Monday, September 9, 2024

Getting back to normal March 6, 2014

 

So, yesterday was her second week mark at the clinic and she’s come to realize it’s not enough time.

Most cases take about two months.

Since she only set aside two weeks for this, she’s uncertain as to what she will do next.

Or if she is actually on a leave of absence from her job with the city, as some have suggested.

She has also come to realize that she’s had a relapse every year of her life and that she needs to resolve this issue.

While she says she has a number of friends, she only has two locally (does she include our owner or our former temporary boss as among them?)

She also notes she has very little in the way of material goods, such as a five year old car, but no career. She claimed she’d led more than 17 lives and had nothing to show for it, except for the experiences she insisted on cramming into each life. She lives in a room with shoddy furniture, few friends and a tendency to abuse herself.

As pointed out in my previous journal entries, she seemed to punish herself for a life style she some how (and mistakenly) believed was wrong. (I judged her, too, which was my mistake.)

These essays are pretty straightforward, if not quite as revealing as her more convoluted poems.

She pointed out that prior to going to the clinic, she could not even justify setting aside a week to herself. But depression and the need to come to terms with her disorder forced her to seek help.

Previously, she would tell herself she was fine, nothing was seriously wrong and that she didn’t really need help.

Like a junkie denying an addition, she had convinced herself she had no problem.

Finally, she surrendered herself to the process and the angels and to those others in the clinic with her.

The two weeks was the length of time she had discussed originally with her therapist in order to remove herself from the dangerous situation, and perhaps get the cure she needed.

Of the slightly more than two dozen other residents of the clinic, most of them were younger than her.

What seems to scare her is the fact that she is just far enough along in the process to know she may not be able to avoid a relapse, and has yet to fully recover. She doesn’t even know how deep the problem is, and how long it will take and how much energy she will have to exude to truly recover.

At this point, she unveils something that surprised me.

She really wants a successful career, a husband, children, and to be able to travel – future goals, although while at the clinic her most immediate goal is to remain calm, non-judgmental and perhaps find a measure of happiness.

I did not know she wanted to live a life that was more or less traditional, and wonder about her rearing children after the poem about the infant she posted last year. Is that she really wants deep down in her heart?

  


email to Al Sullivan

No comments:

Post a Comment