss the person who believed that there was something wonderful waiting for her everyday. I miss the girl who had confidence and was learning to speak up when needed and set boundaries when needed. I miss the sunshine. I miss feeling like I belonged in a room. I miss the days when I wasn't afraid of myself and who I was. That person was me and I didn't get to spend very much time with her before the pandemic hit and her life began to unravel. I miss me and I want her back.
I have since changed jobs within my company. I was sad to leave the old job because I would miss my patients and my team. But I gained an incredible team and left behind the massive mountain of stress that had been sitting on my chest. It has given me more time to rest, to get my house in order, to hopefully find time to make my physical health a priority, and most importantly the time to be honest with myself. The truth is I know exactly how to move forward with helping myself. I know exactly which skills I need and I know that I need to practice them to get back on track. I know that I had complete control of changing my thoughts and ultimately my emotions. But I wouldn't. I wasn't willing.
So, here I am laying it all out for myself and for anyone who happens upon this public journal. It's time for me to be willing to try again. I guess the skill that would be appropriate for this predicament would be Opposite Action. I'm feeling fear and disgust with so many things surrounding the idea of turning to my beloved skills and what may or may not happen should I start to use them again. Dialectical behavioral therapy would tell me to see if my emotions fit the facts of this situation and if they don't fit then an appropriate response would be to act opposite to my urge.
What is my urge? I would like to keep hiding. I want to protect myself from the world by closing myself off like I've been gradually doing for three years. I want to protect others by never opening my door to them and inviting them in. If they aren't around me they can't get hurt. I want to stay in my little shack and eat ice cream and popcorn and watch all fifteen seasons of Supernatural. I want to continue to avoid using my skills so that I don't have to face my emotions.
What is the opposite action?
Well.
It's time to use my skills.
