tomorrow is another day

The only thing I know is that I shut down. The following days, weeks, months are all in a blur. I remember only wanting to eat lemons, needing to be covered in wool, that I sat anywhere my parents put me, and rocked back and forth, back and forth. I felt lonely, desperate. Whatever my thoughts were, I could not express them; I was forgetting everything and did not remember the basics of living: I could not recognise any sensation, emotions, feeling. Nothing. I was zeroed. Resat beyond my control. It took me about one year to consciously leave the comfort of my bedroom, 8 years to trust someone to drive me around, 15 years to get a driving licence, 21 years to sleep alone, in a house, by myself.

I could only imagine, at that time, that I was losing the plot. My thoughts made no sense, and when my emotions started to come back, they were extremely intense and I could not differentiate, for example, between feeling desperate or just being moved by something. Everything was desperation, disaster, pain, hurt, I felt closer to death than alive. I wished Death would come but I was way too scared to call her in.
I definitely felt not understood. And nothing made sense.

That day, that 15 August 1988, wasn’t the first time I lost something precious and felt excruciating pain. And it definitely wasn’t the last time. But on that day I learned the most important lesson I could have ever learned; the lesson that, at the age of 44, made me decide to trow everything I thought I knew to the wind and go back to the roots: back to school, back to me, and I became a counsellor. Then,  a chaplain.
The lesson was: there’s a part of me, a tiny tiny minimal infinitesimal minuscule part of me that is still ok. I am going to be ok, I am going to go back to being that 20 year old woman who travelled the world alone, who was strong and happy. I haven’t lost everything. There’s this tiny tiny minimal infinitesimal minuscule part of me which will get larger and deeper and stronger, and everything is going to be ok. I can build on that spec of me. And I love Life.

I learned Hope.

Every time I speak to a client I remember that same kind of pain, and desire to feel better, and to believe that they are ok, that it’s going to be ok, no matter what.
Every time I say good-bye to a client, I try to imagine their sense of Hope, because now they are ready to go on without the support of therapy.
Every time a friend calls because they want to talk, or someone reads a horoscope, or have their tarot read, or they receive the first text message, or someone smiles at them: it all goes back to Hope: please, tell me it’s going to be ok.

Hope.