​If I do not embrace the crazy, constantly changing, ever evolving chaos that is my life, I know what the results are. They are dark, dismal, completely enveloping and will swallow me into a pit of despair. Sounds dramatic, I know… but that’s because it is. It does not take much for my mood to shift from feeling perfectly positive to feeling perfectly dreadful. It can be really exhausting.
 
During all of the years that I have been doing work on my personal growth, one of the most important things has been to recognize that those moments that start feeling so painful that they will actually end me this time are lying to me. They do not tell me the truth of my experience. The truth is, life is f*cking hard, man. Some of us, especially those who are highly sensitive and empathic, can take on such a heavy emotional load that it feels like too much to bear. And unlike some people, I do think we are given more than we can handle sometimes. In those particular moments, I allow myself to shut down and go into survival mode because that is the best I can do, and that is good enough. I do not feel shame anymore for just getting through the day. I heard someone say recently that if the best you have is 20% of yourself to give today, and you give 20%, you are actually giving 100%. I like that idea, because it stops me from entertaining the inner critic that falsely asserts I am never enough.
 
My therapist recently challenged me to practice what she called “microdosing positivity.” When something good happens to me, she asked that I make it a point to stop and acknowledge how that physically feels in my body. I have spent so many years focusing on what feeling bad is like that feeling good is actually far more unnerving. Like anything else, it takes practice. When the part of me that is my protector shows up to seemingly self-sabotage me, she asked me to try to learn to love and embrace it for what it is trying to do instead of becoming irritated and attempting to shut it down.
 
Recently I had an experience that felt so good, so wholesome, so aligned with my soul and my innermost hopes and desires. Naturally, my immediate reaction when I thought back to it was to activate the protector, who just knew that it could not possibly be as good as it felt. There had to be a catch. There was no way this was going to be meant for me, no way that it would stick around. And because the situation has present limitations that are outside of my control and cannot evolve into the things my heart wants, the protector started working overtime. It began erecting walls of steel to guard my fragile heart. It told me to completely discount the experience because the outcome cannot be what I want it to be. OF COURSE this was too good to be true. OF COURSE it would be nothing but another disappointment. I went from feeling the highest of highs to a full on dopamine crash. I could feel those walls getting higher and closing me in, just like they always do. I could not talk to anybody. I began to withdraw into the illusion of safety that is my insulated cocoon keeping me away from danger.
 
The thing is, that cocoon also keeps me away from experiencing what I really most desire – connection and intimacy. I have watched it happen over and over. I experience what feels like even the slightest hint of rejection, and that little child inside me who was so brutally abandoned and unloved latches on to the protector for dear life. My reaction to anything outside of my own expectations is often majorly disproportionate to the actual situation.
 
It was no different this time. When I communicated with the person who resurrected a part of me that I thought very well might be dead, and it was clear that there was some continued spiritual work and growth for both of us before we could be the versions of ourselves that both each other and the world deserved, it was very difficult for me to hear “not now” and interpret that to mean anything but “not ever.” When it comes to matters of the heart, I am not what I would describe as patient. I become almost like a child excited about a new toy – I want what I want, and I want it NOW. A very mature and spiritual reaction, I know. But that protector just wants to avoid the suffering that has kept some of the most beautiful parts of my soul hidden. I understand why it happens. I have spent a lot of my life hurting, and I want to avoid more suffering.
 
I also know that if I want another outcome for my life, I have to start taking different actions, and that includes in response to my own instinctive defense mechanisms. I took some time to feel sad, disappointed, and release my chokehold on the need for instantaneous results. I decided to try that microdosing of positivity my therapist told me about. I closed my eyes, placed my right hand over my heart, and brought myself back to that moment I would normally try to avoid for fear that it would forever disappear. I pictured the scene where it happened. I noticed all the details around me – the dim lighting in the room, the sheen emanating from the television, the softness of the blanket against my skin, and the warmth of a body so close to mine that I had not experienced in so long. I asked myself, what does this feel like? I recognized the fullness of that aching hole inside that rarely allows, or even recognizes the need for, any company. My stomach flipped and quivered against the butterfly wings circulating around its edges. The weight of anxiety that I wear like a cloak almost all of the time was lifted. And, much to my surprise, I did not feel any fear. I felt seen. I felt safe.
 
I have had many experiences since then that completely removed me from that safe place. Sometimes, I have been so far removed that I forgot the safe place existed for a time. But somewhere, buried though it might be, I know not just that it was still there - I know that it will always be there. No matter what happens or does not happen in the future in relation to this person, there is nothing that can change that moment that gives me full-body goose bumps.
 
Because I am not actually delusional (even if it feels like I can be at times), I do not believe that people are perfect. I do my best to no longer place people onto pedestals that will eventually crack and crumble beneath the weight of my expectations. I do believe, however, that moments can be perfect. And regardless of what comes next, no one can take those away from me except for me, if I allow them to self-destruct out of fear they will never return.  
 
I cannot count the number of times I have placed my hand over my bruised but healing heart in the past week, gazed downward or softly closed my eyes and drew that experience back in. Every single time I feel the outward edges of my lips curve up into a faint smile. The world gets lighter, my chest tingles and the flutters dance. That moment was perfect, and it was mine. Nothing can take it away from me. I imagine I will have many more like it in my life, but for now, I am grateful for it to be a reliable anchor in the unpredictable waters around me.
 
When the tides feel rocky and the ground shifts under my feet, I can always come home to my heart. There, I will always be safe.

​I no longer have to own sh*t that is not mine in order to make peace.
 
I have spent the majority of my life walking on eggshells. That is what happens when your primary caretaker is inconsistent – frequently angry, often disapproving, more likely than not unable to meet the simplest of emotional needs. As a child, I did not have the skill of discernment, so I did not know that when someone was unhappy, it was not automatically my fault. I internalized the outward expressions of negativity and frustration, and eventually this developed into the deepest of my core beliefs: that there was something inherently wrong with me. That I was a “bad” person. That I was an expensive inconvenience, and that I alone was the source of misery for those around me, particularly my mother.
 
This was not true. It was not fair for her to unload her own unprocessed emotional trauma onto me in such a way that I felt like I was at fault for her constant negativity. I do not think this was intentional, at least not always. This is what is referred to as intergenerational trauma, which is trauma that is passed from a survivor to their descendants. My mother’s own horrifically painful childhood left unhealed wounds that she projected onto me, which she probably absorbed from her caregivers, and on and on. Nonetheless, this was the reality of my formative years.
 
One of the most prevalent consequences of this experience was that I blamed myself for everything. When I got sober and we were talking about “owning our part” in the resentments we had formed in our lives, that was absolutely no problem for me. I frequently had a much harder time seeing fault in anyone else, and instead I took it all on. The result was that I hated myself from a very young age. I believed that the reason my parents fought and were so mean to each other was because they were unhappy that I was around and they did not want me. This is another very common experience for children who grow up with caregivers who display emotional inconsistency and immaturity – they take on the responsibility for the happiness of others, and believe if they just behave better, then the chaos and turmoil they are experiencing in their lives will stop.
 
For me, this manifested in many ways, but one of the most damaging was that I became a total perfectionist. As an undiagnosed neurodiverse child, school was very difficult for me. Because I learned how to mask my deficiencies and was otherwise able to “keep up” with extraordinary effort, it was not until I was 19 and in college that I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which remains highly underdiagnosed in females, particularly of my generation and older. I did not know why my brain did not seem to work like my brilliant sister’s. All I knew was that I felt “slow,” which often led to one of my most dreaded experiences – the look of disappointment on my mother’s face when I did not perform to her expectations. I cannot tell you the amount of stress and anxiety I put myself through to try and avoid seeing that expression.

​Some of my worst childhood memories involved not just my caregivers, but being on the receiving end of the cruelty of other kids who enjoyed finding reasons to poke fun at others. One of my earliest memories (which is not very early since I do not remember a lot of my childhood, which I have since learned is very common for people who experienced trauma at a young age) is when I was participating in an elementary school spelling bee. Up until that time, spelling was my favorite subject. It was one of those innate talents I had, which is consistent with my ongoing love affair with language and written expression. In order to prepare for the championship round and find out who would be going on to the district competition, we were given a packet of words to memorize that were potentially going to be asked.
 
I memorized every word on that list, which was divided up into different categories. I breezed through the early rounds and made it through to the finals. Excitement coursing through my veins, I was asked to spell the word “teal.” I froze. I remembered that this word was listed under the category of “birds,” not colors. I knew how the color teal was spelled, but was that the same as the way the bird was? An overwhelming wave of nausea engulfed me. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I felt the eyes of my peers in the audience boring holes into my skin as the judges looked on. I knew I could not just keep sitting there, and it did not appear that the differentiation between the bird and the color, if there was any, was not going to make itself evident in that moment.
 
“T-E-A-L…” I paused. I later learned that as I stared at the ground, the judges started to lift up their green cards to indicate that I was correct, but I was so immersed in my own overthinking that I did not see them. I continued, “…E?”
 
