The Return

I started drinking decaf at night; sprinkling a little cinnamon in the bottom of the French press for a single cup, poured into a tiny ikea coffee cup with pink flowers like someone’s great-grandmother. Sometimes, I have a mini biscotti with it.

I listen to a playlist full of Bonnie Rhaitt and Emmy Lou and Patty Smith and try not to well with tears when my eldest hums the harmony while putting away the dishes.

I have stopped the dinging of notifications on my phone and stepped away from shiny platforms that demand a piece of me- I have been collecting the pieces like broken shells and gluing them together. They don’t fit how they used to, but I don’t mind all that much.

I have been testing what might happen if I stop the whirl of anxiety before attempting productivity. Can I produce if I am not in a panic? Is it still considered work if I am not floundering to keep up and lose track of time? Am I still ambitious if I break for lunch?

I thought I would miss it- the drive to create content for others’ immediate consumption. Forced creativity. I have been afraid that if I were to slow down, I would stop altogether like a train past its prime, stuck on the tracks. Nowhere else to belong, but no further to go. I’m tired of living my life like someone is grading me on it with emojis.

Trauma work is taxing, they tell me. They didn’t have to- part of me knew all along which is why I avoided it. I am still ambivalent about therapy but what I have noticed is this: when I close my eyes and really listen, it’s my own voice I hear now. I am not sure I trust her yet, but I can definitely hear her.

Closing in on a year ago I was faced with the exercise of facing my inner child, and ran. I wanted nothing to do with her. I didn’t want to see what she was wearing or if her face was sad- it always was, sad. I didn’t want to walk anywhere near her in shame. In shame because I left her. I left her to fend for herself, and I listened to everyone’s voices but hers. I closed my hands around her mouth when she screamed, I wiped her tears at the very corners of her eyes so they never spilled over, I dressed her over and over in clothing she hated that made her invisible- and safe. And then I walked away and made a new life without her, leaving her to believe she never deserved the kind of life she had always wanted.

I left her behind the door because it was much easier than to open it and face my deepest fear- that for all of my trauma and the things I have carried, the biggest wound I have is self-inflicted by abandoning her.

I haven’t been able to open the door yet. But the world is slowly settling and the screens have stopped dinging and my heart is beginning to believe that I won’t get kicked out of the human race if I don’t make a deadline. Our hands are touching through the door and while I still wish she would stay there and that this would be enough, I know it is not. I know she needs more. She deserves more. And I’m the only one who can give it to her.

Thing To Heal By

I have been obsessively watching, “The Bear” and I wish I wasn’t completely taken by Richie’s character, but I am. His brokenness in “Forks” in season two and his reclaiming of himself was one of the most moving episodes I’ve ever watched. There was something incredibly healing about the whole, misanthropic thing.

I’ve had a hard time eating these days, something that only happens when there is a big shift in how I’m viewing my own life and the people in it. When that happens, only a few things that feel like home stay settled in my stomach. These are them:

1. My own chicken stock made with the carcass of a roasted chicken, onions, garlic, celery, carrots, a bay leaf, fresh thyme, black peppercorns, a splash of apple cider vinegar and some sea salt and a lemon slice low and slow for 12 hours. Strained and sipped in a mug, it’s the closest thing to medicine.

2. A tuna salad sandwich from Raymond’s. Don’t ask, it just is what it is.

3. A pumpernickel bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon.

4. Portuguese custard tarts.

5. Soft scrambled eggs with sourdough toast.

T.J.Klune’s beautiful, somber books are slaying me. I don’t think I would like them if I were in a different season of life, but for right now, they are simply perfect.

I am a Throne of Glass fan through and through but I was so disappointed with Sarah Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses I’m unsure of what to do with myself now.

Cheers to those doing the heavy lifting of healing the things we really wished we had kept in the closet.