The Chimera

It's been a long time, gentle reader.

How best do I explain my journey in the past few months?

I finally got in to see a therapist right about the time my mental illness rendered me nearly incapable of living what was left of my life. I was awake involuntarily until all hours of the morning, sometimes only finally falling asleep as the sun was coming in through my not-quite-blackout curtains. I would then sleep until somewhere around noon, at which point I would get up enough energy to plant myself on the couch where I would eat and cry and cry and eat and marathon television shows on Hulu and Netflix and eat and cry. I could occasionally manage to take a shower and even sometimes leave my apartment. If I had an obligation to someone else, I could manage to make it into the city or to a social gathering with only three or four mild to major panic attacks on the way.

I had such amazing friends during this period of time, reader. Friends without whom I may not have been able to leave my apartment at all or may have been reduced to a blubbering anaerobic fetal position on the sidewalk. So many amazing friends that to mention only a few would be a disservice to the rest, but the ones who helped most must surely know who they are. My parents, too, have been truly wonderful in their care and concern and quest for understanding.

Just before going home I got in to see a psychiatrist thanks in no small part to my exceptional new therapist. This psychiatrist put me back on Sertraline and then gave me something potentially more important.

Ah, reader, how can I possibly express to you what a difference it makes to correctly name the beast? Like the fabled Rumpelstiltskin or any demon in Creation, to know its True Name is to have power over it.

Depression, I called it for years. Then major depression, but still it did not heed my call. It did not bend the knee, but rampaged through the kingdom of my life, outwitting all my best-engineered defenses.

Well enough could I see the destruction in its path, but I only ever caught glimpses of the elusive beast. Fangs here, scales there. Monstrous claws, size unimaginable, a tail tipped in venom. Each sighting left me more shaken than the last. How can you defeat an unknown enemy?

And then the psychiatrist gave me its True Name:

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

And I called it by its name and it came to the gates of my being and sat sentinel at the door. I saw it finally for what it was, like a feral child or the lion with the thorn in its paw. It was not my enemy, nor was it malicious or vindictive; it was scared and lost and suffering a magnitude of pain I had forgotten or locked away. This creature was the one I'd invented to guard my darkest dungeons and fight my fiercest battles. I cannot defeat this beast. I must help it. I must tame it.

My kingdom is still in ruins, but I am rebuilding. And I am teaching the beast to trust me.

But most importantly, dear reader, I am finally being kind to myself.