The dreaded red cards flipped up in front of me. I recall hearing the faint voice of a judge saying “The correct spelling is T-E-A-L. You may step down and join the audience.”
 
My face and chest flushed an excruciating shade of blotchy red, as it always does when I feel any heightened emotions. I held my breath as I stood and walked down the five steps off of the stage. I could hear the snickering of my peers, and that short walk felt like a mile as I begged the tears stinging my lowered eyes to hold themselves in. I do not remember the rest of the spelling bee, who won, or how long it lasted. All I remember was the shame of failure that engulfed my entire body.
 
When it was over, we were sent out to recess. Kids, even the ones that are supposed to be your friends, can be cruel and I knew that I was going to be teased. Before I could get to the bathroom to hide, one of those “friends,” the ring leader of our group, approached me with a particularly satisfied look on her face. “So you didn’t know how to spell the color ‘teal,’ huh?” She snickered, as did her followers standing close behind.
 
“Well,” I stammered, “on the list we were given to study, ‘teal’ was listed under the category of birds, and I did not think that such a simple word would be on the list if it was not spelled differently than the color…”
 
Now, some of you are not going to be old enough for the upcoming reference, so I will explain. During the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championship, there was a scandal when it was discovered that Tonya Harding, an American figure skater, had hired someone to attack her rival Nancy Kerrigan during a training session. The assailant struck Nancy on the knee of her landing leg with a metal baton, in hopes of knocking her out of the competition so that Tonya could secure a spot on the Olympic team. The immediate aftermath of the attack was captured by the media and broadcast for months, with Nancy sobbing on the ground and yelling “Why me? Why me?” over and over. (Spoiler alert – Nancy was unable to complete the U.S. Championships, but she still secured a spot on the Olympic team and went on to win a silver medal, while Tonya finished eighth, later pleading guilty to hindering prosecution related to the attack and being forced to resign from the U.S. Figure Skating Association. Karma, people.)
 
I realize that the point of including this anecdote is not immediately apparent, so here it is. This scandal was going on at the same time of the spelling bee. My friends came up with the clever idea to turn Nancy’s “Why me?” cry into “Why ‘E’?” to taunt me for adding the extra letter onto the word that got me eliminated. They even came up with a hand signal to reinforce their self-satisfied hilarity. They were relentless for months. Eventually I realized that if I stopped allowing them to make me visibly upset, they would let up, so I became skilled at internalizing the shame and laughing alongside them about how dumb I was. When it was no longer causing me obvious pain, they eventually let it go and moved onto the next easy target.
 
I was ten years old when this happened. Nearly 31 years ago, and there is not a single detail that I made up to fill in the blanks in my memory, because there were none. The lessons gleaned from that experience were many – one, that making mistakes was unacceptable and perfection was the only option to avoid embarrassment and shame. Two, that I was, in fact, very dumb and I had better work harder than anyone else to make sure nobody knew. Three, people were not safe, because if this was the acceptable way to treat friends, I certainly did not want to know what happened with people who did not fit in that category.
 
This was not the only experience that assisted in the development of my incredibly warped sense of self, but it was very significant. If only I had studied harder… if only I was not so stupid… if only that forsaken word had not been in the “birds” category… if only, if only, if only. The common theme of those “if only’s” was that at least ninety percent of them could be considered my fault. It was not even that I was unable to grasp the idea that everybody makes mistakes; it was simply that I was not allowed to do so. If I did, everyone would know what a useless disappointment I was.
 
I do not remember what my mother said when I got eliminated from that spelling bee, but I can visualize the look on her face as clear as if it had happened yesterday.
 
Recounting this experience today makes me so incredibly sad for the little girl who was just trying to do something she enjoyed. She did not know that it was okay to not be the best at everything she did, so when she made a mistake, it felt catastrophic. She learned that anything less than perfection was unacceptable. I could describe countless other occasions that further enforced this belief system, but I think you get the point.
 
I have been in therapy on and off, but mostly on, since I was 19 years old and struggling with a life-threatening eating disorder. I have spent 16 years in recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction. Even still, it was not until rather recently that I even became aware of the origins of the unyielding self-loathing that permeated every decision I would go on to make for decades, like a thread that wove itself through and connected my entire existence. When I was attacked by my first boyfriend in college and reported it to the police, it was my fault that the fraternity where the assault happened got into trouble with the dean. When there were difficulties in any relationships I had – professional, platonic, or romantic – it was my fault because I simply lacked the skills to properly relate to other human beings. It did not occur to me that when the fraternity blamed me for getting the guys in trouble, the fault actually laid squarely in the lap of the man who so brutally snapped my head backwards he gave me whiplash while trying to choke me. I did not understand that if someone treated me with egregious disrespect, that it might actually be about them, and have nothing to do with me. I read countless self-help books. I searched in every place I could think of to discover the fundamental flaw in my makeup that bled all over everyone and everything around me. If I could just figure out what it was, I could fix it. Right?
 
A few years ago, I remember telling my therapist that although my parents had given me everything I needed to succeed in life, I had screwed it all up and I was a failure. For all of the preceding years when working with other therapists and in recovery, when I was asked about my childhood, I described my family as loving and supportive and simply not a source of trauma. I had not been physically abused and my parents were still married. But then, my therapist asked something no one had ever asked me before – what exactly, in my view, had my parents given me that I needed to thrive? My response was that I had grown up in a nice home, that my parents paid for my education, they bought me a car when I was 16, et cetera.
 
What my therapist told me next absolutely blew my mind. She said that those things had nothing to do with developing into a well-adjusted, emotionally mature adult. Children need to be seen, soothed, and feel safe. She asked if my primary caregivers had made me feel those things. I paused and gave it some thought before answering. No. I had not felt any of those things. When she told me that I had not, in fact, been provided with everything I needed, it was like the entire world stopped moving. For another dated reference, do you remember the show “Out of This World” where the main character Evie – who was half-alien and had inherited special powers from her father – could touch the pointer fingers of both hands together and stop time? It felt like that.
 
You would think that something as mind-blowing as this would be a huge relief. In some ways, it was, but it shook the core of my entire foundational belief system. Was it possible that sometimes the bad things that happened in my life were not because I was a bad person, or because I did something wrong to cause them? I mean, that would be great news, but it was incredibly disorienting.
 
I will not get into the myriad of ways that this realization began to alter the course of my life, because they are too numerous to name in a single post. (I’ll save that for the book.) But one very significant piece, and the reason that I told you the story about the Nancy Kerrigan-esque bullying, was that I was no longer responsible for the entirety of every challenging or difficult situation or relationship in my life. This is not to say that I was absolved of my part in all of these conflicts either; quite the contrary, I almost always contribute in some way to the things that happen, whether it is by way of active participation in the inciting event or in my response to it. But I, Lisa O’Leary, was not just a bad person whose darkness infected everyone and everything around me. Sometimes other people, places or things were responsible, too.
 
Why does this matter? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but let me just give a few examples. I am not responsible for my mother’s childhood trauma. Yes, it was horrible, and it explains a lot of why she sees the world in such a cynical way; but it does not give her the right to make me feel like I am the cause of all of her discomfort. I do often play a significant role in the challenges in our relationship because of how I respond to her words and actions. The younger parts of me that try to protect me get easily activated when I feel like I am back in my childhood home, trying to do anything to feel loved and accepted in spite of my many imperfections. But that does not mean that I have to give her a pass when, during a recent and completely unnecessary conflict, she told me she wished she never had me. I do not care how old you are - that is just about the worst thing I can imagine hearing from a parent. I did not turn this into a yelling match, as is my default. (Anger is my go-to for everything to avoid feeling pain.) My response was to thank her for finally verbalizing the way she made me feel my entire life and to take the necessary steps to get myself out of the toxic living situation I was in.
 
One of the things I learned in early sobriety is that I cannot control how people act, react, respond, or do anything. All I can do is focus on keeping my side of the street clean. Today, because I have learned that I am not the detestable person I once believed I was, when conflict arises I have the ability to step back and try and look objectively at the situation. What was my part in this? Did I share some of the responsibility? Or is someone else truly projecting their own issues onto me? If it is the latter, then I no longer have to fall prey to my default settings and take on the blame for what is happening. I can allow it to hurt, and I can be sad. But I do not have to hate myself anymore. And, even if I did contribute to the situation in some way, I still do not have to hate myself because I am a human being who makes mistakes. What counts is that I own them, I make amends when necessary, and I do my best not to repeat them. Perfection is an impossible standard and one that no longer serves me, if it ever did.
 
I am not responsible for making sure that everyone around me is happy. I simply do not have that kind of power. I am responsible for my own actions, behaviors, and being open to communicating with the people I care about and allowing them space to share, even if – especially if - my intent does not align with how they feel. If I fail to meet someone’s expectations, particularly if they have not been communicated to me to begin with, that does not mean I did something wrong. I also do not have to hold anyone else’s toxicity in order to make peace or force relationships that are not meant to endure. I get to choose what I receive in my energy and allow in my life.
 
