Learning How To Sail My Ship

In the summer before my junior year of college my parents realized, after 30 years of marriage that they were no longer in love with each other. I think my mother wondered if she was ever in love. I was home from school for the summer, and I watched how this realization effected both of them. I watched my mother cry everyday, and watched my father scramble to try and fix it. I saw how much they cared about each other. I thought about what it must feel like to be wrong about love, to think it was the right thing for 30 years, and then to wake up one day and realize it was wrong. I wondered if they felt like they had wasted half of their lives, and I wondered how it must feel to have to move on. I spent the entire summer thinking, wondering, worrying, and crying.

When I returned to school, I realized that I wasn't feeling well. Ever. I felt like throwing up all the time, and sometimes I actually did. My adrenaline would rush for no reason at strange times...at the bar with friends, during class, and would wake me when I tried to sleep. I became completely irrational, convinced that I was dying of a strange disease.

I stopped doing anything. I stopped getting out of bed. I stopped taking showers. I fell behind in my work and I cried all day. My roomates took walks with me at night because fresh air made me feel a little less sick. I watched sitcoms and stopped eating. I called my mother crying everyday. After months of this, my mother told me I needed counseling, and that until I helped myself she wouldn't listen to me cry anymore. She said that she had no respect for people who refused to help themselves.

The next afternoon I walked alone to the counseling center. I cried while I walked. I felt so afraid that I would never feel like myself again, that I would spend the rest of my life so sick. The counselor I spoke to told me I was having anxiety attacks. We talked about my parents. We talked about my life as a suitcase that was over packed, I just didn't have room for anything else. It was time to unload. And piece by piece, I unloaded.

Over the next few months I learned about getting control over my life, over my anxiety. I learned that taking medicine was not "giving up." I learned that I couldn't control everything. I tried to learn that I needed to go easier on myself. To let the anxiety come, and understand why, to understand that it was ok. I learned that it's ok to be mad at my family. That I was afraid of making the same mistakes. Slowly but surely, I got my life back. I owe my life to the man in the counseling center. I'm still learning.

A few months later, I was walking through a card store and I found blank card that simply read, "I am not afraid of storms...for I am learning how to sail my ship."

I put the card in a frame. It still sits next to my bed.

I'm never going to be perfect, and I will try not to be afraid, and I know that a storm will come....

But I've gotten a little bit better at sailing my ship, and I learn more everyday.