29 and alive af

On Saturday February 22, I turn 29. I haven’t historically been a huge “birthday person,” but this is going to be a big one. Not only will it be the last year of my 20s, but I wasn’t even sure I would make it to 29, so I’m fairly excited it’s happening.

My 20s were a hard fucking decade. I think that phenomenon is pretty common for people in general. During my 20s, I: survived sexual assault, married my partner, earned 2 degrees, got my first big girl job, bought and renovated a house, was inducted into three academic honors societies, won an award for educational excellence from the MEA, got diagnosed with anxiety, and depression, and PTSD, and ADHD, and endometriosis. I traveled the world, became an aunt twice over, helped my sister through a divorce, stood as a bridesmaid a million times, got at least 25 tattoos (I’ve honestly lost count), made friends, lost friends, survived suicide, fell in love with New Orleans jazz, started a blog, and came out as bisexual.

I’ve been so low I didn’t think I would make it out. I’ve had adventures. I’ve accomplished goals. I’ve coped with failure, death, and pain.

Those were my 20s. Doubtlessly the most formative decade of the three I’ve been alive.

And standing here, looking down the barrel of my last year of my 20s, it is difficult how to adequately express the extent of my happiness that I am still alive.

The knowledge and understanding that I almost committed suiced in October has weighed on my mind in interesting ways over the last four-ish months. Considering I had no plans to wake up on October 30, 2019, I could have never predicted the ways that fact would ultimately bring an end to many chapters of my life, and a beginning to many others.

What I can no longer do is…

Look, I made a suicide plan and scheduled a time to follow-through on it. We have a detached garage, and I therefore knew my Subaru and I could poison myself with carbon monoxide without harming my dog and cats in the process. But, on the day I was planning on doing it, I went to the hospital instead. And here I am.

I consider this event a “mental breakdown” in the very purest sense of the term. I survived my 20s by gathering up all of my symptoms from PTSD, anxiety, and depression, all of my endometriosis pain, all of my emotional needs, and shoving them deep into a well in the pit of my stomach. Within me lies a Mariana Trench packed with the ghosts of my past I refused to acknowledge. And it totally worked. I had everyone convinced that I was “normal.” Better than normal, actually. Ask my bosses and/or teachers from this time period and they would describe me as high achieving, exceeding expectations.

But as I tried to keep them captive, those ghosts fused together like the Power Rangers once they transform into that robot thing. They became stronger, angrier. A demonic beast that ate me alive and almost killed me.

And now that I’ve fought that demon, and won, I can’t lock it back up anymore. Like, I literally can’t. My brain has literally lost the ability to perform that function. I think about mental health every single day. I talk about mental health every single day. I have to. My near-suicide didn’t kill me, but it did kill my ability to suppress. I have completely lost my ability to pretend. I can no longer “fake it til I make it.”

This means I acknowledge and work through every thought distortion, every distressing emotion, and every trigger as it comes. This is exhausting. Some days it feels like all I am capable of is surviving. It also means that there are lots of things I was able to do well before, that I can’t do at all anymore.

For instance, I can’t commit to plans. I hate myself for it, but I’ve bailed kind of a lot lately. I usually make plans with someone ahead of time, and will spend the intervening days fully committed to going. But if something triggers me on the day of said plans, I bail. I have to. Because I learned the hard way that, if I don’t put my mental health first, it could kill me.

I also can’t take control in chaotic situations. Honestly, most large crowds give me anxiety right now. But, if I don’t have to be in control, if I don’t have to be the one that makes sure everyone gets home safely and nothing gets lost, I can relax. On the other hand, if I am given any kind of responsibility in chaotic situations, I completely shut down. This has made doing my job almost impossible. I don’t know how many of you have spent time in middle school lately, but it’s a pretty chaotic place. Teachers constantly need to be on guard and in control or everything will fall apart. Everything often falls apart anyway, even if we teachers think we are in control. And I cannot handle it anymore. Luckily, my coworkers and administration have been incredibly supportive. But still, every day is an uphill climb. Every morning I start back at the bottom of the hill.

What I can do now that I couldn’t before…

I can be honest. I can be the most honest version of myself possible now. This is momentous for me. I no longer have the energy to try to “get” people to like me, or impress anyone, so I don’t anymore. Obviously, I still have low self esteem. It will take much longer than four-ish months for me to topple that mountain. That being said, I no longer let it change my behavior. I no longer let my low self esteem stop me from asserting exactly what I want and need.