Today, I am pretty proud of my side of the street. Tomorrow, I might not be. But I am grateful that no one dictates what it looks like other than me.

This is not how I pictured it.
 
Ten years ago today, Patrick suffered the first of many seizures that led to his diagnosis with glioblastoma, which would ultimately end his life just ten months later. I have written about the experience of being his care partner extensively. I have worked in grief counseling to process the trauma. I have been ceaseless in my pursuit of uncovering and discovering who I am underneath all the layers of meaningless noise that the world spends so much energy and money to convince us are important.
 
I spent years of my life hardened to the world and everyone in it. I was angry, because anger lives in many parts of my younger self that I used to survive as I grew up and began experiencing the challenges that have come my way. That anger, I now know, is not out to make me miserable – while that might at times be the result, its presence is in fact trying to protect me from the pain of being a deeply sensitive and feeling person in an often cold and unforgiving world. That pain is what I was trying to avoid when I suffered with a severe eating disorder as a teenager. That pain drove me to years of alcohol and drug abuse that nearly cost me everything. Even just the fear of that pain has stolen countless moments of beauty, of connection, and of hope. It has often rendered me frozen in time, unable to move forward, paralyzed in a fraught nervous system that weakens my resolve and leaves me incapacitated. And many, many times it has almost convinced me that life would never get better and the world did not need me anymore; that my suffering would not end unless I took permanent action to assure it would.
 
But in spite of myself, no how matter how dark and lonely it has been, a shred of light always remained just visible enough to keep me here.
 
If I am being honest – and, who am I kidding, I am not really capable of being anything else at this point – some of the most intense anger I have felt over the years has been at that tiny glimmer that refuses to dim, telling me that life will not always be so bleak. I cannot speak to the tragedies that anyone else who might read this has been through, nor will I try to. But I can tell you that ten years – a quarter of my life – have been spent in more physical distress and spiritual crisis than I would anticipate one could survive. Countless doctors, diagnoses and treatments, which have often left me with more questions than answers, drove me into financial and emotional bankruptcy. A career that once defined me had to be torn from my clutches, leaving my hands bloodied and marred from the death grip I used to try to maintain some semblance of control. That career was something I once clung to in order to convince the world, but mainly myself, that I was worth something. Without it, I had no idea how to interact with people around me who asked questions about my life. I constantly felt the need to justify my existence, because we are conditioned from the time we are very small to believe that our value comes from productivity, from money, from whatever you “have to show for yourself.”
 
I am not exaggerating when I say that since that fateful night ten years ago, my life has consisted of one chaotic event after the next. It has been lonely. I have felt isolated. Misunderstood. Disconnected. I am not recounting any of this to garner sympathy; instead, it is simply an accurate assessment of what this decade has been like. So, maybe it makes a little more sense now why I have regularly felt vitriol towards that tiny sliver of hope that has not allowed me to finally throw my hands up, to relent, and to say “Thanks, world, but I have had enough.” It was never about wanting to die. It was always about wanting the pain to stop.
 
I knew at a visceral level that someday I would begin to feel a shift. It started, as it always does, deep within my soul. I stopped trying to impress people, period. Now, do not think that this came simply out of virtue; quite the opposite, it came about because I lost all of the things that we typically use to assess value like money, property, relationships, or even health. It was not until I no longer had those things that I realized how little any of that matters to me. On that drive to the emergency room racing behind the ambulance that carried my love to an unknown future, was I thinking about what kind of car I was driving? Of course not. I just needed it to get me to his side. When we were talking to the care team after Patrick’s surgery and heard for the first time confirmation that what we were dealing with was the deadliest type of brain cancer there is, did my career as a lawyer come up in the conversation? No, because it made absolutely no difference in the trajectory of what was to come. No amount of money, education, or anything else of extrinsic value could give us the only thing we really wanted – more time.
 
Very few people outside of my carefully cultivated and intentionally small inner circle have any clue what it has been life to live daily in my chronically ill body. I have been told both implicitly and explicitly that I need to just “get over it” [insert your choice of “it” here] and go back to work, to stop being a drain on society, to quit playing victim and stop living in the past. Hearing these things used to really hurt. I felt so much guilt and shame over the fact that I could not do the things I had studied and trained to do, and that I had been indoctrinated to believe were all that mattered.
 
It took a lot of work in therapy, in my recovery, in lessons learned from betrayals and loss of relationships to unlearn those things that I once thought were my core values. Instead, those “values” were a product of mass marketing to create a society of thoughtless robots that play by the rules so the people in power at the top can stay there, and the rest of us can believe that we are somehow lacking. My automatic response when something goes wrong – or, perhaps better stated, does not go the way I expect – was to believe that it was my fault. I have spent much of my life far too uncomfortable with the proposition that sometimes there simply is no explanation for why things happen the way they do. While it felt awful to believe that there was something so fundamentally wrong with me that could be blamed for the misfortunes I experienced, that was easier to accept than being unable to find answers via reason or logic.
 
As I let go of those beliefs that were holding me hostage, I also began to let go of my need to prove myself to anyone. I began to feel the freedom that comes with not caring what people think about me. I stopped thinking I was unworthy of love because I did not have the fancy resumé I used to wear proudly across my chest. I realized that if people judged me because my physical and mental health challenges became disabling, that was their problem, not mine. Not everyone has to like me. If someone thinks that I am of lesser value because I am a “childless cat lady,” that speaks so much louder about them than it does about me.
 
The deeply meaningful work I have done on myself has led me to a place where I no longer hate the person looking back at me in the mirror. I sincerely, with every fiber of my being, love her. That is not to say that all of the parts of me that live inside get along all the time. Far from it. I often describe myself as living in a constant state of existential crisis. But as that love for myself began to grow, so, too, did that tiny fraction of hope that kept me alive during the darkest times. I still would consider it an exaggeration to say that my hope is brighter than my skepticism, but it continues to expand.
 
Over the last few months, those internal shifts have started to manifest into external change. After what felt like losing total agency over my life when I had to stop working and move home with family, I was finally able to buy a car again. Wow. Is it a brand new BMW like I had some years ago? No. Do I care? Absolutely not. I am thrilled that I have something that can take me where I want to go. I was able to move back into an apartment and live on my own. Does it come with luxurious features and a mortgage so I can call myself a homeowner? No. But it is mine. It is my beautiful space that I have cultivated to be a sanctuary, a place for continued growth and healing. Everyone who has visited describes it as warm, welcoming, and homey. It is full of bright colors, candles, and pictures of the people I love. My doormat says “I hope you like Taylor Swift and cats.” I have never been more excited about something used to wipe my feet; something that used to mean nothing to me, apart from its aesthetic. Now it reminds me that this life I am rebuilding is no longer based on fear or appearances. It is about celebrating all of me – the good, the bad, and the ugly – and the immense gratitude I have for the opportunities that are coming my way.
 
Without getting into the specifics, because I still get to keep some things just for me, last month something happened that removed the crushing weight of almost a quarter of a million dollars in student loan debt that has driven every single decision I have made in my adult life – every sh*tty job I took, every place I moved, and the impact all of that had on my health. I am still having a hard time integrating this information into my brain and body, because it does not seem real. It was something that I firmly believed was impossible to get rid of, that I would live with until the day I died. And, it would not have been possible to receive this relief if all of the terrible things that have happened over the past decade had not occurred. Oh, the irony.
 
A long dormant part of myself was recently reawakened in an unexpected, and in some ways unwelcome, way. I realized that my heart still had the capacity to love – deeply and completely. Even though it could not work out the way I hoped, it showed me how much I have changed. I do not have to be afraid of becoming the jealous, insecure, fearful woman I was in past relationships – because I am no longer her. I saw that I can meet challenges and conflict head on, and that not every disagreement has to be a fight. I made choices that reflect the woman I am today, who respects other people more than I need to have my own wants fulfilled. I was reminded that feelings will not kill you, even when it seems like they will. Even amidst the vacuous space I am currently in trying to sort through it all, I know I have been through worse and I will get through this, too. I have gratitude for being broken hearted because I know my heart still works. That gratitude is only that tiny sliver right now, and I am mostly still in the throes of grief. But it is there. With time, it will grow. And when the right partner comes along, I am so thrilled that he will get to be with the woman who lived through all of that pain, and who can show up fully without feeling like she just needs that last puzzle piece to be complete. I am that puzzle piece.
 
This is not what I thought my life would look like ten years after that catastrophic night when I looked into Patrick’s eyes and saw our hopes disappear. But I would never trade what it feels like for anything.

To the one who told all the lies - this is my letter to you.

Last night I rented the film version of Taylor Swift’s "The Eras Tour." I started watching it and almost immediately I started crying. I couldn’t figure out why. Sure, plenty of her music touches me to the point of tears, but why was I crying to songs like “Style”? Where was this coming from?
 
Then it hit me. This was about you.
 
