Category: Self Reflection

Personal essays on self reflection diving into hard truths on personal behaviors, issues and thought patterns to lead to personal growth and development.

Heartbreak & Loss

Knots and Rope.

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I have found myself in a local outdoors club meeting. Sitting in the third row of chairs in the back room of a local store, I am surprised by how happy I am to be there. I had insisted a club would be too much for me. I changed my mind.

I introduce myself to the group when it’s my turn and the leader at the front proceeds to go through a schedule. I add events to my calendar. I listen to other people’s trip reports. I make a mental note to bring a notebook next month, it’s a lot of information to take in all at once.

At the end, we are told to practice tying a knot before we disperse. I will be training to rappel soon and I am determined to learn this skill. Tying these knots correctly can be the difference between a fun trip or a complete disaster. Life and death.

I eagerly take my rope as it’s passed down. It’s thin and green, checkered with bands of red and white. I run my thumb over its coarse surface.

My vision blurs around the edges. I blink twice.

I divert my eyes to the pamphlet I was given and make the diagrams on the paper come into focus. My friend next to me points to the first knot on the page and begins to show me how to start it.

I watch him for a moment before staring down at the rope in my hands. The volume in the room gets louder, I can’t make sense of it. I line the rope ends parallel but I can’t tell if the rope needs to cross in front or behind. The more I try to move the rope, the more my hands feel like I have somehow put on a pair of invisible wool gloves.

‘Let’s go over here so you can practice tying it on,’ my friend says suddenly. I look away from my untied knot, to the left, and see the others wrapping their ropes around the horizontal bars of the chair racks. The cacophony of the room reaches a fever pitch. I stand up and my mind goes completely blank.

No. No. No. I can’t do this.

I start to move towards the racks. My breath feels shallow in my lungs.

‘Hey! We need you to fill out your membership form!’

Thank fucking god. I turn to the man who has approached me and I follow him to a folding table to fill out forms and pay my dues.

By the time I finish, the room has been packed up. It’s time to leave.

I excuse myself to the restroom. I wash my hands slowly, looking at myself in the mirror. I don’t break eye contact as I pull a towel from the dispenser, drying my hands on the rough paper.

We all reconvene at a pizza place down the street. My friend and I are some of the first to arrive.

I stare at the menu board. I can’t make sense of it’s layout. I find the section that lists individual pizzas. I remember I don’t eat meat anymore. I look at the ingredients of each pizza. I narrow down which one’s don’t have meat. I promptly forget which ones I was comparing. I reread the different pizzas and different ingredients again. I can’t remember which one is which.

I feel tears building in my throat. What the hell is my deal?

I get to the front and pick one at random. I won’t remember them well enough to wish I had gotten a different one anyway.

We settle in, one by one, along a long table. An older man sits across from me, to the left. He has been around a long time, he is well respected.

I cut a bite off my pizza, I can’t stand the idea of my hands being greasy. I lift it towards my mouth, pausing as I watch the steam from the cheese coiling upwards.

The man is telling a story about teaching people how to rappel off a local bridge. Someone driving by called the cops. They thought he was hanging people. He laughs at the absurdity of it.

I feel an internal record skip, a little bit of static and then a pause before it starts playing again.

My friend, sitting to my right, asks him a question about different devices and this starts a conversation among the table around the physics of ropes and knots.

The man across the table describes how his time using ropes outdoors was completely different than what he did for his training to work for the local Search and Rescue.

The record skips. I am looking straight at him, I can still see him in front of me. I can still feel that I am sitting on a black, vinyl chair in a restaurant.

My body is split.

I feel the weight of a blanket curled around my body, the sensation of the leather couch under my fingers.

The man’s face begins to take on a different appearance.

‘Did you learn how to tie all these knots in the navy?’

No, no, no, no. We are not going there.

I return to the full present with a harsh slam. The man is still talking. I remind myself that he is extremely knowledgable and deserves the respect of my full attention.

He is describing how the friction and the amount of loops onto a surface can make anything a rappel device. I ask how you know how many loops. I believe the answer was by weight. The person directly across from me tells me his weight and the corresponding amount of loops. I mentally calculate how many loops it would take for me, half of the amount.

He would have been 2/3 of that.

Skip. Static. Pause.

Nope, absolutely not. We’re not going there.

The man is describing how they used to wind the ropes around their arms to descend, he would wear leather. He laughs that he has some pretty nasty scars from the friction of the ropes still burning his skin.

He would have loved this guy.

Shut the fuck up, I hiss to my own mind, shut the fuck up.

But it’s already done. The thought summons a feeling of presence, my body splits again.

I am in the present in both worlds but in one, the person sitting on my left changes.

I live both scenes simultaneously for a moment before my conscious mind resists, ripping out the alternate present with the fury of a rabid dog.

I give up on following the conversation. I look out the window. I wish I could go outside to smoke a cigarette. I feel myself furrow my brow. Gross. I haven’t smoked an actual cigarette in years.

Good lord, get it together woman.

I look down and realize I have eaten all of my pizza. I don’t remember how it tasted after the first bite. I think I liked it. I stand up to gather my plate and the other’s around me. I walk to the trash can, throwing away the greasy paper and stacking the slim metal trays. I turn back to face the table and the friend I came with is standing up to push in his chair.

We are leaving. Thank god.

On our way back to my car, I push through the fog that is threatening to take over. I think about why I want to learn how to tie these knots, how much farther into caves I can go if I can rappel. I try to remember what I liked about caves. I try to remember what I like about anything or why I have done anything at all, at any point in my life.

I keep pushing back the fog. I ask my friend if I can borrow a handful of books and a bit of old rope to practice with. He sends me on my way with them.

I realize, once I have driven halfway down the street, that I have not pulled up my maps to direct me home. I wonder if I can make it without them.

I glance down at my phone. The fog pushes back.

It was a noose.

My head swims.

I forget about the map.

It was a noose. You were tying a noose.

It was not a fucking noose. I wasn’t learning how to tie a fucking noose.

Stop being so dramatic.

Stars start popping up in my line of vision as the field closes in, going dark around the edges.

Absolutely not.

I take a deep breath. I am about to get on the interstate, I have been finding my way home.

I take another deep breath. In through my nose, out through my mouth. In through my nose, out through my mouth.

My body splits. I am driving down this interstate in the dark, I can see the streetlights and the road in front of me.

Simultaneously, I am on another interstate.

Midafternoon, it’s raining. I am driving home. I am breathing like I am breathing now. My head swims, I don’t know if I can make it.

I just need to get to him.

No, wrong. That’s the past. There’s no one to call, no one to get to.

Stars, tunnel vision.

I blink my eyes rapidly while extending my arms straight out, stretching my spine backwards into my seat. I push my focus fully onto the road in front of me.

I’m walking into the garage.

I, once again, rip myself back to the present. In through my nose, out through my mouth. Stop this, you’re fucking driving.

I’m standing on the top step, I can feel it under my feet. I can smell motor oil. He’s standing in the middle, on a stool.

I just need to get to him.

You stupid bitch, it was just a fucking rope. It has nothing to do with this. You are being dramatic. You are being dramatic.

I am at the edge of the stool now, looking up. The noose is still around his neck. I can see how strong the rope is, the texture and the colors that check through it. His face is contorted, he’s angry.

Blink. Blink. Blink. Deep breath in, out, in, out.

I watch the rope as it moves with him, rubbing against the tender skin of his neck, the knot on the side jutting out at an awkward angle.

You’re okay, you’re okay. You’re almost home, you’re almost home. You’re okay.

As he gets down, my stomach rolls with nausea. If he had jumped, how would I have saved him? Could I have held him up? Could I have cut the rope?

I feel the roughness of a rope around my own neck, it rises and falls with my breathing.

Oh, it was never even fucking around your neck. Now you’re just making things up.

Stop. Being. Dramatic.

I pull into my driveway, snaking back until I am able to turn and reverse my car, backing it up to the gate.

I haphazardly gather my things. My stomach clenches and burns. I stumble up the rough terrain to the front door. I feel drunk. Uncoordinated, unsure, out of sync.

I rush through putting everything away, my limbs are not cooperating. I get in the shower. Slightly hunched over, I rub a bar of soap between a washcloth. I focus on the feeling of hot water on my skin.

It was a noose. It was a noose. You were tying a fucking noose.

I don’t fight it anymore. I am home. I am safe. It can play all its tapes.

Just get on with it.

With that permission, it all plays, a mile a minute, image after image, clip after clip, until it slows to a stop.

It tired itself out. There’s nothing left.

I exhale. With my eyes closed, I reach out a shaking hand to turn the water off.

