Losing Everything to Find Me Again

If you’ve been following along, there has been a fuck ton of shit happening in the last 6 months. A breakup from a long-term relationship, moving into a studio apartment, finding out my health wasn’t what I had expected, getting closure that my parents will never be what I need and now…an apartment fire started by my cat to top it all off.

I’m looking around my place laughing at how empty it is. The couch, linens, food, and kitchenware that all had to go due to the chemical and plastic fumes. It echos in here now.

Coming home to find what it was tore me up inside. It was one of the worst days of my life. With everything else tacked on I was pretty much crashing out and everyone around me knew – which has been highly unusual and uncomfortable. I cried for days grieving the items that I had bought mutually with my ex and how I was now forced to actually move on from them. I settled with the giving up the impulse purchases that I had held onto out of guilt. I went through every single item I owned and got rid of more than 50% of it due to the fire.

Now that I have finally collected myself, 1 week later, I have come to terms with the fact that I really had to lose a lot these last 6 months so that I could find myself again. I have done a personal inventory on not just my apartment, but my relationships and my body.

I have recently purged old, very gray boundaries with my parents for shiny new ones that protect me from perpetual disappointment. I have given up a lot of peace to indulge in sexual exploration with men; men that didn’t care about me but taught me valuable lessons that have raised the bar on many levels sexually and emotionally.

I threw away the me that wore sweats every day and was consistently high, for a sparkly version that admires her body and all I put it through – enough to go to the doctor, exercise, eat healthy, and feel whole again inside of it.

And now here I am literally throwing shit away. Items that I couldn’t quite part with on my own because I felt I had to keep them, maybe because I actually needed them – sure – but also because it was the only things left in my life that was from my old one. An anchor into something comfortably sad and an ugly shade of velvet gray.

That couch was one of the last things that needed to go so that I could just move on already from my old self, life, and relationship. I mean I didn’t need the fire to do that, but it forced me to emergency eject out of the fog and into reality.

So, as I look at my empty apartment, there’s no one here but the echo of my own voice talking back to me saying, “you’re alone now”. My initial reaction is to cry, tuck myself into bed and let myself drown in loud music that will fill the unknown parts of my brain that are too scary to hear right now. The ones that say:

“What now?”

“What if something happened? You don’t even have an emergency contact.”

“What do you want to do with your life now?”

I can choose to feel sorry for myself, which don’t get me wrong I lived on that train for a moment, but I started to take stops in “No one is expecting me – that’s nice” land and “I don’t have to stress out about making sure the dishwasher is loaded correctly for fear of getting snapped at” land. I jumped off that train altogether when this fire happened and I realized that if my life was like it was 6 months ago, this would have been ten times worse.

She would have made it worse. The person I was then would have let her drag me down into a shame hole on how I’m not responsible enough, reminding me of how this inconveniences her through pouting and passive digs, that this fuck-up (though not my fault) is just another example of me letting her down and not having my shit together.

She made me feel less than her all the time and I put my blinders on for what – an emergency contact? ‘Stability’? A family that was way better than my own and invited me in wholly? Safety? I would say comfortability, but it wasn’t comfort. It was people would say, ‘delulu’ and not the good kind.

So, I’ll sit here eating my chicken pot pie in peace knowing that no matter what comes my way, I got me. I will never let myself down the way I did then. That no matter what the fuck happens, no matter how much I ‘lose’, I still have me to fall back on and she’s pretty fucking awesome.