The day I went to see that concert was the last day we communicated. It was the day the proverbial shit started hitting the fan and I started to find out all about the intricate web of lies you had spun to gain my trust and win my heart. Seeing the film play out made it all come rushing back. I hate that you took that experience and colored it such a dark shade of blue.
 
I thought I was doing fine. Other than when I first learned about who you really were, I had not cried much over you. I was mostly just angry, which turned to apathy. I thought to myself “Wow, I am really handling this well.” I silently hoped I had sidestepped the landmine filled with your betrayal and cowardice and was able to just let it go. I should have known better. There is no way through it, but through it. It is now time for me to process what happened so that in the future my heart is not tainted by your treachery, so that I can expose the cracks in my soul that will eventually be filled with gold like Japanese kintsugi. You do not get to take the beauty that the mosaic of my life is building. But I do have to allow those broken parts to be seen before they can start to mend.
 
It started simple enough. You were a friend I had met through social media via my online fitness community. We had a lot of the same friends, often rode our bikes to nowhere at the same time, and had been friendly for a couple of years. Last year, you started to become very flirty for a brief period in your messages to me. After being widowed eight years ago I am extremely cautious about who I allow around me, and something about our conversations just seemed a little off. I asked if you were married. You told me you were separated and that the situation was complicated. Shortly thereafter you pulled back and we stopped talking regularly. I did not think much of it at the time because there were no feelings involved and it seemed harmless.
 
In January of this year, you made a comment about a story I posted. I responded in kind, and from that day until the end of July, we spoke to each other either by text, phone or FaceTime almost every day from our opposite corners of the country. At the outset, I specifically asked you the status of your relationship. You reiterated that you were separated and had filed for divorce, and there was an arbitration scheduled for some time in February. From the beginning I told you that I was not interested in being anybody’s pass out of their marriage; that I would not be the scapegoat for people to blame for a divorce occurring; and that if there was any possibility that the two of you might reconcile I was not going to continue our communications. I have been down the road of being that hated woman when the vitriol of Patrick’s family was directed towards me throughout our relationship and even long after he died. You told me that your entire family knew that the two of you were getting divorced, so there was no way I would be blamed for anything. You also confirmed that you saw no possibility for reconciliation.
 
There was no grey area in my pointed questioning. There was no wiggle room. You had to simply lie to my face to answer as you did.
 
You said you were still living in your shared home's basement in spite of the divorce filing, but that you were on a waiting list for a condo. You told me that because your children had health issues and you were frequently traveling for work, you agreed to temporarily stay in the house together with whom I thought to be your soon-to-be ex-wife, and live separate lives. The arrangement seemed odd to me, but you assured me it was temporary.
 
I told you that I was going to choose to trust you until you gave me a reason not to. This is very different from my nature, which tends to be very skeptical, but I was hoping that by changing the way I approached this relationship there would be less jealousy or suspicion than previous relationships I had been in. In hindsight, of course, I wish I had not been so trusting. But it was not willful blindness. You were convincing. I never suspected you were lying about anything. Nobody would do what you did to a woman who was quite clearly cautiously allowing you into her life in spite of her vulnerability from past traumas. You knew I had not dated since a brief period four years earlier, which ended in a dramatic trial to win a permanent restraining order against an unhinged lunch date. Before that, it had been three and a half years since my husband died, and I had not been with anyone in that time. Your lies would have to be too elaborate, bordering on sociopathic to pull this off. So I believed you.
 
You were adamant about not telling our friends in the fitness community that we were seeing each other/talking romantically/however you want to categorize it. You said this was because this community was your “safe place” and you needed it for your mental health. You told me you did not want any of the drama that might be associated with us openly being a couple, because people would likely misunderstand your separation/pending divorce and claimed that you were trying to spare me the judgment that would come from it. You used a mutual friend's awful experience to get my buy in. Personally, I did not want to deal with any drama, and I wanted the opportunity to get to know you without the influence of anyone else’s opinions. I was okay with keeping it between us. The number of times you repeated why this was so crucial seemed a bit overkill, but I did not think much of it other than how important it was to you. So it became important to me. You also said that while the you and your wife had discussed seeing other people, if she found out that you were dating someone, she would likely make the divorce much more difficult and you were concerned about custody of your children. I certainly did not want to cause complications in the divorce being finalized, so again I agreed that while we were figuring things out it would be best to not make our relationship public.
 
You were a really good pretender. You made it make sense. This was not the first time you had done this.
 
We were in constant communication in those early months. I knew that would not be sustainable, but with you living so far away, it was all we had. We bonded over our mutual love of 90’s R&B music, sending each other a song a day that I compiled into a playlist. Eventually it was six hours long so we started delving into the 2000’s. That one ended up being four hours long. Do you realize how many days we had to do this to build up ten hours of love songs? Do you realize that while you were drawing me in like a predator does his prey, I was trusting you to be gentle with my heart?
 
Since having to stop working due to my chronic illness and mental health challenges, I have struggled to find security within myself and where things stand in my life. I was defined by career, by "stuff," by who I associated with - and I lost it all. It was not my fault. Nothing that has caused me to end up here was the result of something I did wrong. Nonetheless, I did not know how to explain to a potential partner that I was not working because I had become disabled, that I was living with my family and that I would soon be forced into bankruptcy because of medical bills. I thought this would immediately peg me as unlovable and undesirable. You knew this, because I told you. But you did not judge me. You told me that you admired how much I had overcome, and that I still got up every day and fought for my health and happiness. I cannot even explain the relief I felt when you expressed this. Whether you meant it or not, I do not know – but it was true, and I thought you saw me. Maybe you did. It does not matter anymore.
 
After a few misfires and last minute "emergencies," you finally came to visit me in California. I was so anxious waiting for that day. You described how you would run to me when you saw me, scoop me up and kiss me in a way that only what felt like ages of waiting to be together could bring. I carefully planned my outfits. I put together a welcome basket filled with all of your favorite things, including a custom workout towel with a favorite saying from your most beloved fitness instructor. In spite of my 15 years of sobriety, I bought your drink of choice,  knowing it was a nearly nightly way to wind down at the end of your day. I wanted to show my appreciation for you traveling to see me, to see if this thing was the real deal or just a hyped up online romance.
 
While the moment you arrived was more awkward than romantic, it was to be expected after all of the anticipation and build up. It did not take long for us to warm up to each other. I will spare the details of the trip, because you know them and I do not want you to have any enjoyment by my recounting them here. After spending several days together, I felt our connection was cemented. Your text when you got back home said that what you were afraid of – that being with each other would be as amazing as you thought, and that it would be even harder to be apart – came to fruition. You talked about how you knew my living situation was difficult and you were thinking about places where we could live together. You had asked me early on whether I would be willing to move out of state, and I recognized that if things worked out one of us would have to move, and I would not expect you to move away from your children. You painted such a vivid picture of a future that I came to believe it was the path we were on. A difficult one to travel, yes – but I knew just how difficult it had been for me to connect to anyone, let alone romantically, in my years as a widow. I was willing to wait.
 
I thought it was real.
 
I invited you to join me for what is arguably the most significant event of my year, the Head to the Hill event with the National Brain Tumor Society. I travel annually to Washington DC to advocate on behalf of the brain tumor community to our legislative representatives, in memory of Patrick who died of brain cancer, and so many friends I have gained and lost along the path following his death. You had to work so you were not a part of the activities, but the fact that I had someone there with me was not lost on my many friends who were in attendance. I had never even spoken of anyone romantically since Patrick died, let alone had someone with me. After a night together, you were supposed to meet some of those loved ones once we got back from Capitol Hill. You ended up leaving during the day, saying your child was ill and you needed to hurry home. I was sad, but completely understood.  

For the next several months, we continued to talk every day. You were very deliberate about discussing the future. You said you hoped that our relationship would progress to “walking down the aisle.” You told me that I needed to have “thick skin” to deal with your family because their humor was to be very tough on each other. I asked you what about me having over a decade of experience as a successful litigation attorney in a "good old boy’s club" profession indicated that I was thin skinned, and you conceded my point. Since I had not worked during the time we were friends or romantically involved, you really had not seen any side of me other than one that was supportive, understanding, and extremely patient. I mention patience because after that trip, you must have indicated you were going to fly me out to either your work trips or to your city at least a dozen times, but it never happened. You told me you were going on a trip at the end of May and wanted me to join you, and then at the last minute said that you needed to cancel the trip and stay home to help your mom with her brother/your uncle, who was dying of inoperable cancer. You indicated that you were under great financial strain because you were footing much of your uncle’s medical bills.
 
In June, I began to express that I was not satisfied with the lack of in-person communication as well as the fact that you had cut back talking on the phone and FaceTime, and were mostly talking to me via text message. I informed you many times that I simply could not maintain a connection over text. You told me that this was just a temporary situation because you were so overwhelmed with the circumstances in your life, including work stress, your uncle’s cancer, and also your step-father’s cancer which you feared would take his life not long after your uncle because he was becoming so frail.
 
