Where is the Karma?

A 100 Bad Days Update

What does it look like on the other side of a year of therapy, just shy of 12 months with a solid two days a week?

Being on the other side is overwhelming with nostalgic emotion, mixed with some confusion and frustration.

And it hasn’t ended; I still feel very fortunate to have Zoom sessions every other week. I even added a life coach to the mix this past February. I feel as if I am in good company on this one, for the pandemic who shall not be named has relinquished one substantial benefit; people sought advocacy for mental health in droves. Look at us, all working through the mental muck! I won’t act like it’s even remotely similar for us; I can only share my experience and hope that perhaps I am not that different from the rest of humanity…perhaps anyways. Overall, I can’t even begin to express the amount of knowledge I have gained. It started with Medicaid appointed sessions with students working towards that far-reaching license, and slowly evolved through holistic means, group DBT (which REALLY changed my views for the better, click here to learn more), COVID forcing social interactions to be null, and then opportunities for online sessions with a whole new battalion of professionals that weren’t previously accessible, and (long breath) an insane amount of ups and downs along the way as I inevitably changed my surroundings for the next six months.

I have these moments of frantic helplessness, thinking to myself, “But I was doing SO GOOD. What happened?” Only to be countered with the inverse extreme of “Life is amazing, I am SO LUCKY.” My quest continues daily (if not hourly, in fact) to find the peaceful balance between the two. Hence, my inspiration to take another song from the great cinematic band AJR and create Where is the Karma? A 100 Bad Days Update.

This for all of us that work our asses off trying to do what’s ‘right’ for ourselves, especially when we have no idea how. Scratch that, we have ideas, but it’s tough to wake up and say ‘I’m going to do a+b=c to be happy.” It doesn’t quite work like that (and if it does, please enlighten the rest of us).

I’ve found it’s those little steps each day; those kinds of steps where most of the time, you fall more than you manage to crawl up. Add in the even harder part of being OK with that. Then the hardest part of all, loving yourself and thanking your body for attempting to crawl up that one step in the first place. I feel a sense of great sadness for only realizing this path in my late (gasp) thirties, but also so much gratitude for the opportunity to make it right.

And here I am, a year (and a half) later after (and currently in) all the therapy. Days split between screaming at the sky, “what else can I possibly do to make things work for me for once?” And being so overwhelmed with the pure idea that I have the most incredible life one could ever hope for—those moments of wondering where is the Karma, and seeing it right in front of me.