Even when you’re a therapist.
A couple weeks ago, I had to confront this difficult truth yet again. I had planned time off for the end of March - a week for myself and a week with my kids for Spring Break. I was going to go to my parents’ place on Vancouver Island and just breathe for a while. I knew I needed it. The past couple years have been a lot for anyone on the frontlines of healthcare, and somehow it got even harder as 2022 began. The sheer exhaustion of pandemic fatigue, the oppressive weight of the state of the world and the systems we live in, the day-to-day griefs we all continue to face because life stops for no one… it all adds up for everyone. Being the person who gets to hold space for all that is a blessing and a gift, and it also means that breaks are even more critical.
But it’s funny how sometimes it isn’t the big things that finally break us - it’s the metaphorical straw that breaks the camel’s back. It's the little things that, when added to everything else, are just too much. For me, it was as trivial a thing as I could imagine. A few weeks ago, I was looking through my old photos and suddenly (and quite unexpectedly) realised I was prettier than I thought I was, especially in my late teens and early twenties.
Now I know that a lot of us have a warped sense of ourselves and how we look, especially as women of colour, so maybe I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was by this sudden insight. But as someone who has worked on self-love and body positivity for a couple decades, it was shocking how much it knocked the wind out of me. Full blown trauma body - dissociation, flashbacks, loss of appetite, the works. I hadn’t felt this way in years and years, which is a testament to both how much I had healed and also how deep the wound must have been to impact me in this way.
I had to cancel a week of work. A full week of clients who needed me and income my family needed. But I just couldn’t do what I do when I was that activated. I could barely make it through the one or two initial consults I decided to keep in the schedule - 10 minutes each, and relatively low-grade issues as compared to my regular trauma-heavy work, and I was still so triggered that I barely managed to get through them. I had a hard time focusing and kept dissociating.
So I reluctantly took a week off and then I did what we all so often do: I blamed and shamed myself. I was annoyed at having to deal with issues I thought I had long-since dealt with. I fundamentally don't believe in patriarchal, capitalist beauty standards. I learned long ago that how I looked was not the most important thing about me and I had the great privilege to live in a largely body-neutral home that supported that perspective. Moving from neutrality to love was a much easier transition as a result, so I learned to love my body in my 20s and never looked back, even as I gained fat and had babies and aged. And I do truly love this body of mine that has carried me through so much and held so much for me over the years. But here I was, at nearly 38, drowning in the same hurt that almost killed me as a teenager. And it took me days and days and hours of conversations with friends who know me better than I know myself to realise what was going on.
It wasn’t just that I didn’t know I was pretty when I was 18. There is valid grief for so many women when we realise we just couldn’t see ourselves clearly before, heartbreak for that version of ourselves who wanted so badly to fit the mould that it ached. And that was certainly part of it for me. But more than that, it was the realisation that I did in fact fit the standards I had long-since shut out and it still wasn’t enough. Even if I was pretty, it didn't change that I was bullied and unwanted and unloved in so many deep and painful ways. It meant once again confronting the fact that we live in a world where far too often for women, nothing will ever really be enough, that even checking off every single box and hitting every single bar won’t earn us the right to live and breathe without having to justify it.
But most of all, it was that realising that this one thing reopened a wound that lives in me at a cellular level. Humans need to be wanted. Belonging is such an intrinsic human need that it is the core of Adlerian theory. We want to be loved and to be held and to be part of something more than ourselves. We want to be attractive and desired and attended to. For a long time, I had explained my not belonging in so many places as being a result of patriarchal beauty standards. Since I (thought I) knew that I would never fit them, I just ignored them. To realise that I did and it still didn’t change anything, didn’t make me fit any more than I ever had, was too much.
Add to that the very real possibility that there were way more people interested in being with me than I ever dreamed, and that I might have been part of at least one love triangle I knew nothing about, and you’ve got the worst possible thing that could happen to a girl that spent decades healing from the wounds left by bullying and by never feeling like she would be enough. Learning that I may have been wanted in a way that I desperately longed for and to not have realised it is a whole other kind of pain, and one I wasn’t prepared for.
What it meant was that I was, once again, drowning in my own need to be wanted. It stuck to me like a salty sea breeze. Even as a write, I can feel it creeping beneath my skin, this ache to be seen and heard and loved; to be able to be my whole self, without apology, and have that be a good thing, a worthy thing; the desire to not have to wake up every day feeling like I need to prove myself to myself and the world. It’s a human thing to want to be loved in that way but it’s also a thing I had learned to do without. I have learned to settle for being respected and admired for the work I do, work I love and that I am always grateful for. But it has also been a coping mechanism, a way to have part of that need met while numbing out the rest of it, so opening up that part of myself again has been especially difficult.
I am fighting the urge to revert back to my teenage self, to pick at scabs and poke at wounds to see what happens. As much as my 20 year old self wants desperately to know with certainty whether or not she was really wanted, my 38 year old self knows that isn’t really possible. No matter what romcoms and sitcoms tell us, no one really tells their college crush they were in love with them. We live in a world so deeply committed to hiding, filled with people who rarely allow themselves the gift of honesty, especially about their emotions, so I’ll probably never really know, and that’s hard too.
All my years of work on this mean that I was able to recover enough to be able to get back to work after a week away. And it also means I know this is going to sit with me for a long while. I’m still trying to process it all and figure out how I move forward, how I make space to see my life in a completely different way than I have all these years. It means I have to find a way to internalise this information, to incorporate it into my self-narrative and to let it shift that narrative if it must. It feels a lot like a kaleidoscope; for so long, I've seen things the same way - the same colours, the same patterns - only to have it suddenly shift into something entirely new. The colours look familiar but everything is somehow different and new. It's beautiful, but it will take some getting used to.
It is a great truism of therapy that healing isn’t linear and it isn’t time-limited. Sometimes it is infuriatingly circular, and that's certainly how the last few weeks have felt for me - like I've been stuck in a loop trying to make sense of all this. But I know healing is happening all the same. I know I am not who I was 20 years ago or even 2 years ago and that matters. The breakdowns will still happen from time to time, and that too is a truth I have to make space for. And I deserve the same compassion I give to others when they hit this point, so I’m going to keep giving it to myself, and I hope you will too.
