February 1, 2021 Shower Thoughts

Dear Diary…

This isn’t a fancy article for a publication. This won’t be proofread. It’s just a raw dump of what’s been in my brain for sanity sake. Maybe the content will eventually fuel a formal submission, but for now…this isn’t it.

Geezus fuck, I’m spiraling fast.

The past two weeks have felt an emotional beatdown.

This morning while picking the kids up from school, a random thought crossed my mind. How lots of people here (and when I used to write in the journal on a fetish site) will say things like “you’re so strong” and “you’ve gotten through a lot”. The usual “you went through hell and you’re a warrior” blah blah spiel.

I brush those things off because I think of people whose kids have cancer or are handicapped after an accident. My struggles are a joke in comparison.

But today…suddenly all the hardships from the past 15 years hit me all at once. It was like clips of them flashed in front of me within a second. I’m old as fuck so I don’t bounce back quickly from that kind of thing.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I were out of the woods. But I’m not. There’s too many things broken that need fixing.

This isn’t a “whoa is me” kind of thing. I’m not a victim of anything. Just a feeling of being in the middle of a decade-plus-long gauntlet knowing that I’m nowhere near the end. I’m losing the ability to plow through it all like a warrior. If I had to go through what I already did, holy fuck I’d buy myself a straightjacket.

I’m in prison. This isolation is killing me. I’m the queen of texting and instant messaging, I used to do that all day. But now, using it as my only source of a social outlet combined with the occasional Zoom makes me feel beyond disconnected. I’m not one to talk to my friends about my problems (they’ll flip their lids when they find out about Joseph and I because I never say anything) but there was comfort in being around others. And at the very least, venting about the miniscule parts of life.

Honestly, I want to fly back home. This is the first time since my green card application that I’m unable to hop on a plane and go home. The US will never feel like true home to me. Which is okay, as long as I can go home every other year and reset. Seeing my childhood friends grounds me. There’s something to be said about seeing people who have known you your entire life that aren’t your blood family.

My brain keeps thinking how fuck it all, I vowed to not waste 2021 the way 2020 was wasted. But there’s so much that is out of my control. I can’t just pack up and go on a mini getaway…I have my kids and they’re almost always home (now that we’re doing hybrid again it’s still just as time-consuming because we have to get them ready, have uniforms prepped, drive them and pick them up 3 hours later).

But even then, everything has a price. Everything. And the price of rushing towards my happiness will come at the expense of my kids’ happiness. And the whole “kids are resilient” thing is such BS. A loss is a loss. Bouncing between two homes doesn’t give the same feeling of safety like staying in one.

I think about staying in the situation now and my soul wants to die. I wish I could suck it up for them. I really wish I could. I tried.

My hands have been shaking all day, so much that I can barely type. So I did a bunch of admin home paperwork stuff, and that was a disaster. Dropping things, writing stuff that doesn’t even look like English, packing up stuff to be shipped out and barely able to seal anything properly.

God, what I wouldn’t fucking kill to even just get my eyebrows threaded. Not because I can’t do my own eyebrows (I mean, I can’t, but it’s a first world problem), but because I just want something from my “before life” to feel normal again. I didn’t realize how much I valued going every 6 weeks with C, how she and I would catch up, and our Corner Bakery lunches after. Seemed so insignificant at the time. Now, I’d do anything to experience that again.

Has this whole thing made me appreciate things in life? Hell yes. While I hate people, I would do anything to shop without plexiglas everywhere.

Deep breath.

As always, writing makes everything better. Well, better-ish. Okay not better at all really but it provides clarity and calms my brain like a drug.