Oh Chaotic Dust,
In turns you’ve obsessed over and avoided those early days of mental illness. You would spend months refusing to even think about the innocuous trigger of the mental hell you would for years endure only to spend the next few weeks pouring over every detail with one question: couldn’t it have gone differently?
But that’s not how triggers work. For all your wishful thinking, you know that if it hadn’t been that Summer it would have happened eventually. More what ifs for you: what if it had happened earlier? What if it had happened later? Either way, you would have ended up ill before receiving help. And either way, you’d be forced to face the true demons; not the innocuous story or the first sickening thoughts, but the events in your past that should have been warning signs and, sadly, one of those things you have no control over: your faulty mental wiring.
That’s one of the goods that often comes out of mental illness: it forces you to face all that you’re scared of. Of course, often it does this by bringing you to the brink of sanity and life itself, but when you step up (and it is a huge stepping up) you face it all: the abuse, the wiring, the predispositions, the habits, the self-harm, the doubt, the depression, the suicidal thoughts, the addictions, the upbringing. Not all of those were you, but all of them have been someone, and many wrestle with more than one of those.
That’s another thing about mental illness – one of the really horrible ones – birds of a feather flock together. It’s rarely ever just one thing. You know that. You’ve been told by one therapist that she wants to just focus on your depression, then told by the next that he wants to just focus on the OCD. And you’re sat there, screaming at them that you’re a person – whole and raw and complex – and that it’s you they need to be treating, not the names and diagnoses. But that bit, the treating you, well, that can’t be done by anyone else, not really. It’s a scary thought, because while every single therapy session, no matter how painful or seemingly mundane, was worthwhile, at the end of the hour the session always ends and then, after a bunch of months, all the sessions end and it’s on you alone.
That’s where all the wondering about if it could have gone differently ends too. No matter when or how it happened, realistically it was inevitable, and it would be on you to get the help you needed. The trigger of Summer 2015 was a random crack in the damn, but given your past and yourself, eventually a crack was going to form. The important question over what could have gone differently is over what you could have done differently. You know those things now, but back then you didn’t.
And what you did do made it all so much worse.