Something borrowed.

I keep typing and then erasing. I put myself out there and then I take it back. I am trying to be mindful of how the things I say can affect others. I am trying to not be selfish. I thought there would be freedom in writing this blog but there is not – because I can’t even write about the things that are close to my heart everyday anymore, without crossing the boundary I have been given. 

I am trying to be an adult, when I know that parts of my are not. I’m stunted and that’s not an excuse. That’s an actual truth. I am learning to do things as an adult and it’s not easy. Often I feel like a rebellious teenager who pushes boundaries only because she doesn’t understand why they are there in the first place.

I like dreaming because I can hang out and have a relationship with my daughter in them. I think I may get in trouble for mentioning her again – but keeping this inside is making me sick. I want to stay asleep so we can continue to develop what was never there. I know it’s all my fault – I was addicted to meth – but having to pay for it every single day of my life is really fucking me up. And not being able to write about it is also fucking me up.

And I know she’s going to read this, and then they are going to read this and I may not be allowed my once a year visitation anymore. But maybe you guys just shouldn’t read this if it’s going to cause waves. I need to say these things.

I am getting sick from not being able to speak freely.

So now that this is open, I need to get another thing off my chest. My boyfriends daughter really liked a pair of my sneakers that I hadn’t worn in about 3 years. They were in mint condition and they were very cool sneakers, so I told him she should try them on. She did and she loved them right away and they fit her feet so perfectly. So I said she could have them. They were of no use to me anymore, and she could give them a happy home. They made her happy and that should have been enough for me.

But I went from happy for her, and then suddenly that happiness changed into something else. I was so sad, angry and resentful inside. Why on earth was I resentful of an 11 year old getting a pair of my shoes that I had not worn in years, and they didn’t suit my style anymore? Why did I feel like I could throw a temper tantrum and take them back? I had to really brew and stew over the reason for me acting like a child. 

It turns out it was because I had never given my own daughter any hand me downs. Nevermind a super cool pair of shoes. I don’t even know my daughter’s shoe size, so I couldn’t send her shoes even if I wanted to.

You don’t realize how huge these small things are until it doesn’t happen to you. Or when it does happen, but it’s not with your own child. She has never borrowed my makeup, my tweezers, my shoes, my clothes. I never had to search her room in a frantic state to try to recover what she borrowed from me. I never busted her running out the door wearing my shoes. She has never borrowed something from me because our next visit is never a definite. Nothing is ever sure between us, except that I am here. And she is there.

It’s this small things that can destroy me if I don’t get them off my chest.

I think I am ok now, and I am ready to get out of bed.

Cues and clues.

I have been feeling something strange for the past few days. It’s like a quiet has washed over me. I have no desire to leave the house, and when I do I feel a bit of a panic. Like something is going to happen to me and I won’t get the chance to go to school. So I feel safe at home, I feel safe under the shelter of these walls.

I can only compare what’s going on to be like the calm before the storm. It’s eerie. It’s strange because I have never been here before yet it feels so familiar. The success and the rewards of sobriety are abundant in my life – but each time something new happens I am still in shock.

6 more sleeps and I will be officially a university student. 

When I talk about it to anyone, I feel like I might start squeeling and crying. I try to keep myself calm but the plain and simple fact is that I don’t really think this is real life. I feel like I’m hallucinating the entire thing.  Why did the universe choose me to recover and succeed in life? Why are there so many people still suffering out there. Why me?

A small part of me doesn’t want to do it. I want to stay the same. I want to be the same. I just want to be ordinary. I want to live my ordinary life, with all my ordinary things. I don’t want to have to live up to some greater expectations of myself. 

I am scared of the future because I will finally have to face the truth. My truth. I will have to really take a look at everything that my life was and is. I will have to stand against all the darkness that tries to tell me to stay ordinary.

I am not unique. I have been told this time and time again. There are many people who have the same insides as me. The solution is unlocked with the very same key.

