sentimentality
What am if not a sentimental monkey full of joy. I sit back on my single bed with the sun pouring into the dorm room I’ve come to know as home. I sit back in fuzzy covers and reply to texts from my best friend and create new ones for my mother.
Today when I woke up after sleeping in I appreciated how great the sun feels on my skin and my friend’s text tells me how happy this makes her. Though my first reaction is happiness mixed with love for her, for a second I am confused.
Do I not always feel like this? Did it used to be different, and in that second I allow myself to remember. Immediately I see what she means.
I still can’t tell if it’s a coping mechanism or if my brain always struggled with memories this much. I try to suppress the thought that my troubles with memory might be all the weed, smother it with the response that I needed it when it was there.
Nonetheless I let myself remember, partly through the stories of those who were there. Like my sister who didn’t tell me she was scared by the weight I had lost ‘til I had gained it back, my psychologist had called me on it at the time but I had hardly noticed. I hadn’t been eating and I hadn’t really been living but somehow I hadn’t noticed. It was a hard summer and for whatever reason my brain didn’t connect each negative day with the next, I had tunnel vision from the depression but depressed me didn’t want to live in that tunnel.
Now I sit here with my blue duvet warming my legs, not too worried that I slept through my first class of the day because I have a good relationship with my professor and so far I am doing quite well in the class. It’s an A- I am particulary proud of, and a class that makes me happy for the future in a way I haven’t been in quite a while. Social justices is a sad topic but my professor spreads her positivity to my heart and I know I can be a part of the change. One voice has power, even mine. And when I catch myself thinking like this it’s hard not to look back and be happy-- less than two months left in this genre of therapy. The one that transformed me from a shell of myself to a thriving version; the therapy that took away the weight of all the negative thoughts my mind had been carrying since my auntie died, as well as some before and many after.
I hadn’t realized how far I’d come til I stuck my neck up a bit to look around. There is nothing I can ever be prouder of myself for then both saving my life and turning it in to such a worthy one. And letting all of the beautiful people I’m so blessed to have around me help get me here, each of them saving me on different nights in different ways until here I am. Here I am, in some form of remission, gearing up and ready for the next chapter of my life.
--EMILY FRANCES













