Grief is Someone Else's Backpack That I am Inexplicably Carrying

I talked to my therapist recently. More accurately: I cried to my therapist recently.

I started the session by saying I’ve been struggling a little bit with a couple of things, but succeeding in keeping my head above it. Then as I started talking, I realized, I’m not really succeeding in those. I’m barely treading water, sinking faster than I can kick my feet, and I want to just be able to swim.

As some or most of you may know, my mother died when I was little. I was seven years old when she left this earth. I was four when she got sick. So, between trips to the hospital and chemo appointments, and me not being able to remember the first 2-ish years of my life because I was a baby, I really only had 2 years worth of memories to build, and those same 2 years to form a relationship with her — as much as one can at that age.

As of April this year, she has been dead for 21 years, and I am 29 years old as of September. I have lived far more of my life without her than I did with her. She taught me how to read, how to tie my shoes, and how to respond to compliments (you’re supposed to say “thank you,” not “I know”), but I’ve learned so many more things without her aid than I ever did with her. I have no personal experience on which I can base any perception of what she was actually like as a person.

Most people find that sad. For me, though, it’s just a fact of life. I don’t grieve my mom’s death because she wasn’t really a part of my life. Sometimes I get sad when I imagine the best case scenario of what could have been if she had never gotten sick and died, but that’s always brief, and it doesn’t really matter, because that’s not the reality. It’s not sad to me; it’s just a thing that happened. I have a wonderful stepmom who has been my mom longer than my own biological mother was. I also had several amazing mother figures who stepped in to help raise me when my dad was struggling, before he met my stepmom. I have never lacked in that area.

The part that affects me is the fact that everybody else’s relationship with a person I never met has been looming over me this whole time

Growing up, my family pushed this idea of what my mom was on me. Up until a few years ago, she was an angel. A saint. A perfect deity who could do no wrong. She was a perfect mother, a perfect wife, a perfect person. Now that I’m an adult and I’ve put together small pieces of secondhand accounts of history, and I’ve decoded stories my family has told me, I find myself strongly doubting that.

From everything I’ve heard about my mom, she was a person influenced heavily by societal roles, gender norms, and the expectations placed upon her by the people around her. She was deeply flawed. She had issues and problems and things that she struggled with. Just like everybody else.

One innocuous thing that I know about her is that she really liked dolls. Last week, my dad and stepmom were cleaning out their storage room and found a bunch of her old dolls. My dad texted me a picture of them and asked if I wanted them. 

The only memory I had of those dolls was the fact that I was too scared to play with them as a kid. Not because they were creepy, but because I didn’t want to ruin them. It was drilled into my head that they were special because they belonged to my mother. These were sacred objects; too important to be played with. So I kept them in my closet and never touched them.

I told my dad I didn’t want them.

He replied, “Nana made them for your mom.”

I felt the shadow of my mother fall over me again.

Hoarding is a genetic predisposition in my family. My great grandmother died when I was a teenager, and she left boxes and trunks full of stuff for the rest of my family to sort out. The mindset of the rest of my family is, if this was important enough to this person who is now dead to keep this whole time, then it has to mean something to me, because I am their family. There’s an obsession with heirlooms. Everything is an heirloom.

For a long time, I kept little trinkets and objects that belonged to my mother. I am also named after my great-great-great aunt, so my family assumes I want all of her stuff, too. I had a lot of things. Shelves full of them. Clothes that were my mom’s, ceramic dishes, little stuffed animals. Rocks. Shells. Pins. Jewelry. I only kept them because dead family members were kept on a pedestal as these perfect beings, and if these things belonged to them, I couldn’t just get rid of them. They were special to them, so they therefore had to be special to me.

We recently had a discussion with my grandfather over Zoom about his end-of-life plans. He said, “I don’t care what you do for a memorial, or how you want to dispose of my remains, because I will be dead already at that point, so it won’t matter to me.” The rest of my family seemed confused, but it made perfect sense to me. That moment unlocked something in my brain. Why do “heirlooms” matter to regular people if you never knew the person who owned it first? If it’s of historical significance, give it to a museum. You, the individual, do not have to keep it if it has no significance to you personally.