But as a whole I am not ordinary. I can see that my story and my future are completely extraordinary. I know this because when I tell people about where I am going next week and where I have been – they too are squeeling and almost crying. 

I feel paralyzed at home here. I feel good and I feel bad. I feel so many things right now that it doesn’t feel like anything anymore. 

Everything good that has happened in my life has been the result of listening to the clues and the cues of the universe. Anytime that I have stepped in the way of that and tried to reroute my path, I was made aware that what I was doing was selfish. When I live in self my life is in shambles. I want to burn my life to the ground when I am in self.

So right now I’m just going to sit here and wait for another cue and clue about what the next few days are going to look like for me.

12 more sleeps.

12 more sleeps until I start university.

It’s kind of funny because this is what the universe picked for me. This is the direction that everything pointed me to. I finally stopped running on self will. My self will was running rampant for so long and it found me in circles. 

I was literally chasing myself in circles, inside squares that I kept locked inside the smallest of boxes. I kept myself in the sickest places possible because I had no hope for a life after – drugs, addiction, domestic abuse, crime, loosing my child, loosing my brother to suicide, poverty, mental illness, physical illness. You see I was looking at all of these things as a cumulation of problems that just weighed down so heavy upon one another. They grew legs and became something else entirely. They consumed me, and they were my medicine at the same time as they kept me sick.

Then it was like an angel appeared in the form of my probation worker, and all those problems started to become individual issues. And then I started to look at them as conquerable. I learned that I was a part of the change that needed to happen within me.

So we worked together, and I never thought the end result would be this. This being my life, which now is like a real functioning member of society. I have changed.

12 more sleeps and I will be sitting in class, with a group of individuals that also want to be part of the change that needs to happen in this world. 

I need to do this. I am so fucking scared. I am so scared. I am terrified. I want to turn around and go back to not listening to what the universe says. I want to pretend like my ears are full of cotton again. That I can’t hear anything because I’m crying too loud. Like when I’m sobbing so hard that the universe can’t distract me long enough to give me a message. 

Isn’t it just easier to stay put? To stay safe. To pretend like I still don’t know what to do with my life.

I feel crazy, I feel so happy. I am so scared. I have never been scared like this before. I don’t want to fail, and everyone keeps telling me that I am going to do great. But that person that has always lived inside of me tells me to be realistic, and then five seconds later she tells me that I am going to get straight A’s. I am scared and I am happy.

So happy that I have already read chapter 1 from two of my textbooks, now I am onto the third one. I am excited and I am a scared.

12 more sleeps.

Fleeting thoughts.

Quitting using meth was easy. When I was finally ready. Because it stopped working and the only alternative was to get help. I was desperate and finally the pain of using outweighed the pain of not using. I was running out of ways to make money. I was running out of excuses to not hold down a regular job. I was sick and tired of feeling unwell.

Quitting drinking was easy, when I decided I wanted to live. It was either drinking and death, or quitting and life. I had decided that I wanted to die. I wanted to end my life because I couldn’t envision a future without alcohol in it. Alcohol had become my solution to quitting meth.

Getting clean and sober was much easier than staying high and drunk everyday. When I said everyday, I truly mean it. I wasn’t a weekend warrior – unless you count the times that I tried to quit and then decided I could control myself by just using or drinking on weekends. My drugs and alcohol were my medicine. I didn’t use meth to party, I used it to be able to live. When I took that out of the equation i didn’t know how to live as anything other than a recluse. So alcohol solved that for me. Alcohol made me feel alive. I was happy to have survived a meth addiction, and I wanted to celebrate.

The slope between the two parts of my life were very slippery. I thought I was doing pretty well because I wasn’t using meth anymore. But the affect alcohol had on me was a completely different world. I was out of control, and I hated it.

It’s easy getting sober and clean – when you are ready. It really is. But what they don’t tell you is that you are going to feel everything, over and over again. Every small thing that you pushed down while high or drunk, it still lives inside of you. It waits. And it waits.

