I am not good at permenancy. 

Going through my life, most of the things that I have called mine haven’t stayed around very long. 

I have lived in, and lost so many homes. I’ve wrecked or ruined every car I’ve ever owned. I’ve had countless jobs and struggled keeping any of them. I’ve been married and divorced, and almost every single friend I’ve ever had, I am no longer friends with. My counselor told me one time that the issue with my memory, and the way I seem to forget feelings and people and the reality of a situation not very far behind me has to do with the permanence part of my brain. I struggle recalling the way I felt the day before, not in the sense that I don’t remember what happened, more so that my brain has forgotten what the emotion truly felt like. 

It surfaces in physical ways and ways that only I can only try to explain how it feels. 

For example, at work, if a student gets called down to the office, I will respond on the phone with “Sure, they’ll be right down”. Meanwhile my students look at me (not as much anymore since we’ve been together a while) with confusion only to say, “Uhh, they’re not even here today”. Or if someone were to paint a building a different color that I pass by everyday, I would have no capability of remembering what color it was before or even notice it’s different than it was. Everytime I go to the store I have to make a list, even if it’s for only one thing. I also have to write down exactly what I need in the exact moment I think of it, or five minutes later I will completely forget I needed anything or that I even was going to go to the store. The second my environment changes, I forget what was in the previous one. When I walk out of the store, every. single. time without fail, I have absolutely no idea where I parked my car. Not just like semi aware but not sure how far down, I will see the parking lot and it’s like my mind goes completely blank and I have to hunt around for AWHILE to find it.  I run out of gas on a monthly basis because I see my gas light on and by the time I have reached the gas station I forget I need it. And again and again until my car stops moving. 

A more serious example that isn’t as visible is the way I can’t hold on to how people feel or remember how I feel around them. When my ex boyfriend used to go on trips, I remember asking him every single day, sometimes multiple times a day if he still loved me, and telling him it didn’t even feel like we were dating anymore. If I can’t see someone’s face, if someone hasn’t told me they care about me or I matter to them that day, I struggle recalling that security I felt when they told me the day before. I can’t remember what isn’t directly in front of me. 

It makes keeping relationships difficult. 

This is all especially frustrating because I do NOT like change. The few things I do remember I do not like to be altered. When I move into a new house, I arrange it as close to the old one as possible and never touch it again. I put up the same posters, the same decorations, and soak into the comfort of things being exactly the same. 

I slept with sheets two sizes too small for my bed for the last year, safety pinning them to the end of the bed because I couldn’t bear to change the way my bed looked when I was in it. 

But there has been one constant in my life. That’s my best friend. I’ve known him since I was 14 and we worked together in an ice cream shop. There was an immediate kinship between us, although we outwardly appear very different. We listened to the same music, had the same sense of humor, and friendship with him was easy. He defended me when I needed it, and he never judged me. I lost contact with him when I got pregnant with my son and got married, but only a few short months after separating with my ex husband we found each other again. Since then he has walked with me through every episode, every victory, every dramatic change I have undergone for the last 4 years. He really isn’t even a friend to me anymore, he’s my family. He is the one constant in my life that doesn’t statistically have to stay, but he chooses to anyway. The one constant I know I can count on. 

The last blog post I posted before I took a long break from writing, too tired to even function let alone express myself, I wrote about him. I said that he had made me realize something that had opened my eyes to my own self sabotage and I wanted to share more about it. I never did, instead falling into a very painful 6 months of chronic drug abuse and emotional torment. 

I remember the night so clearly. We were sitting on my bed, his back facing the headboard and wall, me cross legged facing him and I was crying. I was once again fighting to keep myself together after the devastation that the person I was with had caused me to feel. I was angry and confused and my heart was broken. 

