CW for mention of suicide and grief.

I've said often that I'm a clamshell, that I never open up to anyone. Not IRL anyway; journaling is different. After nearly two years of therapy, I finally opened up about a huge trauma that I've never discussed with anyone. About the suicide of my best friend after years of enduring abuse, and the guilt I've felt for that. Something I've carried unprocessed for nearly 25 years, and which directly related to two attempts to take my own life.

I had been building up to tell that story for months, but I always got so scared, that I always found an excuse not to. Finally this week I did it. I packed all my feelings, put them in a locked box in my brain, and forced myself to at least get the facts and chronology out. It still took more than an hour and I barely got the minimum out. At the end of the session the therapist aked me how it felt telling this, and my truthful answer was that I wasn't feeling anything yet. That I had intentionally put up a wall in front of my feelings, so that I can tell the story. Because I couldn't cope with both telling the facts and feeling the emotions. So I shoved them away for another time.

After the session I didn't go home. Instead I went boxing. It was fun. I punched things, got punched, laughed and sweated it out. As I left the gym and said bye to the last people, I felt something shift in me. Suddenly all the memories came back. Not of my friend how I think of her in her last years as a teenager, but of us as children, as pre-teens. Of all the pranks she talked me into doing. Of how funny she was.

And as I was walking to the bus stop, the wall inside me collapsed and I started crying. Not just some tears. Sobbing, gasping, choking crying. I couldn't control it at all. I just cried and cried, all the way to the bus stop, and in the bus, and after that in the train, and from the train station to home. A full hour. People probably thought I was on drugs, but I simply couldn't stop. It felt as if all 25 years of grief were trying to get out all at once. I never knew how much I needed to talk about her.