The Minutes to Come

It's officially 2010 and I am officially relieved. 2009 wasn't my best year, nor was it my finest moment. Although I had a lot of good things in my life last year, like our house, good times with friends, a brand-new nephew, travel, great work opportunities, I feel like I was living in anxiety quicksand for most of it. I conquered a lot of anxiety behaviors this year and gained a lot of really great coping skills, but the struggle to get to today was very difficult. It's exhausting to constantly do cognitive thinking, to reframe every thought you have, to question if your feelings are anxiety-driven or just how you feel, and then to chose the best way to respond when you really want to scream, cry, or hit something. E-X-H-A-U-S-T-I-N-G. Couple that with living in an OCD nightmare of boxes, construction, and instability and we had a recipe for me, well, flipping the fuck out. I damaged my marriage, my financial future, my career, my health... I bought massive amounts of crap to feel better, I drank alcohol to distract myself, I emotionally ate to the point that I gained thirty pounds, I checked out at work, and, worst of all, I failed to support my partner while he worked soooooo hard to make our house beautiful...

But, with a lot of support from my amazing husband, my family, my friends, my mental health practitioners, and last, but not least, from myself, I finally feel like I'm ready to live, and enjoy, the life that I want, that I worked for, even as I was drowning. More importantly, I'm ready to spend 2010 fixing my cosmic balance sheet. I took a lot in 2009, now I want to give.

Instead of making general and vague promises to "give back," I've decided to do something a bit different. I've added up all of the money that I spent in 2009 on emotional purchases and for every dollar I'm going to spend one minute doing something good for the people my spending most affected: the boy, myself, and those in my community who went without while I went with too much. In the spirit of openness, I'm going to share exactly how many minutes this actually is: 10,000. That's right, I spent 10,000 dollars on clothes, books, dvds, on crap, and now I'm going to spend 3,333 minutes helping the boy paint the trim or build the headboard or work on his art or watching movies he wants to watch or playing frisbee; 3,333 minutes eating well or exercising or taking advantage of opportunities at work or learning a new skill; and 3,333 minutes volunteering at homeless shelters or urban gardens or tutoring or job training.

It's going to be hard, not because 3,333 minutes is a lot--it's only about 55 hours--but because I'm not magically "cured" of my mental illness. I'm not suddenly anxiety free, able to handle whatever, whenever. I'm still going to have squidgy days where I don't quite know what to do and don't know how to fix what I'm feeling and make an unhealthy choice. But with everything I've learned and with all the amazing people in my life who were there for me and loved me despite me being soooooooo weird sometimes, I can do this. I know I can, because I already spent 2009 doing it, and I came out on the other side.

I'm ready, world. I'm ready.