And I can assert myself now. My long history of perfectionism made it impossible for me to ask for help. Both in and outside of my school career, I limped my way through many things I could have made easier for myself if I would have just asked. Then, asking for help literally saved my life. I was self-aware enough to realize what I was going through was an emergency, and I reached out to a coworker who took me to the hospital. More than anything else in my life, this event made me realize it is OK to ask for help. I would love to say that asking for help is easy for me now, but that would be a lie. Still, I can ask for help now, and that is a triumph. I can assert my existence and validate my own needs. I can lean on the people in my life who have been desperate for me to do so in the face of my lifetime of fierce independence.

Finally, I can talk about and work through my emotions, rather than letting them conquer me. That demonic beast of suppressed needs that almost killed me in October? I calmed it. I gave it the validation it so desperately needed. I gave it a home in my life, and my heart, and my brain.

I shake hands with the symptoms of my PTSD, and my anxiety, and my depression. I acknowledge their existence. I acknowledge their importance. And I allow myself to walk away.

I ask myself what I’m feeling regularly. I allow myself the time to define my emotions. I am compassionate with myself. I utilize my skills and my support system to fulfill the needs of my emotions. And I put them to bed.

Then, there’s grief…

I don’t know about anyone else, but I was never told that humans can experience grief for many types of loss; only one of which is the death of a loved-one. I have cycled through many different and unexpected iterations of the five stages of grief over and over again since October.

I’ve had to grieve my former, “perfect,” self. As I mentioned above, my ability to exceed everyone’s expectations was fueled by my ability to suppress all of my trauma, emotions, and needs. Therefore, my inability to suppress those things has resulted in a considerable drop in performance. I can no longer do the things I once did, to the standard to which I once did them. And this is really difficult for me to handle.

Releasing myself from needing to be perfect has not taken away my feelings of failure every time I fall short. I relied on my former perfection to prove my self worth to the world. I derived self esteem from my productivity. I am currently in a time of life where self esteem and feelings of worth are running in short supply. Additionally, I no longer have my perfect performance to draw from. I therefore am experiencing an intense loss.

A loss of identity (as the “best” at whatever I’m doing). A loss of confidence in whether or not I’m still meeting expectations. A loss of confidence in how my bosses and colleagues feel about me.

Furthermore, I am daily coming to new understandings of the roots and consequences of my mental health. I have a lifetime’s worth of connections being forged in my brain as I truly analyze my emotions for the first time. These connections often result in epiphanies, often that knock me on my ass.

I’ll give you an example: while talking to my partner about something unrelated the other day, it hit me that I have spent the last decade of our relationship truly believing that I was unworthy of his love. I literally believed that I had nothing to offer a partner. I believed that, in order to keep his love, I had to prove myself worthy over and over again. I lived my life in an intense state of anxiety that, at any moment, I was under threat of losing the love of my life once he realized I couldn’t maintain the standard of domestic excellence that I was pretending I could.

That’s fucking depressing.

My self esteem was so low, I wasted an entire decade of life refusing to allow myself to feel loved, when I had an overabundance of love available to me.

Please tell me I don’t have to illustrate for you what I lost in this scenario.

Happy Birthday to Me

My point is that my 29th birthday is a big deal to me. This year, I will shamelessly celebrate myself to the fullest. I will be loud, outrageous, and silly. I will overdress for the bar I’m going to.

And everywhere I go, I will let everyone know that it’s my birthday.

Because it is not just a birthday.

It is more than an anniversary of the year I was born.

It is a symbol of the hellfire I walked through.

It is a trophy forged out of the ashes of my old life, and reborn in the phoenix of my new.

My Coworkers Found Out that I Love Celine Dion Last Night, and I’m Not Even Embarrassed

How long has it been since you’ve danced?

Full on

Every limb engaged

Breathless

Dancing?

I don’t mean the kind of dancing we are told we need to do in order to attract a mate.

I mean the kind of dancing we did when we were toddlers. And the familiar song from our favorite Disney movie came on in the car on the way home from daycare.

I mean the dancing where you are nothing

but yourself

and the beat

and off-key repetition of the lyrics.

and every ounce of

your energy

your spirit

your self

is fully invested in this kinesthetic expression of the sheer euphoria achieved by being fully, totally, and inescapably present.

At what age do we stop dancing?

Not competitive, structured, dancing.

