No one's coming to catch me

What I discovered about fear, safety, and healing after the hospital — when no one was there to catch me anymore

Call it fear. Call it anxiety. Call it overwhelm.

It doesn’t matter what label you give it; it’s pulling me down, and it has been since the day I got home from treatment.

It hit me as soon as I stepped into my apartment.

I was home…

And my safety net was gone.

There was no one to run all my ideas by. No one to go to when I get overwhelmed. No one to teach me the coping skills I didn’t have time to learn while I was busy tearing down all my walls and learning how to let things go.

Suddenly, it was all up to me.

And, without the safety and comfort of residential treatment… I felt completely, utterly alone.

I wasn’t ready for the sheer panic that hit me in wave after wave.

I thought I’d conquered all my demons in treatment, and now, everything was supposed to turn up roses, all the time, every day, around every corner, and with every wise decision I knew I was going to make, now that I was finally free of my past guilt, shame, and regret.

I didn’t know that future decisions would still feel just as painful, frightening, and overpowering. I wasn’t ready to come home and have my fear consume me…

And boy… did it consume me.

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I’m sitting on the floor, my back to the wall, listening to my “All For Love” playlist on Pandora, sobbing uncontrollably.

I’ve been having these meltdowns almost every day. I can feel the pressure building up, beforehand, so I usually know when they’re coming.

Sometimes, I can keep the panic at bay if I put on my headphones, take a CBD gummy, and start singing all my favorite songs, with all the power I can muster.

Singing is the only thing that can keep me from crying. The crying still comes, though, eventually — so singing isn’t a cure, it’s more a way to buy me time, I guess, until I feel safe enough to cry, and just keep crying, and let it all come out.

It’s scary to cry like this.

Last summer, this kind of crying was what finally pushed me over the edge, and landed me in the mental hospital. Back then, I thought these meltdowns were a sure sign that I was out of control.

I would sob in the same spot on the floor that I’m sitting in today, and I would let the fear, and the panic and the overwhelm, just completely overpower me.

I would be afraid to cry. Embarrassed. Ashamed. Worried. Convinced that something must be wrong with me, for me to be having such deep, intense emotions.

I would try to resist it. I would fight against it, and try to make the crying stop as quickly as possible.

The more I fought, the harder I cried.

It got to where all I knew anymore was panic and overwhelm.

The thing is… as much as it was hurting me, I knew I had to get all those tears out.

Even last summer, I knew it was the pain I’m holding onto, that’s holding me back — that’s preventing me from living the lifestyle I want.

I knew all those old memories, all the pain, all the shame, the judgment, the fear… all of it… they’re all mental or emotional blocks that stand in the way of me being able to think clearly, to see what’s really in front of me, and to make choices that will move me forward, in full alignment with my values and my identity.

They were like barnacles, sucking the life out of me until nothing but darkness and confusion remained.

I knew those painful old memories had to go.

But I didn’t know how to get them out.

I only knew how to sit in the corner and cry.

And, actually, that’s what I did for probably a whole year before I went to the mental hospital: I sat, every morning, with pen and paper in my hand, my back against that same wall, and journaled, and cried.

I tried to dig up as many memories as I could, thinking if I could just cry about it all, I could finally be free. And I spent 365 days — at least — crying every morning, over every painful memory that ever came up.

But just crying wasn’t enough. (That’s how I wound up in the mental hospital, after all… so, for real: don’t try this at home. You won’t like the outcome.)

Every day, I cried, more and more, trying to get all those memories and all the pain and everything out of my body. And every time I cried, it was like walking in quicksand. With each tear, my heart sank deeper and deeper into the abyss.

In time, I came to believe I could never be free of my past, and the only way to escape the pain was suicide. (I’ll write more about that later… much later… I’m not ready for that deep dive just yet.)

Suffice it to say, in the mental hospital, I learned a safer way to cry.

Or, rather, I learned that it is safe to cry — but to get the full effect, you have to get everything out. Not just bits and pieces, here and there.

You have to cry all of it out, all the way down to the roots, or else it’ll just build back up again and you’ll get stuck in a perpetual cycle of crying enough to relieve the immediate pressure, but never enough to find real and lasting peace.

Mind you, I am not a doctor, and this is not psychiatric advice. This is just my experience.

But my experience in the mental hospital — after days and days of crying just enough to relieve the immediate pressure…

My experience in the mental hospital was if everyone would just leave me be… and I could go sit and sob in the quiet of my room… away from all the other patients…

If I could just cry and cry until I finally cried every bit of it out…

Eventually… the crying would subside.

Not once, but every time I cried.

Now, in the mental hospital, I felt safe to cry everything out.

In my apartment, before going to the mental hospital, that hadn’t been the case.

