I remember the day I was told straight to my face that I was a very negative person.
Shock, humility, sadness…were all things I’d probably feel if it weren’t coming from my therapist. I mean, how could I blame her? I was paying her for her honesty.
For the past two years, I’d been dealing with so much…life. Anything that could go wrong, ran to it, and I stayed still on the other end, standing like an idiot, waiting for something to go right.
I remember feeling out of control, stolen from. Like my life wasn’t mine anymore, and I was just someone playing a part. Call it depression, call it a quarter-life crisis, call it bad luck. Whatever it was, I was letting it win. I was a stranger, so far away from myself, with daily reminders of just how miserable I was.
And so it wasn’t so much a surprise when my therapist told me I was a negative person. It was more so a light-switch. I had not recognized who I’d become in the past two years, but I didn’t think anyone else did either. Yet here I was, being told something about myself that felt so foreign. It’s as if in that moment, a piece of the old me jumped to the front and brought with it the truth, the thing that woke me up.
I was in a toxic relationship with misery.
This is how people see me? It must be. If my therapist (who I only met with once a week) could see it, then surely everyone else could too. I knew I had changed. I had lost my sense of humor, I took everything personally, everything so seriously. Afternoons made me sad; nighttime made me anxious. I had looked at everything that had gone wrong over the past two years, and I realized I had surrendered to it. Misery didn’t just love company; misery was the company. At some point, it had convinced me to let go of everything that made me, me, while it sat down next to me, making me believe that it was what I needed in order to get through what I was going through.
As I sat there on my therapist’s couch, more of the old me started to show. Curious as always, ready to learn. I asked her why she thought that. She was more than happy to answer. “When you have the option to be positive or to be negative, you always seem to choose the negative. You always look at what could go wrong, instead of what could go right.”
I do that? I guess I did.
“But why?” I asked her. “Why would I want to choose that? Why would I want to be that way?” and we talked some more about it. Self-esteem issues, maybe something more deep-rooted that had come up because of recent events. As we sat there, digging, trying to understand, I kept repeating the same thing to myself: “choosing”. Yes, on the outside, I was choosing all these things. I was choosing to isolate myself, choosing to hinder my growth, choosing to see the bad and none of the good, but none of it actually felt like a choice when I was actually doing it. The things that made me sad, the things that made me miserable—it always felt like I had no other option in the moment. I was so burned out from the real things happening around me that I didn’t have the energy to take care of what was happening on the inside.
That’s the thing about misery. It made me believe I was keeping myself safe, all while only doing more damage. If I expected the worst, nothing could catch me by surprise. Misery offered me comfort at the time. A promise that even if things went really wrong, they wouldn’t be worse than I had already imagined them to be. Misery had moved in, and trying to fight it cost more energy than I had at the time, so I just let it be. Soon, I became reliant on it. I can isolate myself because I’m going through things. I can put zero effort into this project because what’s the point anyways? I can stop dreaming because what are the odds of it coming true? Misery, the negativity, it kept me safe from being more hurt than I already was, even if it was the thing that was hurting me the most.
In a toxic relationship, the person you’re with may convince you that you need them. That you’ll have nothing if you don’t have them. That it’s either them or nothing. And when your self-esteem is low, and your vision is blurred, you really do believe it. You really believe there’s no third option. Until one day, when you’re sitting across from your therapist, crying over, actually, a really great thing (now that I look back) that you’re just convinced is going to go terribly wrong because misery has convinced you of that, recent events have convinced you of that, you yourself have convinced you of that, and it’s all so blinding that you never thought to stop and turn around, at the therapist who’s pointing out your pessimism to you, to see that she’s standing next to the door of said third option that had been there all along.
I spent two years making excuses for why the bad was more deserving of my attention than the good. Misery caused such a quiet commotion within me, kept me so distracted from that third door, not because it was protecting me, but because it was protecting itself. It kept saying “look here, look at me”, so I wouldn’t have a chance to turn around and see the truth.
Misery is both equal parts external events, and internal attachment that we create in order to find some sense of comfort and safety. And although I referred to my wake-up call as a light switch, it was more of a slow dim that keeps getting brighter. Each day I’m able to see more and more, slow strides back to who I was, bringing with me all the new things I want to become. The farther I get away from misery, the more energy I regain. Just like a toxic relationship, it drained the life out of me.
For a long time, I thought I’d never be able to find my way back to my old self. I think that’s why I stayed still for so long, because I was scared of getting lost even further. But it’s also because I thought there was no old version of me to get back to. And in a way, there isn’t. I’ll never be what I thought the happiest version of myself was, and I’m kind of glad about that. Even then, misery lurked, keeping me smaller than I thought I was. And I still don’t live without it; it would be insane to say I never have a single negative thought. But the light is on, and I can see my way around. I can see the options I have, instead of making blind choices out of fear. I don’t need misery, so we’ve officially broken up.
The most important relationship we have is the one we have with ourselves; don’t let anyone or anything ever try to convince you otherwise. I've spent so long choosing what felt safe over what felt right, choosing what was familiar over what was good for me. But I'm learning that not everything that offers comfort deserves a place in my life. And if something requires me to keep abandoning myself to hold on to it, then maybe it's time I let it go. So I choose myself. I choose to see the good in the bad, the possibility in my dreams, and the light in me.
With Love,