You knew that a woman widowed by cancer would give you leeway to care for family members with cancer.
 
You went on a trip out of the country with some friends, I thought. After you returned, our conversations continued to be mostly by text and increasingly surface level. I asked you then – and numerous times before – if perhaps this was just not the right timing and you did not have the emotional bandwidth for a relationship. You just kept saying your feelings had not changed, it would not be like this forever, and despite the numerous opportunities where I offered you an “out” of the relationship, you continued to express your desire to move forward together.
 
Why did you not take the exit ramp? You had to know that you were in far too deep to ever dig out of if you did, in fact, want to be with me, and I would never be able to trust you. Your secrets could have stayed yours. But you were greedy, and callous, and wanted to bleed me dry before you decided you were finished with me.
 
One day we had a conversation over the phone in which you raised your voice at me and were nearly yelling. I told you early on that yelling and not fighting fair was a deal breaker for me so I ended the call and said that we could speak when we were both more grounded. I refused (and continue to refuse) to ever accept that type of emotional manipulation or abuse. It seemed to me that this may have been when you realized that I was not going to just fawn over you and never have my basic needs met, nor allow you to treat me with disrespect. Perhaps your shiny new toy lost its luster because I became real; I have no idea. But after that call, for the first time we did not speak for a few days. This continued on and off for a brief time but when we spoke, you continued to reassure me that “we were fine” and all of your difficult life circumstances were taking everything in your energy to get through each day. You did not consider my circumstances. I noticed.
 
The last day we spoke before you inexplicably went dark after over seven months was the day of The Eras Tour. You told me you were sorry you had not been in touch, but that the family was gathered at the hospital because they were going to “pull the plug” on your uncle that day or in the days to come. You again assured me that there was no issue between us. I sent you a picture from the concert. After that, I heard nothing from you. I did not yet know I would never hear from you again.  
 
Before the concert, I told my best friend from law school that had traveled across the country and I had not seen in years about you. The facts of your alleged divorce/separation/living situation did not sit right with her. She was concerned I might have been lied to and asked me whether I had looked into your background. I told her I had not because I was trusting you and taking you at your word.
 
The next week, I spoke with my friend and said that I was done trying to make a relationship work when you were not putting in any effort. She told me that her worries had led her to do some digging, and asked if I wanted to know what she found. Pit in my stomach, I said yes. That is when I learned that there was no divorce registered in the county you live in. I discovered many other things, and I was in shock by the number of lies. We came across your wife’s Facebook page and saw a photo from March of this year that seemed to have been taken during the time you and I were planning your trip to California. The photo looked very much like a picture of a happy family, and not a couple embroiled in a prolonged divorce process. I was horrified. She had also found family members’ Facebook pages and seen that on that last day we spoke, when you were supposed to be at the hospital with your uncle, your mom and step-father – who you said was deathly ill – were on a cruise, by all accounts in good health and spirits. I felt sick.
 
True to my word, I had never told any of my fitness community friends about you. Finally, as the wall of lies surrounding your true self were crumbing, I told a friend who knew I had been seeing someone that it was you. Her immediate reaction was that I needed to speak to another one of our very close friends because she knew that last year you had a relationship with her as well. I then spoke to our friend directly and asked if she had been seeing you, and she informed me she had. I do not know the details of your relationship but I do know that it was not casual and you had been to visit her several times last year. We were both shocked and devastated, especially when realizing you had been playing us both and telling us the same lies. We also determined that the day after you and I last spoke, you began contacting her much more frequently than you had in the preceding months.
 
Had you simply taken one of the many outs I offered you, I probably would never have found anything out, nor would my friend. But you did not. Considering you were carrying on two relationships simultaneously with women you knew were good friends with each other, I of course suspected that we were not the first people you had done this to. The story was shared with some of our friends and I began to hear more stories about your inappropriate behavior with other women. I left you a voicemail letting you know I knew what you were doing, who you were doing it with, and that you were done. Caught. I felt the knife twisting in my back as I said those final words to you.
 
I did not know what to do, so I sat with it until it became clear that I was not motivated by revenge. What I knew was that you were putting the physical and emotional health of all of us at risk with your lies. That is not something that I could stomach sitting on without letting your wife know. I felt terrible thinking about the times you must have said you were traveling for work, leaving your wife at home with your children, when in fact you were traveling to see other women. So I wrote her a letter, detailing much of what is shared here, but without any unnecessary insight into my own feelings and pain. I knew she would have plenty of her own.
 
After a clandestine arrangement to make sure that the letter reached your wife without you intercepting it, she sent me a return e-mail the same day. She confirmed you had never been separated and no one ever filed for divorce. She gave me some insight into some of the things I was questioning. I responded and told her that I was so sorry that you had lied, manipulated, and caused so much wreckage and destruction and that if she ever needed anything from me, I would make myself available.
 
I thought that would be the end of it. But when I found out that you continued to lie – even in conversations with people where you were purportedly “coming clean” – about the nature and extent of our involvement, even though I could (and did) back up everything I said, I knew you remained dangerous to any woman who might be kind enough to respond to your outreach. In fact, you were recognized for your use of social media to foster connections in our community. I could not stand that you were held in esteem by the community that you were using to target vulnerable women. I support other women, and I could not stay quiet in the event others were in the dark like I was. Who were trusting. Who did not expect someone could be so deceptive, so horribly hurtful. And I am sure you are not the only one who has done this.
 
So here we are. After thousands of words that I write to chronicle my experience, to process my feelings and to memorialize it as the destructive mess that it was, I still cannot convey the harm you have caused. You made me, without my consent, party to an affair that I explicitly refused to be a part of from our first conversations. You took my agency to choose away from me by withholding the truth. You ripped the carefully placed stitches I had worked so hard to sew in my ability to trust and let someone in. Your name does not deserve to be spoken in the same breath as Patrick’s, but you were the worst thing to happen to me since he died. YOU had a choice, one that you did not give me in return.  What you did was dark and diabolically cruel.
 
But you do not get to win in my story.
 
I will take the valuable lessons I learned from your duplicity and begin the process of turning them into the gold that will mold my broken pieces back together. Those stitches are already being re-sewn. I feel sorry for you, that you are so small that you have to tell big lies to feel relevant. I am grateful to be free of you, untethered in every respect, untainted by your artifice. My past trauma has shown me that I can and will move forward as I leave you far in my rearview mirror. I do not need you, or anyone else, to be whole. I will do the work to be my own hero.
 
As Taylor herself wrote, “karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend, karma's a relaxing thought – aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?”

Today marks seven years since Patrick and I married in a beautiful, intimate ceremony at home, just 48 days before he died from brain cancer. I felt compelled to tell him how I feel today, and have decided to share this with you. 
For You
For you, I wouldn't change a thing.
Not the trauma, the grief, or the darkness that has embedded itself in the hole in my heart where you lived when you were here.
Not the moments of chaos when you were sick, when the tumor made you resemble yourself but little.
Not the fear I had, not just of losing you, but of you when your terror and confusion took over.
Not the nightmares, the panic attacks, or the depression that have remained long after you've gone.
Not the anger when I think about what life would be like if you were still here.
Without all of the pain, there would be no you in my story, and I can think of no greater tragedy than a life having never known your love.
I wish I could take back the pointless arguments and wasted time, but they taught me to never take anything for granted.
I wish we could have loved each other with more freedom, but I have learned that love does not have to be held in a vice.
I wish we hadn't been subjected to judgment and cruelty by those we loved and we thought loved us, but now I know that what other people say or think about me has no bearing on my self worth.
I wish I could have been kinder and more patient, but I learned that I am human and that making mistakes does not mean I am a bad person.
In my sorrow, I've been forced to face not only my grief, but myself.
I see that even when my heart has been shattered and it feels like things will never change, I can stay alive.
Sometimes staying alive seems impossible and I feel the beads of sweat drip down my forehead when I imagine the relief permanent darkness might bring.
Often I wish I could have taken your place.
There are still a lot of days I don't want to be here.
But I stay.
Because I've stayed, I've been able to see more in my soul than guilt, shame, and remorse.
Because I've been willing to look at my own ugliness, I have started to find my beauty.
My sensitive heart makes me passionate and empathetic, not weak and powerless.
My vulnerability lets people see who I truly am, and gives others permission to be seen.
Losing everything has stripped away my ego and given me permission to stop playing a game I never wanted to play.
I still wish you were here.
I still miss you every day.
That I does not mean I am refusing to keep moving, or that there is something wrong with me for gently holding my heart when it aches.
It means I still love you.
I will always love you.
And without you, I wouldn't love me.
So for you, today and forever, I wouldn't change a thing.

Hi, all. It has been a while. Bear with me – we have a lot to catch up on.

