In the Summer of 2020, over 4 years ago now, we were not allowed to train Jiu Jitsu. My coach at the time had these words for me:
Its not about what you cant do now, its about what you want to come back as.
In between then and now things happened that I could never have prepared for.
The last 1400 days I have been living in an alternate timeline with not many witnesses. And when I floated back to earth, it took time for even myself to realize I am changed. And not magically. In a very sobering, invisible way that not many understand or can see.
I’m now in a place where I am not who I am.
That was a Freudian typo.
Not who I was, I meant.
The last few weeks I turned to social media to try to find people who understood. But increasing I found myself online for longer and longer, constantly scrolling, answering, trying to write my own thoughts and opinions that aren’t always well received or relatable. Opening the apps every 10 minutes to try to find something that made me feel back together—interrupting my efforts on projects I am working on because I am getting jammed and obsessive about finding community or someone who knows. Now, it’s giving me anxiety, sucking my time, producing internal running commentary where I am comparing myself to others excessively, all day. Having me run into people who vehemently disagree with me, despite us sharing the same diagnosis. There is so much unrest in the Autism community. I wish we could all come together. But it will never happen.
I got rid of 3 social medias I checked at least 20 times a day, off my phone. In the next month I will see if I am even interested in returning. Ive heard of social media detoxes, paring down the apps in favour to a less harried day to day existence. It seems like in opting out of these portals is like shutting off the stream to what daily life is to many now, an extension of self.
In OT the other day, I mentioned how my fundamental values are changing so deeply, the divide between myself and literally everyone else feels multiplied. I cant get my mind around the earthquake happening inside me let alone try to explain to most who have no curiosity to understand anyway.
I also know I have a lot of privilege even within my circumstances. But I’ve experienced things the last four years that everyone around me has not. Normative peer events are not in my purview. Threat of Houselessness was. Food insecurity was. Employment issues have always been. Depression, dissociation, therapy is. I consider myself in Recovery from so much. Maybe I am in shock, for how close it was, to being infinitely worse than the worst already was.
I told OT it was like I had been on a precipice. I have stared into my own abyss and have had it stare back. And I cannot shake that experience. It went in, rearranging me. And because of that, as I do my best every day-sometimes every moment-I see myself, the world, everything around me, fundamentally different. And I cant hand out flyers to others to bullet-point it. I cant make anyone care. And I cannot connect to many, many things that used to hold ultimate purpose and value before.
OT said that this is a relatively normal occurrence in (intensive) therapy. They motioned upwards, as a symbol of what’s happening to me. But that is not what it feels like. It feels like a tailspin that where or whenever I land, is going to be far from where I took off.
In the depths of my mental health crises, I clawed my way, everyday, to the next. Some of my most potent memories are weird. It’s remembering what the stair carpet felt like under my shoes, walking up to the assessment office. The opening the nondescript brown, wooden door to the office I had waited my whole life to find.
Sometimes, my old coach’s words cross my mind. Would I have preferred to have known the turbulence ahead of me as my life was about to break down, my psyche pulverized into shards and dust to be Kinsugi’d somehow?
Come back as?
There was never a “back”.