Time Out

This is for a friend who has been having a rough time. Different friend than yesterday, but still, I like to help my friends when I can. I don’t know if this will help, but it’s worth a try.

We’ve been through treatment for a long time. While I, and most of the rest of the people who went through treatment with me, am technically out on my own now, I still go to a therapist, and I still go to support groups. I imagine I will do both of those for quite a while, because, as I have talked about before, we can’t cure mental illness, just manage it and hope we can keep it under control. This can seem like a lot of work, and at times it is. But nobody is sitting by our sides telling us that we can’t feel our problems.

We don’t have to spend every second of the day watching for a symptom to pop up, or a situation to arise, so that we can make use of the skills we have learned in treatment. We are allowed to feel our pains and our problems, because, well, we have to. There’s no getting around it. There are no bad grades for taking a day to just feel what we’re going through. I know there are times in the future when I will feel depressed, and I won’t always want to try and control it with a skill or an acronym. 

It takes time to live with what we live with, and sometimes we don’t want to take the time to try and help ourselves. But the times we don’t want to take the time to help ourselves are exactly the times we should. We can’t always go at full speed, however frustrating it is, because if we try, we’ll just run into walls. We can’t force ourselves to get better. That’s not going to happen. 

Sometimes we just need to slow down and take the time we need to deal with our problems. Ignoring them won’t help, and will often just make them worse. It is frustrating as hell to not be able to move forward at the speed we want to, but slowly is better than not at all – which is exactly what will happen if we try to rush into more than we are ready for. We don’t have to – we CAN’T – work on using our skills and knowledge to help ourselves all the time.

Anything else would be unfair to ourselves.