Fine

A lot of time and a lot of water has gone under the bridge since my last post.  It has been interesting, reading back over the old posts - posts from a time when recovery was my sole focus, where I was learning to be well.  I was expecting to find my writing childish, inexperienced, the way I always have when I reach a new stage of life and look back at old patterns.  I didn't.  I actually think it is more level, adult and honest than I am being now.

Having had a long stretch of pretty good mental health, things started to slide a bit a year or so back.  I fell back into old habits of keeping quiet, being controlled and eventually lost myself again in a confusing tangle of obsession, blank obedience, and eating, purging and exercising away my emotions.  I went back to therapy.  I had some boxes ticked by the NHS, and I came away exactly the same.  This is possibly unsurprising, given my extremely developed ability to appear absolutely fine, and refusal to show any sign of anything being otherwise.  It's part of what kept me going as a child and a teenager, and I have rarely shaken it off - fine is really the only option most of the time.

Until I started to pull 'fine' apart last time.  Then I discovered that 'fine' actually meant locked and suppressed, and the only real way to be fine was to be not fine for a while when I just wasn't.  In truth, I was a lot more fine when I was managing to say that I wasn't, because that helped me to identify the feeling, the source of it, and either do something about it, or simply remind myself that it was not forever.  I appear to have lost that perspective a little, somehow, though logically I still know it.

So I'm back at a crossroads, having eagerly followed one path down a dead end where some monsters awaited, and where I got stuck for quite a while.  With a little encouragement and a few risky moves, I think I have managed to make it back to the middle to begin to set off down the rather lumpier road that leads somewhere better.  Currently I can say with confidence that I am not fine, and I don't know how to be so.  But that in itself is the first few hand-holds on the side of the rock, so I shall just dangle here for a while as I work out where next to reach for a crack to put my toe in.  It might take a while, but I would like to see the view from the top again.  Patience, persistence, and some risk-taking will get me there in the end.  Then maybe I will be mostly 'fine' for this point in my life.