I get out of the shower, wrap myself in a towel and look at myself in the mirror. I look into my own eyes. My head feels empty, like it will wobble precariously around on my neck if I move. Without breaking eye contact, I reach for my brush and begin gently untangling the knots in my hair until it all lays smooth, curling against the contour of my skull and down my back. I turn away.

I settle into bed and put my headphones on, queuing up a simple binaural beat. I lay back, close my eyes and breathe in, feeling my body begin to relax into the softness of the mattress on the exhale. I follow the beat with my eyes, left to right. Left to right. Left to right.

I wake up the next morning, groggy and heavy.

I dreamt of ropes, long and winding, seemingly never ending. In the dream, I made my way methodically down them, tying one life saving knot after life saving knot.

None of them became a noose.

Relief washes over me as I sit up. I stretch, turn and then stand, placing both my feet on the cold floor.

They are just knots and rope.

And I found my way home.

Post Views: 52
Self Reflection

living big!

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I have been trying to read a larger variety of articles on substack recently.

One theme I have noticed among a lot of the content I peruse is this big, meaningful theme of ‘life is an adventure.’

‘Living big.’

Usually accompanied by an empowering narrative accented with travel pictures, nature hikes, good food, etc etc.

Good content, of course, well written. I’m not shitting on it.

I have been thinking about how I used to see content like this and feel like I should be doing things like that, my life felt lackluster in comparison. When I was doing things like that, I felt like I should probably be doing more.

I don’t feel like that anymore.

Reading them now, I realize that my life is probably one people might see and say, ‘I wish I could do that.’

To be quite frank, it’s a pretty stereotypical ‘over thirty, no kids, passive income’ lifestyle. It’s not unique. Just scroll substack and you’ll find tons just like it.

But I’m sure if I compiled a highlight reel of it all, it could be described by some as ‘living the dream.’ I’ve probably described it that way. It totally can be.

It just didn’t feel that way to live it for a long time.

A lot of advice I have been given over the past year was along the lines of being grateful and appreciating the life I have now and all of the opportunities that come with it. I give this advice to myself too. And I am. And it does help.

‘Look at how great your life is, look at how far you’ve come!’

The roadblock I kept running into was, ‘But you don’t understand, I would give it all up. I would give up every single part of it to go back in time, to go back to that ultrasound and hear a heartbeat when there wasn’t one.’

This wasn’t the adventure I wanted. I wanted a mundane life. I wanted my partner to be as good as he was on paper. I wanted our baby. I wanted to live in our house in the country and to be surrounded by all these people I had met that I felt truly cared about me.

That was my dream life. This one has often felt like someone else’s.

There’s a lot of different ways to live big.

I have been working on a lot of different things recently. One is a product that I have named, ‘The Futile.’

It’s called this because one: it’s based on the recent time period of my life that I wanted to die almost every moment of every day so it’s hilarious to me that it’s named after a song about eating rat poison for dinner.

Two: It was the original idea which I spent months and months trying to create just for there to end up being literally the simplest solution which was also the very last thing I tried.

And three: because I spent this time period, the first half of my time here, doing everything big and beautiful and I felt almost nothing at all. Futile, indeed.

I would hike all the way up a mountain, get to the top and stand there looking out at a view that was awe strikingly beautiful and I would feel proud of myself, sure. I would admire it. I would acknowledge how lucky I was to be able to be there.

But I would feel so, so achingly empty. I’d sit there for a while, thinking and feeling nothing at all, and then I would make my way back down.

Sometimes I think my nervous system is so skittish that it just slams the ‘emergency shut down’ button when I start to feel some inkling of joy. There’s probably a lot of truth to that, to be honest.

It had to give me some sort of dopamine though because I would go back out and do it again. I think I also kind of liked the ‘feeling and thinking nothing at all’ part of it. I do actually remember these moments more fondly than I felt at the time.

I was trying to live big. And I’m sure it all looked and sounded great. And at least I was trying.

But it wasn’t the way I thought I should have, could have had or would have.

Now that I am a little farther into my ‘adventure’ here, I do feel emotions in these ‘big moments.’ But they aren’t any bigger than when I have felt them in so many small ones.

There are so many moments in my life I didn’t think were big at the time.

Sitting in the back room of my old job, laughing with my best friend. Talking about our days, complaining about insignificant things. Even just existing and knowing she was there. There was a level of comfort and safety in that I haven’t felt since.

That was living big.

Looking at the face of someone I loved so much and thinking it was one of the wonders of the world.

I’ve seen some of the wonders of the world. It’s not the same.

That was living big.

Now, before I go to bed, I set up my coffee maker to start brewing at 3:33 am so it’s ready when I wake up a little after four. I fall asleep feeling sparkly as I think about how much I am looking forward to my first cup of coffee in that really quiet moment right before the sunrise.

I wanted to look forward to waking up again. Now I do.

It might not sound like much but it sure does feel like living big.

Living big isn’t about all these wild, picture perfect moments.

And I know I say that as someone with a lot of free time and not a lot of responsibilities so I get to do ‘wild’ things a little more than some.

And sure, they make great stories and great pictures. I do like looking back at them.

But it’s the pictures of mundane every day moments that I look back at more, the ones I wouldn’t remember otherwise.

It brings me back to all of those old family videos I watched recently.

None of them are ‘big’ moments. They are all very small, insignificant moments in time captured by my grandpa with a video camera everyone continuously expresses distaste for.

Now, everyone is grateful he annoyed them all with the video camera.

Because they are big moments. They are the story, they are the history.

They are the moments we might not remember but the ones we would give anything to go back to.

They’re proof we were all here. They’re proof we all lived our lives together. They are proof we lived big.

I still skipped a lot of the parts with just myself in them because it made me deeply uncomfortable.

Family can be a mirror to see yourself in. They do shape your worldview, for better or worse.

My family isn’t as close as it once was. Some aren’t here anymore, some have drifted apart. It seems like every loss fractures a part of that mirror until what is left doesn’t make a full picture anymore. Your reflection is distorted.

It’s easy to get caught up in what could have, should have or would have been in life.

It’s easy to get lost and drown in wanting so badly to be able to go back and change it or even just to have the chance to back and live it all again.

It’s hard to keep looking in that mirror, to keep not recognizing yourself, until you find one day that you’ve only managed to shatter it into smaller and smaller pieces.

It’s hard to think that the life I am living in this moment, this exact present moment, is probably someone else’s dream life. I am ungrateful.

It’s hard not to argue that, due to what led me here, my life should not be anyone’s dream life and that this hypothetical person is actually living my dream life because that is was what I wanted instead.

I am a brat. And a loony.

I yelled at my brain for long enough to shut the fuck up, to get off its miserable hamster wheel and enjoy this god damn moment for so long that it finally did. It shut the fuck up and then I could take a look around at my actual life and say ‘you know what, this is actually just fucking fine!’

It turns out, I actually did get a mundane life. It’s not blowing up every few months like it did for the past five million years. And I finally realized I should be throwing a fucking party instead of a fucking fit about it!

I should throw a party that I finally don’t feel like eating rat poison for dinner. It wasn’t all futile.

I realized recently that I don’t have to keep trying to make sense of my reflection in the shards of glass from an old broken mirror. Some of those pieces weren’t even the ones I started with. They weren’t inherited. They were slipped in, disguised as a missing piece.

There’s something about a brand new mirror.

The more I could zoom out, the more clarity I had, the more I could see that it wasn’t all about losing my partner and the baby. It was the main plot, of course. But it wasn’t the whole story. It wasn’t the only reason why it all hurt so badly.

It was also about having somewhere I felt like I could belong. It was becoming a part of a family that wasn’t my own. A family that felt right when mine hadn’t for so long.

Broken glass is weathered over time, the edges of old glass aren’t as sharp. New glass is.

For once I didn’t feel like I was on the outside looking in.

When my partner lost his mind and when I lost the baby, I was treated like a monster.

When I look at these pieces of new glass among the old, I realize they are cheap. Fun house glass, a little tricky. Meant to skew perception and deceive the mind.

There is a second wheel my brain will find itself on. It’s a wheel that says, ‘he was perfect, it was all your fault, you were the problem, you were why he lost his mind.’

It’s harder to yell at your brain to shut the fuck up when it’s playing a recording of a voice that’s not your own.

I would have never belonged there.

I paid movers to move me out of the house in the country the day after my surgery. I had no other choice. When they left, I stood in the center of a house in the city I never wanted to live in again and I stared at all of the boxes in a daze. Eventually, I made my bed, laid on top of the covers and stared at the ceiling instead.

I was alone. And I felt even more so.