With methods, and rules, and schools, and choreography.

The kind of dancing where you move based

on instinct

on emotion

on vibe

Your limbs writhing on

(or off)

rhythm

each with a life of its own

performing movements

and making shapes

never before seen by humans.

Let’s make a promise to each other.

Let’s dance more.

And think less.

How to Isolate Like a Pro: A guide to letting your anxiety ruin your relationships

1. Meet someone you’re really into. Become friends with them. Maybe even start to love them. Let that feeling fill you up. Feel loved. Feel confident. Feel the excitement of a reciprocated connection. Reach out to them when you think about them. Create inside jokes. Spend time with them whenever possible.

2. Start over analyzing everything they do and say. Personalize it. Every space of time you don’t talk, let it make you think it’s your fault. You obviously have done something wrong by this point. People don’t like clingy people. Stop acting like you’re obsessed with them, it’s obviously chasing them away.

3. Prepare yourself for inevitable rejection by pulling away. Talk yourself out of messaging them every single time. Be aloof. Mysterious. Put the genie back into the bottle. Tell yourself you imagined the connection in the first place. You’re stupid. You’re naive. I can’t believe you thought they cared about you anyway. It’s better to just pull away now so you don’t get your hopes up.

4. Try to read their mind. Where did you go wrong? What do they want from you? Maybe you can change yourself somehow to get them to like you again?

5. Finally talk to them again. Maybe you messaged them, maybe they hit you up. They’re trying to figure out what’s wrong. Oh you’ve just been busy? Oh ok, they thought they may have done something wrong. Let’s hang out I miss you too.

6. Repeat.

And in the Middle of the Chaos, a Love Story [pt II]

I love my husband. I think the feeling that I am the most excited about right now is how much I love my husband. I don’t think he gets enough credit for holding me together. So I’m gonna tell the whole world the extent to which he deserves some credit.

My husband and I met in college. Right around my sophomore, his junior year we were really starting to develop actual real feelings for each other (beyond the “let’s get drunk and try to get laid” attitude inherent in American university life).

That fall I also got raped.

And I didn’t tell him.

But I went crazy.

I capital H, Hate when we call women crazy. And I can’t find a more accurate adjective for what I was.

I entered into a period of severe mental and emotional instability that impacted my relationships with everyone in my life. I reflect on this and I wonder why no one in my life told me about myself back then. Were they that scared of me? Or was I as good at hiding my inner chaos as I thought I was?

But during it all, there was my friend. So caring. So stable. So funny. So sexy. So god damn laid back. So absolutely in love with me.

So naturally my friend turned into my boyfriend. And then my live-in boyfriend. And I was still unstable. But I had the grounding force of my boyfriend containing my chaos within its shores.

And I continued to function. Regardless of the chaos.

And then we got engaged. And we took a nice long time to plan what was still the most fun wedding I’ve ever been to or heard of in my life.

And then I became a wife. And a wife is something different. A wife has weight to it. A wife has a standard to live up to in the role model of both her own, and his own mothers. And the standard is very high among these women.

Let me be clear, this being held to a standard? It wasn’t something my mother, nor my mother in law, ever held me to. This came from my brain and my brain only. And it was due to my feeling of just being “different” *cough*queer* that stressed me out. My mother and mother in law were both good mothers. And their style of mothering were both traditional in the sense of being caretakers and child rearers in the home.

This would not be my style of motherhood. In fact, I don’t actually want to be a mother. I feel that way for a lot of reasons, but one of them is the fact that I do not have a caretaker personality. And my mother figures both had stellar caretaker personalities.

I cannot cook. My ADHD makes it difficult for me to stay clean. My husband annoys me when he’s sick (sorry babe).

No, I want to engage in a deeply emotional and/or reasoned discussion. I want to connect on interests and vibes and creative sparks. I want to help you grow emotionally and spiritually. I am such a fucking Pisces.

But I’m no good at helping anyone – like not even myself – maintain physical well-being.

So my inability to reach this standard I saw before me started eating me alive. And my anxiety started peaking like never before. And I entered my blue period. This was a period of depression of which I had no idea the magnitude until I was able to look back in hindsight.

Then between 2015, the year we got married, and October 29, 2019, the day I almost committed suicide, my trauma got triggered. Over and over again.

At first it was a few small triggers. Being alone with a strange male on an elevator. At a gas station. Dropping off donations at Goodwill.

