As I stared at the window, I saw many familiar faces and I knew, this was the moment I've been fearing ever since that day in July 2016, in which I decided to go on a sabatical semester to heal physically and mentally of demons who were eating me alive.
I've had a melancholic cape all day, as I remind that decision. I remember feeling like a freaking failure, and not understanding in what moment we had come to this point. I was always the girl who had it all planned, and went according to the plan as it was supposed to. My life never had an inch of doubt in my organism. Never had, and I assumed, never will. I knew exactly my career choices since elementary school. I graduated from high school and I never doubted, neither about the program or the institution. I had everything perfectly timed out, and it never crossed my mind that it could change.
Before the breakdown, I remember my psychiatric asking me if we should consider postponing the semester that I was already half through in. But I was making my thesis, ending a year long practice and I remember as painful it was to wake up every single day, and as few my mind could capture in classes, I couldn't conceive doing it.
But months later is wasn't just a responsibility as me as human being, it was also the quality of treatment that patients in a clinical practice were going to receive. And all of the sudden it wasn't a matter of sticking to the plan or not. It was a matter of survival in a moment when I was hanging to life by a tread. It was a matter of falling in love again with life, or at least make the idea of living it possible. I was prisioner of my mind and body, and all of the keys I've used in the previous 22 years weren't useful anymore. I had to find new roads, water and fertile soil, in a ground that had just been shaken and deserted thanks to a horrible catastrophy. It was a matter of life or death.
I don't know honestly, if I would've survived in that semester if I were studying, seeing clinical pathologies and having contact with patients. I really didn't want to find out what were the odds of killing myself in the process of following my plan, so with great grief, I didn't enroll myself in the university that semester. I say this, with great grief, because it was a painful process. I refused to be that girl who wasn't perfect. Honestly, it wasn't until a year ago when I realized how obsessive I am with plans and the way I had my whole life planned out. And it hurted, if physically burned to let go what I though we're the plans and the times of my perfect life, to adjust to the needs of the reality.
With my whole therapeutic team's support and my family's unconditional love, I dedicated myself to art, writing, volunteering, spending time with my godchild and therapy, exams, new diagnoses, and pharmaceutical changes. I traveled, I learned how to walk and talk again, I accepted the chronicity of those things I can't change, I saw the best and worst in people, I traveled to a multicolored ocean and to my childhood home to love life a little bit again.
All of the sudden I was back with my studies and the sabatical was a past thing. But life always reminds us of those things that still hurt to show us, we've gotta heal. And today it strucked me again. I hated those who were graduating and I couldn't help but feeling I belonged there, that I made the wrong choices, that this wasn't the plan. And as all of this things crossed my mind with a serious face and way too much eye rolling, I sat in a class with a teacher whose one of the wisest people I've ever met. I chatted with people that I never thought to meet, but feel like friends after some weeks. I even did an exercise in which I could talk about my difficulties of my parent's separation as part of the role play.
And as I reflected in how many amazing things have happened since this plot twist, how many incredible people I know now who I wouldn't have met if I had followed my university plan with no time off, I felt lucky. I remind myself of how wise is life. And how perfectly timed it is. Clearly that didn't make me immune to today's graduates. I had to blast Kelly Clarkson's "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" on my way out as I passed through the place the ceremony took place.
And as I finish this sentences all that I can say is that I'm grateful. That taking those 6 months for self care purposes was the wisest choice I've ever made and that I don't regret it for a second. That those who told me I was weak or not responsible or poorly treated can kiss my recovery ass. And that yes, waiting for those extra 6 months to graduate didn't kill me, it made me stronger.
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