If you are going to read this blog, I am going to request you listen to "Genesis" by Deftones.
I am going to start including a song with my blog posts.
You must get connected with the music in my head if you are going to hang here.
Or not, because I wrote this post in silence, then listened to this song.
I'm going to try this thing here, where I visit you more often, dear old blog.
I tend to make predictions about what kind of self care routine I intend to practice. Something about this feels like setting intention to revisit ye olde form of writing.
I am told I am good at writing, and I believe people. I am.
It feels like wrestling with the gods this time.
I am in a mental health space I haven't been in years. Since I started this blog actually. Oh wow.
I fucking hate when I fall into weird things like that and extract the meaningfulness. I don't want to feel spiritual anymore, but I swear I am far too good at this shit, the finding meaning shit.
The meaning of this return shall be to enter the next layer of healing and move this blog into greater places of love for myself, like I suppose it's always been trying to do in its own way.
This time is different -
I am not alone.
I am in therapy.
I am sharing with friends.
I know that I am loved.
I am struggling like before, and this time, I have already lost so much.
Last time, I was in the midst of wrestling with all I was about to lose.
I am going to be candid this time. Not for the purpose of oversharing, but for the purpose of documentation.
I am returning to these artful places of creation lately and honestly, it's scared me a little bit because I keep remembering what kind of head spaces I was in last time I got this attached to my art. But now, I am loving this part of myself, forcing my Positive Self Talk into those places. I have understood the reason I create. It is to survive and find dwelling places for my pain. It is all I know how to do, in the most exorcising way anyways.
I no longer find it purposeful to allow people into my pain for no reason. I am not sharing my pain to inspire people anymore. I am sharing my art. Allow my pain to live and breathe, for me. Here we go.
CANDID TIME, A COLLECTION OF SCENES FROM MY LIFE, 2021
As per my past blog posts, I moved this year. Home is Columbus, Ohio now. I like it here a whole lot. I love leaving it just to come back and remember where my home is. I live in a small two room apartment, and I have lived here in many iterations for 9 months. Wow. It's my small human child now.
I love this apartment so much. It has 5 giant windows that feel so spacious and I have put so very much work into my bedroom nook. This space I am writing in - my nook - is the home piece for me. I throw my clothes into a pile on the floor that sits about as high as my bed, and lay down, look out my barred window, and the world is quiet again. I can hear myself breathing. I look around at pictures of my friends and family and the meaningful things I have placed here, and I am home. Just removed enough from former home to be my own place, just close enough to be reminded of where I come from.
I moved here on account of my past longterm partner of 8 years. I uprooted my entire sense of life and very important therapy to be here for them. We broke up in the first 3 months. There is something about being confined to a 2 room apartment in a brand new city and revisiting the same issues once again that lends itself to the end of things. We were so ecstatic to be here, too. Now our old nook is my nook, reclaimed and redecorated. My cat sits with me and misses her old parent but longs for my return home each day, and we cuddle in bed when I get home. I made the decision to move forward in my life without my nesting partner as an extension of the therapy I uprooted for them - the ultimate irony. Go to therapy, exorcise your demons, and they just might be the ones sitting next to you. I say this in the kindest way to myself - truly, what did I expect to happen? I am far too good at taking therapy seriously to let it do anything other than transform me. So here we are. I feel quite over my partner 6 months down the pipeline. It was a long time coming and I went through many days of bad depression over the months, and now I am just ready for my divorce to get moving in the direction it needs to. It's just funny how all that time ended in a breath, but I am glad it did. I am so glad.
Because,
it made room for me to meet someone spectacular. I am polyamorous, so there is no necessity in partner hopping. But when unsafety exits your life, safety has room to enter it. There was a moment of overlap there for a month in this transition and it's funny the way, like I said, therapy was always going to change me. I put too much of myself into that work I uprooted - it followed me here in the form of the pussy willow branches I let sit above my nook, the way they sat, bloomed already, in my therapist's office. I met this person on a whim, on those fucking dating apps. God, they are truly awful. Now I am inclined to put a little more faith in them, but I'm so jaded, I'd like to call it pure luck. I waited on myself to match them and that feels so true to the entirety of our relationship. We both were so patient with each other, so loving, so caring, so gentle, and so healing for one another. It was a true, pure love I pined about so much in this very blog over the years, covered all the sappy songs to, and I found myself as a romantic in this relationship. I used to hold so much silly shame for being as highly romantic a person as I am. I want it all - all the sappy movie moments, something soft and sweet given and received in consistency, the swell of love exchanged beyond the butterflies and into the real. This is what we had, and it was a type of beautiful I could not possibly capture in words (I don't think - I am seeking them). How ever I got so lucky, I do not know, and I am inclined to think it really was fate. I am finding no explanations lately for why something so pure came into my life and I am, oddly enough, finding some meaning in the ideas of intuition and that nonsensical shit I stopped believing in years ago. What is true love but if not magic, though, says the romantic in me. I believe, more than I ever have before. And I have found myself once again outside the shame. I AM IN LOVE WITH THIS PERSON. It's a sheer beauty my heart can carry the weight of it these days, weeks after the breakup occurring on pure circumstance. It is a love for an only-time-will-tell series of future moments and in this moment of my life, I am focusing on what the fuck else I want to squeeze out of life. I have no other choice, or the depression in the loss would drown me.