Then a rapist got elected president.

Then Harvey Weinstein and Larry Nassar and Brock Turner and #metoo.

And then Brett Kavanaugh.

And then I watched a boy choke a girl in my classroom.

Then a girl got raped in my school.

Then I got assaulted at a Halloween event in Detroit.

Then I almost committed suicide.

And then I took a leave from work, did the best and most intense therapy I’d ever done, increased my dosage of medication, started to love myself again.

And the whole time?

My husband was there. Working on our communication. Working on his own mental health so he could better support me. Developing himself through education and starting a business. Having respect. Being an ally. An ally to me. To women in general. To anyone over whom he has any privilege. To plants. To animals. To the earth.

He helped me develop my understanding of my own sexuality. And didn’t feel challenged by it a single god. damned. second.

He broke himself out of the binary. Became willing to accept the depth of human beings on many grey levels so utterly terrifying for a Taurus.

He pulled us together after a terrible year and turned into the support system for his whole family.

He dug down literal roots into the soil of his own creation, and made the sexiest vegetable garden possible, that was able to feed our family for months.

He has big dick energy in literal droves (with his nose piercing, and painted nails + personal trainer physique, manly beard, and canine teeth that are just a tad wolffish).

He is the ultimate caretaker. The ultimate support system. The ultimately perfectly designed partner to me on this wild ride of a decade we’ve spent together.

I know you will say you don’t need it. But CREDIT babe. Take every single drop of credit I can ring out of my poor mangled heart.

Stay grateful for your support system.

And in the Middle of the Chaos, a Love Story [pt I]

I started work again on Monday. And just like that, it feels like I never left. It was a good week, an uneventful week. Even with that being so, my feet are swollen and sore, my knees are killing me from being on my feet all day. I’m exhausted, I’m breaking out, and I’m realizing how difficult it is to take care of yourself when you are a teacher. Most of all though, I hate what it’s done to my relationships.

I’m the kind of person that will do what it takes to do my job well. Unfortunately, teaching is the kind of job with an infinite to-do list. If you’re like me, and you have to be perfect, there will be an unending list of demands to keep you busy and distant from everyone in your life but your students.

My initial concept for this blog post was a detailed assessment of the aspects of being a teacher that makes this the reality. But I quickly got bored. As shocking as the details are (or should be) to everyone else, they are the mundane reality of my day to day. Instead, I ended up daydreaming about my husband.

You see, on Sunday before I went back to work, my husband admitted to me he had anxiety over me going back to work. He was anxious because he felt like he was losing me. Since I would be going back to work. And he had gotten used to having me around.

I have to admit, this crushed me. And it’s all my fault. I started reflecting on my and my husbands relationship, and really realizing how much my mental health and my job has had an impact on it.

I realized how much I had put my husband through.

I realized how badly I needed to make changes, so my work life could no longer suck the life force out of my physical, mental, and relational health.

So on that note, I will be following up tomorrow with a poetic narration of my own reflections in this vein that ended up in a love story of epic proportions.

And as it goes for everything else, I’m kind of starting to lean into this theme of freeing myself from the mold of how I thought my life should go. So who knows…

2019, The Triumphant Year

It’s New Years Eve and, like many, I’ve been doing a lot of reflection. Looking back, I cycled through many adjectives before I could find the right one to apply to 2019. I landed on triumphant. When looking at the year as a whole, 2019 was not exactly good. There were important moments of joy, but there were just as many important moments of heartache, and even near tragedy. I worked hard this year; at work, for grad school, on myself. I not only went through changes, I went through complete transformations. All in all though, 2019 was a triumph for me. Here, I have included a brief reflection on the events of this year that made it so damn triumphant.

The Joy

On January 23, 2019, my sister’s divorce was finalized. This may seem like a weird event to include in the “joy” category, but believe me, it was the right choice. Sometimes marriages need to end. My sister’s marriage was one of them. And when it did, I got my sister back in a big way. This event also started out our theme for 2019 with a bang. This year, my sister and I decided, the theme would be “Taking out the Trash.” Basically, that’s our asshole way of goal setting. The goal being that we would spend 2019 ridding our lives of anything toxic that no longer served us. And we totally did. Toxic relationships, toxic thoughts, toxic habits; we systematically deleted as many as we could from our lives throughout the course of the year. And believe me when I tell you, I felt a sense of increased joy and freedom with each deletion.

