Where Do I Belong?
The vast majority of the time, I feel like I know where I need to be. But now, as summer waxes, I feel unsure about what to do about potentially coming back to Chicago.
Even just typing the words makes me anxious, and my natural reaction to things that make me that anxious is to shy away. I’ve shied away for months now - I’ve been living with my family for almost four months - but the more time goes by, the more the idea impresses itself upon me that I need to go back to Chicago.
The feelings of cowardice from the beginning of the pandemic are starting to come back, not to mention I miss my friends, potential love interest, and the few activities that are starting to reappear. People have mentioned that they miss me, and my parents feel that I need to go back to my life even if it’s not the same life it was when I left.
As for me, I remember how lonely it can feel to be by myself, and due to the pandemic, I will need to do a hard quarantine for two weeks when I come back from my current location. I’m in a state that has more of the virus than many others, so staying away from people could protect them - but it would also place me in the precarious position of being both bored and lonely, two major triggers of negative thoughts.
I can’t help but picture disaster scenarios where I wander my small apartment for hours on end, feeling desperate and helpless. I can’t help but think that I’ll feel trapped in my apartment and in my head, and that the transition from having family around me whenever I want them to being completely alone will be extremely difficult to handle.
Most of all, these thoughts scare me because they remind me of other times when I’ve been bored and alone. At those times, I feel particularly precarious, like the smallest thing can send me into a spiral. I think of the time I did a summer program at a faraway college while I was still in high school, and the two weeks felt like a year when I got sick to my stomach a few days in. I think of my junior year of college, when I was so far gone I had no hope I could come back.
These are extreme cases, but the fact that there’s a global pandemic making me overthink simple things even when I’m here at home makes me question going back. It’s not that I don’t miss the friends I’ve made, the activities I’ve started, or the independence of living alone. It’s that I am afraid to let go of my comfort in the storm of the pandemic when things are getting worse rather than better.
I consulted with my psychiatrist who has known me since childhood, and she offered me advice in her very practical style: make a calendar for the first two weeks and fill the days with activities I enjoy, making sure to keep myself busy and definitely not bored. When she said that, I could already think of how I could paint miniatures for D&D and other tabletop games, play Animal Crossing and a brand-new remake of a game I loved as a kid, and watch shows on Disney+, Hulu, and Netflix.
I also dared to venture into my cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) archives to find some of the techniques that helped me at another time when I was having huge trouble with transitions. I read through my old thought journal and saw how I categorized the different automatic negative thoughts (ANTs) and taught myself to fight back against them. I found a document filled with best- and worst-case scenarios I wrote to try to get the fear of the unknown out of my head. I found a painful document where I wrote in painstaking detail the moment I knew I was in a crisis situation. I found a recording of a therapy session that I haven’t been brave enough to listen to yet, but I must have kept it to inspire myself at another difficult time.
In the next few weeks, I’m going to try my best to use these tools to fight back against my automatic rejection of the idea of going back. I’ll try to talk things out with family and friends, write down my thoughts and feelings, and remember the motto of one of my CBT books - “thoughts are thoughts, not threats.” Just because I am so afraid of going back and spiraling out of control doesn’t mean that will actually happen. I am strong, and I have been through much worse before. It’s just a matter of reminding myself over and over, each time the thought cycles, until it stops appearing in the first place.
It’s been a while since I’ve tried such a regimented approach to CBT, but I feel like it’s my best bet for this. I can’t do exposure therapy since the change will be big and all at once, and I can’t know for sure how things will go, but if I take the time to prepare myself as best as I can ahead of time, I hope I will be able to have a relatively smooth transition when the time comes.
Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.