This Ship Has Sailed

I’ve been thinking lately about choices – choices I’ve made, and choices that I’ve let pass by.

There are plenty of life choices that have passed me by while I’ve been distracted with some aspect or element of healing (or not being healed)… some of those choices are not really gone, and I will have other chances to try again, but some of them were one-time or time-limited opportunities – chances I will truly never see again. I sincerely regret that I was not in a place to take advantage of those choices at the time, or that I didn’t recognize them when they were open to me.

Thankfully, there are not many events of that nature in the healing journey. I’ve written before about how long it took me to finally get to the point of actively working on my healing – and of course, until I reached that point, I was going absolutely nowhere, whether I was in therapy or whether I wasn’t.

That period of time spanned a solid decade… so I really am thankful that healing is not one of those processes where I look back now and see ten years’ worth of choices and chances that I missed out on and can never get back.

Life didn’t wait for me – but my chance to heal did.

I find that reassuring – that the chance to heal can’t be lost by not getting there fast enough. It is generally a chance that will be open to us whenever we catch up to it.

But on a very few occasions, there actually are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities in our healing journeys.

I don’t think they occur often (or at least, they haven’t for me) – which, again, is a relief! Because, like most rare opportunities – they change absolutely everything – and if they happen to us, it will stretch and challenge every fiber of our beings, cross every limit and smack every sore spot and force us into a stumbling run of growth if we want to keep up… or stunt our progress immeasurably if we don’t. They’re the kind of opportunity that you almost don’t really want to get.

We don’t get to choose, though. If it happens to us, it happens like a lightning strike. One day, suddenly, we’re right in the middle of it.

This hasn’t happened to me often, but I did get one of these opportunities once – and although I missed a lot of chances in my life, I’m pretty glad that I didn’t miss this one.

On the surface, it didn’t appear as monumental a situation as it was. It didn’t immediately announce itself as the kind of opportunity that would stretch out to shape the future of my healing for better or for worse based on the choice I made right then. But as I got deeper into it, those implications became unarguably clear.

The easy choice, and the default choice, was to do nothing but the same old thing I’d been doing. The situation didn’t initially seem to call for any big change, and big change is not something I jump up and down with excitement about making anyway, so I certainly wasn’t looking for an excuse to do that. It seemed initially like the “same old, same old” approach would be just fine.

But then the “same old” approach started to raise some really uncomfortable questions – like, was I really committed to healing? Committed enough that, when the “same old” approach proved inadequate, I would be willing to try something drastically different? Even if it meant facing things I didn’t want to see, or doing things I’d never had any real intention of doing?

Well, the first answer was a resounding no. I mean, committed to healing when all it meant was doing the same old thing, sure, but not if it was going to involve all that… Uproot everything, internally and externally? Change everything? There were rules! There was precedent! There were habits, and “this is just how things are”, and the comfort of familiarity, and a sort of outraged and defensive sense of events outpacing me. I wasn’t there yet. (And secretly, in my head, I was thinking it would be okay with me if I never got there either.)

But my healing wasn’t waiting for me. And in this one situation, it wasn’t going to wait. I could run to catch up, or I could sit there being defensive and let it run away from me – and if I did that… well, it would be like missing the last bus home. There wasn’t going to be another chance.

Oh sure, I could keep working on healing. But at that point, I would just be “healing” – just doing the little stuff, the relatively meaningless stuff, the fluff stuff – because I’d let the really deep stuff go on without me. I’d decided it wasn’t worth a big effort from me, and I’d refused to do what it would have taken. And if I changed my mind a few years down the road – I would have the consequences of this choice to overcome, in addition to all the other challenges and roadblocks in my way.

I generally and genuinely believe that anything can be overcome – but of course, the “anything” I’m usually referring to is “anything that someone else did to me.” And in that context, I do believe that anything can be overcome.

But in this situation – where I had all the elements in place – a good therapist, and as much stability as my outside world was ever likely to provide, and the internal teamwork to back it up – and I still chose to let my healing opportunity run away without me – that would be something I did to myself, and I’m really not sure I could ever have overcome that.

I think the messages that choice would have conveyed to our group would have been catastrophic. I think it would have told them all that healing wasn’t really that important after all, and nobody really had to take it that seriously. I think it would have been an insult to all the system members who were forced to handle abusive situations, whenever and however those happened, because I wouldn’t take a risk to help them when it didn’t happen on my terms. It would have been a very literal choice to stay with our primary abuser instead of even trying to get away from him – an actual choice to do that, even though we finally had an actual and valid opportunity to choose something else, and we knew that, even when we tried not to admit it – and that would have been a disaster. An absolute disaster. How would we ever have overcome that?

So I’m thankful that I had a therapist who recognized the psychological importance of this situation and could help me to recognize it too, in time to actually do something about it, because otherwise I’m pretty sure I would have missed it.

And I’m glad that I ran to catch up with my healing, even though it was a nightmare whirlwind time of feeling like I wasn’t ready for any of the things I had to do or face or decide. (I’m also glad that period has passed now, and I hope (and expect) that I will never have to do things in quite that way again.)

It was a horribly unpleasant time to get through. But having reached the other side of it…

I’m devoutly glad that I didn’t let the ship sail without me.