Now that I started, it’s hard to stop writing. I have typed a lot more than I have published so far – which has been more extensive than planned already.
Only a month ago, everything outside was still wintry and barren. Now you look out of the window and the trees are green, the grass lush and the air so warm that I’m already walking around without socks.
All the flowers and foliage are certainly helping to keep my spirits up – even though around this time last year, my mood was on a steep decline and already far into depression territory. So maybe it is a wrong perception and the two are entirely disconnected. In any case, I am really grateful for winter being finally over.
For tomorrow, I have planned a meeting with my oldest friend – our friendship goes back to 5th grade when we were just ten years old. I have not seen her in three years, or maybe only two: my memory is a bit fuzzy on that.
Originally, we wanted to meet in December, but at that time I was just weaning myself off citalopram (after not quite six months of rather ineffective treatment) and was experiencing a lot of vertigo and nausea so that I ended up cancelling our plans repeatedly.
By nature, I am a person who does not need other people around her all the time. They exhaust me and after times of socializing, I seek out solitariness on purpose to counterbalance. Unfortunately, delicious solitude will turn into debilitating loneliness before I know it if I’m not being careful, because I tend to withdraw rather far and for extended periods of time.
The friends I made, past and present, all have shown astonishing perseverance and initiative in the process of befriending me, getting active time and again to lure me out of the hole I retreated into.
The greatest responsibility for my self-imposed confinement falls to an underlying feeling of bothering other people with my presence, or at least boring them. I would hardly ever get active and instead wait for them to make the first move, because then I could at least be certain that they really wanted to spend time with me and not just were too polite to refuse my request.
A side effect of therapy is that I try to take other people’s reactions at face value instead of suspecting hidden meanings. If someone smiles at me and tells me they had a good time, why should I doubt it, right? Yet, I secretly did just that very often in the past and required a good deal of reassurance before I would allow myself to truly believe them.
So this time around, it was me who initiated tomorrow’s meeting. After all, there must be a reason why we are friends.
Lugubrious Layara 