I used to be flattered when people compared me to my mom. “You look just like her.” “That’s totally something your mom would say.” “You got that from your mom.” I would be flattered because to me, that was like getting compared to Jesus. I wasn’t raised religious in the technical sense, but there was a pantheon of deities that was worshiped in my household. Just not one of the traditional ones.

I had a phase for a while where I craved uniqueness. I wanted nothing more than to stand out as my own person. I wanted to be different from others. At the time, I didn’t know why. I didn’t think it really needed a reason. But now I know. That was when I started to get tired of the constant comparison.

Throughout all of this, I also had a sibling with severe mental health and behavioral issues. Not only was I expected to be a carbon copy of my mom (or, more accurately, a carbon copy of the grandiose idealization of my mom), but I was also expected to be The Good Kid. I was supposed to be the stable, healthy, happy one that was quiet and that behaved, that was “an old soul” and responsible and smart and made prudent choices and stayed within the lines. My sibling used all the resources and bandwidth that my father had. The responsibility of everyone’s sanity rested on my shoulders for the majority of my formative years. If I wasn’t the rock, everything would fall apart and it would be my fault.

I was never allowed to just be a kid.

I also had a temperament that needed a lot more direction and outside structure than I had. My dad was relatively laissez-faire about his parenting style. Don’t do anything you don’t want to do, and stay away from things that will break the law or hurt yourself or others. Otherwise, do whatever you want. I didn’t have a lot of specific options laid out for me, so rather than going out and finding things to do, I didn’t really do anything at all. I watched a lot of TV and I played a lot of video games. I joined a youth community service group for girls in middle school because I had a friend who joined and I wanted to spend more time with her. It was what she wanted to do. It wasn’t what I wanted to do. And then, after I joined, all the younger girls looked up to me and leaned on me as a role model, so when the initial friend and I grew apart, I felt like I had to be there for everybody else. I served as president of my chapter for two separate terms because it was what was expected of me.

It was always just a fact that I was going to go to college right after high school. Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to, it was just assumed that that was the way it was supposed to happen. It wasn’t until high school that people started asking me what I wanted to go to college for. I didn’t have a solid, concrete answer for more than a few months at a time.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

When I was really little, my answer was always “everything”. I wanted to be a firefighter, and an astronaut, and a chef, and a farmer, and a mom all at the same time. After I learned that that’s pretty much impossible, I always answered with a shrug. The answer was intangible and not consciously known to me at the time, but it was that I wanted to be a better person than my sibling, I wanted to be someone that my mom would be proud of, and most of all, I wanted to make everyone happy.

In eighth grade, I thought I had it nailed down. I wanted to go to Oxford to study psychology. The problem with that was the fact that I wasn’t motivated to succeed in anything other than psychology specifically. My grades slipped because I never did my homework — not because it was too hard, or because I didn’t understand the material, but because I didn’t want to. My parents told me, “You’re not going to get into Oxford with Cs and Ds.” I shrugged and said, “Okay.” Guess I won’t go to Oxford, then.

I wanted to be a historian until I flunked AP World History. I wanted to be a musician until I discovered I didn’t care for writing poetry. I wanted to be a YouTuber until I realized I don’t like constantly being in the public eye. I wanted to be a photographer until I had clients who didn’t have the same artistic sense and didn’t appreciate my work. I wanted to be an author until I found out I had to constantly force the words out onto the page with no breaks and write at a greater quantity than I was able.

It’s really apparent that something went wrong somewhere when the hyperlexic kid fails English 101 three times.

“But you’re so smart!”

Am I? Because I know a lot of words? Because I know what people want me to say, so I’m good at testing? Because I’m a talented mimic?

I’m “smart” because my mom wanted me to be. I’m “strong” because my dad needed me to be. I’m “resilient” because I had to be under my specific circumstances, otherwise things could have gone horribly wrong and I would have lost everything.

I’m not strong; I feel things deeply and it affects me severely. I’m not resilient; I’d rather lie down and take abuse than inconvenience someone else. And “smart” is a debatable, nebulous term that has a lot of aspects and facets. People just think these things are true of me because I play the part. I seem smart because I use big words. I seem strong and resilient, because I don’t tell people when I’m struggling. I see my struggles as personal failings, because why would someone as strong and resilient as I am, as I am supposed to be, struggle?