On the other side of the coin, I opened myself up to new kinds of connections this year. I brought new people into my life. And, in 2019, I built connections with these new people by being genuinely myself. As someone with a lifetime of low self esteem under my belt, I attracted a lot of people based on how I could serve them. I made many friends and relationships over the years by being a people-pleaser. I became a pro at morphing myself into exactly who each individual wanted me to be (a pattern which widely led to our theme this year, see above). In 2019, I quit doing that. I worked on building my confidence. I committed myself to being honest, to allowing myself to take up space. And, as a result, both the old relationships I kept, and the new relationships I made, are stronger, more loving, and more supportive than I’ve ever experienced.

These people are what brought me joy in 2019. I traveled with them, I traveled to see them. I had silly drunk dance parties with them. Explored new outlets for creativity and worked on fun projects with them. Stayed up all night talking to them. Sang Celine Dion with them. Watched every single movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in order with them. Taught them. Learned from them. Laughed with them. Cried with them. Leaned on them for support. So, to all the people who helped make 2019 a triumph for me, thank you. Thank you so much.

The Tragedy

Whereas some of the highs I had in 2019 were the highest highs of my life, I also experienced the lowest lows. The first half of the calendar year was the last half of my 2018/19 school year as a teacher. That was a really difficult school year. I had a high population of students with childhood trauma, a high rate of suicide attempts among my 8th graders, rampant issues with homophobic bullying in my school (that my school district handled inappropriately regardless of how hard I fought for change). By the end of it, I was questioning whether or not I still wanted to be a teacher. Those questions immediately sent me into an identity crisis, as teaching is all I ever planned on doing, and all I ever felt I was good at. The school year ended with me witnessing an episode of gender-based violence in my classroom that triggered my trauma.

When summer rolled around, I really should’ve taken a break. Taken care of myself. But another stressor I’ve been struggling with is money. So, I taught summer school and I enrolled full time in grad school for the winter, spring, and summer semesters. Overall in my life, I’ve used work and school as a coping mechanism to avoid thinking about my inner turmoil. If I’m busy, I’m not thinking, so I have to stay busy. In 2019, this habit almost broke me.

Then the 2019/2020 school year unfortunately started with more triggers. On September 9, 2019, a student from our school was kidnapped by a member of the community. She was held and raped inside my school building which was open after hours for a community event. The man was caught and is being appropriately sentenced. But this event made my place of employment a rape trauma trigger that made going to work almost impossible.

When October rolled around, I was primed for a breakdown. October is always already a difficult month for me. I was raped at a Halloween party in college. Therefore, as much as I love it, the Halloween season is an incredibly salient trigger for me. All of the sights, sounds, and smells of Halloween spark flashbacks that plague me all month long. Combine that with the triggers I had already experienced this year, and I walked into October on a razor-thin edge. Then, on October 19, 2019 I was volunteering at a Halloween event in Detroit. I basically volunteered to pick up litter and empty cups off the tables so I could get free entry. I was in my own world, cleaning up the balcony of a ballroom at the Masonic Temple while a goddess of burlesque performed down below, when a drunk man I had never seen before grabbed me. My official insignia as event staff didn’t protect me from being dragged into a shadowy corner as anonymous drunk asshole attempted to stick his tongue down my throat.

I fought him off.

I went and told my supervisor.

Security found him and, no questions asked, kicked him out immediately.

I thought I was fine.

10 days later I almost killed myself.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know the rest.

The Future

Both the joys and tragedies of this year taught me a lot. They actually led to some of the most important transformations I’ve ever been through. Every single thing that happened in 2019 helped me understand myself, my needs, and my mental illnesses much better. They convinced me to seek help and make the changes that I desperately needed to make. The therapy I engaged in was the best choice I’ve ever made for myself, and I am looking at starting a new year, and a new decade, in the best emotional, mental, and relational space I’ve ever been in.

And, for 2020, my sister and I have officially decided on our new theme: I Come to Slay. In other words, 2020 will be a year of continued deference to my best self, my strongest needs, and my most important desires. I will take up space. I will be assertive. I will love myself as much as I love others. I will try my best to make positive changes in the world.

I’m ready for you, 2020. Let’s do this.

