In high school, as most of you can imagine, I was a total dork. I was bullied for a lot of different things, and I was really mean to myself over it. It's taken a long time for me to fully come to terms with all of this and to be okay with it, but here I am in 2023, seven years out of high school, and I finally feel like a human being again.
A couple of years ago I stopped writing. I felt like I wasn't allowed to, for some reason or another, and so I just closed my journals and notebooks, and cold turkey quit posting my shit on the internet for everyone to see, and gave up on the drive to write and create. Part of it had to do with the church I was attending, or the fact that I was attending church at all, and some of it had to do with time management and different family circumstances.
I didn't have time.
I no longer had the passion.
Aaaand, so I just stopped. Why not, right? Nobody was reading it anyways. Who even blogs or writes anymore? Everyone is on TikTok and Instagram now and I felt displaced, over my head, and way out of my league.
In the time that I've kept quiet and away from writing, I have experienced some great joys. I have some extraordinary people in my life and they care what I have to say, so I usually keep all of my quips to my immediate bubble and away from everyone else.
Last year, and the year before, sucked.
2020 sucked because of the pandemic.
2021 sucked because I thought my dad was literally not going to survive it.
& 2022 saw back to back traumas in January, February, April, and May. To the point where one night in July my husband and I thought I was having a heart attack and landed in the local ER.
Turns out, the panic attacks I'd been having? I was having like the demigod version of one of them, and the doctor did a heart work up just in case, chatted with my about my options, and referred me to a new doctor. She's been awesome, and as of December I've been on meds for six months to help with my anxiety (my first time medicated since I was diagnosed... with anxiety and depression... in 2011, twelve years ago!) and it has changed me as a person in the best way.
My degree path shifted. I got fired from a job. I have the coolest job ever right now, that has nothing to do with my degree path, and my life has so many options ahead and it's been really neat.
I have some friends that are older than me (and when you are reading this, no I would never call y'all old, but you're pointedly older than I am and thus wiser) that drink box wine with me when they come into town and I have adopted them as my other parents. They gifted me a notebook for my birthday, and a week later, I sat down and wrote.
As of right now, I've been writing for some reason or another since August, and it has been really refreshing. I have journaled a bit, taking what normally would be housed here and airing it there, and this week I started DMing (Dungeon Mastering, for those not nerd-inclined) for my friends for the very first time in D&D. Work requires a lot of writing, and storytelling, even if it's over the phone with my coworkers after a shift with a drink in my hand.
I'm around people that I never thought I'd be around, from all sorts of weird and crazy backgrounds, and I find myself being depended on and needed and it's been incredibly stressful and incredibly strange. At the same time, it has been overwhelmingly necessary, and has kept me alive. Bad mental health days now consist of messaging distanced friends for advice and memes, and jumping into another friend's car or riding along with my husband to spend money on food or trinkets. (Retail therapy is real, y'all. Don't knock it until you try it.)
* * * * *
All of this above leads me to the point of typing this all out at 3am, when I could be reading a really good book that a friend has loaned me, and that is that I have reflected a lot recently on my words and on the words that are around me.
People have really wrecked me with words in the past. Whether it was high school bullies, shitty coworkers of the past, strangers on the Internet, or even people in my family that I thought I could trust, people have spent a lot of time influencing how I feel and I have been taking shit way too personally.
2022 was the year of me learning not to take everything personally.
2023 is the year of me going back over the notes I took when people did treat me with the kind of disgusting ferocity that made me think about ending my life as a teenager.
Being a young adult is weird and messy, and despite the crazy looks I get when I tell people that I'm married (because I'm "only 24" and that seems impossible), I feel like I have escaped a whole different hellscape of life by finding someone to love and be committed to this early on. Bless him, I can be a lot sometimes, so bless this man for taking my attitude in stride and understanding me at my weakest.
Facing the past is odd when people around you keep screaming that you have never been through anything rough.
[To be fair, I haven't ever faced an addiction or been to jail, so I guess that makes me lucky?? Or something like that?? I don't know. I lost a friend to addiction in 2019, the first person I'd ever been close to that died of an overdose, and so I will never view addicts or alcoholics or anything with less dignity than they deserve. The amount of medical professionals I see that don't acknowledge that medicine in the modern age defines addiction as a disease is so far beyond me, and I really could go on for ages about how people like that shouldn't be anywhere near modern medicine.]
