What I learned in therapy

     Recently, my dad asked me what I had learned in counseling. He knew that I had gone for the two years I was in graduate school and figuring my way out of a major depressive episode and it had helped me a lot. His last 3 years have been really bad and he's started talking to a counselor.
     I remembered a few things I had realized- being happy isn't a future goal as much as a day-to-day way of being and how I never had parents in my teens, just a mom at work and dad who was traveling for work or drunk in the garage. Despite sharing most of the things I'd figured out, I didn't think what I was saying way really conveyed what my time with my therapist really did for me. Soon after, I was talking to a very close friend and he told me the details of his childhood trauma. I knew it had happened because he's very open about the face that he was molested as a child but avoided thinking about the specifics. It was clearly very hard for him to talk about it and had so much empathy for him because I know how hard putting a dark and painful thought or memory into words can be. I listened, laid there with him and let him know I would always be there. One of the big things that hit close to home what that he needed help and no one was there for him. I shared my version of when I needed help and had no one around and felt the pain and darkness in my own memories but, despite their gravity in my mind, they didn't seem to hurt as much as my friend's.
     That, I realized this morning, is what going to counseling has really done for me. Talking about the hard things for my past, having someone help me work through it and learning how to approach something that really hurts and think more about it without getting lost in shame/anger/sadness/fear. It's helped me work out a lot of things, but more importantly, it's given me enough tools to figure out how to handle the dark time of life, past or present. I know I can ask other for help when I need it and how to shut down negative thoughts that start cycling around sometimes. Therapy didn't fix my life; it showed me how to do it.

Painful Personal Growth

For me, S&M and sex have been thought of as separate and I like them that way. Sex is fun, funny and, at times, can be used to strengthen a relationship if done correctly. What I enjoy about BDSM is the intensity of the experience and sex would cheapen it in a way I'm just not interested in at this moment. I know the two can be linked but I've yet to figure out a way to do it that make the two work together well. That being said, I'm still very new at this and imagine with more experiences, I will probably find a way.

 I have spent a lot of time thinking about why I am the way I am and why I enjoy pain. The oversimplification of an answer has always been "I'm wired wrong" as an explanation of why I enjoy the sensation of pain, an experience most people spend their lives avoiding. A better, longer and more complex answer has come to me through the process of developing my other hobby, distance running. At the end of a run, I feel the same way as I do after a good beating. After an event, I feel as though all of the periphery of my life has been stripped away. I'm not worried about the perceived problems in my life, questioning past decision or concerned about how people may be judging me. I don't think about my many insecurities or anything beyond the here and now. All of the daily shit just melts away and I get a few brief moments to truly live in the moment and see the core of who I am. It's the endurance of both activities that allow me to get a few fleeting moments of peace to feel strong, see the person I really am and who I want to become.

Reflecting on these moments and what I had to do to achieve them give me strength in my everyday life to face the self doubt and anxiety left over from my mental health struggles. Many people view me as a confident person, which in reality, I am not. I am so afraid of failure everyday. One of my favorite quotes on the the subject is from Game of Thrones. "'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?' 'That is the only time a man can be brave'". I'm not confident, just brave enough to face new fears everyday and try not to let the fear of failure keep me from trying to get what I want and need to be happy. Remembering the moments of clarity and feelings of strength help me live my daily life and allow me to escape it when I need to.

Physical pain is one of several types of pain; there is also emotional and psychological (or what others might call spiritual) pain. To me, physical pain seems the most acute while also being the most superficial. It can be enough to distract you from anything else at the moment it is occurring but also quickly fades after an event is over. Emotional pain isn't as acute as physical pain but it lasts longer. It can linger and corrupt other life experiences but it can be thought through and reasoned away. Psychological pain is the most severe because it has the ability to effect who you are and create doubt about how you think of yourself.

I have spent a lot of time thinking and working through both emotional and psychological pain in the last 3 years due to the emergence of clinical depression. It runs in my family and my twin sister, my father and I have all suffered greatly. Both my sister and I have dealt with it through therapy and antidepressants, which I still take on a daily basis. My father is a recovering alcoholic and I believe drinking was his way of coping. I was a daily drug user for roughly 3 years before I got everything under control. I smoked pot everyday because it allowed me to distance myself from the dark feelings that were so overwhelming at the time and gave me a change to think about what was going on without the fear and doubt and sadness that had consumed my life. I pride myself on a high pain tolerance but it got to the point that even with the recreational drug use and regular counseling, that I didn't think I could take anymore. Life doesn't have a safe word and I was looking for a way to make it stop. I didn't want to die but I didn't think I could endure living anymore so I began thinking of death, first abstractly, then planning an effective, easy and clean way to end my own life. My main consideration was making sure once I was gone, any remaining affairs I might have would be easy to take care of for my family and that no one would have to clean up a big, gory mess. I felt so completely worthless and didn't want my death to be an inconvenience.