While writing the first draft of this post, I got very overwhelmed by the magnitude of what has happened in the world in 2019. From the most recent Prime Minister election in Great Britain, to India’s anti-muslim actions in Kashmir. From the climate crisis, to the continued indigenous rights violations and trans-violence happening world-wide. I look around and the world is a scary place. The state of affairs in the wider world is causing a great deal of trauma among many populations and gives me anxiety almost every day. That being said, I felt as though ruminating on all of these things I can’t control isn’t exactly the type of healthy reflection my therapist was talking about. So, if you are interested in educating yourself more about what’s going on/want to learn more about how to help, I’ve provided a list of links below:

India/Kashmir

Climate crisis

The bigot Great Britain just voted into its top job

Trans Rights

Indigenous Ally Toolkit

SOME of the many important issues impacting indigenous populations

One very small piece of mass incarceration

Literally every voice in this publication is worth learning from

Force of Nature

Look into my eyes.

Is there fire there? Do you see how the spark has returned?

I let my spark go out. It got put out.

Years ago.

When the kindling that once resided at my core was dampened by the dark void that swallowed it as I looked deeply into my own eyes reflected in a mirror over a dirty bathroom sink during one of the worst moments of my life.

But it’s back, I can feel it.

It started at the base of my pelvis. And caught. Traveling up my spinal column, flooding my senses with a sense of assuredness. Gusto. Moxie.

And others can see it too.

“You have that spark in your eye.”
“I love when you give me that fiery stare.”

“You look beautiful, full of energy.”

Look into my eyes.

Is there fire there?

Strength

A redwood.

Tall.

Steady.

Thousands of years old.

With stabilizing roots stretching down, extending their plump, life-gathering tendrils towards the molten core of

Me.

You.

Everything.

A volcano.

Fierce.

Willful.

The force of which cannot be stopped. Cannot be tempered by any man.

It bursts forth with the power of an exploding star.

And then, as its grit settles softly into the nooks and crannies of existence, it whispers:

“You are strong.”

Darkness

I was halfway through writing a post about why the capitalist consumerism of Christmas bums me out when I stopped mid-sentence and burst out laughing. Oh my god I thought, I am so morbid.

I immediately thought about a conversation I recently had with my sister.

I am a writer. I have been a writer since I started crafting my own letters and narrating my own stories to picture books in kindergarten. That being said, I’ve never shared my writing with anyone. I have a bachelor’s in history. I’ve written history. I’m getting a masters in curriculum and instruction; I’ve written curriculum. But my personal writing, the contents of my brain, and my heart, and my soul; I’ve never shared that.

And now I am. With this blog. This is my first taste of uncensored sharing of the deepest part of my brain, and my heart, and my soul. And it scares me. And I know people are reading it. Not that many people, but still, people. But I am getting zero feedback. Not negative, not positive, just none.

Well, that’s not completely fair, nor true I guess. There have been a few who have reached out and thanked me, told me they’re proud of me, and told me to keep it up. I appreciate that feedback so much! Knowing I have support at all has been key to keeping me going.

But I’ve not gotten any specific feedback. No critiques, no comments about how certain things made people feel, or how they may have been changed because of what they read, or how they connected to something I said. And that makes me hella anxious.

I don’t know how people are actually reacting to my writing.

When I voiced my concerns to my sister, her answer was so simple I had to mull it over for a few days before I was able to accept it as true. Basically, she said there is nothing wrong with my writing. It is honest, it is unflinching, it is dark. And people have a difficult time processing through the kind of feelings this writing makes them feel.

I knew she was right. It made sense. My darkness has been present my entire life. I remember my mom freaked out when I was in preschool because I said my favorite color was black and she thought I was depressed (I don’t really remember if I was yet, but hey).

The reality is, I’ve always been drawn to thinking really deeply, realistically, and morbidly about things. I’ve always been drawn to dark colors, late-night discussions, cemeteries, and the quiet solitude of large bodies of water at night. My curiosity is ignited by decaying buildings, bones, skulls, fungus. I relish the intellectual challenge of true crime, against the background of the crimes themselves.

It probably isn’t a coincidence that I’m also terrified of most of the things I just named.

I have no idea where that morbidity comes from. Maybe it is just my depression manifesting in my personality. Maybe I am just a pessimist. Either way, I’ve slowly come to realize how my darkness can make others uncomfortable. My sister is right, darkness scares people. Darkness brings up feelings people usually try to avoid. Sure, I have set my own darkness free and am glorying in the freedom I feel because of it. But a lot of people are perfectly happy suppressing their darkness and keeping it positive.

