You don’t need to be depressed to start therapy. You don’t need to be suicidal to start therapy. You don’t need to be carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, crying yourself to sleep every night, or going through a dark traumatizing experience, to start therapy. You only need to be a human being. With basic human needs. That’s literally all what therapy‘s about.

(It’s definitely still important to start if you experience any of those feelings, I mean it’s not just exclusive to that.)

For me, the decision to start therapy is one of the hardest I’ve had to take. I remember that even after deciding to go for it, and for my first couple of sessions, I promised myself I was never going to share this with anyone in my life. I thought it was forever going to be my own little secret. Because of how much I used to let society’s perceptions -about this topic in particular- get to me. I thought everyone would think I was crazy, weak, or maybe too lonely. It wasn’t something that uncommon around my circles at the time, yet I still thought I was going to be so badly labeled, that I chose to stay silent instead. But now, and in all honesty, I realize I really can’t call myself anything but courageous. So very courageous, I don’t even know where I got all this courage from.

I only say courageous for it takes so much to finally decide you’re ready to even acknowledge the existence of your very own can of worms, let alone touch it or start messing with what’s inside. It’s not easy. It’s so not easy. But it’s so important. We all have those; tens, if not hundreds, of worms that have gathered over the years. Ones that have so carefully been kept inside their cans for the longest time, and others that we might have no idea they even exist. But they do. And they all happen to have their own loud impacts on our lives everyday, no matter how much we like to believe they don’t. They will always, somehow, continue uncomfortably roaming at the back of our heads, waiting for the day when someone decides to maybe deal with them.

Something someone so special might’ve once told you when you were just a little kid, and your innocent mind continued explaining it in all the wrong ways along the years. An emotion you might’ve so intensely felt at some point in life, yet got so harshly invalidated that you continued thinking it all only happens inside your head. A devastating idea you might’ve always had about yourself after you once messed up in a certain setting, then unconsciously continued believing you should avoid it for the rest of your life. So many different worms, and so many more different consequences for each of them. We walk around carrying all those, all the time. It’s not easy to acknowledge their existence, but it’s not easy to completely ignore them either. And we hardly ever realize that all it really takes is to open up.

Opening up to someone who might or might not understand; definitely something that has been a major fear of mine. Opening up to a stranger to begin with, about my entire life. For someone who found it so hard to share the littlest, tiniest details about herself with her own loved ones, how was I ever going to allow myself to do that?

So much more on that, on my next one!