That week, while I was recovering, my best friend tried to visit me multiple times. My best friend. The one that I had spent countless hours with at work, the one that I had always felt the safest with.

I turned her down every time.

But why?

How had these things I had just experienced have the power to fracture my self image so irreparably? How did these people who were not my family, who had not even been in my life for that long, erode my self worth and sense of safety so far down?

How had I quickly become so scared of being vulnerable that I couldn’t even allow my best friend to comfort me in the worst moments of my life?

I don’t know. I regret it.

I have shut out almost every single person in my life since.

I hate to admit that I do not trust people. I struggle to feel attached to anyone.

It does not feel safe.

A few month ago, I was invited to go rock climbing. It was something I really wanted to do and I had been invited a few times so I finally accepted.

Rock climbing is easy. I am not afraid of climbing up high or falling off the wall because I don’t really care if I do.

I had wanted to rock climb so I did. I had a feeling I would be good at it. I don’t know why.

Soon after I started, I was invited to be a part of a climbing group.

I did not want to do that. It sounded terrifying and I did not think I would be good at it.

I know why.

But I did it anyway. I cried all the way home one of the first times I went but I still went.

And then I kept going.

People always talk about the trust that you build in people as you take turns belaying each other.

I put a lot of focus on learning how to belay when I started. I never, ever want to drop someone. It makes me sick to think about it. I want people to trust me to take care of them, to keep them on the wall.

It makes me laugh because I don’t really think about my trust in the person belaying me. I assume they know what they are doing. If they don’t and they drop me, fuckin’ oh well. Nothing new to me.

My past experiences with a sense of ‘family’ had chipped away at me for so long and so deeply that I was terrified of being a part of something as small as a rock climbing group. That I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in this group dropped me, I almost expected it.

But I did join the group. And no one has dropped me yet.

I may not need to trust someone that can keep me on the wall.

But I did need to trust that someone wanted to.

I think I can be good at making friends, even if it wasn’t easy to start.

That’s living big.

I avoided a certain mountain here for a whole year. The one my old partner, the one who was perfect on paper, wanted to show me. I didn’t want to go alone.

But I didn’t. I went with my friend, the same one who invited me to go rock climbing. I thought of him more as a mentor then because I didn’t think a seventy five year old man would really want to be my friend.

I thought he was just being nice since I was obviously miserable, lonely and borderline haunting the desert like a spooky ghost.

I didn’t go up that mountain alone and I think having even just one good friend can make an already beautiful view feel so much more alive.

That’s living big.

Over the past couple weeks, I used a pair of tongs to slowly fill an entire bucket full of prickly pear fruit from my yard.

Six jars of jelly in my cabinet shows me that there really was fruit underneath all those spines. My friend and I boiled it down, stirred in some sugar and turned it into something completely different.

Sweet, even. No spines to be found.

That’s living big.

I took a break from writing this for a moment to fold some laundry and a painting on my wall caught my eye. It was given to me not long after I moved by the woman who owns the property I live on. It’s a prickly pear cactus and it’s technically on loan because a member of her family painted it.

But she loaned it to me. It’s in a pink frame because she noticed I liked pink. There is a rattlesnake skin shed draped over the top of it. She found it and left it for me because she ‘knew I liked things like that.’ She only found it because she was trying to find out how the aforementioned snake was continuing to get into my yard. Turns out, it lived under my house.

The snake came back this year. I didn’t mind when it popped its little head out from under my tomatoes. I apologized for getting it wet and I went inside as it slithered towards me. When I let her know it was back, she came over in her snake boots, literally ready to send guns blazing.

No shots were fired and later that night, I saw the snake slither out of my watering can and make its way out. No harm done.

Even the rattlesnake gets to live big.

I appreciate that someone came over guns blazing. I appreciate how much she’s taken care of me. I need to make sure I give her a jar of jelly.

I guess you can be the prickliest little pear on the cactus but there’s always going to be someone who knows you just need a pair of tongs. And there’s always going to be someone who knows how to turn it into something that pairs well with something else.

The right people will make you realize it might be worth it to take a cactus and make jelly.

It was. I love peanut butter and jelly.

And I love a desert metaphor even if it’s not my most poetic.

I think experiencing every day life with the right people can be what makes life feel big.

From the inside looking out, I know where I belong.

I don’t want the life I thought I did.

I want this one, this one feels right.

This one feels like living big.

This one feels like mine.

Post Views: 33
Self Reflection

Ancient Parts.

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Recently, I decided to go through a bunch of old home videos.

The week after I watched them, I noticed that I kept feeling this deep sense of shame. My brain tried to find something to attach it to but there wasn’t anything relevant. It wasn’t from an external source. It wasn’t related to any events in my life currently.

It was seemingly out of nowhere but so, so familiar. I hated it, I tried to ignore it.

I realized later that it was an old and ancient part of me. An ache so deeply rooted into my soul that I can’t find a beginning for it. It made me weepy.

After watching the home videos, I kept wondering if I was a really annoying child. If I was too much.

But why? Nobody in the videos acts like I am. There’s nothing to imply that if you watch from the outside.

Watching from the inside though, I could feel it. As I watched her, I could feel that little girls shame deep down in my bones.

Do I feel ashamed of my child self? Why else would this feeling make me want to turn my back on her? Why else would I desperately want to push this so far out of my awareness?

I don’t remember feeling this deep sense of shame as a child. But I did, didn’t I?

I feel this way as an adult when I feel like I missed some sort of social cue. If I am too much or too little. It’s an inherent feeling of being on the outside looking in.

I don’t know if I’ve ever truly felt like I belonged somewhere. It always feels like I am on the outside looking in.

I mean, I feel great by myself. If I’m alone, even if I am really going through the trials and tribulations, I feel safe in my own skin. But that’s just it, isn’t it? I only feel fully safe when I am alone.

I wonder if this is why I have struggled so much to live with people. I’d bet it one hundred percent is, actually.

Even the people I have felt the most comfortable with, I couldn’t successfully live with them. It’s a pattern I have seen continuously in my life. Even when I have tried to change it, everything still somehow blows up. Despite the external events that led me to move out, I still fear it was always my fault.

I was too much or I was too little. I am ashamed of it.

I have a scar on my neck from catching a stray nail on a swing set when I was about four or five. I don’t remember it.

This little white crescent moon mark has moved its way to the underside of my jaw as I have grown. I can’t really see it.

It caught my eye tonight as I was getting ready for bed. It’s an ancient part of me, one I don’t even remember. The story of it makes me feel brave. I wonder if someone told me how brave I was when it happened.

They’re interesting, scars. When other people have them, I love them. They are fascinating. A part of the body that carries its history. If it is still here to be seen, the scars are a living testament to everything survived.

On myself, I don’t mind them. Some of them, like the one on my neck.

I hate the ones on my face. I had beautiful skin until I got pregnant and I’m assuming the hormones fucked it all up. Since I am older, it doesn’t heal as well. The marks take a long time to fade.

It’s depressing. I don’t like looking at them. Despite that, I hyper focus on them. Sometimes I barely even see my full face.

For the past nine months, I have been working on a project.

When I began, I started with a simple idea. It’s evolved into something so much bigger than I could have ever imagined.

What I want to launch first was not the original idea. But it is the fullest embodiment of what I set out to create.

As I prepare to do so, I have been thinking a lot about scars. It unfortunately leads to me having the song ‘Scars’ by Papa Roach stuck in my head far more often than I’d like.

It seems that there are scars you can fade and some you cannot. A fresh scar heals easier. An old one may never. It’s been a part of the body for too long.

But what about the scars we carry internally? The deep down ancient parts of ourselves? The ones that come up from seemingly nowhere when we hear a certain song? When we smell something that causes an entire memory, fully formed, to play out right before our eyes?

I believe those can fade over time. They can become just a part of the story.

If we look at them when we want to look away.

If we see the full picture of ourselves instead of just the old wound.

If we take the time to intentionally care for them instead of fighting against ourselves to act like they don’t exist.

If we don’t turn our back on the little girl because she might be ‘too much.’

If we learn to love them.

Post Views: 40
Heartbreak & Loss

leaves.

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When you’re growing plants in containers, they don’t start showing growth above the surface until their roots have spread far enough through the soil below to support it.

In the past four months, I’ve acquired a lot of plants.

I’ve never really been a plant person. I used to have a peace lily that I had taken from my dad’s funeral but I was always convinced that it had decided not to die only because it knew I would feel like total shit if it did.

I’ve talked a lot about roots on this blog over the past three years.

Reading it all back, everything in my life up until March of 2024 seems inconsequential to me now. It seems like someone else lived that portion of my life and I only stepped in after.

