Through

Yesterday I was mad. 

I had a plan for the day, and I was all set to get the ball rolling. The plan was: first, unload my groceries. But before I even unloaded half of them, something happened and it all went to hell. 

I walked back into the house in a daze, and my husband said, Are you okay? I said, No. I made lunch and choked it down. My head wouldn't stop spinning with the thing that had just happened. I was angry, but I didn't know what to do with the anger. Anger is a difficult emotion for me in general. Most of my life I held it in, smoothed it over, walled it off. I was pretty good at pretending I didn't care. Sometimes I was pretty bad at pretending. 

Fifty million sessions of therapy later, and I've learned that the healthy way to deal with difficult feelings is: You feel them. 

The first time my therapist told me this, I said. Ah, it's like the line from Robert Frost, "The best way out is always through." Okay, sure, she said. 

But what if you don't want to feel the feelings? I forgot to ask her this. Or, if I did ask her, I forgot the answer. I cleaned up my lunch dishes and realized I was enraged. I said to my husband. I’m mad. He said, I can see that. What can I do to help? Can I hug you? 

Before I met him, I didn't know this was a question a person could ask another person. I didn't know you could say no. 

I said, Yes, and when he hugged me, I burst into tears. It was amazing how hard I cried. When I stopped, I said, I think I want to go for a walk. I took the dog and tried to lose myself in a funny podcast, but it didn't work. I was still jittery. I reached out to two friends, but they were both busy. I felt like I might crawl out of my skin. 

I ate an over-sized chocolate bar. That was glorious for like, two minutes, but then I felt sick. Now I was angrier, and all of the anger was directed at myself. My day, which had started out so promising, was going down the tubes. I went for another walk and tried to do a trick my therapist told me about where you look at five things and touch four things and listen to three things and smell two things and taste one thing. 

All I could look at was the sky. All I could listen to was the same song over and over. Under Pressure by David Bowie and Queen. 

The song is about love and it made me feel terrible because what if there are limits to love? And also, what if deep down, you hate yourself? I kept walking. Why can't we give love one more chance, says Freddy Mercury. And then David Bowie says, in so many words, Yeah, why not? 

It hit me that the love they're talking about includes yourself. It only took one hundred repeats of the song and 18,341 steps to come to this conclusion. My feet were burning by that time, but the anger was gone. 

I had found my way through, apparently. 

It only took a day. It only took a lifetime.