itmightnotbeok

I always said I couldn’t love someone new.

The idea of meeting someone I know nothing about, who knows nothing about me, seems like asking for disappointment and heartbreak. How could I trust that someone was actually who they portrayed themselves to be at this point? I’ve held strong to those who have walked with me through the mess that my life has been for the last 4 years, and that’s it.

No new friends.

But I already knew him. He had already been in my life. I had seen him at some low moments and he had watched me crumble at mine. He sat in the backseat one night over a year ago, in front of my ex’s parents house, as I revealed my deepest shame to him. I knew he was the one person who would understand what it was like to create your own misery, even when you desperately wanted something different. He was my friend. I trusted him. But everytime we would become closer as friends, the chaos in our own lives would distance us. I kept reaching out to him, desperate to have him see himself the way I saw him, all the while rejecting the voice in my ear that told me I was making a fool of myself. My ex would ridicule me, laughing at how stupid I was to think of him as “family”, that he didn’t care about me and never did. I sat with him the night I went to the hospital and tried to tell him how much his presence in my life meant to me. He watched me as I was tormented that week of the Miami fair. He told me it was the first time he realized that I was actually a good person and not the POS I was made out to be. He listened to me as I cried that week. He defended me, he believed me.

I remember sitting in the car as I applied makeup to his skin so his job wouldn’t see the black eye he had gotten the day before and thinking, “this person is so precious to me”.

We did face masks together, had dinners with my family, spent countless nights out or just riding around, separated but still together. Something about him, his hurt, his heart, I was never been able to move on from.

I’ve said before that I struggle knowing when it’s time to let go. And in true form, I have never been able to shake the memories he left in my head. I’ve never been able to convince myself that he was not that empathetic, non judgemental, smart as fuck person I spent so much time with. I couldn’t convince myself the things he said, he didn’t mean.

I can see all of it so clearly still. Watching him sleep in the backseat all those late nights, listening to him explain why I couldn’t get past the third day, carrying loads of laundry to the laundromat when my son was suffering, leaving work to pick him up on the side of the road, giving him the notebook and Christmas cactus before he went to the hospital, sitting in my car as I sat parked in the lot right before his house, gripping the steering wheel so hard it hurt my palms and screaming in anger and grief, knowing what was about to happen to him all over again. I remember sitting in the pews the day of the funeral, tears flowing down my face, staring at the back of his head, thinking, “please don’t take him too”.

I kept trying. There was no evidence that anything I said mattered to him. I would send him paragraphs, telling him that I was there for him. That he didn’t have to struggle alone, that the world needed someone like him, someone who was kind, and intelligent, and good – that I didn’t want to him to die. And even though I wouldn’t hear anything back, I still couldn’t let go.

Then, at the beginning of the year, I saw him, standing outside of the gas station alone. My daughter was in the passenger seat. She had watched me worry and care for him so much the last year.

“You gotta get out and talk to him”. 

I threw open the door and ran and wrapped my arms around him. I looked up into the face of someone who was hurting so badly, his eyes rimmed with purple and his skin turned a shade of greenish-grey. I told him I was sober. I told him that I loved him and that I was here for him. That I would continue to be there for him. When I got back into the car, my daughter and I both sobbed. 

“That might be the last time we ever see him alive.”

He texted me three days later. He told me he was almost 30 hours in. I raced to him and dropped off everything I could think of that he would need. 

And from there? He’s allowed me to support him like I’ve always wanted to, and in turn he has supported me. He’s listened to me, become closer to my family, been kissed by my mother, cooked with me, walked with me, met my best friend, held me, healed parts of me that I couldn’t heal on my own. He showed me the beach. He has assured me everytime I have been scared and spiraling, he’s proven he is capable of handling my insecurities; without making me feel so broken, and become someone I can’t see my life without. He has earned my trust.

I loved him before, but it’s different now. He wasn’t someone new, but I guess I kind of am.  

I was five months sober yesterday. And while I’m scared of what these feelings in me will cause my future ones to be, I’m also excited. I’m happy. 

He makes me feel safe. Every day I spend with him, only makes me love him more.

