For the fifth time that night, nausea washed over me, as my gut began to heave and contract. Pulling myself up to kneel, I pulled the glass bowl closer to my face, as the razor-sharp convulsions brought up more bile. The yellow liquid stung my mouth.
I groaned as I collapsed back onto the bed, looking up at the shadows that cut across the ceiling. The pain that clenched my stomach filled me with regret.
What am I doing! Do I really want to die?
That was the second time, over the past week or so, I had been throwing up into the dead of the night.
I wondered if the neighbors could hear me?
But my soul was tired.
I had come to the terminus of a jagged path, and there, at the end, stood a colossal sized transparent wall, which had bound me to my core. Its shadow overawed my spiritual pulse. It was void of light, and I left my mind.
My will to move over the thickness of my depression, had shattered as broken glass. Stamina left me, and this time, I was unable to swim through its dense deluge. There wasn't a realm in my body that even wanted to. I descended into the depths of a desolate and dark crevice. Hopelessness clothed me in rags, with its contours as black as coal. Crows' cawed from the edges of my thoughts, as each day grew dimmer and dimmer.
Only a month before, my twenty-one-year-old nephew had drowned. At 6.30am on 4th July, he jumped into a river; the coldness and current taking him instantly. No time to fight. No time to grab hold of the grass or reeds from the fringe of the river's edge. No time to rethink his actions. A light soul, with an angel's face and the greenest blue eyes, with a talent and ambition that had fueled his music career; one abrupt decision, took everything in a flash.
I was lucky to attend his funeral, what with the complications of the pandemic's restrictions. Still, as I joined in and wept our goodbyes, my thoughts were a little shaded by the echoes of the cruel text I had received the evening before. My relationship was over!
My boyfriend had lost, first a sister—to a brain tumor, and then a brother, who was killed by a blow to the head. And so, he wasn't strong enough to deal with my family's tragedy. At first, he held me and cared but then, during the week before the funeral, he began to repel from my neediness. Signs of him shutting down were happening all over again. This wasn't the first time he'd done this to me. It seemed as if my suffering triggered his own buried grief. His coping mechanism was to slam the door right in my face.
The torment of him drastically blocking me, enmeshed itself into my triggers: the vast unpacked wounds that had embedded themselves deep into my soul. Unexplored, unexplained and with a life of their own.
Nonchalant for a good month after the funeral, the façade started to slide. The numbness (which I still live with), of my nephew's suicide, on top of the emotional scars from by my parent's emotional and physical abandonment, gushed within—its sentient force engulfing me. These wounds had been taking over the trajectory of my life, much more than I was aware.
Enduring five months of the pandemic, the restrictions, family suicide, chronic painful illnesses, and the finale of the abrupt end of love (all over again), pulled me apart at each and every seam of my entirety.
The bottle of wine I worked my way through most days wasn't enough to blot out my internal mental demise. I would drink more, as I drowned further and further into an oblivion of anguish.
Was it a coward's way out, or the eventual breaking down of an old paradigm?
It felt that after years of struggling with one drama after another, this time, there was nowhere to go. I had previously fought so many battles. But this one, I disappeared into a crack. This time, I let go. I fell further and further into a vacuum I'd never known. A barren land of nothingness. A place devoid of a future, a place that smelled of death.
In that arena, impressions of suicide flashed across my psyche. How I could ever invite those thoughts to stay, with the idea of my daughter knowing this, I do not know. It was a dark state where life as I once knew, had deserted me—its structure and framework dissolved, and unbeknown to me at the time—intensified by the depressive effects of alcohol.
I found myself searching out sedatives to mix with my wine, to help anesthetize my thoughts, which sank heavy into the evenings. I just wanted to die. Swallowing back a handful, and no care for Do Not Exceed, would at times, bring me to retching over a bowl into the depths of the night. Praying, ashamed and in pain as the bile was forced from my stomach.
My jeans became uncomfortable as I gained extra pounds—my stomach swelling; I looked pregnant. Over that time, as the wine weight was added to my body, I began to awaken. Little by little.
Before the pandemic restrictions, I lifted weights regularly. I detested being overweight and as I gained those extra stones during my breakdown, something within, shook me awake. The abyss became less deep, and the ability to ponder and have hope was starting to thaw.
I spent more time considering the reality of a Creator, something outside of me that loved me and could help. I contemplated God and invited in the idea of Him knowing me.
I began to understand that at the very depth of my rock bottom, where I had walked through fire and calcination, was an opportunity to reconsider how I was steering my life.
A little after coming through to the alchemy of those months, I came across a quote: God is your rock in your rock bottom.
How true, I had thought, as lightness started to descend upon me. I would talk to God, as if He were there, accompanying me on my walks, around the cherry blossom tree lined park.
I considered if my thoughts were set in stone as much as they appeared to be. New insight emerged as I began to see how easy it is to be fooled by them, when we actually possess the power to overthrow them. I contemplated my limiting beliefs and began to realize they were not mine, but outdated and indoctrinated stories from my past: from my father's rejection and shame over me, chronic criticism from my mother, and from other treatments of abuse and negativity, I have lived through.
Over this time, I was able to finally see that I had settled for the role of playing the victim, and that I had willingly but unknowingly, chosen to adopt that position.
I joined a new gym by December and when the third set of restrictions came about after Christmas, I joined in with the online classes.
My breakthrough gave me the power to catapult myself through my self-doubts, and I found myself having to do this when I completed an online course I had taken out in the first lockdown, pushing past my limiting beliefs. It felt foreign and uncomfortable, but I received glowing feedback. I wondered if this is what people do: work through the steps, but not always necessarily feeling brave; just courageous.
I refrained from drinking for seven months, working hard at eating clean and working out. I won a global competition out of only twelve participants around the world. I was astounded and felt as if God was seeing me.
And the following year I worked through almost a year of couple therapy, as well as therapy for myself. Even though there had been a long break, my relationship with my boyfriend has completely changed through our therapy together. I discovered much about shame and co-dependency and write about my trauma—which has been a powerful healing tool.
Over these five years, even though I have worked on so much, it's not over. I'm still working on self-compassion and my limiting beliefs. Yet in walking these steps, I have been able to complete a freelance journalism course, which was in fact, the hardest accomplishment I have yet to achieve. At every assignment, I cried. But I understood that it was only my limiting beliefs that were telling me I wasn't capable. I also have written almost two hundred articles, yet I understand I have the rest of my life to grow.
The mind is like a muscle, and we can change it by creating new neural pathways and new paradigms of belief. Being courageous doesn't always mean we feel brave; it's just taking the steps regardless of what we feel.
"Sometimes God lets you hit rock bottom so that you will discover that He is the rock at the bottom." Tony Evans
blogpay
Total Comments: 0