Mental Health

For the first time in my life, I called in to work and said I was having a bad mental health day. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to be more honest about my mental health, so I was honest. I didn’t say I had fallen down the back steps, I didn’t say I pulled a muscle in my back while shoveling, I didn’t say I had a migraine, and I didn’t say I had food poisoning from the Chinese buffet I didn’t stop at on the way home. See, there’s one thing I will lie about, just one, and that is what is hypothetically wrong with me so I can take a mental health day. Well, no more. I struggle, sometimes, and there is no need to hide it.

I am in the bell jar today. I called in sick today, because I was certainly not going to be my best self for my customers today. As much as some of them get on my last nerve, they deserve the best me I have to give them.

Today wasn’t that day.

Some days I don’t have a best me to give.

Today was that day.

I got to spend way too little time with my friends and family in Indiana, and then I spent 13 hours in the car on my way home watching countless cars slide off the road, sit in the ditches, and be pulled out of the ditches. I contemplated the government shut down and what that means for whom. I listened to podcast after podcast. I took some pictures. I stopped for some food and beer. I listened to more podcasts. I contemplated more politics. I got angry. Then I got sad. Then I got inside my own head. And couldn’t get out. I was stuck in a metaphorical snowbank in a metaphorical ditch inside my own head.

Usually Bec can drag me back out of there—she hitches up her tow chain and gives a few good pulls (did I take that metaphor too far?)—but I only saw her for about an hour before we fell asleep last night.

Before I left for Indiana, I put Facebook back on my phone, so I could communicate through messenger with people whose phone numbers I didn’t have, and now I’ve taken it off again, because I was checking it compulsively, just to see. And, sadly, I broke my own half-hour-limit resolution, and I spent way too much time on Facebook over the weekend, reading the nonsense that others were posting and arguing about. I know my self worth doesn’t rest in social media, but you know sometimes I fall into the trap of thinking I’m not good enough, smart enough, fast enough, beautiful enough, articulate enough, or popular enough. I quit my PhD, I quit my Ironman pursuit, I quit my ordination, I quit my diets way too fast. For being someone who was raised never to quit anything, I’ve quit a lot of shit since adulthood hit. I even quit my own half-hour Facebook limit! I wrestle with that. I wonder constantly where I’d be if… If I had finished my Phd, if I had kept pursuing ordination, if I had just sucked it up and done what it took to get my teaching license when we moved here, if, if, if…

So, I’m sitting here after shoveling paths like my own personal labyrinth around my yard, drinking a delicious small batch roasted Ethiopian Yirgacheffe that my brother gave to me, snuggling with my cats, and trying to get right again.

I am posting this to say: I had a beautiful weekend with everyone in Indiana, I had a beautiful run on Saturday night, my drive was good except for the last 3-ish hours, and I’m snuggling cats, but I have this gnawing feeling that what I do and who I am isn’t good enough. I keep hearing these voices say to me, but you could have been so much more if you had just applied yourself, like an appliqué, to your studies, to your art, to your church, to your athleticism, to your…

I call bull shit.

What I do and who I am are good (enough).

Now just to convince my brain of that. Maybe a run will help; shoveling certainly did.