My best friend and I have always had the kind of relationship that isn’t afraid to call each other out when needed. It hasn’t always been pretty, but it’s some of the most authentic love I’ve ever experienced. He used to get frustrated with me when I would call him out, saying that I held him to standards that I didn’t even hold my partner to. And he was right. I did hold him to a higher standard, and I wasn’t afraid to tell him so. He has always made me feel safe enough to tell him anything, knowing he wouldn’t degrade me, knowing he wouldn’t use the information to manipulate me, knowing he would still be there after I said what I had to say. So yeah, he got the harsher, more authentic side of me sometimes.

That night we faced each other, in a silent home, the only ones still awake, and he showed me that same trust and respect. 

He was angry. He was tired of watching someone he loved hurt themselves over and over again by choosing to stay with someone who was undeserving of the care I was giving. He was tired of cleaning up the mess that I would become, for someone else. He was tired of watching me fall apart, and having to sweep me up, like a fragile vase shattered to pieces, tired of painstakingly putting me back together, all for me to run back into the arms of the person who broke me to begin with. 

He told me he had read my blog. He said while he was glad I was writing, he became more and more frustrated as he read through it. “You’re saying the exact same thing every single time. You’re coming to the same conclusions, talking about the same treatment, the same pain, just sandwiched between moments of relief. Are you forgetting what you wrote? How could you forget how this time is exactly the same as the other times? How could you not remember”? 

I felt stunned. I promised him I would read through my own words that from start to finish, which up until that point I hadn’t done yet. 

That night as I read, I continued to become more and more frustrated. Frustrated that I could be so ignorant of my own feelings. Frustrated that I could be so blind to the grief that had consumed me countless times before, hoping for a different outcome. I was grieving for all that I had endured, and angry at myself for letting it happen over, and over again. 

But like I had done so many times before, I didn’t follow through. I stopped reading my blog after that, and stopped writing completely. 

That summer/fall was one of the worst times of my entire life. I was deeper into my addiction than I had ever been, expanding into areas that I hadn’t before that were causing me to have more severe physical side effects, some that have stayed with me into sobriety. I was desperate for relief, lost and searching for something to make the pain stop. I checked myself into a facility to detox and yet still within two weeks fell back in with both the dealer and the addiction. I spent those months on a whirlwind of some of the most manipulative, cruel treatment I have ever experienced and the whole time allowing it because I couldn’t handle losing the drugs, or him. I was trying to survive, but I was rapidly deteriorating.

Fast forward almost five months or being sober later. I am messaging my daughter this morning and I sent her a text that said this “I don’t want a relationship to ever get to the point where I hate them again. If I see the signs that they aren’t aligning with me I want to walk away.” and one that followed that said “only I can protect myself”.

Last winter, I started reading through my blog on a regular basis like I had promised to do. At least once a month I will read it from start to finish. It usually leaves me feeling awful, with vivid flashbacks and nightmares. But I know that for my own sake, it’s necessary to remember the words I’ve written and the ways I have felt. 

When I sent that text to her, something in my head triggered my memory, and I knew I had said those words before. 

I wrote this in April 2024 under the blog titled “But what’s worse? The pain or the hangover?”.

“I hope I remember this. I have always said that I have been waiting my whole life for

someone to protect me.

How strange, at 31, to realize that maybe that someone,

has been me all along.

Maybe the way I break this cycle of ending up with people who aren’t meant for me, who are unsafe for me, is that I stop looking for safety in them.

If I can learn to keep myself safe, then maybe I will learn to see things as they are, not what I want them to be. If I can learn

what makes me feel unsafe early enough, anyone who threatens that, will not have

access to me.

Maybe if I find safety and comfort within myself, I will finally be free.”

My memory is shit. But I remembered that. I remembered that I wanted better for myself. I remembered that I am my own keeper. That I am my own protector. That I have the ability to stop things before I am so entrenched that I can’t get out. 

It was a weird moment. But I’m thankful for it. I’m doing what I said I would do. I am remembering the promises I made to myself. Because of my best friend, because of me. 

I am healing.