I Should Be Happy...

The eyes truly are the windows to the soul. When this picture of me reappeared on my Newsfeed I was thrown back to where I was one year ago. It was bleak. I remember the thoughts streaming across my brain, “I should be happy, I should be happy, I should….”

I was drowning in a sea of self-loathing. If asked to name five things that I liked about myself I would have had difficulty finding one or two. Just weeks earlier I had started blogging the thoughts in my head. I also decided to stop hiding behind perception and to do my best to be real. I spilled my secrets: depression, sexual abuse, and my quirky coping mechanisms. It helped to put it all out there, but I was still entirely broken. I had unbelievable guilt for feeling the way that I did. My blessings were off the charts. Why were they not enough?

After posting this particular picture, a friend sent me a pm that simply stated, “What’s going on with you? I can tell that something’s not right.”

I ignored the message. I was not prepared to respond to someone calling me out on my flatness. I envisioned a cardboard cutout of myself propped up at the mill at Rockbridge where the photo was taken. I was there, but not really.

And through it all, Andy was holding my hand. He took me to our favorite places (that’s where Rockbridge comes in) and acted as if everything would be fine. In that moment, during that struggle with the abyss, I was angry at him. I thought that he wasn’t seeing me. Because he didn’t talk about it, I thought that he was ignoring me or even embarrassed by me. When I would cringe to be touched, he still hugged me. He was summonsing me with his kindness and unconditional love. He knew that I was still in there. He refused to give me what I was begging for: solitude and isolation.

Today, I am so thankful that I hung on and that I didn’t give in. Who knows, maybe I would have if I had not been shown such caring and compassion. I’m pretty sure that there’s a lesson in there.