And then it comes to the surface and to try to push it away, because who wants to have to feel something so dark and painful from your past, that you were the cause of. The trick is to process these feelings, but not to let them take control. You have to acknowledge them, but have the strength to let them go.

Just let them go.

I am at the point where I am spinning – not quite out of control – but it’s there. It’s there waiting to send me down another rabbit hole because what better way to remind myself of how bad it was. 

But I am writing this down, so that I don’t have to send myself there. I am acknowledging the feelings that are living inside me about my past. I am seeing that they are there, and I am putting them into words.

I am changing their power from controlling me, to just being fleeting thoughts.

My past will not control me.

Please stop hating the ghost of me.

I saw something on social media earlier that made my brain go all twisty. It made me question whether my past was actually as bad as I remembered it to be. If the drug addiction that took over my life was really so bad. Was I just a shitty person, or did I actually have a problem with crystal meth?

I am so healthy now, that the person I was and the life that I lived seems like it never happened. Or maybe it did happen but it wasn’t that bad, because how could I go from that, to this?

How could I survive that? 

What I saw today made me feel like I had a choice in choosing crystal meth over everything else in life. So down the rabbit hole I went as I decided to log into my email and start reading from the end of 2002. My pulse starts racing and I feel my eyes focusing on the screen, so obsessively and so contently. Just like before. Just like when I was high all those times trying to plan my grandiose life, around the bags and the boxes that I was constantly living in or out of. There is friendly emails back and forth with the mention of meeting up for coffee, or waking up quite often – but we didn’t drink coffee and if we were emailing that already meant we were awake. My mom would constantly email, just asking for an update. Just wanting to know if I was alive and safe. She would beg me to call her, or send an email if that’s what I needed to do. Sometimes she would even send me random e-cards. I wouldn’t ever reply unless I had something good to say about my life. My classmates were concerned. My old friends were concerned. Even the people I used to use with were concerned.

I thought that I was doing pretty good, until I wasn’t. I honestly didn’t think that meth was the problem. I thought the problem was the world around me. That I had low credit from having no credit which made it so that I couldn’t even rent an apartment. But how could I rent an apartment with no job, and no money? How could I get a job if I had no place to live? I just thought that the world was out to get me. The only thing that stayed the same, was the meth. I could trust the meth, and I could always find a way to get it into my body. 

I made the choice to do that first line, but I thought I was stronger than I really was. I had no idea that I would loose everything, time and time again because I didn’t think I was strong enough without it. I couldn’t keep my eyes open for more than 10 minutes without it. I needed meth just to feel normal.

Yes I loved the meth, because it’s what I thought I was worth. I didn’t think that I deserved anything more than the lifestyle I was living in. I was too fucked up and too complicated for my family to deal with, so I did what I knew would come as close to medicating myself. I stayed away so that if the day did come that I chose my own demise, they would maybe hurt a little less because I was absent for so long.

Sending myself down that rabbit hole tonight, was awful. My eyes are bugging out of my head and I feel spinny and just wired out of my mind. But I do know that I was a very sick person. There is no doubt in my mind about the power of addiction, but sometimes I forget about how bad it really was, because of how good it is now.

I am not that person. I never was that person. That was the meth. It had me.

Please stop hating the ghost of me.

The body that I live in.

My issues with clearing my throat was getting so bad that I finally made a doctor’s appointment. But it became almost obvious while driving up to peachland and not vaping for a period of time, that it was most likely the PG that is in my vape juice. I can’t see myself quitting vaping especially when I am going to school. I need one vice in my life, otherwise it will be right back to food.

So I switched to a vape juice that was mostly VG, and so far so good. I only had to eat one fisherman’s friend lozenge yesterday, as opposed to a pack or more a day. I also only had one episode of a throat clearing attack, which says alot because it’s been pretty bad lately. I actually don’t know if it was even allergies because I stopped taking the allergy medication and I feel exactly the same with my symptoms as I did when taking it.