So I push away anything that makes me uncomfortable and anything that questions the identity that I have spent my whole life building, all so that I can be a person that somebody I never knew could be proud of. And I’ve gotten so good at avoidance that I have trouble identifying when I’m struggling. I don’t know what it looks like to struggle until I’m curled up in the fetal position having a panic attack because I feel like everything is falling apart and I can’t control anything and I’m failing at the role I’m supposed to play so I don’t know who I am anymore and it’s all my fault. I’m supposed to be a person that can roll with the punches and take anything that’s thrown at me. So why can’t I do that anymore?

Well, if you carry a certain amount of weight for a long time, and the weight keeps building and getting bigger, your legs will give out eventually. You just stop being able to carry all of it.

The answer isn’t to give up. The answer is to reassess. How much of this weight is necessary? How much of it is old garbage I don’t need anymore? And, the most difficult question for me, but perhaps the most important: How much of this can I get help carrying from someone else who is willing?

“Nana made them for your mom,” my dad said about the dolls he found in storage.

I said, “Nana can have them if she wants them. I don’t need more stuff.” What I didn’t say was, there’s no room in my house for them, and there’s no room in my life for them.

He said, “Point taken.”

I told a close friend of mine about how I was feeling, and they told me to look up the term parentification.

I’ve always felt like nothing ever belonged to me, really. Not even medical diagnoses. Most of the time, I meet up to maybe 90% of the criteria, at the absolute maximum, for any diagnosis, and I find a lot of community with people who actually have them, but there’s always a part of it I don’t have and can’t relate to. AuDHD. Hypermobile Ehler’s-Danlos. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. OCD. Even physical traits and identities. I’m definitely not blonde or a redhead, but I’m definitely not brunette. I’m not skinny or fat. Short people say I’m tall, tall people say I’m short. My sexuality is fluid. I'm definitely a woman when I’m around men, but if you put me in a room with people who identify as women, I feel like I don’t belong there either, like something is fundamentally different about me.

But then I looked up parentification. And for the first time, everything made sense.

It’s not my dad’s fault that I took on all the responsibility of raising myself. It’s nobody’s fault, really, it’s just the way the cards fell. I’m one of the luckier parentified people, because I only had myself to raise, and I didn’t have any younger siblings. But I did feel as though I bore the brunt of everyone’s emotions. I was the family therapist. I was a therapist for my friends. And all I got was a school counselor trying to coach me through grieving my mom when that wasn’t the worst of what was happening.

I couldn’t tell anyone I was struggling, because I didn’t think I was. I thought it was just life. I thought it was a normal thing for “good” people to do to listen and give advice and bear the weight of human suffering. I would get random allergic reactions and psoriasis and eczema breakouts and my weight would fluctuate and I would have delusions and crying outbursts and nightmares and hallucinations. When I got x-rays before I had braces, my orthodontist pointed out the fact that somehow, I had both an overbite and an underbite on top of my crossbite; my jaw was shaped to have an underbite, but I clenched my teeth so much from stress as my adult teeth were growing in that the bottom teeth were tilted backwards and my top teeth touched my bottom gums. People would ask me what was wrong, and I couldn’t articulate what was actually wrong, so they would assume I was grieving my mom. I assumed I was also grieving my mom. People would tell me grief is weird and manifests itself in strange ways. Maybe it does. But it doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s disproportionate that I only had that two years of really knowing my mom and now that she’s been gone for 21 years, I’m still feeling the same grief.

I’m not. Not really. That’s not what’s affecting me the most. Yes, I lost my mom at a young age. I didn’t lack the presence of a mother figure, though, so it really didn’t make a difference to me. I was sad about it for a while, but my life went on and the world kept turning and I’m here now and I don’t know any different. My mom’s death isn’t a major factor in my life. It was an event by which I defined myself for a long time, but that's about it.

For the people around me, though, it was a different story.