I don’t think I could have loved someone new. But maybe not because I was too afraid. Maybe not because it seemed like it would be a waste of time.

Maybe I felt that way because that part of my heart was already reserved for someone who’s face I could never forget. 

“I was all in from the start.” 

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.

I talk a lot about hope in this blog.

Here’s what I’ve been hoping lately.

I hope you get scammed on Facebook marketplace.

I hope you never own a car that’s not a piece of shit.

I hope the next time you go to give a cop the card inside your glove box, my hair bands fall out and he searches your car.

I hope you never leave “up” from the casino, and if you do you lose all of it that day.

I hope you’re never able to hear a Kanye West song without thinking of me.

I hope no one ever notices the little things about you.

I hope you get banned from your favorite bars.

I hope all of your whales start to grind this summer one by one until you can only have one rider at a time.

I hope you always have a white streak under your nose after going to the bathroom and never realize it.

I hope every stupid pick up line you try and give a woman falls flat every time.

I hope you get drug tested for your ID the next time you travel to the fair.

I hope your posture continues to get worse.

I hope people make fun of you for the bald spot on the back of your head behind your back.

I hope you never forgive yourself for pretending to be someone else in high school.

I hope you never have real friends, only “associates”.

I hope you break your ankle again.

I hope your nose never clears up.

I hope I never see you again a day in my life.

I hope everyone you think is loyal to you shows their true colors at the worst possible moment.

I hope you keep having your mom do your adulting for you and you never learn to grow up.

I hope your lose your headphones everytime you buy a new pair.

I hope you can never smell your own bad breath.

I hope it always pours when your windshield wipers need to be changed.

I hope you are ignored everytime you seek attention from a stranger.

I hope everything is never better than “alright”.

I hope you can’t watch basketball ever again.

I hope your brother gets the fuck away from you and your family.

I hope you never get the balls to cover up that tattoo.

I hope you always have the fashion sense of an NPC.

I hope you become a spitting image, inside and out, of your father.

I hope the stress that you used as a reason to degrade and disrespect me, gets worse every morning you wake up, and you never find true peace.

I hope the only friend you have, sees you for the low life you are and leaves you behind to live a better life.

I hope the people you use for your own gain never die because of your inability to care that your “job” kills people.

I hope the memories of you screaming at a woman who loved you haunt you until the day you die.

I hope you can still feel that spit on your face.

I hope I heal from every wound you left and the scars fade to nothing.

I hope you get what you deserve.

There’s a place between anger and love.

There’s a place between giving up and hope.

There’s a place between hurt and peace.

There’s a place between sadness and pride.

I’m in that in between now. There will always be a place for you in my heart, even if there isn’t one in my days.

There’s no anger. There’s no bitterness. There’s no spite.

There is still joy, even in the loss.

I don’t think I’ve ever loved and lost and wished them well and meant it.

But I wish you that. I wish you well. I always have, and I always will.

This post is not about you.

I’ve spent so much time on this beach recently. I’m sitting here now, on a piece of decking laid atop two perfectly placed roots of a tree. A seat made for two. Remnants of fires I’ve had with people I love scatter the sand to my right and the rain is starting to come down harder, soaking through my shoes and covering my skin. 

I had been here so many times with you before. I always wondered why you called this spot tucked away a “beach”. A small parking area with only trees in front of it, we would come here when you had a deal to make and that’s all I knew of it. Always the passenger, I couldn’t have even gotten here on my own if I tried because the only times I had been here was in the middle of the night when I was already high. 

This place holds such different memories for me now. Roasting hotdogs and marshmallows with people I never thought would see me as good, looking for shells with the kids, the photo I have on my wall, making a bucket list with one of my best friends, sobbing in his arms on the sand when my head felt like it was spinning out of control, petting horseshoe crabs with my daughter. 

I never knew this was here.

I never knew that behind the wall of trees, there was a path that lead to the water. That there was sand, and shells, and a place to rest. 

This place has been here the whole time. The beach is the place I love the most. And it was here the whole time. 

You never told me. You never showed me what was right in front of me all of these years. A place that could settle my mind, and bring peace to my heart, was hidden when I was with you. 

