Everyone thinks you’re fine. You know you’re not.

You show up, you keep it together, you get it done, and lately you can’t do it the way you used to. You’ve been hiding that, and it’s getting harder to hide.

Acelli, Solid Ground Counseling & Wellness, Cedar Park.

I answer my own messages.

Cedar Park, in person. Online anywhere in Texas.

Nothing is wrong with you. You’ve been telling yourself you should be able to handle this, because you always have, and you figure most people do. Anyone carrying what you carry would be worn down by now, and that isn’t failing at anything, it’s what carrying all of it does to a person. You kept going because stopping never felt like an option, and nobody stopped to ask whether you were okay, so eventually it caught up with you.

Maybe it was a panic attack, out of nowhere, on an ordinary day. Maybe a night you couldn’t stop crying, or a morning in the car outside work when you couldn’t make yourself go in. Or maybe nothing happened at all, and you’re tired on a Wednesday the way you used to be tired on a Friday.

How the hell did it get to this point? Carrying everybody’s everything, for years, is how. You don’t have to wait until it feels unbearable, and you don’t have to explain why you came. Write me a few lines, or call, whichever you’d actually do tonight.

If tonight is the bad kind

Call or text 988. That’s the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: a trained counselor answers, it’s free, it’s open all day and all night, and if you text, any message starts it. If you’re in danger right now, or it’s a medical emergency, call 911 instead. I’m not an emergency line, and I’d rather you had those two numbers than waited on me. In the morning, write to me if you want to.

If you want to know what happens next

You may be asking yourself what it actually looks like if you do this. Well, you pick a time on my scheduling page, the button at the top, or you call me first at 512-793-7737, which is free, and ask what therapy with me is like. Then you think it over for as long as you need. How a session goes has its own page, and so does what it costs, so there’s no hunting for either one.

Relational and trauma-informed is how I work. In the room, that means I listen a lot more than I talk, and how you and I get along is a big part of the work. How you got here is yours to tell, in your own time.