Complicated, Part 2

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” ~Confucius

I’ve seen several psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists in my life. I admit that freely. It’s a fact. And I’ve gone to see them not because I’m crazy, but instead because I’m confused. Isn’t that why most people go? Life is confusing, the starts and stops, the ebbs and flows, just the very nature of existence. People do things for a plethora of reasons, most of which are unknown to anybody but themselves, but those of us affected by those choices end up dealing with the aftermath, the consequences that inevitably come as a result. We just want to know, “Why?”

We do this complicated dance as human beings every single day of our lives. People judge us, we stress out, and we deal with it the best way we know how. The best way I know how to deal is to talk things out, or even just to write things out. Getting those words and moods out in a constructive way has been difficult for me, though. I get started with a therapist, she helps me talk through my issues, and then I leave thinking I now have all the tools I need to uncomplicate my life. But I don’t, and I don’t realize it until a ways down the road when something bad happens and I freeze, stuck in a seeming glitch in my own matrix.

You’d think I might decide when those things happen to go back to whichever therapist I disappeared from, but by that point I’m embarrassed that I didn’t put it all behind me. I’m worried that she will judge me like I feel I’m being judged by everyone else, and I put it off until I feel too much time has passed for me to return. It’s truly a self-perpetuating feeling that can drive me insane if I focus on it too long. So I put that out of my mind too, but it’s not really gone. It just festers below the surface like so much else in my life until I make another poor choice and I’m forced to seek help again.

And the whole time between those poor choices is spent writing out my feelings, trying to get them out, to force them out like garbage tied up in a plastic bag left by the curb. But that can only do so much. You see, writing is an outlet but it’s not a cure. It can’t change the way I make my choices, or hijack my decisions and make them right. I feel a weight lifted off me, but maybe that’s simply another way I delude myself into thinking I’m okay, that these complications in my life are just stepping stones and not roadblocks. Then I look up, though, from my writing, and I realize where I am in my life, somewhere I never wanted to be, somewhere I never thought I would be, and I’m treading water.

So I need to change my established patterns. I need to go back to when things were simple, when every choice wasn’t a behemoth waiting to take off my head when I mess it up. But how do I get there?

Sam