In some ways I’m glad I never shared this place with you. I don’t think I could come here now if I did. 

That’s how it always was. I was always so close to what I wanted. I was always so close to a happy moment, to safety, but I couldn’t access it. 

That feeling of serenity was blocked, not by trees, but by you. 

This place has become somewhere that I’ve spoken out my deepest fears, a place I have laughed at, a place I have held hands at, a place I have dreamed of the future and made plans to live. 

All the things I tried to do with you. 

The no trespassing sign nailed to the divider at the end is the only thing you have in common with this place. 

I woke up feeling your arms around me this morning. I opened up my phone and unblocked your number, a fleeting thought that if I did, maybe I would have the chance of seeing that you still miss me. That you were trying to reach me. But before I even left the screen, I changed my mind. I blocked it again, finally knowing better, and I came here. 

A place that gives me all that you couldn’t. 

I miss you. But I have been missing you, the person I wanted so badly, since June of 2023. I think part of me always will. 

But I am making new memories. And I’m going to be fine. You always said you would be if I was gone. That life would carry on. 

You were right. 

“I’ve been thinking of so many hurts from so many years today for some reason. So many memories ripped away from me too soon or so many that were stained into me without my consent. I stood out there in that rain and just had this moment where it literally felt like it was washing away the blood from my skin. Like the world was weeping for me. Then I started crying and it was like the world was weeping with me. I know it will still be hard sometimes. The rain didn’t heal the wounds, but tonight felt like the world was grieving with me and helping me release what doesn’t serve me anymore and it was beautiful.”

Losing you was the end of everything I wanted.

How beautiful it is, 115 days later, to want so many things I never knew were there all along.

Most of my tattoos have been spur of the moment. I have over 100 random thoughts, stupid pictures, or numbers covering most of my arms and legs. Don’t get me wrong, I love the spontaneity of them, and don’t regret a single one. Still, there’s one tattoo that I have thought about quite often, and have never been able to sit down and actually stencil out and place on my body with permanent ink.

Too much – Never enough.

This phrase, on the days that the part of me that wants me to fall to pieces, the part of me that sees every imperfection in myself, the part of me that wants to sit and wallow in the sadness that is always fighting to take over, this phrase covers my thoughts so subtly yet so thoroughly that it’s hard to identify how deeply its weighing me down at times.
I found a note in my notes section today from October 11, 2021.
It read-
“Maybe the reason I am attracted to people that don’t feel the same way about me is because when they do, it feels fake. Because deep down I don’t think I am good enough for them anyway.”
I have been working really hard at not letting this part of me speak out as much. I have been working on positive self talk, on not letting other people control my emotions, on believing I am good enough and not too much no matter what the people around me choose.
But today, I speak from the part of me that wrote that note in 2021.
I have been so close to love so many times. Every time I get too close, it slips out from under my fingertips. It doesn’t matter what I look like, how healthy I am, how much I fight for it or how nonchalant I am, it always dissipates, my confidence and hopes along with it. I choose to trust each time I get the idea that maybe now is my time, and I never am chosen in return.
What is the flaw in me that keeps me from solidifying anything real?
What mark am I missing that would make the only ones capable of giving me what I am so desperately searching for, be the ones that offer it to me cloaked in thorns. Like a rose, offering beauty and grace, only to pierce the one daring enough to try and hold it.
What if I am too much? What if I will never be enough? If I spend my days as the lover, and never the loved. Will I always have these waves of sadness and defeat? Or will one day I adjust and stop hoping? Who would I even be then?
Always the secret.
Never the seen.
What is so wrong with me that if I ever hope to be loved, I have to set aside the things that embody being cherished just to feel it. Is the light that I feel inside of me, the one I want to pour out onto those I hold so close, really just like the ones that give you a headache? Instead of a warm glow, it offers a piercing, whitish blue that makes you feel overstimulated and uncomfortable.
How can I have gone this long, and still not found one person who feels like what I have to offer is what they have been looking for?
What am I not seeing?

