Excelsior: Onward and Upward

    Dear EN502,

    Hello, it’s been a while. I’ve sat down at my computer several times to try and put everything into words but didn’t know how. Eventually, the distance I put between myself and writing felt too big to breach, so here I am, at the end of May. Determined to share something.

    In March I experienced an event that, in terms of video game vocabulary, dealt a lot of emotional damage.

    Uncovering childhood wounds: -800EHP (Emotional Hit Points).

    I’ve been trying to regain that EHP ever since, but facing that deep-down hurt has been really hard, and scary, and I’ve done a lot of crying.

    Crying in the car: +10XP. +5 Combo points for doing it multiple times.

    Crying in the staff office: +25XP.

    Crying in the staff lounge: +25XP, +25 bonus XP for doing it in front of two of my managers.

    Crying violently on the steps of my house: +50XP. Achievement unlocked for Companionship: my roommate brought me a glass of water and sat with me for an hour.

    Crying on the phone to my friends: +15XP. Achievement unlocked: I have really good friends.

    Crying during therapy: +0XP, I do it all the time.

    I feel raw inside from these emotions. They weigh me down and strangle me. I open my mouth to tell people what I'm feeling and nothing comes out.

    I finished reading Turtles All the Way Down by John Green recently, and he included this quote by Virginia Woolfe: “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache… The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

    “It hurts,” I sobbed at my roommate as he sat with me on our steps.

    But I don’t know how to describe it beyond that.

    I didn’t write for a long time also because I was waiting for a conclusion, a resolution. Where I could add, flippantly, to a blog post, March and April sucked, but everything is good now. Pain stops being a vulnerable thing if you talk about it in the past tense.

    But now I’ve realized that what I’m experiencing is not a quick fix. I have to live with it for a long time and integrate it into my life.

    “This will never go away,” my manager told me as I cried in the staff room. “But it will be different.”

    So. Here I am. Feeling unchanged, but ready to move forward.