It still feels like the large majority of the ‘after’ took place before I moved. But I’ve been in the desert for almost a year now. The timelines are skewed in my mind.

I spent a decent amount of time over the past winter so consumed by my own grief, so unable to accept the events that transpired before I left, that I truly believe I experienced a full mental break from reality.

I would have dreams, back to back to back, of being in a labor and delivery room. Perfect on Paper Guy handing me our baby. They were so vivid that I could tangibly feel his skin on mine as he handed her over, the warmth and weight of our baby in my arms and the feeling of him wrapping his arms around us.

They plagued me in my waking hours too. Awake and asleep. I saw it and felt it. Over and over and over again.

It drove me insane.

I wanted to move on from it all. I wanted to leave it behind me. I would focus on releasing it, meditating on letting all go. I would try to redirect the imagery to me handing off our baby to the universe.

Then I would have dreams where there was a knock on my door. When I opened it, it was my dad with a little girl, holding his hand. He would bring her back to me.

Again, it was driving me insane.

Only in the past month or so do I feel like I have been able to come to terms with the fact that there is nothing, not a single thing I can do, to make these dreams a reality.

Excruciating.

I want to be able to see a new future, or a future at all, that can carry the same hope that one summer of my life did.

I’m still afraid of the dreams coming back and pulling me back under. But I can’t put roots down in soil that’s not even real.

So I started collecting plants.

I had to collect a lot of them to make it a hobby that was actually time consuming enough to be distracting. I monitor their progress, I put them under grow lights every morning. I create their own soil mix, purify their water, untangle their leaves.

I do wonder sometimes what will happen if one day I have other shit to do. But that’s a challenge for later me.

I swear they all thrive because I am not afraid to fuck with them. People on the internet will tell you not to, that it’s detrimental to their growth. But at the first sign of a problem, I don’t delay trying to solve it.

Pull them out and look at their roots. That’s usually where the problem is.

When you repot a plant, there is a time period after where it seems like time stands still, like literally nothing is happening. But it’s just settling in, taking a second to adjust to its new environment before it takes a real look around. It can be discouraging. But I understand this process now. I am patient.

If you keep consistently taking care of it, it consistently grows. Even if it doesn’t look like it is.

After what seems like an eternity, a new leaf starts coming out. In a week or so, it will unfurl. A month later, there’s another.

Growth takes patience.

I was standing around looking at them the other morning when a voice in my head said:

‘Savannah, just look at how much you can grow.’

I still run into issues. A leaf yellowing can be a sign of multiple problems. But sometimes, it’s just that an older, original leaf has run its course. It’s served its purpose to grow the plant to the point it’s at now and it’s time to let it go.

The annoying thing is that you can’t really pull those leaves off until the plants truly gotten everything it needs from it. If you force it before it’s ready, you risk damaging the stem or throwing it into shock. Eventually though, they’ll pop right off without any resistance.

It just doesn’t happen overnight. And it really is kind of ugly to look at for a while.

So it goes.

I’ve learned a lot from my plants.

I started a full vegetable garden a couple weeks ago. I can’t micromanage everything about my outdoor plants environment. Nature has to play its hand too. It scares me more than I would like to admit. It strikes a chord.

When I was pregnant, I ate so many fucking eggs that I can’t eat them now without thinking about it. Eggs are great sources of choline, which helps develop a babies brain. I thought if I ate enough eggs, surely I would then grow a baby with the world’s biggest brain. But hopefully without a big weird head.

I have been stuck for so long on what I couldn’t grow. There was nothing I could have done, I still couldn’t grow the one thing I wanted to grow more than anything in the entire world.

I can’t change that and I still battle with it every single day. Every single day there’s a moment I am reminded of what I couldn’t grow.

But it brought tears to my eyes today to realize that, subconsciously, I have surrounded myself with so much proof of what I can.

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Self Reflection

Wasting Time.

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I think about the future a lot.

By that I mean, I try not to think about the future a lot.

By that I mean, if I think about the future too much I spiral out into an existential crisis.

People like to ask you about your future. What are your goals? Where do you see yourself in the next five years? What are you doing this weekend?

My answer to these questions is usually, ‘I don’t know, whatever I feel like doing.’

I wish I was saying this because I am a totally free spirit who only lives in the present moment but I’m not. I’m scared to think I know what my future holds. If the past year has taught me anything, it’s that if you think you know what the future holds, you’re probably dead wrong.

So now I am afraid to know but I’m also afraid of not knowing. And I have absolutely no idea how to answer any of those questions.

I feel like I am in limbo. I don’t move forward or backward. I’m stuck.

I take the exact same road to get pretty much anywhere I need to go. I am usually focused on the road in front of me as I am a diligent and responsible driver.

There are mountains in every direction and on all sides of me. There are rolling hills, plateaus, giant crests in the distance. I see them everyday, they have blended into the overall landscape of my route to work.

Straight in front of me there is a massive mountain, like behemoth sized. It’s usually a giant grey geometric shape outlined on the horizon, it’s easy to forget it’s even there.

The other day I was driving to work and the sun hit in a way it hadn’t before and it was like I had never actually seen it before. It had always been right in front of me but that day, it was magic. It fucking ruled.

I sit in the exact same spot to see the stars a couple nights a week. Mainly because it’s spooky out here in the dark and it has the clearest view while also being close to my gate.

The Leonid meteor shower was last night so I went out to try and catch it before I went to bed. From my vantage point, I was looking up at Cassiopeia. When I went back out in the early morning, I was looking up at Gemini.

It wasn’t even a twelve hour difference.

I have a fun activity I do called ‘sun chasing’. This is where I go on all sides of the property, walk at different elevations and sit on different points of the fences to get the best view of the sunset or sunrise.

It’s a different spot every day. It’s also a different sky every day.

I have sat on those same fences while I waited for storms to roll in. I watched as the clouds moved in different directions, I felt the subtle shifts of the wind as it picked up strands of my hair. I tracked the first few raindrops in the distance to the downpour that came soon after.

I moved when I realized a metal fence wasn’t the smartest place to be sitting during a thunderstorm.

After a day and a half of rain, I watched teeny tiny little blades of grass grow up out of a bunch of old, dusty dirt. I wondered how long they had been sitting dormant, just waiting for the right opportunity.

They died, obviously, this is the desert, but that isn’t the point.

This time period of my life feels like I am standing still. It’s hard to track the passage of time here, there’s no seasons. I didn’t realize it was Halloween until I saw pictures of people carving pumpkins back home. I feel like life is moving forward everywhere else while I am floating along in an eternal summer.

Which isn’t the worst when it comes to hypothetical purgatories.

The days keep passing, they turn into months. I feel like I am wasting time. Like I need to be doing something. Getting out there and meeting someone so I could maybe get married and have a chance at having a baby before I turn 35. Or investing in this blog so it can be something more than a webpage I use to send my thoughts out into the ether. Or trying to learn enough about one thing enough to do something different with my career.

I could observe all of these things and conclude that I am stuck, I am standing in the same place while the world rotates and changes around me. Which would be a shitty metaphor and an even dumber science experiment.

I don’t know why I get all worked up about it. I don’t even know if I really want those things. If I did, I’d probably do something about it outside of randomly panicking about it every few days.

I’m not doing those things.

I’m watching storms roll in. I’m watching the sun rise and set. I am tracking the patterns the moon moves in as those days turn into months. I am watching as grass puts in a real valiant effort to grow out in the desert. I am watching as it dies too.

You don’t learn how to do all of these things without standing in the same place for awhile and letting the world move around you. So I guess it’s not a shitty metaphor at all.

Honestly, I guess most of the time I am just hanging out and doing whatever I feel like doing. And then I sit and listen to music while I write about it and send it off into the ether. Or I sit and write unhinged things I will never, ever send into the ether.

Oh, and I’m alive and actually living. I’m not grass in the desert. I don’t know what I am but I’m not that.

I take that back, I guess I am sitting dormant and waiting for that perfect opportunity to present itself so that’s not really a shitty metaphor either. I’m just not going to give it a solid effort only to watch myself die anymore.

When it comes to the future, I think I should just chill out. I think if I allow myself to move with the rotation of the earth, if I don’t try to cling to an idea, a space or a time, it’ll take me where I need to go.

Resisting it would literally be pointless anyway. I don’t control the damn earth.

I don’t know why I’m so worried about the future anyway.

I think one day I will be bopping along, the sun will hit something completely different and I’ll say ‘Oh! That’s exactly what I was looking for!’

The sky is different every single day. I don’t need to know what it will look like tomorrow, next week, or next year.

