The Road to Italy Part III
I have a mental image of myself laying in bed on a stormy Saturday morning Memorial Day weekend 2021, scrolling through all my friends’ Instagrams as they partied and celebrated my best friend in Croatia on her bachelorette. I made sure to like all their posts while simultaneously trying to ignore their stories.
I was far from being a victim here; if anything, I felt like a bad friend. I hated that I wasn't able to be there for my friend and myself at the same time, but it was a decision I made and needed to live with.
It triggered a short-term depression and I sought out therapy for the first time since my mid 20s.
Mental health treatment used to be very different. I used to secretly walk 4 flights of stairs in college to avoid being seen getting off on the “mental health floor” for my counseling sessions.
When I started my job in Chicago, I put a secret weekly meeting on my calendar and brought my entire makeup bag with me to clean up after therapy. I never told anyone where I was going and if someone had asked me, I would have lied.
I sought out therapy in 2021 because I recognized there was a distinct difference between how I was showing up in my life versus how I wanted to show up in my life. The things that had once made me happy were no longer doing so, and I wasn’t sure what needed to change.
I had 3 sessions and while I can’t say they were particularly groundbreaking, it was a step. It helped me work through the temporary discomfort of the situation I had created and allowed me to reach a point of acceptance with where I was at in my life.
I also stopped drinking for around a month and a half, breaking the fast at my friend’s wedding in July 2021. The most interesting observation was that drinking alcohol didn’t really enhance experiences anymore; under the wrong circumstances it just made me tired. I didn’t put a hard boundary around alcohol because I didn’t feel the need or desire to give it up fully at this point in my life.
I started to feel better.
I continued working through my emotions and started running with my sister. This new hobby helped connect me to the younger part of myself who ran Cross Country in Middle and High School, and I was surprised to find out that I wasn’t someone who hated running, as I had proclaimed for the previous 10 years. I learned a lot of new things about myself during this time.
I spent those same 10 years as someone who “loved to travel” but had failed to leave the country. I went to one wedding in Mexico in 2017, but my passport remained wildly unstamped. I blamed being single or "having no one to go with" for the reason, but this was clearly untrue after Croatia.
An interesting thing happened when I cancelled my trip to Croatia; I was left with $1800 flight credit that needed to be used by March 2022. I was under the impression that this needed to be used on one flight, and I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to go with me on a big trip.
This misconception and my life coach Maria got me on a plane to Rome.
Part IV coming Friday, June 16, 2023.
xoxo,
