CN: substance abuse, discussion of serious mental illness and attempted suicide
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it’s deep winter 2014.
i am temping at a job where i am alone at a desk all day, and am still trying to wrap my head around the nightmare that was my term of AmeriCorp service the year prior.
my best friend and i had been living together, but our respective spiraling depressions pull us apart from each other, a silent severing that leaves me confused and alone for the first time in four years.
my partner and i have separated, but are still enmeshed, using what little we have to keep each other from tipping over too-close edges. neither of our friend groups know how badly we are struggling individually and together - they think we are fighting at the concert, but i am talking a drunk love down from walking into traffic. when i go home, i use the same strategies on myself, to varying success. i get it.
it’s deep winter 2014, i am living alone, and there are four bars on my block.
—
even as a teenager, i knew addiction ran in my family, and with my training, was not willing to risk activating that trait waiting to be triggered in my bodymind. at least, i thought that’s how it worked. my senior week in college, i smoked part of one cigarette and craved them for weeks afterwards - i haven’t touched one since. what teenage me thought was that if i limited myself to something that was more manageable, i’d be safer.
alcohol? safe? foolish. (but i tried. harm reduction?)
i’ve always been the kind of person that people carrying burdens find it easy to unburden with, almost compulsively - strangers on my commutes, people in my communities, the places i frequent, and in my work, of course. for a long time, though, i never knew how not to take it on, how not to become my empathy, how to slough off the weight of interactions with others that i often had not even actively consented to. so i drank. and then i felt.
there are so many things we only learn reactively, rather than proactively. so many things that caregivers are not prepared to recognize or address with love, respect, and care. *sigh*
i’d alternate between bars, and usually got left alone in them, but one night, a woman was talking to me, not particularly caring that i was more interested in the $4 margaritas the bartender kept handing me in beer glasses. eventually, i noticed when she said something about sending her boyfriend over, i got wary, grabbed my knife in one hand and waved for the check in other. but it turned out, he just wanted to talk to me, too. he told me about being raised in the Catholic Church, how doctrine went against the things he’d felt, experienced, and believed, and how he had lost much of his Irish Catholic family over it. he wanted me to know that my green aura was incredibly bright, and that the path is hard, but that he saw me and wished me well.
—
…to be seen by a stranger in such a way. to somehow know he was right. to feel completely undeserving of and caught off-guard by the assessment was too uncanny for my alcoholdepressionisolationstressheartbreak-addled mind to handle. i hauled my ass across the street, stumbled up the stairs, and wept.
strong green auras are a marker of Healers. open, compassionate people, who are also more easily influenced by their interactions and proximity to others, and also affected by isolation and rupture of relationships. it can indicate immense change or capacity for it with regards to the self and spirit.
that winter, i had my first and last suicide attempt. i was not scared of dying, but i was heartbroken by the fear and sadness on the faces of the friends who came to help me.
that spring, i chose a purpose and applied to a graduate program in New York to be closer to my family. the tattoo i got when i arrived is of an Audre Lorde quote:
“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
the green heart chakra is named Anahata in 'Sanskrit’ which means ‘unhurt, unstruck and unbeaten’, a determination that i unconsciously began cultivating in myself upon my arrival in a city where i built and explored myself in a way i never had before. where i was able to find help, reconstruct my reality, and learn how to discern my own desires and value my own strengths.
when i began to decide what success meant for myself, i stopped failing.
each time i am honest and brave, i succeed.
now it’s not just the heavy things that people want to share and explore with me, it’s the joy and possibility. i wonder what colors my aura is now. i wonder if that gentleman was able to make peace with his gift, too.
i certainly hope so. i hope you do, too.
stay brave,
seph
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