Without words.

I keep writing and then deleting.

It’s like the person who is the writer in me has gone on vacation.

It’s like every so often I pick up a new internal identity and run with that. I fixate on something new and then leave whoever I was in the past. At this point it just feels like I have left all of me in the past.

I miss writing so much that it hurts. I feel thoughtless and empty. I feel like I am without words.

Thank you for letting me in.

I never imagined that I could feel so whole. Like from the core of my soul I feel like everything I have ever wanted, all the wishes that I could have ever wished – have finally been granted to me.

I do not have to live in a constant replay loop of all the awful things I have done, or all the things that I wish I had done – because right now in this very moment I have exactly what I need.

The door of communication has been opened for me and my daughter and for so many years I had this painfully black void in my entire being. No matter how I tried to redirect myself, and no matter how good things had gotten for me I always had that thought in my mind that I just would never be good enough to be anything more than a once a year visit for her.

Since she has started university it is like a new chapter has opened on both her life and mine. I feel strange talking about her right now, because her story is not my story to tell – but everything is starting to make sense to me. When you spend so long wishing for something to happen and it finally does – it feels like being in a movie with a really fairy tale ending.

We were talking about Christmas gifts and what each other wanted, and she asked if I had a wish list – I was straight up honest with her in that I have spent many years wishing to reconnect with her and that for the first time ever that wish has come true. I have worked really hard to get my life to a stable and healthy place and I finally feel like I am good enough.

I am good enough.

To hear your own child for the first time when they are 18 years old respond to a ‘love you goodnight’ with a ‘love you’ right back – has opened up this entire world of hope and love. It feels like my chest could just explode with hearts, unicorns and sparkly things. I know that sounds weird, but the feelings that I am are experiencing are like nothing I could have ever dreamed of.

The absence of you for so many years was an unimaginable pain that I do not wish upon anybody, but the connection with you now is just so special to me. Everything finally feels whole in my life. Everything just feels right. I feel like a whole person – just so complete.

Thank you for letting me in.

Today.

I am ok.

Light switch

It is strange at how fast things can change in my brain. When life is busy and I don’t have time to think I feel like I am thriving. I feel on top of the world, and I feel like I have a purpose. Then when things slow down, nothing really drives me. It all doesn’t make sense in the way that it did yesterday and the day before and all those days before then.

Slept around 12 hours, woke up and puttered around the house. Lay my clean laundry all over the living room in small piles waiting to be folded and hung. Sat down with the cat and drank my fancy coffee. Everything felt the same as a normal day except today doesn’t feel normal.

Looking at other people’s lives on social media today made me even more envious than normal. I feel isolated. I feel alone in my thoughts. I feel like my entire life is only devoted to serving others, and as much joy as that brings me – what about me? What about the things that I want in life – will there ever be room for that?

I want to take a nap, but it’s almost time to make dinner. I need to keep some semblance of control over my life by following the order of things in a day. I am still wearing the same clothes I wore to bed. My face feels greasy. I think I am crashing because everything slowed down so suddenly. I think I want to go to bed right after dinner, but I have work in the morning.

This might just be a one day crash, or it might be longer than that – these things are so unpredictable. How can I feel this way when I have felt so good in the past few months?

What happened?

Things.

All is well in my life right now. I feel like I am at a place of self acceptance with my body, acceptance and managing my mental health, and working towards being a helpful professional. I am thriving in university. I am feeling really good inside and for the first time in my life I am not waiting for the shoe to drop. I am not anticipating a crash from a state of mania, because I am learning that sometimes I can be just happy – without it having to be a state of my mental health.

If I do end up crashing, then I will do the same thing I did the last time I crashed. I will reach out to my family and friends, I will contact my doctor and I will adjust my treatment plan accordingly. I know now that I cannot do any of this alone.

I really do miss writing, but the truth is that when I write it tends to create a sort of madness in my mind. I become obsessed with it. Hyperfocused. All I think about when I get caught up in writing, is the words in my head, the constant flow disrupts my day-to-day as I think about what I should post next. I find myself backpeddling with my thoughts and it’s overwhelming. But the outcome is beautiful, and I feel like when I go back and read my words that I have written – I was a different person then.