Thankfully, I have all this time to wait and see. Who knows, it might even rain.

Then it will be this grass’s time to shine, baby!

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Heartbreak & Loss

The Choices We Make.

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I fell asleep outside last night. I am someone who falls asleep outside now.

Not for very long though. I was looking at the stars, sitting in a reclining chair at the bottom of one of the small dips in my yard. The sun had barely set but it’s dark out here, they pop up quickly. It’s like your own personal planetarium.

Sometimes when I see something so beautiful that I can’t even believe it’s real, I have this twinge of sadness. I usually ignore it and hope that one day it goes away.

When I woke up outside, I had that same twinge but it brought with it the memory of the last time I could see so many stars, the last time I fell asleep under them.

We were in Joshua Tree. 

The first time I saw the desert was on the back of a motorcycle, riding from Prescott to California. We spent time with my Mamaw in Santa Monica. We saw Tyler Childers in Inglewood. We spent three days in Joshua Tree at the end. 

When we were in Santa Monica, I thought back to the last time I was there. I wrote about it, even. It was when I was looking at the ocean and thought about how nice it would be to walk in and let the waves take me. I was, obviously, so fucking miserable at that time in my life.

When we rode by, when we went to that same beach, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to see it all again from these eyes. It was so healing that it was borderline overwhelming. 

We went to the national park. I had seen the desert landscape from the back of the bike but seeing it up close was something else. It was just so fucking funny. I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at anything in the desert up close but I would absolutely recommend it. I couldn’t stop pointing at things, dying laughing and saying, “What is that? What is this? Look at that guy!”

I hadn’t laughed, really laughed, in months. But I couldn’t stop. In between my gales of laughter, he told me the names of the plants and animals. He showed me how to climb up a rock face and he scaled up a tower of them. I was too nervous to try after I slipped at the bottom.

Later that night, we laughed even more. I laughed so hard that I couldn’t get any words out. Everything was just so fucking funny. 

That night was the first time I had ever really seen the stars. Laying on our backs, he pointed them all out to me, he told me their names and we counted the ones that shot by. He showed me how to identify satellites and planes by their lights. He showed me how a few stars can become a whole constellation.

It was the first moment, the first place, that I felt like everything could be okay again. 

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with nature. I had old science textbooks I would spend hours looking at, realistic stickers of bugs all over my desk. I lived in the city so I had a small backyard but I was always out there poking around and trying to identify the different bugs and animals. I collected worms and threw a fit when I had to wear a dress that couldn’t get covered in dirt. I was usually by myself but I was always on an adventure. 

The best times were with my Dad. He knew so much about the woods and he showed me it all. He knew how to bait the hook, where to cast and he knew how to follow the creek bed. If I was an adventurer, he was the tour guide. I was just happy to be traipsing around at my dad’s side in the underbrush. I liked to be taught things just as much as I loved learning them.

When I was in Joshua Tree, he knew everything about the desert. He knew his way around, it was all familiar to him. As he showed me all of it, I was just happy to be traipsing around at his side. I liked to be taught things just as much as I loved learning them. 

You can see the parallel I’m making here. I didn’t see it until I started typing it out, to be quite honest. 

I always loved to learn and adventure by myself. But it was my Dad who really knew how too. He was the one who paved the way, the one who knew where to go and how to do it. He was the brave one, I just tried to be.

One night, we were riding bikes. He was doing tricks and I followed him trying to do the same. It was fun until my tire hit the curb and I fell face first into the pavement, scraping off quite a bit of the left side of my face in the process. I cried until I went back to my mom’s house. Trying to follow in my Dad’s footsteps, trying to embody his fearlessness, ended in my own pain.

I feel like I can feel that scrape on my face. 

When I was looking up at the stars last night, I remembered being too nervous to follow my partner up the rocks in Joshua Tree. I thought about how I got bolder once we got home, following in his footsteps, climbing trees and sitting on our roof.

I forgot how pure I felt back then, how I felt like the best version of myself. Being with him, living in our house in the country and going on all of our adventures brought me back to that sense of childlike wonder. It brought me back to how it felt to be stomping around in creeks with my Dad, nothing to fear, as long as he led the way. It felt like coming home.

It felt like everything could be okay again. 

Until I fell off my bike. Until he tried to go out the same way my Dad did. Until all those same wounds got ripped right back open.

I spent a summer remembering how it felt to be walking in the sun, nothing to fear, with my Dad by my side.

Somehow, I had forgotten how the story ended.

It took a few years after my Dad’s suicide for me to really grasp the fact that he had died. I didn’t really understand the true pain it left me with until I almost experienced it again with my partner. I understood it even more when I found out I was pregnant a week later. Carrying my own child, I couldn’t escape the gravity of it. 

The summer didn’t last long. It was always brief back then too.

The winter my Dad died, I didn’t try to be brave. I didn’t think I could do it by myself. I was too afraid to do it without him showing me how. I let my face heal and then I packed up all of my adventures into a box and I put it away in a spot where I could act like it, and my Dad, had never existed.

This spring, I wanted us to move out west. I begged him. We were dying in Indiana, it was sucking the life out of us. I thought it was our only chance, the only way we could get ourselves out of the deep dark hole we had found ourselves in. I thought if we just moved, everything could be okay again.

I am embarrassed to say that I begged him to come with me even after everything blew up. 

But when it did, I had to make a choice. I knew after everything that happened, I couldn’t stay in Indiana. I couldn’t pack it all up in a box and pretend it never existed. 

So I didn’t.

I went to the first place I could remember feeling like everything would be okay, the first place I could see the stars. I went where he showed me.

I went out west.

This summer, I built the life I had begged for.

I was my own tour guide and my own adventurer. I kept climbing rocks after I slipped on them. I learned the names of all the plants and animals. I caught the scorpions in my house. I found my own place to sit and watch the stars. I cried when I scraped my knees, I cleaned my own wounds and I watched them as they healed.

I can tell you quite a bit about the desert. I can tell you when the prickly pears produce fruit, when the saguaros bloom. I can tell you which holes have tarantulas in them and which ones have kangaroo rats. I can tell you about how calcite comes up to the surface after it rains and why. I can tell you which feathers in my collection came from what bird, which shed came from what snake. 

I am walking in my own footsteps, paving my own way. I have become who that little girl, happy at her Dad’s side, always wanted to be. But this time, I’m the brave one, not just trying to be. It’s an inspiring story, of course, it’s my story and it is all true.

Sometimes it just feels like something is missing.

When I am traipsing around, there’s no one happy to be by my side. When I learn something new, there’s no one here to share it with. There’s no one here to laugh with when I say, “What is that? Look at that guy!” 

When I see something so beautiful that I can’t even believe it’s real, there’s no one here to look over and know they’re seeing it too. 

I built the life I begged for. I built the life I chose.

Being brave just doesn’t always feel the way you thought it would. 

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Self Reflection

The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars.

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I live in what I would consider to be the most beautiful place in the entire world. I am floored by it daily, I can’t believe a place like this exists. There is rarely a day that the sun isn’t shining. At night, I can see the moon and the stars so brightly that it feels like I am legitimately in outer space. Stars shoot so frequently through the sky above me that it’s inspired me to diligently study astrology to see how all of this beauty could translate into my life. I spend so much time learning about the mountains, the rocks and the animals. I love every last bit of it. 

Writing my last blog, just a moment in time., sent me into a two day spiral. My body was an animatronic robot going through all of my normal activities while my brain was somewhere else. My head was wrapped in cotton while simultaneously going up in flames. Writing that blog poured lighter fluid all over me and posting it was the match that set it ablaze.

I was in the place that tells me this will never, ever get better. It sneers at me that I will never be free, I am cursed by it. There’s no sense in fighting against it, it is hellbent on dragging me into inevitable madness. 

Outside, the sun shone so brightly that it was boring into my skull. The mountains loomed over me, I was looking at them but I couldn’t really see them. They were ominous and even the moon felt like it was judging me. I can’t see the beauty around me when my mind is in the past, it doesn’t compute. My surroundings aren’t familiar to me, I hadn’t seen them yet.

Inside, I obsessed over every detail. Every moment in time that I might have been responsible for how everything turned out. Trying to fill in the gaps of what I couldn’t remember. I oscillated through outward rage and inward shame. I berated myself for wasting my days off by being in this headspace, for not being able to get it together and felt disgusted in myself for pouring out my vulnerability on the internet. 

I don’t really remember what I did Sunday. I know I did laundry and I cleaned. But I don’t remember anything else. This is par the course for episodes of this magnitude. I will be so deeply entrenched mentally and emotionally in the past that, later, my brain can’t even bring the actual details back up. I’m grateful there was only one day of this. Last year I lost a full month from December to January. There are only some details I remember from the time I was pregnant, most of it got thrown out completely. 

