Truth

I had a much different idea in mind for tonight’s post. In fact I wrote it in my mind last night while I was trying to sleep. I couldn’t sleep. Between the pain and the emotions coursing through me… I ended up watching the clock tick until ten this morning when I finally gave in and got out of bed. I was going to write about something much more uplifting, but that post is going to have to wait. I always said that I would write honestly, from the heart.

I’m tired of being positive. I’m tired of healing from one tragedy just to face another one. I’m tired of putting things in the past, being happy, to have that happiness like a rug, pulled up from under me and having to figure out how to stand on broken legs and let them heal. I start to run forward just to have the rug yanked out again and to start the process all over. At what point do you stop running, stop moving forward and just lay there, give up and give in, knowing the pain of the broken legs and not wanting to feel it again? I am so tired of my legs healing from each break, growing stronger, just to have each break hurt more and do more damage then the last. But I get up, I move forward, I keep running. Why? Why do I keep going? Why? Why am I determined to hurt over and over?

So here it is. I am scared. I am scared to tell people, anyone how I really feel. I hide behind this mask of pretending everything is all right all the time. No one, including my husband, really knows what is going on inside my head. I show that I am ok and I pretend that I am ok, when in reality I am far from ok. I am scared to let anyone into what is going on inside of me.

I am scared I will be judged. I am scared I’ll be rejected. I am scared people will not look to me as leader or a strong person anymore. I am afraid people will think I am crazy and take away my positions in a variety of clubs and volunteer organizations in which I serve, that they will think I am unfit to do my jobs or to lead. In reality, I need those in my life. I need to know I am needed somewhere by someone doing something. To take away all that I do would kill me.

I’m just scared. Physically and emotionally. Physically the pain has almost become unbearable, I’ve been running a fever for about four days now, and I cant tell you the last time I slept well. But I can put on a brave face at lunch with a friend, or on a long telephone call. I don’t want to worry anyone, I don’t want to bother anyone. I just feel like something is wrong, but I cant pinpoint what it is. My lower back is killing me but it doesn’t make sense, I didn’t have surgery on my back. Nothing makes sense. Yesterday my fever was 102.9 I’ve been controlling it by staying on top of Tylenol and drinking lots of fluids. I have a doctor’s appointment Monday. I’m just trying to hang on until then. My energy last for about four hours and then I feel like I’ve been hit by a train.

Emotionally, well emotionally, is an entirely different beast. I cant stay still, I cant just rest. Because then I am left with my thoughts. My thoughts are ugly and scary and the stuff that nightmares are made of. I’m my worst critic and my worst enemy all in one. All I hear, when I am alone is how unworthy I am, unlovable, alone. I think about what a failure I’ve been and how scared relationships make me. I think a lot about other things, things I cant write on here, things that people would read and say I am incapable of leadership, incapable of volunteering, incapable. I am afraid people would think I was unstable because they wouldn’t understand the context of the words, they would read JUST the words, not the meaning behind them.

I want so badly to write it down, not to post it, but just to get it out there, but then I am afraid if its written it will be found. Whether by my husband or someone else.

I don’t expect anyone to understand. I don’t like being me. On any given day I wish I could be someone, anyone else. When my friends run home to their parents and I am left reminded I don’t have that, or when we are asked to write down our best friend and so many of them list their moms, or when the holidays roll around and my husbands gone and I am nothing but a hassle, a heavy weight, holding back a friend, or when I feel completely unwanted. When I look at the blog I wrote about last Christmas and how only my deployed husband called me, how I spent most of it alone in my empty house, wishing I had someone to call family.

I hate myself. Literally. I feel like I failed at everything I have ever started. I’ve never had anything normal in my life. I’ve never had a normal prom, a normal wedding, a normal graduation. Normal meaning happy, accepted, surrounded by support, people there who cared. I’ve never had a family Christmas or a time where I felt like I was surrounded by care, love, family, safety. I turned down a writing contract out of fear. Fear of failure, of not finishing what I started, which I have been known of doing. Fear of rejection.