“If everyone else feels that way, maybe it’s time to consider that it’s not them with the problem, it’s you”. I had a therapist tell me that once, maybe ten-ish years ago? Maybe she was right. Most days lately I have been pushing back against these thoughts. Most days I am successful. Most days I’ve got my middle finger up to my last heartbreak, and every one before it, telling myself that it was their loss.

But today I am the one who feels like the loser. I am the one who feels like there is something broken inside of me that I will never find, a barrier between my heart, and everyone else’s. Today I feel like I am not enough. I have spent almost four months now (and honestly years before that too) making sure I am not too much. I try and provide rather than ask. I try and accommodate, I try and accept, I try and practice silence. But still,

I am not enough. I may not be a burden, but I am not irreplaceable. I am not in the sunlight.

I don’t know the reason I haven’t been able to add that tattoo to the artwork I already have. Most days I tell myself it’s because deep down I know it isn’t true and I am grateful I haven’t.

But on days like today, I can’t help but think the reason it’s never become ink on my skin that I will look at until I die, is because I know it is.

The more people love me, the greater the ache becomes that you couldn’t.
The more people help me rebuild the damage that you left behind, the more I can feel the pain of the wreckage.
The healthier I become, the angrier my heart grows at how sick you allowed, watched, encouraged me to become. “My little fiend”, right?
The easier it is for people to consider my feelings, the harder it becomes for me to look at you with any sort of love or empathy, the person who was supposed to love me the most, the person I trusted the most, when all I have are memories of the times you told me I was erratic and unreasonable.
The more I watch myself react out of trauma because of the way YOU made me defend myself, how every fucking day during my time with you, you told me I wasn’t understanding, and now I cant say anything to anyone without rehearsing it in my head a million times, bending over backwards to make sure I don’t come across as selfish or assuring the person that I am not the person that YOU made me believe I was, the more tired I become.
The more I watch people cherish me, and show me grace, the more I realize how much you actually fucking hated me by the end.
The more I experience fear every single time my heart feels peace, the more I realize how scared I was of losing everything, all of the time.
You WERE my everything. And you just kept leaving. Over and over and over no matter how fucking hard I tried to meet every single demand, to exceed every expectation, no matter how many times I waited for you in the dark while you chose to give yourself to every single thing, and to every single person, everyone except for me.
The more people try and assure me that they will stay, the more I realize that the only person I’ve ever believed actually would, was you.
The more my life completely changes and the more yours stays the exact same, the more I realize that I never meant anything to you. It made no difference to your future if I was a part of it or if I was just another picture you could show to strangers at the bar.

I wish I could say I didn’t care about you anymore. Instead, I look for you over my shoulder everywhere I go. I’m constantly on guard when I am anywhere but home or work. But not because I hope to see you. Rather, I am beginning to forget your features, the way your voice sounds, the creases by your eyes when you smile. I am terrified of seeing your face and losing that progress, so I am constantly watching, afraid I will run into you and have to go back to seeing you every time I close my eyes.
I wish I could say I didn’t care about you anymore, that I was indifferent to you. That you were just a mistake that I learned from. That I don’t regret it because even though there was pain, I learned something and I am better for it.
But that would be a lie, and unlike you, I have never been good at saying anything but how I really feel.
I know I still care about you because I fucking hate you. I am not indifferent to the memory of you because the thought of you fills me with so much rage and grief that it makes me sick. I hate you for everything you did to me. I hate you for making me believe for so long that I was someone I was not. I hate you for making it so hard for me to enjoy my life now without it being wrapped in grief and fear. I hate you for destroying any trust I have that someone could actually love me, that someone would stay.
I may be getting better now, I may have learned lessons that will help me moving forward, but if I could,
I would give anything to have never met you.

Since I’ve gotten sober, I feel like I’ve truly been happy for the first time in a very long time. It’s this kind of authentic joy, where I am fully myself, without a crutch, without taking the easy way out. I am able to handle my natural emotions, no matter where they take me. It’s been dark more than a few times, but it’s never been pitch black. Like seeing the hallway light shine through the opening at the bottom of my bedroom door, I’ve been able to hold onto the hope that I will again see clearly. I’ve had incredible moments of joy. And the high that comes with it is nothing like the high I have been chained to for so long.

