at long last, peace

forty

Last Chapter

A really short one. I'm really, really grateful to everyone who supported Telly's story.

Please remember that there's nothing wrong with asking for help. You are worthy of life, beautiful soul. :)

**

Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. I hated therapy back then because I, too, was in denial that I needed help. Akala ko kasi kaya ko na... sa sobrang dami kong pinagdaanang therapists para lang maging maayos na'ko kahit pa paano, at some point, naisipan ko na ring sumuko. But above all that, I didn't want to bother my parents with therapies that could be way more expensive than my tuition fees. At some point, I felt ashamed that I was suffering from PTSD, Depression, and Dissociative Amnesia after the tragedy... pakiramdam ko at that point in life, life just felt worthless, kaya hangga't pakiramdam ko kaya ko pa, kinakaya ko na lang.

Hanggang sa nag-relapse na naman ako because my brain finally found a reason to tick me off again and make me remember my past little by little... and by then, I just really thought I should just give up with treatment and just deal with it on my own.

But then, I realized—asking for help and accepting someone's help is also a step in helping yourself. It's true, that therapy isn't everything when it comes to the path to recovery, at the end of the day, healing still starts within someone, and accepting someone's offer for help was also a way of helping yourself, too. 

Pero, it still came to me at some point that I found it scary that I was getting better little by little... although I'd still sometimes wake up in a bad shape, but not just as bad as I was before. The feeling was foreign, and being stuck in my own fragile bubble for years might have made me feel so. I have been trying to survive on my own for God knows how long and it felt overwhelming and unfamiliar. 

I thought I was becoming a different person that at some point I just wanted to crawl back to that old fragile bubble I hid for years.

People might probably hear that strange and even ask mo na gumagaling na nga ako pero bakit gano'n?

Hindi ko rin alam.

Pakiramdam ko dala ng takot na dinala ko mula pa noon.

"You still have two more sessions for your EMDR therapy," Doc Pidlaoan utters with a smile after an EMDR session. After months of staying away from Quezon City, I was back again at the clinic for in-person therapy. My traumas were diagnosed to be deeply rooted since they were discovered late due to dissociative amnesia, and they were already affecting my daily life that I had to undergo two therapies—EMDR and TF-CBT. So far, ever since I signed up for the therapies, I was finally able to reprocess the major events I had in life bit by bit. "Telly, do you still have that fear?"

"Fear?"

Doc Pidlaoan clasped his fingers together and smiled again, "The fear where you feel like you shouldn't get better."

I bit my lower lip and sighed.

"Every now and then, I think."

He nodded and smiled.

"Telly, if you think that it's not a valid feeling—that you're scared of getting better because you feel like you're going to be someone you don't know—it's valid. Those feelings were rooted in the fact that you had to process the pain within that bubble you were in for years," he says. "But in those years, it was your condition that was leading your way to becoming who you are now. When you're finally better and you're out of the storm, you can finally be whoever you want to be and you'll finally take that lead, Telly. And you might be afraid to lead, and you might not be up for the challenge, but you know, everyone can learn how to be a leader—you'll become one when you've finally found your healing."