I’ve been told a lot, by medical professionals even, how I should feel about certain things. For example, I went to the emergency room recently for severe lower abdominal/uterine pain, and the (male) doctor got paid $1,700 by my insurance company to look at my chart and talk to me for five minutes to tell me that I had a “small” ovarian cyst but that I "shouldn’t" be in that much pain.

But I am, I thought. So what are you, the medical professional, going to do about it?

As a child, I was coached through feelings before I could have them or express them. The adults in my life were scared that I could end up like my sibling, and so they tried to nip all that in the bud by telling me how to feel and how to express myself. I was asked to draw how I felt a lot.

I would often end up with crayons or colored pencils in front of me and a blank piece of paper. Because that was it. It was nothing. I felt nothing. I couldn’t explain it using words at the time (or images, for that matter), but it was an accurate portrayal of my feelings.

“It’s okay, draw whatever comes to mind," the counselor would say, thinking that I was afraid or nervous to draw. "It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

I would look at the paper for a minute, and then sit back in my chair, signaling that I was finished.

“That’s okay, sometimes sadness can feel like nothing.”

The only thing I can recall drawing in those situations was when I was around 15 years old in a counseling session. I picked up the pen and drew a torso of a person, then inside of the torso, I drew a big cage with a tiny person crouching inside of it. I still didn’t know how to describe that feeling at the time, but that was also accurate.

That counselor asked me, “Is there a lock on this cage?”

I said, “Yes.”

She then asked, “Where’s the key?”

And I answered, “I don’t know.” 

~*~ 

I’ve been writing this same post for several weeks now. As of today (the day this is posted), my grandfather who discussed his end-of-life plans over Zoom with the family has passed away, and two weeks ago, on Saturday, my husband’s grandfather also passed away.

Earlier in the day, on my lunch break, I was texting back and forth simultaneously with my father and my husband. My father was telling me that the whole family was visiting my grandfather today in the hospital, and that things looked grim. He was most likely not going to last the rest of the day, let alone until Saturday, which was when I was planning to pay him a visit. My husband was (is) very broken up over the fact that he did not get much of a final goodbye with his grandfather, and so he was encouraging me to take off work and go see mine.

I had a thought:

I work in childcare with infants as my day job. I love my job. Things about the corporate structure and my coworkers and the children’s parents annoy me every single day, but the passion is definitely there. I considered going to a hospital an hour and a half drive away from where I was right then just to watch someone I know and love wither away and die while my whole family grieves and cries around me. Then I considered going back inside, hanging out with a bunch of babies that I also know and love, surrounded by happiness and laughter and nurturing young lives while they grow at their most vulnerable stage.

I knew instantly which one I would rather do.

I told my husband, quote: “I realize it makes you sad, the idea of not getting a final goodbye with a loved one. But like. My family is so much more blase about death. I’m ok with it. If it doesn’t work out [that I get to go see my grandfather in the hospital], it doesn’t work out.” I followed it up later, after a couple more back-and-forth messages, with, “Imma be real frank with you my love, I’ve been told my whole life how to grieve. I don’t need you to continue to tell me how to grieve.”

Several hours later, I read the text message from my father announcing the death as I was walking across the parking lot to my car after work. He knows that I have to keep my phone in my locker, so news is usually broken over text.

I was fine.

I called my husband. We were both driving; he was going way up north to stay at his mother’s house for the night so that he could see his dentist in the morning for an appointment (I’ve asked him why he doesn’t get a new dentist closer to home. He says, “I like my dentist.”) and I was driving home from work. We talked a lot on the drive home, about many different things. For perspective, I live almost an hour away from my place of work.

My dad called me while I was still on the phone with my husband, when I was about about five minutes away from home.

I have not witnessed my dad cry very often. But he was audibly sniffly. He started laying out in detail the events leading up to the death, and that’s when it started to crash down for me.

I got off the phone with him right as I pulled into my driveway. I brought in all my things, put them down where they go, and went to the bathroom to change out of my work uniform and into my comfy clothes.

I snapped out of a dissociative state lightheaded and dizzy, half-undressed with my work shirt in the bathroom sink and my pants halfway down my legs. This was not how my after-work routine usually went. I was confused as hell. I didn’t know what was going on or what I was feeling or how I had even gotten here from the living room. Then, it occurred to me.

