Therapy?

THE PURGATORY

(noun) 1. The place where people suffer after they die for the wrong things they have done before they can go to heaven. 2. An unpleasant place or experience.

I have done nothing wrong.
No, I have, otherwise I shouldn’t be made to suffer.
It’s all my fault.
I don’t know.
God help me.

September 3rd, 2000. The day I lost my smile. The day a part of me died.

My parents were taken away from me that day. While it seemed so long ago, to me what occured that day might as well happened yesterday… every little detail I still remember vividly to this day. You try to repress it, it comes back with a vengeance. You try to forget it, you can’t. You try to preoccupy yourself, the flashbacks still come, no matter how hard you try. Might as well live with it.

Psychiatry textbooks often mention the 5 stages of grief. 5 simple words so accurate in predicting how a person might feel, yet I was mad at it the first time I saw it because they explained it so devoid of empathy, so lacking of emotion. But then that’s what they tell you in the medical line… not to get emotionally involved. A hard lesson I have yet to learn.

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. 5 words describe everything and nothing. As yet I am not ready to share this moment in time fully, as it would take everything out of me right now. Try to understand.

The months that follow were a quick blur. Friends looking at me with sympathetic eyes, relatives and teachers looking awkward and uneasy, my sister going off to Adelaide to resume studies, leaving me alone to my own devices at home… waking up at 5am to catch a bus to school, staying until 10pm at the school library everyday because I dreaded going home to find myself alone again, doing badly in exams, becoming overly dependent on others, trying to keep a once-filled home alive… praying and hoping to God all this would be over soon.

"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies." Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption. Through the worst of times, living on a prayer, hope prevails. God answered. Through this I saw who my true friends are, who have been walking with me through the pain, who have been quietly cheering me on, who have been helping me through all the way, from paying the bills, which chapters to study for exams, to bearing my relapses. Best of all, and simplest of all, they were just there. I felt loved again… and was ready to pick up the pieces once more. I wanted to do everything in my parents’ wishes… I wanted to make them proud wherever they may be.

I remembered my parents once more… so respected and loved by the people around them, a wide network of friends, lives filled with achievements… so full of life and love and happiness. I wanted to emulate that, and worked towards that. All my life I’ve been told to be a doctor I didn’t know what lay beyond. But as I grew so did the interest, and the heart, and the passion… and I could think of no other career option. For myself, my parents, and the people I love most… I chose medicine.

The purgatory ended as well as Form 6, and I was ready to move on with my life.

With hope.
With hope.