I don’t want to have to stop vaping, not right now. And I don’t want to have to start smoking. I know it only makes sense for me to quit vaping but like I said, I need a vice. I am scared of the power that food can have over me, if I don’t have something else to nurture my need to consume.

Why can’t I get into fitness? Why is it so damn hard for me to not just get up and do anything physical, but actually stick with it? My brain feels broken in that I want to look and feel better, but when it comes down to it there is a disconnect. I feel like I did when the drugs stopped working. Maybe my brain isn’t done healing yet. It’s only been 2 years, 4 months and 2 days since I stopped putting drugs and alcohol into my body. I need to be more patient with myself.

Or maybe it’s just my body dysphoria that wants me to look different because if I look different than I just assume I will be different. That my bi-polar will suddenly go away, that I will never be too much, that I will look so good that nobody will care how crazy I am.

But when I start to think about what I would be like if I wasn’t bi-polar – I wouldn’t be me. I have learned to live side by side with my mental illness, which most often isn’t even a mental illness. It’s more like my child that lives inside of me, who is kind of stunted in her growth. I am learning how to live with her, just as much as everyone around me is.

Just like I am learning to live with body the way it has always been, with extra padding. And for me to want to change that, feels like an obsession of the mind. To be healthy is one thing, but to have my life revolve around fitness just to keep my outward shell looking pleasant is a constant battle in my head.

I think I’d rather be happy with the health of my mind, than wanting to be in a perfectly toned body. But everytime I pick up my phone, it tries to tell me different. It wants to make me feel bad for the body I am in.

But this is it, this is the body that I was given. In all it’s mperfections. This is the body that I live in.

I will do this.

I don’t know if I am just purely happy, or completely manic right now. It feels like it’s just happiness but it’s hard to tell because it’s not often in my life that I have been able to experience happiness without mania, or substances. So let’s call this happiness, because I am overflowing with so much goodness right now. It’s spilling out of me.

I want to throw my hands in the air and scream at the top of my lungs. I want to scream how I am alive, and how I wasn’t before. I want the world to know that there is a light side to the darkness. I need to show people who have suffered the same as me, that when someone tells them they can change, that there can be truth in it. Recovering from a hopeless state of mind is possible. Not just recovering but thriving.

I want to stand on the rooftops and scream for all to hear me, that there is love and there is light and there is so much hope through surviving addiction. Through surviving a lifetime of suicidal thoughts. Through living through and maintaining mental health when being bi-polar. There is something so powerful about coming out alive.

It’s so powerful that it’s fueling my fire. It’s lit something so deep in the core of my soul that is so powerful it’s catapulting me into the sky, over and over again.

I am scared, so so scared about what’s in store for me in the next 2 years of school. But just as I have done in my recent past, I will use the resources that are provided for me. I will not forget who I am or where I have been. I will be aware of my possible mental and emotional limitations. I will take care of myself. I will push, but not until I break. I will succeed, even if that means crying and having micro breakdowns once every few weeks. I will do this.

I will succeed because I need to show the judge in me, that I will not let myself be judged and ruled by fear any longer.

I will do this.

Born to survive.

It’s almost noon and I am waking up for the second time. I am not depressed but I have been really enjoying all the extra winks I can get in the mornings. I have been having so many weird dreams about my past, but they have all been alternate dimensions of my past. When I dream they are vivid, and full of life, so much detail and it feels like I’m in a movie. This makes it really difficult at times to want to wake up.

I feel like I may be grieving. I am going through all the motions of accepting and dealing with saying the final goodbye to the old me.  The grief has changed so much over the years that now it has simply become silent. But it’s there, and it’s processing.

I will be driving down the road and I am flooded with memories of that girl that I was for 33 years. The people that were a part of my life. The things that consumed my life. I am full of gratitude and tears well up in my eyes, I am not that person anymore. 

I have been blessed with the opportunity to change, time and time again. And I have accepted it. I have stepped up to the plate of change, but the life I had is still there. There are still people in it. I have left them all exactly where I last was, and almost every single of of them has progressively gotten worse with time. I am grieving for them, I am grieving for me.

