4000 Healthy Days

Trigger Warnings: Suicidal Ideation (SI), Depression, Anxiety, Complex PTSD

I have been counting the days (today we are at 4000!) since I discharged from the hospital for a bout of SI and depression. From that day forward, I began to build upon a newfound sense of self that would keep me going for many days to come.

As night falls on my 4000th healthy day, I have a lot I am thankful for. I have a loving family, an incredible collection of chosen family, and a great network of friends and colleagues that I treasure.

I am preparing for celebrating with some of my close friends tonight and I wonder what I want in the next 1000 days, or 4000 days, or even 6000 days. With the hardships of the last month, with our new president, sometimes it's hard to imagine. But at those times when then the gloom begins to set in, I think back to how far I've come in the last 6-8 months.

Eight months ago, almost to the day, I had a horde of repressed feelings, and traumatic moments in my past that I wasn't ready to reckon with in a meaningful way. I broke down crying in front of my husband Aiden in a way that he'd never seen before. I let all of those repressed feelings, memories, and truly nightmares spill out. We knew that while I had survived a lot; I still had a lot of healing to do. I reached out to my therapist and I soon started looking at taking a medical leave at work. I knew that something had to change.

I had an intake appointment with the folks at Skyway Behavioral Health, and my therapist had recommended them to me for being an affirming place for a trans* non-binary person to go. I began a PHP (Partial Hospitalization Program) which met from 9 to 4 PM each day. I didn't know what I needed to dig up fully, but soon I made a remarkable breakthrough, and it was letting my feelings happen. The biggest part was knowing that the work I needed to do would cause horrible memories to surface and big feelings that would normally cause me overwhelm to rise up. But, what I was learning was that I could bit by bit begin to handle those emotions and deescalate from that place of overwhelm.

Through their classes (DBT, Trauma in the Body, Yoga, and Process Groups) I was beginning to gather tools I needed to move forward. I think the most helpful part of the Complex Trauma track for me was the Exposure we would do bi-weekly as a group. It challenged me to approach something that was seriously activating in a safe context. I learned how to bring myself back down from a high level of distress so that I could function even after what felt what a worst case scenario.

It sparked the desire in me to really dig in and do more. I began the steps to doing a Trauma Protocol, and the one I chose was DBT PE, or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy: Prolonged Exposure. It involved taking a recording of my first person recollection of a traumatic event and listening back to it daily. It's one of the hardest things I've done in my Adult life, but bit by bit, those traumas had less control over my life, so I moved on to the next one, one I didn't know had haunted me since I was in my teens.

As my trauma symptoms subisded, I started stepping down from the program beginning IOP and continuing to work on this Prolonged exposure process, while also working on myself and my own goals.

In my last session with my therapists I heard the recording and even laughed. It was just such an avoidable situation (that I had no control over as a teenager), but it finally did not have control over me.

I finally returned to work, and was welcomed with open arms by my coworkers and supervisors. It was time to hit the ground running preparing for the new building and the next shows to come.

Looking forwards toward the future, there's a lot I want to accomplish. I want to have kiddos in my life (fostering and hopefully adopting a child), I want to strengthen my freelance career to pre-pandemic levels and beyond. But most of all, I want to keep my head up and try every day for the next 1000, 4000, or 6000+ days to be happy.

If you're reading this, please know that you are loved, and not alone.

With Love,

Aaron Harris Woodstein (They/She)