Nobody lives exactly the life they expect to live when they are young. Dreams change, people come in and out of our lives, careers take us places we never expected, the political climate changes in ways that make things easier or harder. There are myriad moments where we pick a path and eliminate others and sometimes that takes us far away from where we thought we would be.
That difference, that distance from where we expected to be is sometimes exciting and interesting, and sometimes it comes with a sense of loss. Sometimes there is both excitement AND loss.
Today I’d like to talk about the loss and about the way that mental health struggles can create a tremendous difference between where we are and where we wanted or expected to be.
I first started experiencing significant mental health symptoms in middle school. Those symptoms were largely untreated until my senior year of high school. My 20s were spent in a haze of barely controlled bipolar and my early 30s were spent gaining control and learning to live my life.
I didn’t do a lot of things one expects to do in their teens and twenties. I didn’t hit social milestones, or get career clarity, or experience any real lasting mood stability during my adolescence and early adulthood. I was surviving, often just barely, and all the energy that my peers were spending experimenting and finding themselves, I spent getting through the day.
I often like my late 30s were my social adolescence and my early 40s have been similar to many people’s late 20s.
Sometimes that doesn’t bother me. My life has been rich even though it has not been traditional. My journey to get here shaped me and I wouldn’t be this person who I love without having walked the path I walked.
Sometimes it does bother me. I sometimes feel like my life started when I was 38 and it’s hard to look at the hell it took to get there and not feel frustration and anger and grief. It's hard not to feel like I’m behind the curve. I feel like my true self has only been awake for the last four or five years and that doesn’t feel fair.
Sometimes that makes me angry. Mostly though, it makes me sad. I feel the loss of the life I thought I’d have when I was nine years old and looking at the future. I feel the loss of friendships, and potential relationships, and professional clarity, and resource stability. I feel the loss of who I could have been if I hadn’t spent so many years barely dragging myself through the day to day.
A lot of the time I don’t know what to do with those feelings of sadness. Sometimes I write letters to a younger self, sometimes I paint my feelings. Sometimes I swim about it. Often I just try to sit with the sad, let the sad happen while I go through my day. I try not to let it influence the choices I make about how to spend my time and I try to make space for it to exist so I’m not constantly fighting against my own feelings.
Sometimes I write things like this blog post.
Younger Meg, teenage and emerging adult Meg, had more on their plate than they knew how to manage. But they survived. I try to hold on to that victory, because it’s a huge one. For many people the success of their 20s is that by the end of that decade they had a decent sense of who they were and where they were going. My great success is that I made it into my 30s.
I don’t want to minimize that success in any way. It was hard won both because of my particular brain chemistry and because I’ve received plenty of messaging that people with my mental health struggles never go on to do great things. I’ve had psychiatrists telling me to aim lower, bosses who didn’t understand why I was underperforming and were very angry about it (though I should note that I’ve also had some wonderful bosses), a grad program with professors questioning whether I was sane enough to be a therapist (though like bosses, there were plenty wonderful professors too), and a brain telling me I had nothing to offer the world. It often feels like a miracle that I got to where I am.
Even with that miracle, my grief is very real and deserves space to breathe just like any emotion deserves space. It’s hard to manage sometimes but it’s so important. And it’s important for me to hold on to the victory of those years at the same time I hold on to the way they weren’t what I wanted or expected them to be.
I know I’m not alone in my grief, that many many people with complicated mental health issues, or any sort of trauma, hold similar grief. It’s not a failing that my life has been what it has been. It is also not a failing that I wish it had been different.
For all of you out there feeling similar grief, I see you. I hope that you are able to hold the grief and also hold onto the successes that have gotten you here. I hope that you find a way to make peace with your past.
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