Goodbye...

How do you say goodbye to something that has been a part of you for more than two thirds of your life?  Something that is so engraved into your personal story that you almost don’t know who you are without it.  I am talking about the Spirits of course.  If you read the first blog post of this series, I talked about how they came to be, over 22 years ago.  Like a shadow, they followed me throughout my teen years into my twenties and then my thirties.  Though not always present, they were lurking in the depths of my consciousness, ready to show themselves without warning and often interrupting my ability to function.  Not only that, but they were dangerous, always trying to lure me into harmful situations.  Despite the disruption to my life, part of me was comforted by their presence.  They were part of me.  They grew and evolved with me over the years.  They were a constant in the ever changing landscape of my life: moves to different states, new jobs, relationships, friendships, hard times and good times.  They were there with me.  And now they aren’t. 

Part of me feels abandoned by them and part of me feels so free from their grasp that I never want this feeling to end.  For the first time since being diagnosed over four years ago, I can say with complete honesty that I feel great.  It’s a feeling that I thought was lost forever.  I have the medication and therapy to thank for giving me my life back.  Despite having to get a blood test every week, the hassle is a small price to pay for feeling this good. 

Let me back up to the beginning of the paragraph above where I said part of me feels abandoned by the spirits.  You might wonder how someone could be protective of these Spirits which were mostly hostile, but experiencing them was something very personal.  Something only I experienced and no one else could ever really know what it is like.  They were a part of me just like how having blue eyes and blond hair is a part of my identity.  The first step in saying goodbye was to start recognizing them as hallucinations and not as actual spirits.  Despite the strong evidence that medication makes them go away, a part of me will always wonder if they were actually real.  It is a hard habit to break, calling what I experience 'hallucinations'.  They have been “the Spirits” for most of my life.  Changing my thinking was and still is a work in progress.

This post is supposed to be a goodbye letter to the Spirits, but I felt it was necessary to describe why this is so difficult to write.  Why it is so hard to say goodbye.  Hopefully you will understand why just saying “good riddance to these horrors!” is not something I have been able to do easily.  I read a fantastic blog by Sara Courter called “Puzzle Pieces: Letting Relationships End” that really hit home to me.  The blog is geared towards relationships and friendships, but it can be applied to my hallucinations as well.  Saying goodbye isn’t an easy thing to do and this blog explains it beautifully.  She says “what is it about ‘forever’ that makes us cling, cling like fuzz to fabric and children to parents’ legs?”  I need to accept that the Spirits don’t have to be forever and that I can live a much happier and more productive life without them.  However, I still am saying goodbye to a piece of myself.  A piece of my identity.  Something that made me unique.  And it isn’t easy to do.  But I’ll try. 

So with that, goodbye Frederick, goodbye Ivan, goodbye Allister. 

My Spirits. 

You are not my identity.