I’ve been able to function at a level that I could have only dreamed of. I was self medicating, trying to accomplish things that come so easy to me now, and it has been a gift. I have hated that my brain has the ability to completely change who I am overnight, fragmenting my life into chapters of people that I can barely recognize. But what has always been a burden to me, this time, has become a strength. My ability to care for the people around me instead of being so fucking selfish, secluding myself in my room so I could use at my leisure, staying awake for days on end making me virtually useless to those who needed me, barely surviving, has given me the desire to want to be alive.

In the beginning, the fight was rooted deeply in the determination to become what I was told I would never be. I would read those texts he sent and feel the anger of being pushed so far into the ground, of being rejected, unseen, and it has kept me going. I would listen to angry music and scream the lyrics in my car, and when I would remember the pain of the years before, the fury of it all lit a fire so deep in my soul, the sadness lying under the surface was kept at bay. 

I’ve talked so many times about the fear I have of sadness. How crippling it can be to my nervous system, how scared I am of never being able to pull myself out of the hole feeling that emotion could put me in. 

But lately I’ve been noticing a trend in my moods. I’ve been having huge waves of sadness that are difficult to cover with anger or determination. I’ll go from laughing surrounded by people I love to not being able to control the streams of tears that start falling down my face. I noticed just how unmanageable it was the other day when my daughter was giving one of my closest friends a tattoo, and I just sat on my bed with them and wept. Normally, even if I felt that creeping darkness, I wouldn’t have wanted to “bring down the vibe” and I would have held it in. But I couldn’t. The tears fell no matter how hard I tried to hold it in. Side note, I have the most incredible support system I could ask for. In that moment, they validated my emotions, forgave my inability to hide the tears, encouraged me and just let me sit with them in silence without judging me or trying to pretend they understood what I was feeling. And I am incredibly grateful to them for that.

The confusing thing is these huge dips in my emotional state have been directly following time spent with the people I love most. When my heart has been working overtime trying to make someone feel safe, or wanted, or show them how important they are to me, or when I experience moments of connection that I know I will miss one day, I start breaking down. It’s like I see myself from a third person view, holding someone’s hand, telling them how much I love them, smiling and laughing, watching them smile and laugh back and my heart starts to break. I’m not pretending to be happy when I’m with these people, I genuinely am. And for some reason the more joy I experience, the deeper my heart sinks each time. Instead of flashbacks of sadness and pain, I’m having flashbacks of joy and love. So then why is it causing me so much anxiety and sadness when I see those images in my head? It’s like my heart doesn’t know how to feel about the memories I’m making. It’s like its forgotten that everything doesn’t always have to make me feel so broken anymore.

When I look at my life and I see how beautiful it is, instead of peace, I have been feeling this deep sense of loss. I spend time with my best friends, my family, and I think about how fucking proud I am of them, and I’m riddled with sorrow as if I am grieving. I cant even move my cat from my chest to get comfortable at night because I am overwhelmed with this feeling that I wont have that comfort that much longer.
I have lost a lot in my life, and I have gone through the stages of grief more than a few times. The worry that I will lose the people I love most is very familiar to me, but it’s not what I am feeling now.

If I could simplify it but also confuse myself even more, it would be that I am actually feeling the exact opposite. I’m not worried that they will be taken from me. The feeling that’s invading my mind and pushing its way into every happy memory I am trying to experience is that I am going to be taken from them. That I am on borrowed time. That I am watching myself from a third person view as if I was a ghost, watching my last moments, even though they have just happened or are currently happening. I am healthier and happier and more stable than I have ever been in my entire life. So why can I not shake this feeling that I am not going to be here much longer? I am not having SI. I’m not passively wanting to die. I WANT to be here more than I ever have in my whole life. But every happy moment lately always ends in tears because I worry its the last one I will have. Things are finally okay. Things are more than okay. My brain knows that. But my heart is still breaking. Maybe it’s all still just too new and I’m not used to it. Maybe a broken heart can’t feel love without seeing it through the lense of grief. Maybe I wasn’t built to feel peace.
I hope this ends soon. I’m so ready to stop being so afraid. I’m ready to feel safe.