It's Been A Long Long Time

 I started this blog so many years ago, and then I set it down for a long time.

Not because I stopped having things to say.

Not because I stopped feeling.

But because somewhere along the way, I set down my feelings, my expression, my truth, and anything external that might disrupt or hurt or cause pain for anyone I loved.

I made myself smaller.

Quieter.

Easier to love, maybe.

Now, I’m bringing all of that back.

Because I’ve learned something incredibly important about myself in the last several years.

All the things that were there before, the things that were an integral part of my joy and how I loved and chose to be in the world, I had set them down because it was too exhausting to keep proving them to everyone.

I had set them down because my mental and emotional energy had run dry.

I had set them down because I didn’t know how to keep carrying all of me and continue on.

So I cocooned inside myself.

I pulled everything inward.

I disappeared but it wasn't noticed because I was still there. Still functioning. Still showing up. 

But I was hiding.

You should know, I did this to myself.

I pulled everything in so I could hide from decisions I had made and protect the fantasy I had built my life on for a very long time.

And that is a painful thing to admit.

Because sometimes the thing that breaks your heart the most isn’t what someone else did to you.

Sometimes it’s realizing how long you abandoned yourself.

Sometimes, when you think you are all healed up and have nothing left to learn, that is exactly when you realize, holy shit, I’m still so broken.

Not broken beyond repair.

But cracked open in places I thought had scarred over.

Still carrying versions of myself I thought I had buried.

But that thought can be freeing, too, because you realize the direction you are heading is not one that suits you anymore. It doesn’t fulfill you. It doesn’t feel like home.

It’s a direction you chose.

But you are choosing differently now.

And there is freedom in that but that freedom comes at a cost.

Reality can be a harsh master when it comes to choosing yourself over the people you love and have loved for so long. 

Even when staying meant losing pieces of yourself so slowly you didn’t notice.

The worst part is how much of it was self-inflicted.

I wanted that part of my life to be what I thought it could be.

I wanted to believe that if I just tried hard enough, loved hard enough, forgave enough, bent enough, swallowed enough, sacrificed enough, maybe I could keep everyone and everything I had built.

But man, hurting people so you can save yourself is a really, really hard thing.

And the grief is sometimes overwhelming.

It doesn’t always feel like liberation.

Sometimes the next part of your life isn’t immediately happy, because the peace you feel almost feels like a betrayal of the person you were before.

You are grieving lost parts of yourself that you hadn’t known you lost.

You are opening wounds you thought were healed.

You are finding old versions of yourself in dark corners, and they are angry. They are devastated. They are asking why you left them there for so long.

Being free can also mean being so real that you have to fight your own mind and the beliefs it held on to so tightly.

Anger and sadness and rage and hopelessness come out of nowhere.

Completely cracked open by a song, a memory, a room, a smell, a sentence, a silence.

And even considering allowing anyone into that part of you, letting them see that realness, that you don’t have it all together, that you are swooning, not in ecstasy but in pain and all the feelings you hid away for so long, can push you into a hermit state where all you can think is, what the fuck was I thinking?

Too much me, after so many years of trying to be less.

And people tell you how proud they are, how strong you are, what an example you are for others, and all you want is a soft place to land where you don’t have to be any of those things.

Where you don’t have to turn your pain into a lesson fast enough for other people to be comfortable with it.

Where you can be messy and upset and crazy and all the darker parts of yourself that the world tells you to hide.

Peace came but it is wrapped in so much grief.

This is when I realize I broke myself open and let all these things out because it would have been impossible to heal while I still held them inside.

I couldn’t keep abandoning myself and call it loyalty.

I couldn’t keep surviving and call it living.

But maybe healing starts when I stop apologizing for the mess.