My last post, "I'm Not Okay," was written just a few short weeks before the pandemic started in 2020 and my home state of California was put into lockdown. Since that time, I have thought over and over about writing again. But every time I tried, I was stuck. Blocked. And not just the typical writer's block we are all familiar with -- I felt frozen in place, unable to move, not knowing when or if I was ever going to come out of a seemingly endless hole that I fear has still not reached rock bottom. What was I supposed to write about? "I'm Not Okay... Still?" I did not want to admit that. I wanted to have something to write about that lent itself to positivity, which I have had a shortage of for a long time.

If you know anything at all about me, you know that the one thing I refuse to do (okay, I'm pretty stubborn, so maybe not the only one) is represent myself to be anything but who and what I am. I believe in telling the truth, not sugar coating things to make others comfortable at the expense of my own authenticity. This has kept me quiet to my detriment. It has left me alone and isolated, not just as a widowed woman living by myself which has rendered me virtually a recluse for over a year and-a-half, but because I constantly feel like the weight I carry should not be shared with anyone. It seems unfair.

Instead of pursuing my passion for writing and delving into the deeply honest and painful experiences that have been happening since the first COVID lockdown, I have retreated deeper inside, distancing myself from but a few people in my life. Worse still, others who meant a great deal to me distanced themselves from me, without conversation or true understanding, leaving me to grieve the loss of those important relationships. It has not felt safe to talk about. I do not want to be judged. I do not want to have my character questioned. I have worked hard for many years to disregard what others think of me, but here’s the truth: it is me who is doing the judging and questioning. But I know that so long as I continue to draw further away from humanity, the less of a chance I have to become the woman I am meant to be. Staying silent for fear of speaking my truth has not worked. I also know that refusing to accept help and support from those willing to give it can be fatal. So here goes.

I was struck recently by something I heard in one of the virtual fitness classes I take every week. One of the instructors asked, "Do you remember when you prayed for exactly what you have right now?" It stopped me cold. (Well, once I was done with the class, because Lord knows I am not going to stop once I've started.) I do remember when I prayed for what I have right now. When I gave up what felt like not just a job but the career I had been working for and humbled myself by moving back home with my parents four years ago, all I wanted was a home to call my own and some space to heal. I did not care about having a prestigious position, magically pulling myself out from under the crushing weight of student loan debt, or even knowing what the next day might bring. I walked out of that dark space with conviction that somehow, some way I would land on my feet again. It was terrifying, but the relief of letting go of control over the outcome was also the most liberating thing I could have done. I was so proud to have taken those critical steps.

Slowly but surely, I did start to heal. I spent time in silent meditation and reflection on a daily basis. I paid attention to the signs the Universe was sending me, regardless of where they might lead. I trusted that I was not in control of my destiny, or wherever I was heading. In short, I was living my life with faith that no matter what, I would be provided with what I needed. No. Matter. What.

That faith led me to a job that, while it was not saving the world or fighting for social justice, provided me with the means to move back out on my own. It was an easy enough job, and I was able to see that I did not have to burn myself to the ground to prove anything to anyone, because I was confident in my skills and abilities. Was it what I wanted to do? No. But the job did not have a billable hour requirement. A legal job without billable hours?! This was unheard of up until this point in my career. Sure, the subject area did not ignite the passion I craved to motivate me. But my boss was nice, the hours were reasonable, and it gave me time to have a life outside the four corners of my office. At the time, it made total sense. It was what I had prayed for.

I started to open up and trust that I was capable of true connections with other human beings. I built friendships, had a brief and wildly unsuccessful stint in the dating world, and found hobbies that helped me to feel something. I felt empty at work, but I hoped that the something I felt in those relationships and activities would be enough to overcome that dark morass that was ever-present and growing in my soul, which came from the knowledge that I was not doing what I was meant to do. I pushed that aside and stayed busy. I ignored the gnawing in my gut and told myself I should just be grateful for what I had. Nobody likes their job anyway, right?

Then COVID happened. When the pandemic hit and I transitioned to working from home, I lost access to most of the things outside of work that made the work itself tolerable. The cycling studio where I taught classes and the martial arts gym where I did Muay Thai were forced to close their doors. My annual trip to Washington DC to advocate on behalf of the brain tumor community, which I counted on to give me the shot of life I needed to propel me forward every year, was cancelled. Each of these losses felt painful, but I was sure that it would all be over soon.

Sigh. We all know how that turned out.

Without a doubt, I was grateful to have had a job that gave me the opportunity to keep working and stay at home. This was important because for several years preceding the pandemic, I struggled with severe chronic pain and migraines, along with the challenging mental health issues I have discussed in prior posts. When the world shut down, I learned that I was “immunocompromised” from the immunosuppressant medications I take to combat my ever-progressing autoimmune disease, and that I needed to take extra precautions to prevent getting COVID. This meant that aside from my “COVID pod” of about three people whom I knew were taking the virus seriously and my family, I was no longer seeing anyone, except my pharmacist.

With the myriad of issues described above, it did not take long before I began to deteriorate. In spite of my efforts to remain engaged with the world, the longer the pandemic went on, the worse my physical and mental health became. I was in so much pain every day that I would spend hours lying on the floor next to my desk, sometimes trying to read my files and keep working but often being unable to due to my extreme sensitivity to light and sound. I had been diagnosed with a rare headache disorder called hemicrania continua (HC), which literally means “one-sided continuous headache,” a few years prior, so I am not exaggerating when I say I have had a headache for five years. (It is not a "just take a Tylenol" kind of headache. It starts like an ice pick in the back of the skull and gets worse from there, and causes a wide array of other symptoms and neurological problems.) Many days each week these headaches developed into full-blown migraines where I would have to stay in bed with the blinds drawn, forcing crackers and ginger ale into my nauseated stomach to keep my body alive. The range of motion in my neck, which I had been having problems with for years, worsened to the point of being unable to turn my head to the left. Flares of both my autoimmune disease (axial spondyloarthritis (AS), an inflammatory arthritis of the spine) and HC were occurring so often I was having no good days, pain-wise.

The loneliness of isolation, intractable pain and discomfort, and insomnia which to this day gives me an average of four hours of sleep per night began taking a severe toll on my mental health. I fell into a deep depression, as bad as it had been after my husband Patrick died. I was full of anxiety over my health issues and how difficult it was making it to get my work done, though for a time I was able to manage by working at odd hours of the night and on weekends when I would have enough stamina to sit in front of the computer for more than a few minutes at a time. I finally reached a place of total apathy with absolutely no care whether I lived or died, and that is when it hit me like a ton of bricks: I was afraid of my own mind. Again. It was not the profound sadness or panic that frightened me, as they had become some of my closest companions over the years. It was the fact that nothing mattered anymore. That is when real concern arises for me because I do not know how far I would be willing to run with those thoughts. That is the kind of mindset that could lead someone like me to a permanent solution for a temporary problem.

A number of doctors, specialists, and mental health experts attempted various interventions to try and manage my chronic pain and increasingly troubled mind. I had a dozen epidural and trigger point injections in my neck and back. I had Botox in my scalp, neck and shoulder to try manage the headaches, as it is supposed to block neurotransmitters that carry pain signals from the brain. MRI after MRI on my neck and back showed progressive worsening. I cannot count the number of medications that were tried, rendering me a full-fledged science experiment. Nothing was working, and working was becoming impossible. I was forced to go on short-term disability for what I was hoping would be a brief period to “get it together.”

The medical treatments continued, including surgery to have artificial disc replacement at two levels in my neck. More challenging than recovering from my second spinal surgery, however, was and continues to be working on my mental health, the necessity of which was confirmed when my “COVID pod” decided I was no longer a welcome member and any reason to leave the house all but disappeared. In a previous post, I talked about EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a type of psychotherapy that is designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories. I have continued this diligently with my therapist who specializes in complex PTSD once, sometimes twice, a week. It is frightening, heart-wrenching, and physically exhausting. I wear a fitness tracker on my wrist which records basic vital signs and shows that when I am “in” a memory we are trying to reprocess, my heart rate jumps to between 190 and 200 beats per minute, all while sitting in an armchair. The physical strain is often more difficult than a 60-minute cycling class. None of this is helped by the ongoing trauma inflicted by the medical system itself which I spend hours each week dealing with, simply trying to get the treatment my clinicians recommend and are supported as medically necessary. Attending to my health is more than a full-time job, but I do not get to bill any clients for my hours. Instead, my bills keep coming, and each minute spent fighting for my care takes a little more of my soul.

As of this writing, nearing a year after my “temporary” break, I have not been able to go back to work. I cannot tell you the amount of guilt and shame I have surrounding what feels like abject failure to live up to what I “should” be. I have realized that this is the real reason I have not been writing. I am embarrassed to watch my peers live their lives, raise their children, run their businesses and take vacations while I sit on my couch, with too much brain fog from the combination of chronic pain and medication side effects to even attempt to read a book. Do not even get me started on the financial toxicity of chronic illness and the interplay with my self-esteem. But I submit to you that this year, while not earning a paycheck and being forced into submission by my body and mind, I have never worked harder in my life. Sitting with my feelings; facing and reliving the most traumatic moments I have ever experienced; suffering frequent panic attacks and flashbacks as I comb through the realms of my trauma-ridden mind; uncovering the terrible beliefs about myself that became so deeply imprinted at such a young age that they have informed almost every decision I have made; unremitting physical challenges from chronic illness which I struggle to accept every day, often at my own expense by overexerting myself in a feeble attempt to prove that I am not as limited as I am; all of these things have been far more arduous and agonizing than studying for the Bar exam, or working in any of the less-than-satisfying jobs with insane billable hour requirements that have comprised my entire legal career.

