A year ago today, I was sitting in the office of Dr. Peeples, the dorkiest/coolest pharmapsychologist certified by the state board of Georgia. While our usual discussion was going in the direction of "blah blah, worried about college, blah blah, my extended family is crazy", He asked my a question that I still can't answer affirmatively. "Are you happy with your life up to this point?" As I sat there with my confused faced (that oh so attractive grimace that makes me look like a chimp), I felt a panic attack coming. I had no idea if I was content, much less happy.
Reflecting on that life changing question, I can't say that I've ever been truly happy. I’ve gone through life laughing off or raging about the misfortunate parts of living as Timeeka Bruton. Dr. Peeples, being a Tibetan Buddhist sage trapped in the body of a 37 year old white man from South Carolina, said that happiness is a relative state of mind. Well I have never truly felt it. I wasn’t a happy baby, a happy child, or a happy teenager (but happy teenager sounds like a paradox). I’m afraid that my adult life is going to follow the same course.
My grandmother (granny for those who know her) once said that one is never truly happy and that we all live in a toss-up between contentment and discontentment. Looking her life, it seems as though she has lived in discontentment for the past 30 years. The only one of her birth children to succeed in life (stable job, married, “healthy” family, her OWN house) was my mother. The rest are perfect pictures of what you can do to completely your life and of those around you. Their failures pushed my mother and grandmother to try to do the best with my generation. And when my oldest cousin failed to make something of his life, all of that hope was transferred to me.
Being the model child of my entire family (nuclear and extended) is the reason why I am physically and mentally afflicted. The panic attacks, the cysts, and my immune system are responding to the pressure I’ve put on myself to succeed. I HAVE TO SUCCEED. I CANNOT end up like my grandmother, my mother, my father, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, and even my older brother. I have spent my entire life up to this point in a constant state of panic, and I know that I can’t live the rest of my life this way.
There was a point in January of this year that I decided that I would try to put myself into a coma. I didn’t want to die (it seemed too cliché to attempt suicide), and I didn’t want to physically harm myself (because I am a chicken). I thought if I spent maybe a week or two completely disconnected from the rest of the world, I would be able to calm down and figure out what is was that I was looking for in life. Instead, I ended up falling out of my loft after taking two really strong pain killers that my doctor prescribed for dealing with my cyst. After that really awesome month of back pain, I realized that the only way I would manage to even begin to figure things out would be to cut myself off from friends and family, which only led to more therapy.
So a year after being handed the question that will drive my life, I haven’t even cracked the surface. I am still hanging out in the darkness of my own psyche. But who knows? A year from now, I might have part one figured out.
No comments:
Post a Comment