Clean Your Room
When I was a senior in high school, I had seen a therapist. In the middle of the web of depression, I couldn't cope, and I had suicidal tendencies. I was failing high school and life at home was rough. There was a big chain reaction of trials that unfolded in that season after my grandfather died; it was the first major loss in our family, and everyone was coping in different ways. My dad kept to himself, trying to keep our family of four functioning. My brother had dropped out of school, dappled with drugs, and eventually got one of my friend's pregnant. My mom was battling her own depression brought on by years of pain from herniated discs in her lower back. Before everything happened, I had been the kid that wasn't in a hurry to grow up, got straight-A's, and I was just a kid trying to understand God and faith and everything in between. My brother used to call himself the "black sheep" and I was his fat, little "goodie-goodie" sister. I was supposedly the proof that my parents did something right, proof they hadn't failed us in being two broken people taking life one season at a time. And, here I was in my senior year, failing them.
The dynamics of those years were much more complicated than I have time to explain in this little blog, but the point is it was messy, complicated, and too close to the heart for anyone to fully understand at the time. We were each putting one foot in front of the other, finding our way to survive it. So, I found myself, in the office of this psychologist fresh out of grad school, talking about why I thought suicide was the better alternative to failing high school. I remember her sitting across from me, feeling as if she could see right through me, wondering if I could trust her not to judge me like I judged myself. She asked me: "What's the worst thing that could happen if all your fears came to pass?" We went through each of the worse case scenarios in my head, and slowly, but finally, I was beginning to understand that maybe this idealized plan, the perfect timeline for my future to unfold, was not worth giving up on myself.
She talked about life being like a metaphorical dirty room. If you look at the dirty room as a whole, you get overwhelmed at the enormity of it all and you're more likely to give up. However, if you look at the dirty room and begin to break it down into tasks, or clutters, or stages, then the task becomes much more manageable, and before you know it as you take bit by bit you look back and you start to see the room coming together. Since then, I have found such wisdom in her advice to me back then. Life isn't about having a "clean room" versus a "dirty room." Life is about the cleaning. If you think about it, regardless of how much you clean, there will always be something more to clean. Yeah, we all clean for specific reasons: events, good hygiene, to keep up appearances, personal preferences, because OCD won't allow us to do otherwise. Most of the times, its you who narrows in on all the unclean areas in your home when guests come over, when really they are oblivious. You just feel vunerable because you don't know what they are thinking about those areas that YOU are aware of. So, in reality, the cleaning is really for you, because opening your home to what it really looks like when no one else is around is messy.
In that season, I willed myself to trust God and believe that He had a bigger plan than my own, and I made a decision to take my life one clutter at a time and live forward. And, I did. I had missed over 90 days of school. My parents met with the principal and all of my teachers to figure out if graduating was still possible. The teachers agreed that if I was able to make up all the work from my absences to pass my classes, then it was possible for me to graduate. It was no easy task. I had to bust my ass, and work harder than I ever worked up to that point. I went a whole 72 hours without sleep toward the end, and up to the day before graduation day, we didn't know whether or not I was going to make it. But I did...by the grace of God...I walked with my class that day.
The dynamics of those years were much more complicated than I have time to explain in this little blog, but the point is it was messy, complicated, and too close to the heart for anyone to fully understand at the time. We were each putting one foot in front of the other, finding our way to survive it. So, I found myself, in the office of this psychologist fresh out of grad school, talking about why I thought suicide was the better alternative to failing high school. I remember her sitting across from me, feeling as if she could see right through me, wondering if I could trust her not to judge me like I judged myself. She asked me: "What's the worst thing that could happen if all your fears came to pass?" We went through each of the worse case scenarios in my head, and slowly, but finally, I was beginning to understand that maybe this idealized plan, the perfect timeline for my future to unfold, was not worth giving up on myself.
She talked about life being like a metaphorical dirty room. If you look at the dirty room as a whole, you get overwhelmed at the enormity of it all and you're more likely to give up. However, if you look at the dirty room and begin to break it down into tasks, or clutters, or stages, then the task becomes much more manageable, and before you know it as you take bit by bit you look back and you start to see the room coming together. Since then, I have found such wisdom in her advice to me back then. Life isn't about having a "clean room" versus a "dirty room." Life is about the cleaning. If you think about it, regardless of how much you clean, there will always be something more to clean. Yeah, we all clean for specific reasons: events, good hygiene, to keep up appearances, personal preferences, because OCD won't allow us to do otherwise. Most of the times, its you who narrows in on all the unclean areas in your home when guests come over, when really they are oblivious. You just feel vunerable because you don't know what they are thinking about those areas that YOU are aware of. So, in reality, the cleaning is really for you, because opening your home to what it really looks like when no one else is around is messy.
In that season, I willed myself to trust God and believe that He had a bigger plan than my own, and I made a decision to take my life one clutter at a time and live forward. And, I did. I had missed over 90 days of school. My parents met with the principal and all of my teachers to figure out if graduating was still possible. The teachers agreed that if I was able to make up all the work from my absences to pass my classes, then it was possible for me to graduate. It was no easy task. I had to bust my ass, and work harder than I ever worked up to that point. I went a whole 72 hours without sleep toward the end, and up to the day before graduation day, we didn't know whether or not I was going to make it. But I did...by the grace of God...I walked with my class that day.
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