Tacos, Xanax, and finding the right therapist

Today started like an ordinary vacation day. Then I found myself getting flustered over a variety of things. Here is the deal. I am surrounded by several people who appear to be struggling mentally. Not family members in this instance. Dealing with them can be a struggle and today right before I absolutely lost it I thought: tacos or Xanax? One of the two is going to make this easier. Then I thought about my therapist and the lifeline we built. It is pretty cool. I am going to post a picture of it at some point because that was some serious work. It took us 4 hours to construct. So basically we drew a line and on the extreme left is the year of my birth and the extreme right is the current year. And over the course of the years she helped me map out various traumas in my life. They are color coded. It has parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, lovers. It has the years people were hospitalized for mental health issues. There are many milestones and tragedies. Then I also brought in a variety of family pictures to this session. There were several "ah hah" moments and at some point you can visually see when the light went out in my eyes. In that moment I became that little girl again. Danny. We then did an exercise where she brings in a chair and I move back and forth between two chairs talking to myself telling me what I needed to hear at various points in my life. It was a hard day but such an awakening. I met her through the VA hospital. She was the therapist assigned by the government to process my PTSD claim (we will address that later). I fell in love with her. I felt like she saw me. The real me. She reminded me of the therapist I saw as a child, Dr. Mary Elizabeth Mason. She saw me too and I loved her. Loved her like I love breathing. And if she were still alive I would thank her for giving 12-year-old me the strength to keep living. A relationship with a therapist is so important. It's not casual like the door dasher that flung my lunch today like a frisbee. They delve into the most intimate aspects of your life. She knows more about me than my gynecologist and I tell you, that chick KNOWS me. Finding the right therapist can take time. It's like trying on various pairs of shoes until you find the right fit. She held my hand and cried with me. She helped me to identify two major themes in my life: when things are too good I start waiting for the ball to drop because I don't believe good things can last for me. The other is I don't think I am good enough for anything and therefore deserve nothing. Even writing that just now feels like I have been slapped in the face with another hard truth. While writing this I hung up my lifeline here in my office. This lifeline is every goal, every secret, every heartache, every wound and every healing. It is my life in black and white with sprinkles of color which is what all life really is.