Each entry I write I find myself evolving into a different person, who eventually and inevitably will either cease to write because I am healed, or cannot stop writing because I have created a madness that cannot be stopped.

To be honest I would be happy with even just slight blips of hyperfocus on writing out what’s going on in my life, and then being able to just return back to my normal life without becoming obsessed. I am not there yet, but I hope to be one day because I really miss writing.

The right thing.

It feels so strange to not have control. My life is compartmentalized into these neat boxes, and everything is labelled. When I go to bed I fear that I am going to wake up in the morning and have forgotten what I am supposed to eat for breakfast, what I should be packing for lunch at work. So I leave notes on the whiteboard, and alarms in my phone. Everything is so planned, my life has been orchestrated into the perfect box of smaller boxes.

But the emptiness I have felt without you since the moment he told me that he essentially had lost you is just so powerful. I thought that you were being cared for by him, but staying with them. On a visit to him, on the way to you – I found out that was not the truth. That it was not up to him about visits, but it was up to them. We lost you. There would be no fighting for you, it was just so. It would have been like fighting a hurricane while on foot. No lawyers, no social services, no social workers. Just people, and a small child.

It consumes me. It drives me to be a better person. It destroys me – but at the same time the thought of you had helped me blossom into a flower that I could never fully explain the sight or the smell of.

I often go back and try to find pieces of you around the digital world. I feel connected to you, I feel like I have been let in. I feel nourished and then I don’t. I thought I had all the answers, but this is the furthest thing from the truth. You are your own person. I am glad that you have such a beautiful life with such big feelings. But my brain gets confused.

I want to wake up one day and have no more pain about this. But that pain just reminds me that I did the bravest thing a mother could do. I let my child go because I could not give her the life she deserved.

So maybe this loss of control, was actually the only thing I could control in my life back then. To do the right thing for her.

What if.

What if all the words I have said, will be all the words I will ever say?

But instead of saying them in a certain order they become a jumbled mess. I have thoughts so often that consume me, but I don’t want to say them out loud. I don’t want to scream from the rooftops the truth about the way things have been for me – because I have been told that it selfish. By speaking my mind about certain things I am only thinking about myself.

So I refrain. And I don’t write anymore because my writing is fueled by what’s going on inside of me. And sometimes I think that people hate my guts when they don’t. And sometimes maybe people do hate me. And sometimes I have dark thoughts because I think that I will always feel this way. But how can I be able to tell the truth if it will hurt people in the end.

It is so cryptic. My life is consumed with never feeling like I am good enough. My life is devoted to serving others because it makes me feel happy, because humans deserve love – but it started because I wanted to prove that I am not a bad person. I am not a bad mom. I am not a bad daughter. I am not a bad sister. I am not a bad employee. I am not a bad friend.

But still to this day I am reminded that I failed as a mom. Because I didn’t fight harder. But how do you fight without resources, with nobody in your corner, with no money? I was sick. I was consumed with the suicide of my big brother. I was trying to better our life by going to university. I was trying to live off the basic student loan amount. I was trying to be better but I was living in poverty.

I thought I had no rights as a human being because I was a drug user. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t have the resources to stop.

But nobody tells the truth about what the situation really was like. Could I have made it if he wasn’t in the picture for that first while? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t have had access to the drugs. Everyday I look back and I am hurting so deeply. I am upset. I am angry. I feel so much resentment that it is making me sick. I worry that when I die, I will still be sick with this.

So I continue to fight for others. For equality. For love. For human connection. Because inside I somehow feel like I am still living in my past and still trying to prove I am not a bad person.

I am not a bad person.

Willing to bet.

My mouth feels like it is packed full of cotton. Only the cotton is my rambling inner dialogue. This dialogue has come back in full force today. It has been what feels close to a year since there has been an urge like this. I can feel the words spilling out of my ears. I am driving and the thoughts are reeling. They want me to write. They want me to explain. They want me to fill the pages with something.

But now I am here and I feel empty again. It is the same craving I have to have a social life. I am jealous of those who have friend circles. They visit often and they share everything under the sun. They bond over their similarities and differences. Same with families. I want to be able to spend time with my family members. But the thought of trying to find words to speak to anyone right now is so frightening. I feel like I have run out of words.

