Choices

I can't get my best friend's point out of my head. I'm not very good at killing myself, as evidenced by the fact that I'm still alive. And at this point in my life, it's starting to cost me things that I really want. Working with my therapist. Transitioning. Being a friend to my best friend. Getting to know my new friend. Hanging out with my old friend. So. I think at this point...I should stop.

"That's easy to say," I thought to myself. "Not so easy to do." But the truth is it isn't easy to say, either. I love having options. Like, my therapist asked me why I smuggled razor blades into the hospital last time, when I took myself there. And the answer was that I refuse to be without choice. But. It was my choice to go to the hospital. Why did I think I needed more choices? If I commit to therapy with him, it will be my choice. If I make a promise to my best friend, it will be my choice. If I make a promise to MYSELF, it will be my choice. What I really seem to want is the ability to have things both ways...safety that's not really safe, commitments that won't hold me, promises that I can wiggle out of. That's a child's way of looking at the world (or a lawyer's, I guess). I am an adult, and don't you think it's about time I put away childish things?

But it won't be easy. At this point, the option, the idea of suicide has been in my head for...almost ten years. It hasn't always been a valid option; there have been lots of times since then that I wouldn't have tried to kill myself for any reason at all. But I could have. It was there. It was my option, my decision, my choice. Always. Getting myself to where it isn't always hanging in the back of my mind will be difficult, to say the least. I mentioned this way of always having a way out of every promise is childish, and it is. But I haven't learned yet how to be an adult about it. I don't know HOW to be an adult without it. What does that look like? How does it feel?

I used words like "bind" and "cage" and "imprison" when I wrote that poem the other day about those promises. And I don't like feeling caged or imprisoned. Who does? But, really, we all bind ourselves in little ways every day. And I would much rather be bound by my own word than an external power.

I told my therapist that I can do this. I can make this commitment, and I can keep it. It's never been a question of ability, though I may have told myself a time or two it was. It's a question of desire, of whether I want to do it or not, even when it's hard, even when I would rather give up, even when I doubt whether anything will ever change, ever get better, ever seem like something more than pointless. I used to be bound by my word, and I didn't think it a hardship then. No. I was proud of it. I used to say that I had never lied to someone who was trying to help me, and it used to be true. It's not true anymore. I can't make it retroactively true. But I can make sure I'm honest from here on out, that if I make a promise, I will keep it.

So really only one question remains: will I commit, or won't I? Will I commit to therapy, to change, to getting better even if I don't feel like I'm getting better...or never do? To learning to live in this world, in my body, in my head, instead of constantly trying to leave?

Will I commit to staying alive to do the things I want to do anyway? Put that way, it seems pretty obvious.