Cleaning Up This Mess (Spoiler: the Mess is Me)

Life. The complexity of it, the triumph, the defeat, the swirling of paths all joining and mixing together to create one person's unique experience. We share. We can understand. Each life is touched by each other, and the web of that spans this whole globe, crissing and crossing as we all move, connected by being alive. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows has a word for the marvel I've felt these recent days: SONDER.

And as I feel this, as I delve into the tangledness of my mental health, I am overwhelmed by the complexity of the world and by the need for compassion, the importance of kindness and remaining soft, pliable, transparent. I'm hopeful, and because of this I'm ready to move beyond the myriad struggles I have faced, just as we all face. It's confusing, how my happiness has opened doors deeper into my wounds. And this is where the sonder connects, really: I am certain that there are other people who have gone through this. That at least one other person in 8 billion has gone through their personal hell, had traumas that plant destructive mindsets and habits, defense mechanisms and coping skills and mental illness that they've just had to bear up under until finally they felt safe enough, stable enough, happy enough, to have some chain or other break and allow real exploration toward healing. There has to either be someone out there who has gone before me, and come out the other side more whole than before. And there has to be someone who will feel the same hope I do right now from witnessing my journey. This whole post feels incoherent, but I think that's because my thoughts are so loud...loud with the happiness of last night, when my fiancé read the love story I'd written on our wedding website and experienced joyful tears for the first time; loud with the absolution of discovering onychophagia, a real word for something I've done my whole life; loud with the realization that I've struggled with ED as a subset of my control issues; loud with anger at the people who couldn't do better than being destructive toward others, and the unfairness of having things to fix that I didn't cause; loud with ownership of the problems resulting from my mistakes and poor choices...it's all SO FUCKING LOUD. And I'm just grateful that all that noise isn't anxious noise. It's noise full of purpose. For some reason my anxiety isn't interfering with the process. And recognising that cuts through the noise. I am grateful.