Amidst this circumstance, I am also healing in a rage I do not have it in me to yet express here. In more ways than one, I am ending a cycle of pain in my life. My body is helping heal my mind, and I am tending to my mind, my inner child, and my heart. It is an ugly process, but healing like this never is pretty. I am so very tired of being unsafe, even on account of unlucky circumstance, and my body agrees. I am running the roulette wheel back in my favor, all bets fed to me by the dealer. I am bending the game in my favor, forever. My trauma is healing, forever.
Prior to the breakup, I also lost my stepfather to divorce, on account of his doing something stupid and unsafe as well. I have given up on men, and it appears I will hold no more father figures in my life. I can't say I'm entirely surprised this is my lot in life. It sucks, but if men be not able to hold space for me, I be not able to hold space for them either. That loss sent me into a panic for a week after and I am settling on how peaceful it is to have his nonsense, if all he ever intended was true nonsense, out of the way. My family is a small as it has ever been, haven shrunk each year since my parents divorced, and it cannot get any smaller until it absolutely must. I guess I could say I'm content in knowing what I have the rest of my life. I lost many in-laws to my own divorce and if two is my magical number, then two I shall embrace. I hate him for it, leaving a gaping emotional hole in my family, but go on, git, if you're gonna needs be got. I've no time for bullshit, and especially these days. He was another cog in the machine.
Great concern has been expressed about me lately, and I have been understanding. But it is truly different this time around. I am more in touch with my feelings - I am physically full body crying now, full body laughing, full body feeling my anger. I am a lived emo song, full of angst and the swell of full emotion. I have big feelings, and I am no longer ashamed of who I am. In depression, that tends towards days of wallowing. In my anxiety, that tends towards rumination. The two combined are like quick sand to get out of sometimes, but I always do. That prolonging of the struggle has drastically slowed down over the years and I am catching these patterns weeks, sometimes even days in. I cannot stop the flow of depression and rumination that follow such a great loss, or series of losses. I can only tend to them, suture the wounds if you will.
I am finding myself in the midst of it. I know now what I will not settle for, nor tolerate. I will not accept anything less than what I deserve, in every relationship in my life, in every area of my life, even when I am struggling. I have learned more about boundaries than I ever have in my life this year, on a sheer necessity for choice of drowning or floating. I chose to float, and here I am, setting and living my boundaries as a form of muscle memory at this point. I am living who I've always wanted to be because I had no other choice. Perhaps, just perhaps, I am not so grateful I was made to feel unsafe but I am at least finding some sense of gratitude in the certainty of having known unsafety was not sustainable or possible for me. I am grateful I learned to let people show me who they are, and to believe them. I am believing them nowadays.
I went on a terrible date last night. She talked over me and had terribly racist things to say about the arts scene I so love, full of the audacity to then ask me to text her. I told her I needed to go home and feed my cat. My cat is more important than her, and I know this now about all the fuckers of the world. I owe you nothing - no amount of my time, energy, or even my adorable nature, and certainly no invitation to come see my cat. I am only willing to share myself with those worthy of being shared with. I am cute, I am funny, I am sexy as hell, I am talented, I am charming, I am loving, I am real, I am compassionate, I am bold, I am romantic, I am snarky, I am of no tolerance for anything less in return.
My cat agrees. My poor baby has a UTI and her meowing is grating on my ears as it reminds me I can barely take care of myself somedays, let alone this beautiful creature. I am glued to my bed sometimes, staring at the ceiling, dissociating, caught in a rumination cycle, sometimes the grief a feeling of shock, sometimes my eyes welled in tears, my body draining the pain of the whole in my chest, little by little, a lot by a lot. She is going to the vet next week. I am getting out of bed for her. We are getting better together. And I will be okay. I am finding my hope, in myself, for my cat, for my nook, for my apartment, for the steps out my door, for the seat in my car, for all the movements that take me where I need to be, for all the motions I am able to make to meet my needs, for self care, for self love, for self life. And I am going to be nothing but dramatic about it, because that is who I am.
My roommate said, "Meow indeed." And I have to agree.
"I reject both sides of what I'm being told.
I've seen right through now, I watch how wild it gets.
I finally achieve balance.
Approaching a delayed rebirth.
I'm positive there's no sense to what I'm being sold.
Yet here I go, I watch how wild we get.
Oh, can you taste your life balanced?
How will you spend your time reborn?
Climbing out of the ashes.
Turning time inside out.
We're miles beyond the sound.
We'll start again, taste a lifestyle that never gets old."