I used to joke that I always felt like an alien in a room full of lawyers, drowning in suits and pearls that made me feel like I was playing dress up. This was not because of imposter syndrome, i.e. an inability to realistically assess my skills and thinking that I was somehow not smart enough to be among them; fortunately, the work I have done over the years has given me confidence in my capabilities as an attorney. What it really meant was that I always felt so different from the rest of them. And this was not limited to other lawyers - it applied in all areas of my life. It is difficult to figure out how to live in this world when I do not feel like I'm of this world. I have never felt like I fit. Square peg, meet round hole. (I’m peg.)

When I look at my current state of affairs, I have to remind myself that this gut-wrenching soul work is what most people do not dare look at. Our culture teaches us to “suck it up,” “tough it out,” and other maddening ways of telling us to shove the painful stuff down deep where we cannot see it and carry on, business as usual. The refrain that has been running through my mind for as long as I can remember -- "What is wrong with me?" -- has played on endless repeat because I simply cannot do what society says I must, namely pretending everything is okay when I am dying inside.

I know the narrative that runs my twisted thinking needs to be changed. It starts with asking what is right with me, not what is wrong with me. I am learning that my willingness to bare my soul, dissect the ugliness, and dismantle the lies I have been telling myself my whole life does not make me weak. Being deeply moved by life and all its complexities does not make me fragile and powerless. Healing personal and generational trauma at the expense of my own comfort and ease is not something tasked to those unequipped to survive what often feels like an unyielding barrage of assaults.

Since Patrick got sick more than seven years ago, I have frequently said I do not believe the saying “the Universe never gives us more than we can handle,” because it has felt like I have had much more than my share for a really long time. But I must concede that, in spite of it all, I am still standing. When I fall, sometimes I need to lay down for a while, but I always get back up even if it takes longer than I would like and feels like I'm being dragged by my ponytail. I have not resigned myself to my current quality of life because I know I deserve better. I know from the deepest place inside of me that my life experiences, my passion, my education, and my talents are not going to end up wasting away on a couch, serving no purpose other than my own misery. I do not know what it looks like or how I will get there, but I know I am going to be able to help people on a bigger scale than I can contemplate now. What that tells me is that I am not doing life wrong. In fact, I think I just might be the one doing it right.

I am still trying. And I am still here.

The title could say it all, but please allow me to elaborate. I am not okay. In so many ways, I am SO NOT OKAY.

I barely write on this blog anymore, and it's not because I don't have a lot to say. It's because I feel like the world's biggest Debbie Downer. I am afraid that people are sick of hearing about my problems. I feel like a gigantic burden on my friends and family, when there has been so much tumult, pain, trauma, and chaos for so many years. Logically, I know that the people who truly love me would never feel this way. They are always there, and they always listen. But when it feels like it has been so long since you've had anything positive to report, sometimes you just stop talking. And that's when things can get dangerous for a woman like me who has lived in varying states of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation resulting from PTSD for most of my adult life.  

The darker it gets, I start to withdraw from life little by little. I stop talking about the endless doctor visits that are bleeding my bank account dry yet providing no real answers or solutions to my intractable chronic pain. I lose hope that there is any real purpose in continuing to advocate for myself and my health, because if I hear "the results are normal" or "the result's AREN'T normal but there's nothing we can do to help you" one more time I fear I will actually shatter into pieces. I kid myself that I have a social life, because I am around people all day every day - at work, at the gym, teaching my spin classes. But there are so few people I can actually bring myself to invite into my inner circle that my world is getting smaller by the day. Even the people I can allow in, I find myself holding them at arm's length, as if to say "I need you, but please don't come too close because I can't bear the searing pain of losing you." Historically, I have been one of the most affectionate people I know, and recently I have noticed myself pulling away when people hug me. Not people I don't know well enough to share that intimacy with - we're talking about the people I love the most. Some of that comes from the trauma that has been uncovered in therapy recently, I know that. But some of it is just because I am scared that the next person I lose will actually be the end of me.

They say grief can't actually kill you, but I wouldn't be so sure. When my husband died of glioblastoma on July 11. 2015, a part of me went with him. That part has never healed and I have accepted it won't, and that's the consequence of loving someone so thoroughly - there will always be a Patrick-sized hole in my heart. What I didn't expect was the PTSD diagnosis, the ensuing fear of new people and relationships, the deep-dive back into disordered eating, the overspending that I am going to be dealing with for years... the hole that I dug, just trying to survive. Now, I am left with the guilt and shame of those decisions that I made. Yes, I know that I was literally trying to stay alive. But no, I haven't been able to extend enough compassion to myself to accept it. 

Something that came up for me today in therapy was the realization of just how heavy the weight of my astronomical student loans is. I went to law school as idealistic as they come, thinking that I was on my way to saving the world. I took out the maximum I could in loans because I was working as a volunteer throughout my years in law school for the public defender in the county where I went to school, assuming that's what I would be doing once I graduated and that I'd be eligible for loan forgiveness in ten years. I graduated second in my class and passed the Bar exam the first time, but low and behold I entered a tanking economy where every county in my state was on a hiring freeze and I could not get a job doing what I loved. Instead, I had to find work, so I stumbled into a series of insurance defense jobs over the past ten years that have never felt like I was doing what I was meant to do. Yet, I have never been able to re-enter the public sector or take a non-profit job, simply because my student loans are so huge that I cannot afford to pay them AND live in California on the salary of one of those jobs. Then enter into several years of having to go on disability during the time my husband was sick and after he died, first to take care of him and then to deal with my own mental health, and you've got years of interest accumulating at a pace that cannot be thwarted.

I graduated law school with $160,000 in student loans. Ten years later, they are closer to $240,000. I owe almost a quarter million dollars because I wanted to help people and not push paper for a living. Now what do I do? Mostly push paper, and cry because I have taken one vacation in the past 12 years since I feel too guilty to spend the money when I have so much debt. It's the albatross around my neck that there's no way out of. I have no financial back-up, no spouse to chip in on the bills, and a system which has zero empathy for your personal circumstances. I should know. When I first went back to work part-time, for a few months I had to delay payments because they miscalculated my income-based repayment plan. They reported me to the credit bureau and my credit dropped 250 points, during the time my car lease was up. My dad had to co-sign my loan because my credit had been destroyed. I was 35-years-old, a lawyer for nine years, and my dad had to co-sign for me. I was humiliated. Thankfully, after six months of fighting it was finally resolved, but the emotional toll it has taken in knowing that there is literally nothing I can do to negotiate or deal with my loans has been done. If there was, I would have done it. (I remember Googling "what countries do not have extradition treaties with the US" in my first year of law school, wondering how I could hide from the IRS. Let's just say I saw the writing on the wall early... and also, that the list of countries was not ideal.)

I am not going to apologize for the word vomit today. I am struggling and I know that if I keep it all in like I have been doing, I am going to actually lose it. It's hard to explain what it's like to someone who has not dealt with mental health issues before. I am not sitting here with a plan to off myself - please let me be clear about that. But it is scary and so sad to feel like you're often asking the Universe to end your suffering, even if that means ending your life. (Please do not 5150 me. If you have more questions about this, please just ask.)

I want to tell you that I believe I can be both grateful for my life and the things that I have, and angry, sad, and overwhelmed by the ongoing struggles. These feelings do not exist independently. I am not a believer that fear and faith cannot coexist, because they do frequently in me. I do a lot to "get out of myself" and to focus on being of service to others. But sometimes, I need to be able to tell the truth and acknowledge my feelings, because they are valid.

Thank you for hearing me. 

I am one tough, badass woman, if I do say so myself. I am resilient. I am strong. No matter what comes, I can, and will, move through it. These are not just mantras I repeat to myself, like I did half-halfheartedly in my younger years, desperately hoping that if I said the words enough somehow I would begin to believe them. These are my unequivocal truths, borne out by experience and proof that I am a survivor.

It hasn't always been this way. I have done a lot of work to get here. I am still in the process of working through some old trauma that, until recently, I did not realize I hadn't fully dealt with. I didn't know that these experiences have permeated every relationship I have had, platonic and romantic. I didn't know that they prevented me from ever feeling like I was safe, or that I could fully trust my own judgment. I thought the combination of talking about them in therapy, working through the resentments in my recovery program, and the simple passage of time meant that they no longer affected me.

I was wrong.