Monday was more painful but it’s also crystal clear. This is a good sign. 

I knew I had to take some sort of definitive action in order to leave the mental state I was in. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. I am always scared it will be one of the times it doesn’t. Those are the really dark times. But alas, we must persevere.

I have been journaling a lot recently. I have different journals for different purposes. My favorite one is used for writing down all of my nature observations in between the thoughts I have at the time. It’s grounding. I also have one for dreams and I have one for rage. 

It’s tiring to write it all out by hand. I have multiple dreams a night so I switched to cataloguing them on my laptop to better reference repeated themes and make connections. They have been extra vivid recently. They are abstract but loaded with meaning. They touch on the deepest parts of my psyche that I struggle to look at. They dig into the roots of my life, they aren’t concerned with my most recent past. 

It’s even more tiring to write out all of my rage by hand. My hands can’t move as quickly as my thoughts and there are many times I struggle to keep up. It’s frustrating. Yesterday, since there were so many thoughts competing for my attention and ultimately torturing me, I switched this to my laptop as well.

I spent hours, and I’m not even remotely exaggerating, hours typing out every single thought that came through my mind. It is 8,683 words. 8,683 words in the format of a letter I would never send. There was a point where it was only making me angrier. There was a point where I felt like it was only confusing me more. There were moments of desperation and there were things I felt embarrassed to even write. I questioned my faith in my spirituality. There is even a section that I go on a whole diatribe questioning if I had fully lost control of my own sanity. I was afraid that if I quit typing I actually would.

I had some semblance of clarity for a while. I took a shower and ate two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I was more optimistic going through pictures and videos of my past few months and appreciating how beautiful it all really is. I posted them to put some positively out into the world. I laid down to go to sleep. 

But I couldn’t. Those fucking thoughts had me in a chokehold once again, careening me backwards. I went back to it. I typed it all out in the form of a text message. I knew deep down that I wouldn’t actually send it but god damn did it feel good to play with fire for a second.

At three am, my entire mind deflated. It had run 8,683 miles and it was exhausted. I was ashamed of myself for still feeling all of these feelings, for needing to write them all out. I was afraid that I was actually just a crazy person, obsessed with my own pain. I wondered if I even had pain at all, maybe I am just really dramatic. 

I focused on releasing everything I wrote that day, acceptance moves forward. Resistance impedes. I don’t want to carry it all with me anymore, I’m sick of being angry. I will embody indifference, I will find peace in my grief. It’s over, it’s all over.

I ended my night by writing a letter to myself, reminding myself that what is not released in some form can only fester, turning itself into bitterness. I reminded myself that there is a very big difference in writing letters you’ll never send and then actually sending them. I reiterated how proud I should be of my bravery to start over here in the desert. I remembered how proud of myself I really was. I remembered how far I have come since last year, since May 22nd, since Saturday night. 

I didn’t sleep much and I still had dreams. But they didn’t have much depth, they were surface level. In the last one I ‘realized’ that today wasn’t my day off and I was too tired to go to work. Simple shit. 

I wake up to my dog staring at me a few inches from my face. The second I crack my eyes open she is tucking her head under my chin and pawing at my face. If I sleep past six am she thinks I might possibly be dead and therefore unable to feed her. She is happy when she finds out that I am not. I am too. 

I get up to let her outside and the sun is shining in that particularly jovial form it does sometimes. It is hitting the catclaw vine that grows over the top fencing of my yard in the purest way. It is just bright enough and it’s refreshing, whispering promises of a better day as it graces my cheeks. 

I leave my front door open so the crisp morning desert breeze can come through the screen, clearing out all the remnants of the past two days. It is peaceful, it is optimistic. It’s a breath of fresh air and possibility. I am right here. The sun is happy I rejoined the land of the living. I am too. 

I am lucky to live where everything survives by sheer determination and force, I get to live in an oasis where things grow delicately and green, wrapping around my home in a way that creates a sense of loving safety. I get to live where animals come and visit me, I have become the Southwest Cinderella. 

I find true healing here in the mountains. It is quite the cliche, forgive me for that. But I feel one among the plants and animals that manage to thrive here, just like me. I am comforted by being held in the valleys of the ancient mountain ranges. They hold steadfast, reminding me that years of violent eruptions and moving parts could redefine my structure but it all ends in an awe striking result. 

You know I love a good metaphor and, lucky for me, it’s chock full of them.

It only took two days to find myself firmly rooted back into the present. That’s not a long time at all. It wasn’t time wasted. 

Everything I experienced led me to exactly the place I am right now, this present moment. It has made the worst years of my life seem like the world’s most beautiful gift. 

Among the sun, the moon and the stars, I am scrubbed fresh, more prepared to keep going. They hold my hurts for me and they will give them back to me if I need to look at them again. If I don’t, they’ll release them for me for good. They guide me to the wisdom I need, they nudge me down the right path. The mountains anchor me through. They all called me here, after all. They know what they’re doing.

I will keep listening.

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Heartbreak & Loss

just a moment in time.

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On May 22nd 2025, I arrived at my new home in a state almost 2,000 miles away from where I had lived my whole life. I packed up whatever I could fit into my car, strapped in my dog and left like a bat out of hell. 

I have not once regretted that decision but I wont lie, I’m fucking broke. The one thing I had going for me back in my home state was the solid foundation of financial security I had built over the years. I have no doubt in my mind that I will build it again. That isn’t the point.

The point is that I decided not to reinvest in my web domain hosting. I decided I was okay with leaving this blog in the past. In fact, I didn’t want the last few years of my life to be blasted on the internet for anyone new I could meet to see anyway. It was a fresh start after all. 

But there are some things you can’t leave behind. Things you don’t even want to. I hadn’t processed, or even accepted, that I had really lost my baby. I had tried to take it on a few times, sure, and there was even a small period of time this seemed possible. On her due date, I spent the day with Perfect on Paper Guy, her father. It felt healing. I thought we were healing. 

Blah, blah, blah. We don’t need to get into the specifics of that shit show. I don’t feel the need to tell that story.

But here, six months later, I am still rocked by waves of grief over and over and over again. I will think that I have come to a point of peace with it all and then something new will happen and drag me back into the trenches. 

I took my head out of the sand tonight and decided to see what would happen if I logged back into my blog account. I couldn’t. It was gone. It was all gone.

I don’t care about any other post on this blog other than a soul as big as my own. I rarely reread them. But that post is a handful of paragraphs that painstakingly and lovingly encapsulated the worst and purest moments of my entire life. I wrote it less than a week after the surgery feeling like I was going to bleed out physically and emotionally. I’ve reread it a million times and I’ve avoided it just as many too.

I have a rough draft of it but it wasn’t the final one I put out into the world. The only record of her being real. The only tangible thing that I have. They asked me if I wanted an ultrasound picture and I refused it. He didn’t, I wonder if he still has it. I don’t know if I would want to see it if he did. 

She was mine. She was his. But she was mine. 

And now I have nothing. That’s not really true, I actually have a lot. But there are so many moments that all I can see is that I don’t have her. 

I can’t even make the words come out of my mouth to share this experience with anyone I’ve met here. I physically cannot make myself. I can write it on the internet and share it with strangers. But to verbally say it? I just can’t. It’s my Achilles heel. I’m afraid they won’t understand or they’ll act like it shouldn’t be this hard. I never understood it either until it happened to me. So maybe they’ll say I should just move on. Didn’t I move away to start a new life?

When someone dies, you grieve. You grieve them not being present in your life any longer. You celebrate the life they lived. All of the up’s and downs, triumphs and losses. It’s devastating and painful and it can take years and years to move on from. But they lived, they were there. 

How do you grieve someone who never lived? Someone you never got to see. An idea, even. 

I hoard my grief. I carry it with me every day, I sleep next to it at night. I let it roam a little ways away sometimes but I always pull it back. I’m afraid to let it go. 

It’s hard to start a new life when you’re aching for the one that never got to. 

When I was pregnant, I would lay on my back and try to feel if my body had changed, if I could feel her in there. I couldn’t. But I still did, in some way. She consumed my thoughts, all of my energy seemed to be concentrated in my abdomen. Everything from that moment forward was focused solely on her. I was ready to destroy anything in my path that threatened her. 

And then there was nothing.

When I saw that I couldn’t retrieve that one single blog entry, I pulled out my credit card and immediately charged it. I didn’t care about the cost, I didn’t even hesitate. I was sick, nauseated and sweating. I frantically did whatever I could to bring it back. I immediately copied and pasted it into a new document to ensure I’d never lose it again.

