On Getting a Therapist

Yeah, I am one of those people who looks at their phone right when they wake up. So when I saw that it was only 12:02 am, I knew I needed to smash my face right back into that pillow.

But, that’s not what happened. Something (someone) inside of me said, “You need a therapist. Now.” Some people would call this a come to Jesus moment, but I think it was me finally coming into myself. Lately, it’s only been a whisper, but at midnight on Monday, it was a clear voice letting me know that the tools I have used in the past to push me forward are no longer working.

With only my left eye open, I signed up for TalkSpace. Then I saw that it was so damn expensive, and I remembered a resource a friend had accessed earlier in the year when I had intervened on him.

There are times when I wish I had that kind of friendship where someone would sit me down and say, “Enough of the bullshit. You need to get your life together.” When you’re someone who struggles with asking for help and/or being vulnerable, you learn how to adapt. And when you’re someone like me who is really good at reading emotions, I know how to give just ~enough to make peolpe feel like they are on the inside.

The truth is, no one really is. There are parts of myself that are so dark that I don’t even have a flashlight that’s strong enough to light a path through its twists and turns.

And so, I have learned to develop a voice within myself that will scream at me when I have fallen too deep. I worry that this voice won’t always be there, or that I will be too far down the tunnel that she won’t be able to hear me, or that I won’t be able to hear her. Either way.

But I did it. I had my first appointment, and I tried very hard to be open. To be vulnerable. To say the hardest sentences. To reveal the pain. To take the lid off just enough that I know I need to go back to clean up the mess.

No matter the circumstances of how I got to therapy, whether on my own or with the direction of a caring friend, I made it.