If you've read my blog before or know me personally at all, you know that I was widowed at age 31 when my loving husband Patrick died ten months after being diagnosed with glioblastoma, grade IV brain cancer. My grieving process, which arguably continues today and will always be an important part of the fabric of my life, was long and difficult. I shared in recent blog posts about what it was like to attempt to reenter the romantic arena about a year ago through the bizarre world of online/"app" dating, which was enlightening, uncomfortable, and ultimately pretty short-lived. What I have not shared is how one of those experiences resulted in triggering horrific past trauma that put me back in a position of feeling constantly afraid, vulnerable, and unsafe. I finally feel like I am ready to talk about it, and I think it's important that I do because it has reluctantly become an important part of my story.

In December of last year, I went on a lunch date with another lawyer who was visiting my town for a court appearance. Because I am not interested in casual flings, it seemed silly to bother meeting someone who did not live here; but he was persistent, and I was trying to learn how to go on dates without expectation and to learn more about who I am and what I am looking for. So, I agreed to meet him.  We went on one lunch date, which did not go well for a variety of reasons. There were red flags left and right, and my intuition told me that this was not a healthy person to be involved with. Some of the things he shared were cause for legitimate concern, but since he did not live in the area and the conflicts between us were so obvious, I figured I would never hear from him again and that would be the end of it. And so it was -- at least for a few months. 
 
At the beginning of March, this person sent me a text message and informed me he was moving to my town. I found this strange, since he told me when we met that he did not know anyone in the area and had a young child where he was living at the time.  The town I live in is relatively small, and the legal community is even smaller, so the last thing I wanted was to have a conflict with him. He asked for information about the firm he was going to work for, which I did not have, and about the surrounding area because he was looking for somewhere to live, which I provided. I kept it light, offering nothing but responses to the questions he asked. 
 
A few weeks later, I received a text message from him telling me he had decided on a place to live, followed by "Hey, I like you and think you really would love dating me.  We could take over the world together.  Let me know if you're interested." The narcissism oozed from his words. I was obviously not interested, but I did not want to provoke any issues, so the next day I told him I appreciated him reaching out, but it was pretty clear to me when we met that we have very different values that I didn't see us being compatible in a romantic way. I wished him the best, and  hoped this would be the last communication. Unfortunately, it wasn't.
 
A few days later I began receiving a series of frightening, threatening, belligerent, and incoherent text messages from him. He was calling me names, ranting about the Devil and the Book of Revelations, and saying awful things about my late husband.  I never responded to a single message, though this continued for several hours.  I was forced to call the police because I did not know whether he was already living in my area and if he had access to public records so that he could find my home address.  To this day, it remains unclear to me what incited his rage, but I felt extremely threatened and unsafe. I ended up getting a Temporary Restraining Order, which he responded to by hiring counsel and causing substantial delays in the process. We ended up taking the issue all the way to trial, where he called me "one of those #MeToo people" in front of the judge. He seemingly saw that as some kind of insult, though it was more true than he even knew. It took several months, but I ended up winning my case and the TRO was made permanent, at least for a few years. He still ended up taking that job and moving here, and his office is less than a mile from mine, but at least I know I am legally protected for the time being.

To someone who has not dealt with trauma and issues like PTSD, my response of involving the police might seem extreme. (If you had read the text messages themselves, you'd be less inclined to think so.) However, what this experience did was trigger unprocessed trauma from years ago. What I have never shared publicly is that I, like most women, have been a victim of assault and abuse at the hands of more than one man. The first of those experiences happened when I was 19 years old. I was attacked at a party by an ex-boyfriend whose 6'2", 220+ pound body forcefully snapped my neck back so hard when he started to choke me that it caused whiplash. After agonizing over the decision, I told one of my college professors, who took me to the campus police, who then brought me to that same police department who got involved in the current case. I went through the process of getting a restraining order, going to court, and watching as ultimately the DA declined to pursue the case against him in spite of my injuries. I felt violated not only by my ex-boyfriend, but by the system itself when it either failed to believe my story or decided "he said, she said" wasn't going to help their conviction percentages and they decided not to take the case to trial. Subconsciously, it ended up being a big driving factor in me going to law school, originally wanting to become a DA -- I wanted to help other people who had been victimized, so that they would not feel alone and unheard.

This experience is not the only time I have been abused at the hands of someone I once loved, but I share it in order to provide context that might give you a window into what happened to me when I started receiving those threatening text messages. It was instantly like I was right back in that fraternity house as a teenager, terrified of what might happen next, unsure of whether I would walk out of that room alive. The day after receiving the text messages, I went to the store and bought a stun gun, pepper spray, and a knife that I began to carry with me at all times. I spent hundreds of dollars installing security equipment on my home, including alarms on every point of entry. I started to avoid leaving the house if it wasn't necessary. I began taking Krav Maga self-defense classes, which ultimately I couldn't handle because the simulations were too terrifyingly real and I would be nauseated for hours after I got home. My anxiety sky rocketed in large crowds. When I would arrive at the studio where I teach spin classes in the morning, it would still be dark outside, and every time I was scared to enter the building.  I began to withdraw from humanity - not just strangers but my friends, too. That deep, unfiltered belief of "You will never be safe and you cannot trust anyone," regardless of the logical facts to the contrary, played on a loop in my mind every day. 

All of this came to a head about a month and a half ago when I got a call at 6:30 AM while teaching a spin class from my home security system notifying me that one of the alarms had been tripped. I went home after class and although I should have called the police to enter the house with me, I entered alone and found the door between my garage and kitchen propped open with all the lights on. There is, quite literally, no way for that to happen without someone physically opening that door. It appeared that they must have entered through the garage, though I don't know how they got in. I don't know if somehow the garage had accidentally opened, or if someone opened it manually. After clearing the house and confirming nothing was missing, I called the police again to make a report. Because nothing had been stolen there was really nothing they could do but record the incident. At the time, I didn't have a camera on that area of the house, so there was no way to know for sure what had happened. I didn't know if it was the text message guy. I didn't know if someone had been watching me, and knew my schedule and that I would be gone at that time of the day. I wasn't sure if it was worse to think that whoever it was knew I wasn't home, or that they thought I would be. What I did know was, yet again, my sense of security was violated and I was terrified. I installed more cameras on the house, but that did little assuage my fears.

PTSD lives at the cellular level, and when it is triggered, my experience is that you live in a veritable hell until you can get to the other side of it. Those all-too-familiar feelings of suicidality returned. I knew implicitly that the intensity of my reaction was not because of the text messages; rather, it was more from those old traumas that were still affecting me. I finally decided that it was time for me to find a new therapist, preferably someone specializing in trauma and PTSD. It is not easy to find help like that in a small town, and even harder to find someone that both accepts your insurance and is accepting new clients. But, as the Universe always does, it showed up for me and led me to the perfect person to help me.

A few weeks ago we started EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a psychotherapy treatment designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories. Much like the hypnotherapy I did while working with my grief counselor after Patrick died, at the start it was horrific to revisit that night in college. I was flooded with overwhelming feelings of terror. I became aware of the fact that I felt a lot of guilt and blamed myself for what happened. I had never truly forgiven myself for the belief that I put myself in a position to be hurt. Regardless of the fact that nothing I could have done ever would excuse my ex-boyfriend's behavior, I still held anger towards myself for that night. Slowly but surely, I began to soften towards the teenage me who had zero coping skills, was an active alcoholic and bulimic, and had absolutely no sense of self-worth. I imagined going back to that night, as the 35-year-old woman I am now, and holding that 19-year-old in my arms and letting her cry. I told her how sorry I was for what happened to her. I assured her it was not her fault. I told her she did the very best she could with the tools she had at the time. I also reminded her that now, unlike then, I have an arsenal of tools at my disposal to deal with the inevitable challenges life will throw at me. Unlike when I was a young girl, I no longer ignore red flags out of desperation for someone to validate my existence. I don't worry about what someone will think of me if I report their unacceptable behavior. I understand that the system might still fail me, but that does not mean that I failed.  

By the end of a few sessions, I no longer felt like a victim of that experience. I felt strong and empowered. I began to trust myself more, knowing that it was not a result of a poor decision to allow a sick person into my life that this recent event happened. Instead, I saw the signs immediately. I did not allow the unhealthy person to share any part of my life. And when he acted out, I held him to account. I do not remotely resemble the trembling, helpless college student who blotted out the pain of that assault with drugs, alcohol and food. I have survived an eating disorder, alcoholism and drug addiction, the loss of my best friend and husband to brain cancer, chronic debilitating physical pain, and countless other life experiences that could have broken me.  Regardless of what happens, I have always and will continue to move forward.

I still have work to do. There are some additional traumas that need to be dealt with, but you know what? I am actually looking forward to working through them. Why? Not because I am a masochist, but because I see the freedom that is waiting on the other side. I look forward to the day that my past serves only as a source of wisdom and strength for myself and others, rather than a trigger for anxiety and fear. I can tell that day is coming soon, and I am so proud of myself for hanging on.

I am, plainly, un-fuckwithable.