I need to do this. I need to succeed so that I can be not just proactive in my recovery in life, but so I can help the youth that need me. I know they need me.

The universe has shown me that my purpose in life is to help people, and I know that everytime I step out of myself, everytime that I connect on a deeper level with another human being – I feel complete.

Now I will continue to grieve the girl I once was, and I don’t think that will ever go away. I will grieve all the loss that I have had in my life, as a result of my addictions and mental health issues. I will grieve the loss of others, as a result of their own addictions and mental health issues. I will grieve, and I will live. I will let this grief help me move forward through university because it’s what fuels my reminder everyday, that I was born for this.

I was born to survive, and I am here to help.

First world problems.

I had a good three hour argument with myself about whether I was going to wash my hair, shave my legs, and/or shower before starting my day. My hair looked like a pile of grease had been thrown at my head. This is one of the perks of working in a Chinese food restaurant. The air is greasy and it sticks to everything. 

I then looked at my legs from all different angles in all different light to see whether I could get away with one more day of not shaving. I argued with myself. Then I came to the conclusion I would wear a shower cap, and I would just wash my body. Because I know that I would feel 100% better once my skin was clean and ready to face another day of muggy, smoky hot summer air.

But even after I came to that conclusion I kept on with the arguing with myself. If I was going to have a shower I might as well wash my hair, and shave my legs. But I don’t want to do either one of those. And I especially don’t want to wash my hair because then I have to blow-dry and straighten it afterwards.

So then I decide no, and this time I mean it. The shower can wait until I get home tonight. I will have a bath, and I will do everything I need to do. 

But then my brain starts back thinking about whether I am really going to want to do all that when I get home. Why am I even fighting myself on this? I feel a million times better once I have done some self care but it feels like there is someone inside of me telling me that it’s more hassle than it’s worth.

I don’t understand why my brain works like this. Is this normal? I like being clean, I like having silky smooth legs, I like when my hair is freshly washed and done. But somehow something in my brain talks me into only doing half of things.

The conclusion I came to was that I have time right now to shower, shave and wash my hair so that’s when would be the best time. I don’t know how I will feel tonight or if I will have time tomorrow morning, so I forced myself into the bathroom.

The moment I took my hair out of the tight ponytail it was in, I felt disgusted with myself. My hair on the right side of my head didn’t even fall out of the ponytail shape, it just stayed there. In all its greasy glory. I knew that’s what it was going to do, but I somehow rationalized just one more day.

It’s not even that I don’t have enough time in a day, I actually have too much time. So something is broken in my brain.

But not totally broken, because I did end up having a shower, washing my hair and shaving my legs. But now I’m stuck here sitting in bed, wrapped in a towel. Fighting having to blow-dry my hair, and then straighten it.

These are definately first world problems. But if these are my biggest problems in my life today, then I am doing pretty good.

Living the dream.

I have spent the last 5 weeks since my final funding appointment for school, in mid air. Obsessively checking my email for the confirmation from my worker. I knew that I would be approved, but there is always that little bit of doubt that lives inside of me – no matter what it is I am dealing with. That unless I am given a 100% yes, then I will always have that possible no hanging over my head.

I stopped checking my email for a bit this afternoon, when suddenly on my notifications popped up an email from my case worker. I opened my email with great hopes that it was a yes, but also knowing that it may be a no.

And it was a YES! I HAVE BEEN APPROVED FOR FUNDING. 

Which means all the hoops that I have jumped through,all the forms I have filled out and all the career prep workshops and classes I have taken in the last 4 years – have finally paid off. 

I am officially 100% a university student, and will be starting my classes in 28 days. I am a student of Social Services and I will be getting my diploma at the end of the 2 years. I have no doubt in my mind, about my success anymore.

This feels like a dream. My life is like a dream. I am living a life beyond anything I had ever imagined. I no longer need to suffer because I don’t belong. Because I do belong. I am a functioning member of society, and even to say that right now feels so strange.

I am living the dream.