This is what grief feels like.

Real, actual grief.

Something they don’t tell you in counseling about "the five stages of grief" is that it’s not really five clear-cut stages with neat labels and set durations. Grief can’t be boiled down to that. It’s its own phenomenon, more than a simple, describable emotion. It makes you feel like someone else. It makes you feel like a vulnerable, squishy, fallible human, an animal, a monster even, and it is the best feeling in the world to feel it for the first time in your adulthood, when you’ve only watched everyone around you feel it for themselves up until that moment.

It makes you feel so deeply, primally, viscerally, alive.

I sat down on the floor where I was previously standing and I sobbed and I cried and I lost my mind, and it felt so amazing. I was finally feeling something by myself, for myself, without anybody else’s influence.

On the outside, I’m sure I did not appear to be okay. Anybody witnessing my breakdown would have attempted to stop it. But I didn’t want it to be stopped. I wanted to finally feel this mythological thing that I’ve been attempting to hunt down and pathologize for practically my whole life.

And that, friends, is an appropriate bookend to this saga. If you take anything from this, let it be that it feels so much better to let yourself feel how you actually feel than to let someone else tell you what you’re feeling. Letting other people put a label on it, diagnose it, medicate it, can be detrimental.

Of course, if the medication helps you, take it, and get whatever diagnosis you need to convince the stuffy men in suits behind the desk of your health insurance company that you need it. That’s fine.

But you’re so much more than what other people say you are. In fact, you’re probably much more than what you describe yourself as. There may even be more to you than you realize at all. There doesn’t have to be a word for it. You are you. Unfathomable. Indescribable. Just you. That’s enough, and that’s okay.

Life Goes On

Hey. It’s been a while. Thought I’d update the blog.

First thing’s first, I got married to the love of my life in October.

Yes, it’s Tyler. 

 

The theme of the wedding was Jurassic Park in Space, given that he loves dinosaurs and I love astrology and astronomy. Our rings are made of meteorite and fossil pieces encased in resin over a tungsten band. I felt like a woodland queen in my crown of dried ferns and flowers, and my bouquet of… more ferns. There were lots of ferns. I was not mad about it.

I had stress dreams for months leading up to the wedding. I was so scared that everything was going to go wrong, that it would all be some huge disaster and that I would embarrass myself in front of everyone I’ve ever known. But when I got to the venue and got ready, I sat down, all dressed up, in the bridal room. As my maid of honor put clear nail polish on the gems of my shoes so that they wouldn’t snag my dress, I just had this sense of… calm. Like everything was falling into place the way it was always supposed to.

I would only change two things about that day. First, I would try to do everything in my power to make the aisle wider. As it was, it was quite narrow, my dress was quite poofy, and my father, who walked me down the aisle, is quite a large man. There was barely any room for us side-by-side. Second, I would have perhaps cut the grandparents from the procession. We wanted to honor them, but there were simply too many of them, and it made everything hectic and crowded.

Aside from that, the day was perfect.

Back to Not Knowing

A year ago today, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.

I love kids. I love teaching them the valuable skills they need to know in order to live a fulfilling life. The problem is, I don't know what a fulfilling life for me looks like anymore.

I got burned out on the teaching path. I worked in childcare for three years and in doing so, I found out an important fact about myself: my bandwidth in terms of children maxes out at two at a time. A classroom full of kids is not my ideal workplace.

So, career-wise, I'm back to square one.

I've always been a dreamer. Ideally, I'd like to be an internet celebrity or a professional full-time author. But those things just aren't practical. Because I was always told by media and by society that I should follow my dreams, no matter how improbable or unlikely, I never thought to explore my options. I've never once gone to a career fair. I never met with a counselor about my professional future. And now I'm stuck trying to think practically about what I could do, rather than what I want to do.

I don't have the mind for school. I'm not stupid, I know I have the capability to do whatever I put my mind to, it's just the actual putting of my mind to it that trips me up. I have a little tiny voice inside me that's petulant and unyielding, telling me, "I don't wanna!" to everything. And it's especially strong when it comes to school. If anything is too easy or otherwise inconvenient, that little voice speaks up. I don't do important assignments. I miss deadlines. And I don't know how to make it shut up.

