It’s October 21st, and it no longer feels like I’m transported back to 2010.

I don’t feel shame, or embarrassment, or ask myself why, or what I could’ve done to prevent it. Instead I feel sadness, I feel sad that my 14 year old self had to experience that kind of fear. She did nothing to deserve that, she did nothing to deserve the hate thrown at her.

14 years it took. And how did I get here?

• Therapy

• Meeting the right people at the right time

• My Career

• A lot of mistakes and steps backwards

• Ella

It’s true what they say, you can’t save someone that doesn’t want to be saved. Years ago, I sat in Susan’s office and I told her “What if I’m afraid to let go and heal because my success is fuelled by trauma? I escape into my work in order to cope with how broken and fucked up I am.” And she says to me,

“Brenda, you’re successful despite what happened to you. Do you understand what I mean?”

I did, I did understand the theory behind what she was saying. It’s something that you see on a self-help-quotes-inspiration-influencer instagram. But that’s it, what if it’s all bullshit? What if I heal and my career grows stagnant. What if I peaked, and healing contributes to my career’s downfall.

“So? What if you do heal, and your career changes and your growth isn’t as exponential? What if that is the cost of being happy and healthy? You come in here, and with every promotion you sit in that chair and tell me that you thought you’d be happier. We talk about this all the time, your narrative of winners and losers. But what if you just play a different game altogether.”

A different game. A game where I focus on myself, one where I do the work and I heal. AND potentially at the expense of my career. Didn’t sound like a fair trade at the time. My career felt like the only stable thing in my life. Work is like a game. It has rules, you have strategies. And there’s a path to how to get to the top. It’s a control freak’s dream.

What is a control freak’s nightmare? Well, it’s feelings. It’s mental health illnesses. It’s unpredictability - and not in a fun spontaneous way. It’s playing a losing game of getting someone incapable of loving you to love you. So, was I eager to give up a game that I grew to love and got really good at, all while making money? All for another game that literally gave me nightmares? Hmm, no. I can’t say I was jumping for joy at that opportunity.

But little did I know, I was already in the new game. Years ago I had no idea how to answer how I pulled myself out of the shit hole that was my life. But the thing is, I see it now. It’s not obvious, and it’s slow and sometimes brutal and sometimes boring. It’s choosing yourself. I chose myself by going to therapy. Even though most of the time, it was me being brat and a smart-ass with a sharp tongue debating why Susan was wrong. And sometimes it’s getting out of bed and brushing my teeth and getting on with my day. And sometimes it’s choosing not to kill yourself.

So I’m alive and well to say, with medication and lots of therapy behind me, those cheesy-ass motivational self-help instagram accounts might be on to something.