Broken Glass and Spilled Glitter

Say you knock over a bottle of glitter. It's finely milled, so it catches to the air and spreads over a large area in such a short amount of time you don't even realize it at first. The bulk of the glitter is in one concentrated area, so you get that up first and try to put it back in the container. But if you aren't smart with how you do it, you'll end up spilling it again. So you get the majority of the glitter back in the container. But without realizing, you've gotten glitter on your feet, in your hair, on your face, on your clothes, on random surfaces, maybe even on the wall. For years, you spot random tiny glimmering pieces of glitter in places you didn't think the spill had reached. You can never clean it all up. You can mop the floor several times and still find glitter in places you know you'd cleaned meticulously. You'll take a shower and wash your face but still find a random speck of glitter in your eyebrow. lol It is impossible to not only count individual specks of glitter, but to ensure that you put the same number of specks back in the container after it's been spilled. I feel like that spill is my recovery process with anxiety. It's everywhere. It bleeds into places I didn't think it could reach. And of course, I could always spill the container again. I have to be careful with where I place it, what I place it around, and make sure the cap is on tightly or I could knock it over. Anxiety feels a lot like that. I have most of the glitter back in the container, but I always find specks of it where and when I least expect to. It's with me for life and I'll probably never be completely rid of it.

With glass, say you break a knick-knack. You can't just toss the figurine; say it's a one of a kind piece and was made just for you. You can't have the piece recommissioned. And even if you did, it wouldn't be the same. You can't recall from memory exactly what it looked like before the break because you never paid any attention to it, but you hope that its a clean break so you can put the pieces back together and for the most part, it is. You've got some loose shards and tiny fragments but you'll be able to put the figurine back together. But when you do that, you notice tiny pieces are missing that are so small you'll never be able to glue them back to the figurine, but they don't cause the piece to lose its shape. Those missing pieces, however tiny, are obvious though, and the figurine no longer fits on the shelf with the other pieces in the same way it once did. Once you've done all you can do with it, it has new value because you don't want it to break again. You know the figurine won't survive another break. It's still beautiful, but you kick yourself for not taking the time to really look at it before it broke. You know and get used to it for the imperfect piece it is now, not for the whole piece it was before the break. Now it's more fragile and demands you handle it with more care. You have to find beauty in its new shape, with all of the cracks and splits and missing pieces. Some people will pass it up, deeming it damaged and beyond repair. Others will feel you should have thrown the whole thing away when it broke and bought something different. It feels like a lot of the time, the only one who sees the true beauty in this broken piece is you. So you keep it close to you, to make sure nobody else breaks it but keep it just far enough out of your reach so you don't break it either. Time passes and you nearly forget about your figurine again, until you step on a piece of glass you didn't see before and it reminds you, painfully, that you missed a piece in your cleanup efforts. And that's how I've felt trying to rebuild myself after that breakdown. Pieces of myself that I didn't realize were missing at first aren't there now. Sometimes I can see flashes of old Mandy in different scenarios, but most of the time I just feel incomplete. I feel whole, but somehow still incomplete. I'm always afraid I'll break again, always afraid that I won't be able to put the pieces back together in a way that allows me to function. 

Ten years ago today, my anxiety relapsed and when that happened, the 'normal' chapter of my life came to an end. I can no longer be that person and can no longer see where her road was supposed to lead. I had to put as much of myself back together as I could and make sure I didn't spill anything else, and find a way to create something worthwhile from that. Who I am now is not at all who I expected to be, and days like today are always rough for me to get through. Despite the amount of time that has gone by since then, it still feels a bit like a death to me and today, I'm struggling. I can't say I'm entirely ungrateful for what my relapse gave me; in retrospect I was seeing things in black and white before and I feel like I see things in color now. I feel like I have more depth as a person, as a woman, than I would have had if I hadn't made it to the other side of my relapse. The way that things happened following my relapse make sense so I can't say there are any decisions in there that I flat out regret. Each of those decisions, each of those events, did a lot to shape me into the person I am now. I love the person I am now, however damaged and fragile I may feel. I didn't love me at 20. Was trying to, probably even thought I did, but I didn't. Ten years after that relapse, my life looks similar and I've been struggling with a lot of anger. The overwhelming lesson I continue to face now that I've hit my 30s is acceptance. I have to accept both what is and what isn't, and I don't know how. Both my 30th birthday and today have made me confront some painful realities of my life, both as they were a decade ago and as they are now. I wish I could say I'm in a much better place, but I'm not. I guess in a sentence that's what I'm having trouble accepting today: the truth of my life, the broken glass and spilled glitter of it all.