I believe I've found a workaround, however. Several accredited universities offer coding bootcamps, programs that last 3-6 months and are about as straightforward as they come. I have experience with HTML and a little bit of CSS, so I feel like I have a good background for becoming a web developer. It's a respectable career that doesn't seem to be going anywhere with the way the world is going. Tech is a major industry. That's something I could do.

But do I want to do it?

Eh. Sure.

I got a job in healthcare after I decided I couldn't handle the children anymore. I'm now working graveyard shifts assisting adults with developmental disabilities. It's better than childcare in some ways, but still not what's in my heart. I've learned a lot, and I respect the people in my current field. But I just can't do it forever.

I know it's what I don't want to do. That's kind of the only thing that's driving me right now.

There's plenty to look forward to in my life otherwise, though. Tyler is going to propose soon, I'm sure of it. I've been looking at wedding venues and setting up a budget and a registry and a wedding website. This man keeps me going. He encourages me to do what I want to do, but also keeps me on the ground, thinking realistically.

Capitalism can take away everything, but it can't take away my dreams.

Moving, moving, moving.

My life is moving at the speed of a freight train right now and I can't decide whether or not I like it.

But I think I'm erring on the side of I do. 

I started dating a guy in March of this year. Seven months ago. His name was Tyler. It was going to be my last date before I gave up on the apps and tried more traditional methods.

The first green flag was the fact that he wanted to come to me for the date. I don't live in a completely rural town, but I am kind of out of the way for most people so I have always been used to making the trip when meeting up with someone for the first time. But he asked me what cool things there were to do in my city, so I told him, and we agreed to meet here.

We clicked almost immediately. Any silences or lulls in the conversation felt natural and comfortable. He made me feel safe to be myself. 

We had Mexican food and then went antiquing, a very stereotypical lesbian date. I always think back to that fact and think it's funny, because as a cisgender man and a cisgender woman, we appear on the surface to be the most cis-hetero couple ever. But I am bisexual, and he is gray-asexual, so the reality of the situation is anything but.

He bought me a necklace. We got milkshakes and walked along the waterfront. The sky started to turn dark gray with an oncoming storm, so we were forced to end the date after four and a half hours.

We kissed.

It was magical.

After three months, I revisited the wedding playlist I had made on Spotify years and years ago. I made edits. I started a Pinterest board. We were seriously discussing our future together. I spent almost every weekend at his house.

By August, the weekend of the renaissance faire, we had come up with a five year plan. We wanted to buy a house together in a better city. We wanted to get married. We wanted to start thinking about kids.

A little over a week ago, his roommates announced they would not be renewing their lease and therefore would be moving out by November 5th.

This, of course, allows the space for me to move in.

In the span of eight months, I have gone from thinking I would be single forever to finding my person completely by happenstance. 

I interviewed for two different jobs closer to him (not all that different from each other, really, just different companies) and received an offer from one. I'm expecting the second offer to roll in later today.

Things are going about as well as they possibly can. But everything is moving so fast, things that happened a few days ago feel like they happened weeks ago. A couple months feels like last year.

My move-in date is November 17th and I am so incredibly excited to start this new chapter of my life. After being stuck for so long, I feel like my life is moving forward. I'm finally going somewhere. I'm so incredibly sick of plateaus and I am so glad I have the resources now to get off of this giant one I've been on for almost five years, only to go up a ski lift to the top of a mountain.

Things are looking good.

You have no idea.

 It was raining. We were going to take a walk on the beach, but it was raining, so we ducked inside of a bar instead, and that’s when you told me.

Right after I said I wanted to make it work. Right after I told you that my dad said that you were a keeper. You said you didn’t see the relationship going anywhere long-term.

I kept it together. I said I appreciated your honesty. I know we weren’t together for that long. But, holy shit, the emptiness and the loneliness that I felt when you told me was fucking devastating. I was so ready to let myself love. Freely and openly. And, god, really that’s all I want to do.

You have no idea how good it felt to kiss you, how every touch felt like electricity and warmth and safety. You have no idea how terrified I am that I’m never going to feel that authentically again.

I fear I’m just going to be single my entire life.