But why? Why do I hoard it when it hurts me so deeply? 

It feels wrong. It feels like if I let go of my grief that will be when she truly no longer exists.

Despite my feelings I have now towards the man I shared her with, that was our baby and that second chance is gone forever, we don’t have any more time. Two for one special, him and her.

I have been gripped with fear recently that if I ever found someone new and fell in love again, if I was to have another chance at having a child, it wouldn’t feel like my baby.

I know this is ludicrous. Truly insane person levels of thinking. There is a neverending list of why I should be grateful that I did not have a baby with him. And I am. But sometimes even just the knowledge that I will always be connected to him, that the grief of her will always be intertwined with the threads of him, makes me want to climb all the way up the mountain in my back yard just to fling myself off of it. There are times I am filled with so much rage that I feel I could burn all of them to the ground.

There will never be her without me. There will never be her without him. She fully encompasses both the absolute best and the absolute worst of us. I worry I’ll never truly be free of it, that it will drive me into madness one day. There are times I have truly considered ending my own life over it. Two for one special, me and her.

I wonder if I will ever really understand why this had to happen. Sometimes I feel like I do and then I don’t all over again. All I can do is continue to see the value of my own life and continue to keep living it. It really is good most days. 

I keep stringing those good days together, I have more moments of peace than agony. It’s getting better. This is just a moment in time.

I guess for now I will just write about it and cry and shake until it passes. And then I guess I’ll go eat a bowl of fucking spaghetti or something and go the fuck to sleep.

But at least I get to wake up tomorrow and if I feel like shit, I get to feel like shit looking at a mountain and a shit ton of cactus in perfect weather. Maybe I will post this to my Blog of Seemingly Neverending Pain that I couldn’t afford so I at least get my money’s worth. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I will do one of the new hobbies I have picked up or study the things I have liked a lot recently instead. 

I really have discovered a lot of things that give me purpose in my life. It might not be what I thought it was going to be. But it’s still pretty good. I really only write about my life when it sucks ass. Maybe I will try to write about it when it doesn’t. I do want to get my money’s worth.

Anyway, no two for one special today. Just a party of one. And thats okay.

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Self Reflection

For the Love of God.

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The song Angel Band by Tyler Childers is what I would consider to be my favorite song of all time. I saw him California and I think I blacked out in the third row when he played it live. I tattooed ‘Hallelujah, Now I See’ across my palms.

It’s a song that I’ve played over and over when I’ve been at my lowest, desperately searching for why I should continue living. It’s a song I’ve played in euphoric moments when I realized that was why. It’s the song I wanted to play when I walked down the aisle when Perfect on Paper Guy and I got married. 

I have listened to the last minute of it, over and over, while I internally writhed with rage, anguish, and joy. It encompasses such a broad spectrum of feelings and moments for me that I think it’s etched into my soul at this point. 

Sometimes I get embarrassed to love something someone else made so much. But I think that might be the point of why music or art is made, to provoke the heart and the mind.

I write off and on through phases of my life. Usually at times I feel stuck in my brain. I don’t even know what I am looking for but I’m going in with a flashlight and a shovel to dig it out. I know there’s something, I’ll find it if I keep digging. I’ll find it if I keep making logs of fossils, sediments, if I keep crafting experiments to test hypothesis. 

My subconscious has been my own personal Everest. The diligence I’ve dedicated to climbing it is unmatched. At times, the level of attention to detail I’ve paid to it has driven myself (and everyone around me, I’m sure) into madness. No stone goes unturned. Sometimes there’s nothing, sometimes there is an entire ecosystem thriving under one small rock. 

As a child, I loved flipping rocks to see what was underneath. They are the Midwest’s version of tide pools. If I chill the fuck out, I like doing it as an adult too. 

What is true in the physical is often true in the spiritual. 

I used to be really religious when I was in highschool. I chose to be, it wasn’t forced on me. I found a sense of belonging, structure, and purpose in the church. I pushed it to extremes, as you can guess I would, and I got burnt out. I had held myself to standards that a teenager really had no chance of upholding, not when they’re riddled with hormones and a healthy desire to self destruct. 

My shortcomings and mental battles within myself truly felt like an angel and devil on my shoulder, pushing and pulling at my soul. I thought I could push through if I was just dedicated enough.

When I decided I apparently was not, I gave up. I turned my back on it. I had a lot of shame about this. I think it was the beginning of feeling like I could not trust myself to see something through.

If I loved something so much but I wasn’t good enough for it, I’d bow out. I’d turn my back and walk away. I’d convince myself I never believed in it in the first place. If I wanted something so badly but I couldn’t measure up, I would repress it.

Fifteen years later, I still don’t believe in the Christian idea of God. I say that from a place of complete truth, I’ve overturned all the stones. I do think Christ’s teachings in the Bible hold a lot of merit as a tool when interpreted from a perspective of searching for clarity and purpose in both the physical and spiritual realms. He’s a philosopher, if you will.

I do believe in the idea of a Universal Spirit, a Source, a Higher Power. It is not so much that I feel like it is bigger (and therefore different) than me, as AA would suggest, but more that it is both separate and part of me. My highest self, maybe? Universal consciousness? It is not that much different from ‘God’. But it’s not personified, there’s no rules for its acceptance. It just is. 

Honestly, I think all of these different religious paths come from the same source and just present in whatever way we will find most palatable. But this is all just my opinion on my little blog so don’t come for me with ya pitchforks. 

Whatever you want to call it, I know it when I feel it and I know when I am in tune with it. My vision and my awareness expands. I become a part of everything, I see from the front of my own eyes. I feel and absorb things as they happen. I can feel every emotion and I can express them from my true self. I do not hide from anything: past, present, or future. 

Most of the time I am in a state of tunnel vision, seeing everything from a little farther back, not quite here. I think about things as they happen, label the feelings. But I don’t quite feel them. This is not unbearable and I am a little better at recognizing this now and it might take a few days, but I can push myself out of it. 

At my worst times, I am watching everything from the back of my brain. I feel nothing, I believe nothing, I don’t trust myself or others. My brain is turning it’s wheels, looking for a threat, looking for a solution. Looking for a way out. Analyzing, analyzing, analyzing. But I cannot see any patterns, I cannot put the pieces together. I have spent months in this stage, usually after a traumatic event, and I don’t usually have a lot of memories from those time periods. I am, essentially, an animated corpse. 

A lot of my distrust in myself comes from rotating through these stages, the last two predominantly. The first stage used to happen so little that I thought it was a fluke, a delusion. Mania, even. 

When I cannot succeed, live up to expectations, or be good enough: I will turn my back, repress, and walk away. I will feel ashamed of the moments I had in my true self where I felt joy, love, excitement. Even more so if I expressed them. I feel stupid for believing in them, believing in anything. 

Fear is the only emotion that I cannot tell you what it really feels like. I can tell you what anxiety feels like. I am anxious all the time. But I don’t think it’s necessarily the same thing. Anxiety is looking for solutions, disaster planning, it’s thinking ahead. It’s a manifestation of fear, most likely, but it’s not fear. It’s covering it up.

Fear is subconscious, for me at least. Fear is repressed. Deeply. 

If I am afraid that I will not be good enough, I am weak. I hate both of those things, so I repress them both. If I am afraid that I will not be good enough and therefore I will be left, I hate that even more. I repress it even harder. 

While I am repressing my fear, I am also repressing my other emotions. The love I have for someone, the adoration, the giddiness of being around them, the desire to be secure and loved. My outward expression of love towards someone makes me feel embarrassed, ashamed. I will look like a fool when they leave. I will look like a fool if they hurt me. I will look pathetic when they realize I’m not good enough. I will look pathetic for thinking they were good enough.

I turn my back, repress, and walk away. I have done it so many times. When the fear dissipates, I go back. But I’m not fully there, I’m subconsciously looking for the sign that I need to prepare, pull back, and repress it again. Sometimes I will shut down out of sheer fear of myself, I don’t trust myself to not keep repeating this pattern.

I am forever careening between hopeful and hopeless.

My fathers were the first men in my life to not live up to the idea I had of them. God was the second. I was left, wondering why they never showed up. Why they never pulled their weight and did the things they said they would. 

My fear of never being accepted, never being good enough no matter how hard I tried, has pushed me into a role of being the savior in my own story. I have written my own Bible in the electrical and chemical signals of my nervous system. It is my universal truth. 

“She’s shouting in the aisle

She’s shaking something fierce”

I began questioning the Bible and it’s teachings in my late teens. Can I question and disidentify with my own version in my early thirties? Can I create a new belief system, new commandments, new verses and parables to build on?