I’m scared of getting close to anyone. People fail you. It happens. Whether in death, or in friendship, they fail you. I’m going through this right now with a friendship I know is not long lasting, a friendship that has caused me so much pain in the last year but because of the love I feel for this friend I haven’t cut ties yet, but I feel it coming, I know its coming. I don’t want to get close to people because I am scared of the pain that will come. People grow apart, sometimes it is as simple as that, but it still hurts. And not having anyone to fall back into, not having a family or home to run to when it happens, no rock there, is hard. It is easier just to keep everyone at arms length. It’s easy to say, harder to do. I love others but I don’t let others close to me. I time out friendships, meaning, I never spend a lot of time with the same person. I see people infrequently, so I don’t get close, I don’t get hurt. Whose fault is that? Mine.

You know, I had written a previous blog about not knowing where I would be buried. That bothered me. I don’t have a place to call home, I don’t have a site to be buried. It would be a matter of time before my grave was covered in weeds and I was forgotten. That doesn’t scare me, it is an ending that I believe is my due, what scares me is the fact that day to day I feel completely isolated, completely unconnected to anyone on earth. Like, why I am here. What is the purpose? Why have I been allowed to die three times and brought back?

When does it get better? Every time something has happened to me I have asked this question. When does it get better?  After being abused and testifying against my parents I asked that. After bouncing from home to home and abuse in the foster care system I asked that. After losing my boyfriend in a car accident in high school I asked that. After foster care I went off to college. Excited, something normal. I loved thriving there, student senate, sorority, academics, normal. Then Brian kills himself.  That wasn’t about me. That was about him. But it happened to me. The circumstances changed my life, rearranged my plans. It was not the normal college experience. Not the normal human experience. I asked, “When does it get better?” When do I get normal, when do I get happy? Nothing after that has answered the question. My mom dying of aids, car accident where I get to lose three of my best friends, three women who I actually loved and who I counted as family, gone in a span of a second, trauma after trauma. Finally I get married. No one was there to witness our marriage. NO ONE. We were alone. As is my life. I wore work clothes, left the ceremony and went back to work, as did he.

Ok, well now I am married. That’s normal right? I mean I married my best friend. We move all over the country and have so much fun together. Its time to start a family. Miscarriage after miscarriage, hell lets throw in a still birth for good measure, I mean, why not, she’s had to handle everything else thrown her way. Lets see if that breaks her. No. I didn’t let it break me. I haven’t let any of it break me. I’ve bounced back time and time again. I’ve dealt. I’ve learned. I’ve grown. Two more miscarriages. I face the fact that I may never have a baby. And it is damn important for me to have a biological baby. I am the only combination of my mother and father on this earth and they are both dead. With my death that line dies. We can’t do surrogacy and don’t qualify for invetro because they cant find out WHY we are miscarrying. If we could pinpoint it, if we knew it was my body I could do surrogacy. If we knew it was the embryos we could do invetro. But we don’t know and therefore I don’t qualify for either. You see they wont take a baby and put it in another woman’s body if my body isn’t the issue. They wont risk another woman to do that and I wouldn’t let them. So we are stuck. Trying to decide do we keep trying do we keep doing this?

And I am stuck asking the question I have been asking my entire life: When does it get better? I have been beat down, stabbed, set on fire, raped, lost friends, had to relearn to walk, talk and live again after a coma, and buried a baby while losing four others and I keep getting up and I keep asking the question: when will it get better?

At which point do I realize it doesn’t get better? That suffering is my lot in life. That this is it? A lonely experience, a disappointing, heart shattering, soul crushing, experience that I cant rewind and I cant undo. An experience that when it finally ends will find me alone in a grave that will grow over with weeds in a matter of time, because I didn’t matter. I don’t have anyone who will come back and visit. Honestly, that’s how I feel.

I am scared of letting anyone get close. Everyone who has gotten close to me has failed me or been taken away by deaths grips. I don’t want the curse that is my life to hurt anyone so I don’t let people close. I just am so tired. I am so exhausted. I cant keep asking: “When will it get better?” Because no matter what, it never does. There will be months and then BAM. A reminder, you are not normal, you are not loved. Here you go deal with this and ask yourself why are you still here? It doesn’t matter how much I loved God or how much peace I found in him, it didn’t matter how strong I was, how positive, it didn’t matter if I was doing things right or wrong, life’s cruelty would seek me out and pause it all and remind me that I will never be normal. I will never have a family. I will never feel loved, because after all I have been told since my birth in words and actions that I am undeserving of it. I believe that people can care and they do, but care is temporary love is permanent, and I don’t believe I will ever be loved. People think they do but they always change their minds.  

And at the end of the day that is why I don’t let anyone know the real me. The real me is closed behind steel walls reinforced with graphene.