—

I wrote this in the heat of the moment, in the car on the ferry ride back home. Since then, I have spoken with my therapist and have discovered some things about myself. Namely, that I have a fear of abandonment due to losing my mother to cancer at a young age. This, obviously, makes breakups feel that much more crippling.

Of course, the logic doesn’t make anything feel any less real. It’s a coping mechanism of mine to hide behind the logical explanations for things to make them feel more distant, less personal. But, really, what’s more personal than a relationship ending?

Another thing I learned about myself in therapy is that it’s perfectly healthy to put my feelings away in an internal metaphorical container… momentarily. Not forever. The box doesn’t disappear. It only gets bigger and heavier with every little trauma that I put into it, and if I don’t deal with any of the contents, I can’t handle them at all anymore. I take out one, and they all spill out all over the place.

So I’m dealing with it. I’m using my safe spaces and free time to cry. Taking the trauma out of the box and confronting it. Looking it straight in the face and telling it I’m stronger than it makes me believe. I can survive this; I’ve survived worse.

And I’m also dating again. So there's that.

The One That Got Away

I made this blog to let out the thoughts and feelings that are too loud to silence. It’s an outlet for my racing mind, for when it gets to be racing, which is rare nowadays, thankfully. But, as it is now, it’s 2:47 AM as I’m writing this and, well… my thoughts are racing.

I’m getting ready to break up with my girlfriend of two months. Not a long time, but honestly it’s the longest relationship I’ve ever had and the thought of doing so is incredibly difficult. I like her. I like hanging out with her. We have a ton in common. I just don’t feel a spark where she deserves a whole-ass bonfire. I want her to be happy and fulfilled, which is why I need to let her go, so she can find somebody who loves her the way she deserves to be loved.

I think about the one that got away a lot (again, something my current girlfriend doesn’t deserve). We went on one date. He was good at holding a conversation where I was bad at it, and we had things in common but not everything, which left room for learning, which was nice. He was cordial, polite, responsible, holy shit a catch. And we just… stopped talking.

I think about what could have been with him a lot. A lot more than I probably should, more than is probably appropriate. I feel like we really could have been something if I had just been better at talking. I keep hoping and praying that he’ll text me again and want to sweep me off my feet. I wonder sometimes if I should text him first, but I’m sure he’s found somebody by now and that kind of behavior would be decidedly uncool. I don’t want to be that person.

I think I might be cursed to be single for the rest of my life.

To a Long Lost Friend

I had a dream about you last night.

We were in school again, this time in college and everything about you was different; you had dyed your waist-length hair blue and had taken on a careless persona, said you were an Instagram influencer now.

But I saw through everything and persevered — we became friends again. We became inseparable again.

It just reminded me how much I miss you.

I know it’s weird that I do. We were friends for one year in high school before going our separate ways because I was dead-set on Running Start and you… weren’t, I guess. You probably stayed in school, did well on your assignments, graduated, and went to college like your parents expected you to.

That’s the thing, though. Did your parents expect anything from you? I always assumed they did from the way you talked about them which was little to not at all. I assumed a lot of things about you from the way you talked about yourself, which was little to not at all. I assumed you were hurt somewhere underneath the jokes and the K-pop and I wanted to help you.

I never got the chance.

It turns out Running Start isn’t all that great. At least not when you don’t put your heart and soul into it. I didn’t. I failed. I got my G.E.D. I often wonder if I had stayed in high school whether or not I would have graduated. But mostly whether or not I would have been better friends with you, and thus more motivated to stay in school rather than sit in the library and draw Pokémon all day, like I did in college.

I’ve had other friend-flings in the past that lasted a year or two and then fizzled out, but the difference is we’re still connected one way or another, and the problem I keep coming back to with you in particular is that I don’t even know if you’re even alive anymore. You could have died and I would have no idea. Nobody would have known to tell me, I wouldn’t have known to attend your funeral, and so now I’m stuck in this limbo of half-grief, of possible grief, where I’m grieving the person I could have known better and didn’t.

I thought I knew you, but I probably really didn’t.

If you’re out there, I do really want to be friends with you again. I have the heart of an elephant that never forgets.

I miss you.