Even now that things are better, I am not the same person I was before my experience with mental illness. I have learned so much about myself, who I am and how much I am loved but I still don't think the insight I've gained is worth what depression took from me. I was young and I used to feel invincible. The fact that the first real setback in life I experienced was so severe has radically altered my view of myself and what is possible for my life. I worry about and doubt everything and live with a constant low level fear of judgement from others and failure. I work to be brave but even putting these words down has been a real challenge. I worry that if people know this much about me and how weak I really am that they won't think of me as the same person as the character I play everyday which is the person I'm trying to become. I've tried to ignore the remaining psychological damage for so long but it continues to eat away at the very core of a person until a way is found to remove it and a person is ready and willing to let it go. I think I'm ready to stop playing a character in my life and just be myself but it's not something I can do alone and I will certainly need a push from time to time.

I'm very attracted to the idea of complete submission within a BDSM relationship. I think it will give me a chance to shut down my thoughts for a while and focus on doing what is expected while gaining peace through a feeling of powerlessness, instead of trying to fight is back and fearing it like I do in my real life. It would be a safe way to lose control with someone I trust; a chance to take off any figurative armor I carry around and just be. Even now, knowing I've been kinky for years, I still feel shame about my interests and was humiliated when exposed. Embracing the lack of power and learning to accept, own and even enjoy the shame and humiliation I feel about my interests in a safe environment makes the idea if submission very appealing. I hope that being able to let go of the psychological pain I've been dealing with for years will help me become a better version of myself, even though personal growth is often very painful. 

Why I wear makeup to the gym.

On many women's fitness websites you'll find complaints about people who workout to look good, not as an effect of their working out but to look good while it's happening. With women who lift, it's the women who only lift the light weights to tone and with people who love cardio it's just leisurely doing the motion without putting any real effort, usually while reading a fashion magazine. These women are usually the ones wearing super coordinated stylish too short or tight outfits and a the dreaded makeup.
 Way would someone wear makeup to the gym if you're these to work and it'll just get sweat off if you're working hard enough. I have a confession, I put on makeup to go to the gym. I don't do a whole face but I do put on fresh, dark eyeliner. It's not so I can be the cutest girl at the gym and I know I am going to sweat it off during my workout because I am a budding distance runner. I love to run and anything below 3 miles just isn't that satisfying. Lifting if ok but pounding out miles is where it's at for me.

Even thought i know the long run of the week will be ok, it's still intimidating when you're starting out. Every person has had the experience of starting out, the point where you know what you're doing but are still building up quickly and know that you have so much more potential that what you do now. You go to the gym, track, piece of equipment or trails and can put out your new personal record but compared to the person next to you, it's not much.

I apply eyeliner before every run as war paint. It's to make me feel strong, powerful and maybe a bit intimidating. I don't want people to see the doubt as I start (or finish sometimes) a run, I want to pretend I'm a total bad ass already as I'm putting out the work to become one. My eyeliner might as well be a superhero mask which I can hide behind a little and go out and the bad ass I know I can be.

One day I will get over the worry I feel before the workout because it'll be part of my routine, but I'm not there yet. For me, wearing makeup  isn't a way to judge how hard I'm there to work, it's an indicator or how hard I intend to work that day.

Mountains, Molehills and Something in Between

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Sales Rep No More

     Today was my last day of work. I left my job as a sales rep who peddled lab supplies at major universities in VA. I was a (small) step above a door-to-door sales person. I met several people I really liked but I hated the job and stress of being in sales. I'm trying to make the transition to be a high school biology teacher but I do not currently have a job.
     Teachers are typically hired in the spring for the next fall. I keep hearing that math and science teachers are in demand so I guess my life has become a reality based litmus test to determine if that statement is true. God I hope it is.
     Several people have asked is I have another job lined up and at this point, I don't. I have some poorly formed ideas floating around in my head about what I'm doing in the near future and will spend the next couple days firming those up but tonight I'm just letting reality sink in. Actually, I'm worrying about everything. In this age of The Great Recession, who leaves a job?! Also, I frequently hear the old adage "it's easier to find a job when you already have one" but I hated what I was doing and the stress was killing me (I only had a few, low key melt downs in my car) but it's hard not to feel like I'm making a mistake.
     The boyfriend tries to understand, and even if he doesn't really get it, he's very supportive. My family is behind me emotionally and, more importantly, financially so I know I will be ok but it's hard to be a 20-something college graduate who can't figure out life and other things. Nobody ever told me how hard being in my mid-20's would be. I always thought I would graduate college, get a job and start being an adult after I graduated college. I guess I just imagined that I would slip smoothly into working life after graduation and work toward my version of the white picket fence and 1.9 children per household (which is neither of those things, I'm just trying to paint a picture). I'm still trying to find my niche and have to remember that this is what I chose.
     Life is not something you work toward but an accumulation of the steps that you take everyday so I'm trying to remind myself that this mixture of terror of uncertainty and excitement of leaving something I knew wasn't right is what living feels like for today.

There is no reason for you to be reading this. (It probably won't even be good).

I need a chance to practice writing, take down some thoughts and maybe even lecture from time to time on important aspects of natural sciences that the general public may or may not really understand.

I am a 20-somthing year old who is about to be unemployed with a master's in a STEM field. I think I want to try to be a science teacher