I was looking at old letters yesterday. From just shy of 10 years ago. In them I was going on about how it felt like I woke up on the edge of a cliff every morning filled with dread and spent most of my day getting myself off that ledge only to inadvertently fall asleep on an escalator at night that brought me right back up again. I said that people talked about being able to change the way your mind worked and that I liked the idea, but mostly it made me want to give them the finger.

 My mind is a lot different today, like they told me it would be, but I never want to lose touch with how difficult that process was and how much pain I had to be in to try in the first place.

Its fresh to me on bad days. You know, the unavoidable ones that come around and make you question everything about your life, every turn of the day feels a gloomy/gritty sort of uncomfortable and you (or me, really) want to just run home yelling with your arms flailing above your head, hide under the covers and not come out. Maybe ever. Today was one of those days.

It reminds me that this is a process, an unfolding of long engrained patterns of fear and discomfort that can change but also can return and it is so important to have some way to get perspective so that those bad days don’t do what bad days can do to make themselves feel even worse, which is to feel permanent, to trick me into thinking it’s not just a day but a relapse back into the abyss of anxiety, depression and unmanageable internal voices that was my life before it wasn’t. It was just a bad day. We are due those every once and again it seems. And with any luck tomorrow will be different.