Spinning & Rising

When I first thought of the name of this blog post, I thought of the Maya Angelou poem Still I Rise.

I rise.
I rise.
I rise.

Two days ago, I think I hit the bottom and now I am coming back up. How do I know? My mind has stopped spinning. I am tired. I am exhausted. The distractions are gone. Instead of drinking or using drugs, my mind created its own distractions where I'd focus all of my attention and energy on outside drama that I had created for myself. When there was a break that made me lose a distraction, I'd find myself looking straight into the abyss of the Boy and I couldn't go there. I was grieving his loss, but more I think I was imagining he was dead, not safe at boarding school, that there would be a possibility that I would never see him again. Of course, I will miss him, but hopefully not with the same dark, grieving intensity. Here is where my emotional, reptile brain took over. I was living in a primal state where my first and only thought was taking care of my child.

Two days ago, I admitted my deepest, darkest fear to a room full of supportive strangers and my kid's therapist and (more importantly) I have seen the Boy and he seems better. Now when I am sitting by myself alone, I have moments where I have no thoughts--I am just there and present. This is a major change from the past few months where my mind was always whirring in the background, and I would have to make enough noise in the front of my mind that the background wouldn't come to the front. I feel like I've lost fifty IQ points in the past few months. My mind was so pre-occupied that I couldn't truly concentrate. I haven't finished any new books except one collection of personal essays that my friend DJ had a piece in, and those essays either dealt with death or were funny. I haven't read a newspaper meaningfully. I've read parenting books because I've had to.

My brain hurts from all of the stress it had trying to keep my mind away from the most terrifying thing I could imagine: that my son might kill himself.

Wilderness therapy was supposed to be the reset button, which is was. There we learned how dark the Boy's mind really was. We knew he was in a bad space because he physically was not participating in the world. He was lying in bed.

"Aren't you glad he stopped going to school?" my dad once asked me. "If he had kept going to school in spite of all his issues, you might not have been so motivated to get him help."

That was a weird question to ask, but the answer was yes. Of course, I wish the Boy didn't have these horrifically dark thoughts where he didn't think he was worthy of loving and living. Wilderness uncovered the tumor. Boarding school is helping to shrink it.

I didn't realize I was in a bad space until another mom asked me a very simple question: "What are you doing to take care of yourself?" As I wrote yesterday, I lost it and started to cry. The emotional dam broke. This was a safe place to break down because I could look into the abyss after seeing the Boy. I could then meet him for lunch and spend the afternoon taking a walk or playing pool or Foosball. I told him how worried I was that he might kill himself, and he could listen. He could tell me about his fears and why he felt the day he did. I feel like he is on the path to getting better, so when I look down into the abyss, I can see hope.

How do I know I am better? In addition to my much, much quieter mind, for the first time in ages, I thought about my career. Not my job, but what is it that I want to do next, where do I want to go instead of doing what needed to be done because it was in front of me. I think of my friend listening to me for hours prattle on about all of the drama in my life. Not that the drama has gone away, but isn't as pressing or in the forefront of my mind. The noise has abated.

And so I rise.