It’s Been A While…

Hello friends,

It’s been a little while hasn’t it?

Where does one even begin after such an absence? Life has been well… life-ing so please bear with me as I try to find my footing even within words spilled across a screen on the vast internet. So where have I been? If you follow me already on instagram I’ve been here, there and everywhere but let’s start from the beginning.

At the start of the year, life was rose tinted from what I thought was love. Finally in a relationship after four years of working on myself and building up my confidence. At first everything felt great, but there was a nagging feeling in my chest – quiet though, it was there, and the feeling never subsided, in fact it kept going on and on, ticking away in the background, but growing little by little. When I was away for the funeral, there was a distinct coldness I felt but ignored it until a family member picked up on it – I shrugged my shoulders and said “It’s a tough time”, she rolled her eyes and said “Yes, a tough time for you – not him”. When I got back, the once full and excitable text messages became sparse, conversations felt empty, and the nagging feeling began to grow and grow. I felt myself wanting to turn inside out, silently mourning to myself and thinking, “I’ve lost him”. During the May bank holiday, after accidentally letting a tear escape at a girls brunch due to an icy response from him, I went home and finally freed him, and in the process freed myself too.

And while at the time it felt like I was back at square one, I think it was an important relationship to have had, and learned from. I understood what I deemed acceptable in a relationship and I was able to break things off when I felt disrespected, which was a huge milestone for me – the old me would have sat in discontent afraid that no one would ever want me (This is heavy for a Tuesday night isn’t it…). It still feels a little raw, and rebuilding the blocks I spent so much time building up has been absolutely painful and more time consuming than I’d have liked but as the youth say – We move.

It seemed this was a season of cutting loose ends as I also quit my day job on a whim – well not quite on a whim, it was very much well thought through on my end but surprising for my then practice. I took the plunge of making a hobby a paid job and decided to do a sprint until the end of the year,  and here we are in December. I’ll be honest and say I’m at a cross road as to what to do next, but more on this in the new year…

Grief was where we last picked up on the blog, and still, months on, the rawness of loss still sits heavy like a blackened cloud above my family. Everywhere we turn her presence still lingers, her smile, her warmth and her softness and it seems to challenge this new version of me; hard, closed off and suspicious. One thing I didn’t expect was how angry and simultaneously lonely I feel. No one tells you about the residual anger of grief and how desperately you want to offload it, but it sticks to you like a tar backpack getting heavier by the day. I am just so angry and weary all the time and I want to scream from the rooftops, to God, to humans, to entities – whomever, that it is not fair.

But alas, it is fair. Or rather, I’ve been self soothing and working on reconditioning my thinking and beginning to understand that in this life, we aren’t entitled to anything but death in the end, and that is it. Everything else is just a series of up’s and down’s until we perish. Simplifying life to it’s bare bones has been one of the best ways I’ve found to cope with the up’s and down’s of this year. I spoke to a friend on the phone yesterday and she asked how I was, I inhaled and said “You know what, I’m tired, but it’s okay, because there will always be bad things in life, and we all have to have some bad with the good”, but later that evening as we discussed adoption and surrogacy, my hand instinctively made it’s way to my stomach and rubbed the empty mass there wishing I didn’t have to endure this hard thing.

I wrote a few years ago about the warmth books lend to loneliness, and in this season I’ve been picking up books and reading them greedily, soaking up words and revelling in their comfort. At night I curl up foetal like with my lamp on, reading until my eyes begin to ache at the speed in which I read each word, and in the mornings I yawn, stretch, appreciate the thin stream of sunlight that hits my bed squarely,  I position my book in it’s luminescence and keep reading. Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, doesn’t matter as long as I’m transported I keep reading, and I think this reading is what has given me the energy to come back and keep writing.

God I’ve missed this feeling, the catharsis. I feel a little lighter even from these few hundred words of unorganised prose flowing from my brain. Today I wanted to mourn and allow the depths of sadness to take me to the deepest darkest parts of the ocean, but in between reading “The Woman in The Purple Skirt” by Natsuko Imamura, I thought write. Sade, write. In all seasons it has been the one thing that has always seamlessly grounded me.

Now enough about me, how are you faring?