“Feels so good to be here

After all these faithful years”

The tattoos on my palms include an eye on each hand. In the center of the eye, and the center of my palm, is a circle that is inked red. This was a tongue in cheek nod to the phenomenon of stigmata, the appearance of bodily marks that correspond to the wounds of Jesus’s crucifixtion. 

I do not believe in the Christian idea of God. I don’t believe in Heaven. And I sure as fuck don’t believe in going to hell when you can experience it right here all on your own. 

However, stigmata is said to be a representation of a very real connection with Christ and that those who experience it are those who wanted that connection so badly that they would put themselves through the trials and tribulations to get there. 

“Just took a walk with Jesus

Just touched his nail-scarred hands”

If we are viewing the connection to Christ through a lens of metaphor for connection to Source, was it a tongue in cheek reference at all? I marked my body, the palms of my hands, with the words and symbolism to encompass everything I believe in. The words I’ve repeated to myself over and over through my own version of hell. I’ve held fast to nothing more than blind faith that I would be reborn, transformed, and full of all encompassing joy on the other side. And I did it with all the joy I could fucking muster.

“Didn’t even bother her

That he ain’t a blue-eyed man”

I believe in the weeping and gnashing of teeth. I believe in the absolute agony of accepting where you are in a moment that feels like it will eat you alive. I believe in the power it takes to not cower and hide your face while it all rages around you. And I believe in the bravery it takes to grit your teeth, turn towards it and stare it down with your god damn eyes open. 

“Hallelujah, jubilee”

I believe in being baptized by water and I believe in being baptized by fire and I believe I have experienced both, multiple times. Each time, I find more clarity, more peace, more joy. I am closer to the core of who I am. 

Every single time, I am reborn. Every single time my capacity for love grows tenfold, and my fear is quelled. At least for awhile, I can see clearly.

“I can hear the angel band”

It’s funny how often fear is mentioned alongside love in the Bible. It’s almost as if they are two sides of the same coin, you can’t have one without the other. 

“I was blind but now I see”

What if fear finally took the backseat? What if I was able to experience a love that is greater than fear?

“And I’ll jump right in amongst them

When I reach the glory land”

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Self Reflection

The Year of Being Wrong.

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When I was a child, I had a crippling fear that everything I had ever done that I was ashamed of would one day come out as a tabloid expose. In my mind, at six years old, I would obviously grow up to be very famous. The paparazzi would dig into my past and eventually I would see my deep dark secrets splashed across all the magazines at my local supermarket. Obviously. 

Thankfully, I don’t think anyone is interested in, “Savannah jumped on a board once to scare out a mole she saw run under it and accidentally squashed it instead.” Or even, “At ten years old, Savannah spent a year terrified that everything she touched would lead to her imminent death!’ 

Even after childhood, I’ve basically had a nonstop printer of Ok! Magazine printing off headlines about how terrible, shameful, and bizarre I am for as long as I can remember. It’s the core of why I started writing about my life. It’s somewhat preemptive to air out all my dirty laundry (before the press gets to it. Obviously.) It helps absolve my shame to understand my life experiences and actions. Even if the driving force behind them at times was, “I was truly an insane person for reasons continuing to be discovered.” 

Writing about my life, however, has doubled the shame complex at times. I have been so public about the thought processing around my life and what has happened. These things evolve and change and the effect they have on my life compounds or lessens as time goes on. I have often reread things I have written and thought, “I don’t necessarily feel that way anymore.” And then shame comes in, “Way to go, bozo, you were wrong!”

This went into overdrive after my last relationship ended. Perfect on paper guy had some not so perfect on paper reactions, I was stuck trying to get over them and eventually I chose to end things with him.

”Savannah leaves another man after thinking he was the one, what a fucking moron!” The tabloids screamed in my head, “Jilted bitch is jilted again! When will she ever learn! Nothing is ever actually going to work out for you!”

I was a laughing stock to the muppet peanut gallery in my own brain. 

Luckily, my brain also has a good PR team. It cranked out new headlines to thin out the barrage of negative reporting. Things like, “Girl who would never have left a toxic situation before ACTUALLY leaves a toxic situation!” “Look out world! Savannah stands up for herself (and didn’t even resort to name calling to do it!)” and my favorite one, “Despite adversity, Savannah continues to believe everything will indeed one day work out!”

But there is still always a whisper in the background saying, “Everyone read how much hope you had, how much stock you put into this. And now you look like a fool! You always look like a fool! You should never express any strong feeling you have because you always end up looking like a full of shit loony!”

Honestly, maybe I do. I wrote a whole blog post about how I shouldn’t always put my whole ass into everything I do and I just kept whole assing it. It’s a quality that I truly love and loathe about myself. Fully in or fully out, I am only ambivalent once I have exhausted all my energy.

There is a fine line to walk in the duality of the things we both loathe and love about ourselves. Depending on how they are applied, they can be an asset or a detriment.

My favorite game to play when I notice I am being overly critical of myself is to take whatever I think someone would say about me (after reminding myself that literally no one really thinks about me that much) and asking myself, “What is the alternative?” 

“Savannah always thinks the guy she is dating is going to be ‘the one’, that he is so special, blah blah.” Okay, so what is the alternative? “Savannah is forever skeptical and on guard with someone she is dating, she never trusts that they are who they say they are.” Fuckin’ yuck, dude. I don’t want that to ever be me. I struggle combating those thoughts enough, there’s no way that I would ever want that to be my full modus operandi. I think I’ll go with my favorite ‘Despite adversity!’ headline instead.

I quit drinking two and a half years ago and the other day I was still spiraling out over all of the ridiculous or horrible things I had ever done. As they flashed through my mind like a reality tv recap, I burst out laughing, “Gollllly, what a wild bitch you were! Aren’t you glad that’s not you now?” 

I’m not going to hate myself forever. Because that’s the thing, right? If that version of me would have loved herself the way I love her now, she probably wouldn’t have done most of the things she’d done. I love her retroactively. I am the sum of all my parts. All of them are welcome (although most of their behaviors will not be tolerated in the present day.) 

That’s another way I challenge my imaginary tabloids: I don’t do so many of the things I used to do. And it’s totally okay if people don’t believe that. I don’t need to live my life constantly proving that I’m not who I used to be. I can just be who I am.

I care what people think of me, sure, but I won’t let it dictate my behavior. I won’t stay in a situation just so I’m not ‘wrong.’ And I won’t allow myself to boil alive in shame I don’t deserve to carry. I’ve worn my hair shirt, I’ve dragged myself over the coals. 

Enough is enough. 

I love that I put my whole ass into what I believe in, even if it is just for a season. Even with my alcoholism, I learned so much about myself and other people. I had a lot of amazing experiences when I was drinking. Eventually, the ones that sucked outweighed the good ones. It was the same with trying to make relationships work that had reached an end. One day, I took my whole ass out and closed the chapter. I had exhausted my energy. It had become a detriment, not an asset. 

I am not afraid of being alone, even when it sucks. And yeah, it really does suck. I’m not going to act like I’m living it up over here. I have a week off work and it could be aired as a documentary on ‘How to be Depressed.’ It’s not interesting, it’s just me eating cheese quesadillas and sleeping for multiple days in a row. Watching ten different tv series and not being able to tell you what a single one was about. Sobbing after every place I went on Christmas Eve because this is not what I thought my life would be like. Raging that I should have been 23 weeks pregnant, glowing with Perfect on Paper guy by my side. Celebrating with our families, my mom, my sisters. 

Instead, I am more alone than ever.

I would rather be alone than be in a situation I can’t remedy. I know when to stop trying. I didn’t know before. 

I always lived my life by the mindset of, “Ready or not! Here I come!” But what is the alternative?

For once, I’m not really pushing myself to feel better right now. I think it’s time to really grieve it all. My baby, my significant relationships, my dads deaths. Who I thought I was, who I thought I would be. I’m allowing myself to be afraid of what’s next. Sometimes you need to know when to hide and when to seek.

I so badly wanted everything to work out this time. Honestly, even just to prove that it could. ‘Former party girl leaves shitty relationship and finds new love, has a baby, blah blah.’ I wanted to prove it to myself, of course. But I also wanted to be a success story to everyone who had watched it unfold, everyone who wanted to see me succeed and everyone who didn’t. I didn’t want to say, “Look who was wrong again!’

I am okay with being wrong. I am okay with being seen as a broken record of ‘Despite adversity, I’m going to keep going.’ I am okay with it all.

Last year, I just wanted to be proud of myself. 

This year, I am.

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