But--
I was sick as an infant and as a kid. I didn't get to do normal things sometimes (like play sports) when I was younger because of illnesses or disabilities that I had. I played basketball in high school and was really bad at it, but that's one of the highlights of my life because of the lack thereof when I was like, a preteen.
My parents have been sick. Dad was sick, completely hereditarily, and it took a toll on everyone around us for a very long time. Medicine has progressed so far, and I'm so thankful that he's still around with us, because at nine years old I didn't think he would be here anymore. For that matter, I didn't think either of my parents would be here. I did think my grandparents would be, but that is a whole different can of worms to be opened and reviewed at a different time.
We were homeless, sort of. We didn't get to live where we wanted. Money, or rather a lack of it because of disease and illness, kept us within a tight grip and directed us for a very long time. Government benefits are not shameful to me, because I understand that wanting to feed and clothe and house your family means that you care and you are trying.
I have a whole lot of religious trauma. From being asked to leave and shunned (not in a formal sense, but when it comes down to it, that's what happened) to being brainwashed and asked to give up the parts of myself that kept me safe and sane (like WRITING!!!) and so my relationship with religion isn't a good one.
I was raised in charismatic churches that believed in supernatural things and lots of spirituality, but I watched so many people that believed you couldn't put something like God in a box, treat the people he created like absolute filth. Sunday was for dressing nice and learning about loving your neighbor, Monday was for being ignored at school by the people in my youth group because the only time I fit in with them was on Wednesdays, when I broke off little pieces of myself and handed it out like candy. Money bought you the trips and the experiences and the life changing retreats, and when you didn't have money, you met God in places like emergency rooms and funeral homes, begging him for healing and change and not understanding why he wouldn't send someone to help you through it all.
"But he sent Jesus." They say.
But if Jesus walked into churches, real Jesus, not whitewashed American Christian Jesus, I don't think that many people would recognize him. When he sits down with the people in the back of the room, choosing humility, whores, addicts, drunks, and "backsliders" to the finely dressed apostacies in front of him, what will people say? Will they rope off the back part of their sanctuaries to make services look fuller on Facebook Live? Will they talk about the one Spanish service they host once a month when America is becoming a country of dual language speakers, especially in communities that were once hailed as more conservative, and will they acknowledge the Gospel in every language... Or just English?
I am plagued by these questions, by my upbringing, and despite all of this I do not think I was failed as a child. Religion and faith are incredibly important to people, and I genuinely believed in everything for such a long time, with deep conviction. I wanted to sing, and dance, and pray. But my singing was on my back porch sometimes... The dancing was done in my hallway. The prayer was done in emergent circumstances or when I sat wondering why I was even alive at all.
So now, as an adult, I am searching for answers of my own. And that's okay with me.
Some people clutch their pearls to them in mock horror when they find out my parents let my husband live with us before we were married. My mom lost lifelong friends because of it, but because her love for me, and for the man I love, was so strong, she just kept on trucking. And has found better friends now, anyways.
In addition to that, there were people that I trusted and looked up to, that fumbled that badly. They breached that trust and ripped happiness out of my grip, and I can say looking back with 100% certainty that if I would have ended my life when I was fifteen years old, some of my blood would have been on their hands.
Why wasn't I ever good enough? I was.
Why did they want to hurt me so much? Because they were hurting, and as a literal child, I was the easiest target.
What did I do to deserve that? Absolutely. Nothing.
I recently learned about some things that sent me into a spiral, and that's when I came to all of this overzealous glorious bullshit about reclaiming what hurt me and using my newfound strength to go over the past some and realize that, you know? Some of that stuff? It really wasn't okay.
And I do not owe anyone my forgiveness.
And I do not owe anyone a relationship with me.
Nor do I owe them kindness, my time, my effort, or the space in my mind that I haven't been charging them for now for almost a decade.
So time's up, y'all. GTFO.
I deserve(d) better, and 2023 is about reclamation and good books. I don't have precious reading time to waste worrying about the opinions of people who have to shout to be heard. I don't have to shout to be heard, and maybe that's why this blog has been so healing for me over the past eight years. Just writing it down is enough for it to get where it needs to go, and be seen by who needs to see it.
Anyways, if you read this far, thanks for picking my brain and letting me rant.
It's gonna be a good year. I'm tired of being afraid of saying good things and thinking that saying them or thinking them is going to jinx it or bring ill-wishes upon me. Here's to a new era of me.
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