I was afraid to cry. Embarrassed. Ashamed. Convinced it meant there was something wrong with me.

But in the mental hospital, somehow, I intuitively knew that I was in a safe, controlled environment, where if my crying ever did get out of hand, somebody could step in and help me through it, and help me get back in control.

And somehow, just knowing I was safe to fully let loose… that gave me the freedom I needed to finally cry things out all the way down to the roots… and to cry out all the pain, fear, embarrassment, shame, guilt, judgment, all of it, every heavy emotion attached to every painful memory…

And leave it all on my pillow, and never have to pick it back up again.

I learned that skill while in the mental hospital — but then they sent me home, long before I had time to master the skill (let alone time to cry out a whole lifetime of pent-up emotions).

After the mental hospital, I knew I could cry everything out, any time, all the way down to the roots, and I could be completely free from all that pain — but only in the safety of a hospital setting.

And, admittedly, that’s more than half the reason I sought residential treatment, after leaving the mental hospital. I knew I still had more tears to cry, and I knew my shame and my guilt was still enough to pose a real risk… so I had to go back in, to finish what the mental hospital had started.

In residential treatment, I found the safety and comfort I was looking for. It took about a week or ten days for my mind to fully realize that I was safe, once again, to let everything out. But once I was safe, it all came spilling out of me.

I cried uncontrollably in group therapy, alone in my shower, lying in bed, early in the morning, late at night — once, I cried through lunch, sitting in the cafeteria, watching other patients walk by, not sure if they should approach me, or leave me be.

My walls were down, and I was determined to keep it that way! So as painful and frightening as it was to cry in front of other people, I made myself do it, until it was no longer frightening, and no longer something I had to force myself to do, but rather, something that just happened organically, in the middle of group, or in small circles during our down time.

It took weeks, but I finally learned that I was safe to cry, in residential treatment, in individual therapy, in group therapy, and in other social settings in the hospital, with other patients or staff.

And once I knew I was safe, it became easy to let the tears flow, and to show fear, pain, shame, remorse, sorrow, all of it. I could safely express any emotion and know I was fully supported in doing so.

And that was amazing. I’ve never felt that safe, or that free, in my entire life.

Then I came home and didn’t have any support.

I still “know” I’m safe to cry, even in the solitude of my apartment. Actually, now that I’m back in the real world, I think I feel safer and more comfortable crying in my apartment than I would feel crying in front of other people, out and about.

But it doesn’t feel the same as when I was in the hospital. That extra layer of safety and support is missing. I’m all on my own now… and if I start to cry and get in over my head, I have to rely on myself to guide me through it…

And I don’t know if I know how to do it all by myself.

But I am.

Because I came home, and immediately got overwhelmed, and felt myself freeze, and panic, and feel like everything is wrong and there’s no hope for me at all…

And I can’t go through one more day feeling that way.

I won’t.

It’s a horrible way to feel.

I’ve already served my sentence feeling that way about life. I will not allow that feeling to become my guiding force, now that I’ve had success in treatment, and in the mental hospital, and know that, as painful as my emotions can be, they are temporary, and eventually, they will go away.

But they don’t go away on their own. Maybe someone else knows more about this than I do, but in my experience, emotions tend to linger until I allow myself to feel them, to process them, and then let them go.

So…

I don’t have to be a slave to the fear, and the panic, and the overwhelm.

But I still have to swim through it all to reach the shore of happiness, and possibility, and hope.

There’s no other way around it.

I have to let myself cry this all out. It hurts, but in the end, it’s the only way I can free myself from all the feelings I don’t want to feel.

I had to learn that I was safe in the mental hospital — and then I had to learn to become comfortable crying the way I do.

Then I left the mental hospital, and I had to learn to be safe and comfortable in residential treatment.

Now, today, I suppose I already know it is “safe” for me to cry… and plus, if I did get out of hand in my apartment, I can always call and go back to the hospital, if I really need to.

So I guess now, the only thing to do is to allow myself to cry in my apartment, as much and as often as I need to…

And learn to become comfortable with crying when I’m alone, when there’s not anyone within arm’s reach for me to go to and ask for help.

Cyring today is easier than it was a week ago… so I’m moving in the right direction.

But man, does it hurt.

I suppose it always will, no matter how good I get at it.

But I can tell you this: crying everything out hurts a lot less than holding everything in.

Holding everything in led me to suicide.

Crying it out is leading me to emotional health — and relative happiness.

When I was afraid to let myself cry, last year, I always thought I was doing something wrong.

Now that I’m getting comfortable with letting it out, I finally feel like I’m getting something right.

Maybe if I can make friends with all my heavy emotions, and release the shame and the guilt and the judgment…

Maybe I can learn to like myself, after all.

And if I can do that, that’s worth all the tears I will ever cry in my life.