I guess it makes sense the masses wouldn’t want to consistently have to confront something they fear so much.

I realize that, just because I’m ready to talk about this stuff, that doesn’t mean everyone is.

I guess I hope that one day, we will progress as a people to regard the darkness with less fear. For, why should darkness be so scary? Why are we so terrified of the unknown? Why do we literarily apply the color black to evil things, “the dark side?”

In the meantime, dear readers, I realize the emotional rollercoaster I’ve taken you on. I thank those of you who have returned to more than one of my posts. I will work on sharing more of my triumphant feelings associated with my mental health journey to lighten the tone a little (at least more so than I am now). And I promise I won’t ruin your holiday with a rant about my critical analysis of the Christmas season.

All I ask in return is that you allow yourself to spend more time with your darkness. Ride the wave of that uncomfortable feeling, let it all out, and see where it takes you. Allow yourself some time to really process through an intense emotion, and see what you find out about yourself in the process.

Love & Happiness to you all.

Self Love

Self Love. This is a concept I hear about all the time. I see the memes, I’ve read the suggestions, I see the posts on Instagram by women claiming to have figured it out. But I still never “got it.”

Self Loathing. That’s a concept I’m much more comfortable with. I am a perfectionist. The only person’s expectations I have never been able to exceed are my own. Good has never been good enough. There would always be something more I could be doing to please everyone in my life, even if it destroyed me.

I’m learning that the cognitive distortions leading to these negative thought pathways are ingrained habits. And habits are hard to break. So, when I thought about Self Love as something to which I should be striving, I could never picture it. I was never able to conceptualize what it would be like to love myself, really love myself.

Until like two days ago. I captured a tiny, fleeting glimpse of what Self Love feels like and how I can define it for myself. And it changed my life.

On Sunday night, my husband went out to spend time with a friend. It is really important to us in our relationship that we have friendships and people outside of each other. Space like this is a healthy thing for us. That being said, alone time is a struggle for me. I am such a people-pleaser, I crave human connection so I can reassure myself I am worth something.

So, when my husband went out on Sunday night, my default setting was immediate loneliness. As if someone had flipped a switch on my heart and my brain, I automatically started thinking about all the people in my life who I miss. All of my friends who have moved far away from me in our adult lives, and all the things we used to do together that would fill me up.

And then I stopped myself. I told my brain no. I refused to allow myself to think those thoughts.

Instead, I asked myself, “If you had access to those friends right now, what would you choose to do and with whom would you do it?”

That’s easy, I replied to myself. My best male friend and I used to do this thing when we would hang out on chill nights in. He’s one of my best friends because he is a verbal processor too. He likes learning about and discussing interesting new things, making connections to prior knowledge, coming to new conclusions, just like I do. So what we would do when we were together was watch David Attenborough narrated nature documentaries on Netflix, on mute, while we listened to music. Phones in hand, we would rapid google any questions we had about animals, we would search up new music to sample, and we would have discussions that I swear could solve all of the world’s problems.

That’s what I wanted to do on Sunday. And, although the sadness at the distance between me and one of my best friends was still there, I had a sudden epiphany that I could do all those things by myself too. Sure, I wouldn’t really have anyone to verbally process it all with, but why does that mean I can’t listen to music and watch nature documentaries on mute? Why can’t I conduct my own solo inquiries into things I’m interested in? I can do that. So I did.

I ordered myself pizza. I put Our Planet on Netflix. I put on a Spotify playlist full of music my husband isn’t really into. I googled a bunch of random things. I drank wine. I had a whole lot of fun.

And the realization about Self Love I mentioned before? It crashed over me like the sun-warmed waves of Lake Michigan in August. What Self Love means to me is finding the thing you love to do, that you don’t need anyone else there to enjoy. It’s the space in my life I can fill, the interests I can engage in, without anyone else’s presence necessary.

Do I still miss my Colorado-stationed best friend? Obviously. Do I still wish he was around to do these activities with? Without question.

And, I found something in myself that I really loved on Sunday night. An ability to feel full, to feel good enough, to feel like I have something to offer myself, to feel like I have worth, regardless of someone else’s opinions of me.

I still don’t have all the answers. I still am not able to truly sit here and say I love myself completely. The self-criticisms are all still up there, rattling around my brain. But, I know what Self Love looks like now. I know how to access it. I know what it means to me.

I hope that anyone reading this will also take the time to figure Self Love out for themselves. Because damn, it feels good.