Mental health treatment worth it, even without gold medals

The worst mental health year of my life, I bought a calendar.  

For every day a dangerous thought would come to me, I would circle the date shakily on the calendar. Some months, it looked like a demented moon cycle, unpredictably full for too many days in a row; other months there’d be no moon at all.  

I had an idea that if I could visualize the frequency, I could stop the mindset altogether. I wanted, so badly, to have normal everyday plans: to-do lists checked off, dinner dates, evenings reserved for curling up with an exciting new hardcover. If it was possible to transcend the difficult work of recovery, I wanted to do that instead.

I told no one I had these thoughts, but I called them many names, mostly to myself. The masochistic tendencies worried me, of course, but more concerning were the times I felt disembodied and far away from myself. In these moments, there were no stakes, no feelings of a place for me in the world. The dull thud of a body was all I amounted to.