Thursday, July 5, 2012

The Chris Project

Over a year ago, I stopped following my doctors orders.  I had become someone's wife, someone's employee, and someone's mom.  I lost myself.  My doctor tried to help me by giving me a pill. And another.  And another.  My medicine cabinet overflowed with medicine instead of mascara and nail polish as it should.

My husband tried to help me by giving me more responsibility in the marriage according to the dictates of his own conscience as THE MAN in what he called a Christian Marriage.  I was to be the woman described in Proverbs 31.  She did it all and was happy to do it for her man because God said so.

Fuck off.  God didn't make me to be your slave, picking up your shit streaked underwear and half empty soda cans topped with cigarette butts.

The medicine was making me crazy.  I was overly compliant with his controlling ways to make him happy.  So there would be peace in the house.  So I could have peace in my heart and in my life.

I wasn't getting it.  I needed peace.  I had to start with me.  My body had given in to medicines for years and was weak.  I bruised easily and healed slowly.  Sometimes it seemed not at all.  My muscles were atrophied from lack of working out.  I quit eating the food my jackass husband INSISTED I eat, I quit taking the medicines and I quit doing what he wanted me to do and started doing the things I KNEW were the right things.

I stopped all my medicine.  I have arthritis so it started with pain medicine and went to symptom chasing after that.  One by one, I let the prescriptions expire and let the medicine run from my body.  This was not the best idea.  I got sicker before I got better. 

I had to strip away all the bad.  I wasn't fast enough and maybe karma thought so, too.  Over the year or more that has passed since I stopped the medicine and started thinking for myself, I've fallen hard and fast.  I got divorced, got arrested, lost my job.  I lost my boyfriend twice so far and really hope that doesn't happen again.  At least not for the reasons before, and he was right.

But I hope to fix that.  I think he hopes, too.  So does mom and my two girls and my sisters.  I was dying a year ago.  Though I look like I've fallen and I can't get up, I've only just started so don't give up on me now.

I've hit bottom.  I'm climbing out.  The final link has been placed and I'm gripping the chain.

I lost my boyfriend for a valid reason and I wouldn't blame him for walking away now.  When I lost him, I thought it was the last thing I needed to tear away the old and bring back the girl I was before all this happened.  To the honest and real me that still desires peace and happiness and knew it wasn't happening, for me OR my kids, in that hell.  I had to get back to me.

I was lost and didn't know how.  I reached out in the middle of the night to a hotline, not for suicide prevention so much as death prevention.  The pain was enormous and I knew it would eventually overwhelm me.  It got me to therapy.  The very next business day.  And every day that week but one.  And the following Monday.  And I go again on Monday next.

Therapy doesn't scare me but being a "mental patient" does.  It means I have to admit some things.  Some things I'm not ready to admit.  But I like my therapist and I trust her.  I think she can help me through this and I can come back.  Back to Chris.

I told the boyfriend I went to therapy.  He came back.  He was hurt but he came back.  He was stunned I asked for help.  He was NOT stunned that I needed it.  He UNDERSTOOD.

He understood.

Maybe not all guys are assholes.

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