I feel as boring as a piece of wet cardboard. I feel like I forgot if I ever had a personality. This goes right back to the question of where my mental illness and personality intersect. Which part of me is actually me?

My doctor prescribed me progesterone because he thought it would help my chronic pelvic pain and spotting – which I have not written about because I do not know how to find the words. It has been happening since June 2019. The spotting stopped with the progesterone, but not the pain. What came with the injestion of this hormone was a darkness that I have not seen since probably the winter before last.

It is not welcome here, but it seems to want to stay. The darkness has setup camp inside my mind. It is trying to tell me that I am boring. That I shouldn’t be in school. That I should not be a social worker. That the next 5 years I have planned out are a waste of money. That I have no actual personality outside of my mental illness.

The thing is, the darkness never remembers that I have seen the light before. It does not recall me fighting and winning. It only knows a joyless future. I know what I felt like before this cloud came back and I am willing to bet that I will feel the joy again.

But for now there is no joy.

Mom vs mother.

It has been minutes since my last post. I am swirling. My brain is backpedaling and I am judging myself. Take it back. Erase. Edit. Rewrite the whole damn thing. Stop writing. Keep it inside. Why did you say that? Why. Just why. What about this?

This is what happens when you do not write for months. The first thing that pops into your mind ends up on the page.

In August I went to visit my daughter. In the last post I questioned whether I would ever be a mother? I am a mom, but I have never been a mother. A mother earns her name and a mom is just a given title. I had never felt like either one until that visit in August. It was the best visit I have ever had and I felt welcomed and connected more so than ever before. I didn’t feel like I was ashamed of myself and that I should hide who I was. This was in part by my daughter introducing me to numerous people as her mom. The first time she did it I thought it was by accident. I fumbled. I paused. I savored the idea of being seen as her mom. My heart grew. I thought it was an accident until she kept doing it, multiple times. Each time she introduced me her enthusiasm grew more and more. With that my heart grew so big I could feel it in my throat. She had called me mama as a baby, but I am sure those were just sounds she was making. I dont know if she knew how important that was to me, but I felt on that day I finally became a mom. This is not to be confused with a mother, because I am still lost on whether I will ever be that.

Even though mom is just a given title, I felt such the opposite of that for so long that hearing it from her mouth really made it true.

I savored this day and I continue to. I have told so many people the story about that day. I wanted to tell my daughter how important that day was to me, but as we have no communication that was not possible.

Until now. She will read this and now she will know that on that day when she introduced me to the world, I finally became a mom.

By default.

So much has happened since I last wrote an entry. I have graduated from University with honours, I went back to school, I bought myself a new car, I visited my daughter, I lived, I breathed. I succeeded in everything that was put in front of me.

There is so much I have wanted to write about but it seems like it is all piling up. The pile of things are too big now and so I ignore them. I sweep them under a rug and I let them stay hidden. These things do not make me sick like they used to. These are just rambling thoughts.

I am in the bath right now and it is so hot that I am sweating. My hands are slippery and yet I still hold my phone clumsily. It is time to write and I am still fumbling to figure out what to start with.

My life maybe, and how everything is just the way it should be. But what does that mean? My life relative to what else? If I compare it to how it was before then things are perfect. Everything is perfect. But there has been a quiet uneasiness within me and I do not know when it started. But it is here and it becomes more. I feel so occupied with my full schedule and yet when it is quiet I feel a loss. I feel like there is something missing.

I am missing something. If I said that I couldn’t quite place my finger on it, then I would be lying. I didn’t think that I could be a mother when I was using, nor when I was first sober. I thought that I would be an awful mother. I pushed it down. I wrote it off because I would never be enough.

Then it started to creep back in, but I thought I had stopped it dead in its tracks. The idea of starting a family this late in life, with no security yet. With no money. That’s it. It is money, because if I won the lottery my dream would be to have a big family, and live in a big house. I would still work of course, but then I would have the financial security that it requires to have children.

I know this is all just a dream to me, but my body is fighting me nearly every day. My instincts are that I should be building a family with children and a future. I only know what my family has done before me, to break that mold feels so strange.

I know that one day I will be a grandmother, by default – but will I ever have the chance to be a mother?