Another year here
[CW/TW: talk of mental health, death/grief, and self-harm (all in reference to past experiences, not current life situations)]
Today is my birthday (28) and this one is special for a lot of reasons.
Primarily, I am setting a new record for how long I have lived.
If you laughed at that and said “no shit” let me explain - I thought I would be dead by now. In fact, I planned on it.
When I turned 26, I planned to unalive myself by 27. That’s a story for another time, but essentially I reached 27 and decided I still wanted to live.
It’s been a weird, bittersweet year of high highs and low lows. And that number 27 has loomed in the back of my brain the entire time, as if to say “you’re not out of the woods yet.”
Today, however, I am 28. And 28 holds a very different meaning.
The only plans I made for 28 were when I was wishing I could ask my 28-year-old self if it gets better. First, I want to share an actual entry from my real-life diary. From October 14th, 2022 (the day I was going to die and decided to live):
This day last year, I was at OSU Newark next to the pond and I wrote SONG FOR SLEEPING as I was wrapping up work on TAKE THIS WITH YOU.
Today, I am at Sam’s house dog-sitting and I had a revelation in her backyard. The trees are in vibrant shades of fall and it’s an exceptionally windy and crisp cool day. It's my favorite kind of weather. Feels like Autumn. Smells like it. Reminds me of being in school as a kid. Reminds me that there is deep grief there - in the remembering of childhood. That I hold a deep grief even from the transition into adulthood.
My dad dying really affected me. It really changed my personality. I think about how I might have felt or been able to cope if it had only been that my parents got evicted and we lost all our possessions. If it only had been that and not my dad dying as well. I would have still had a relationship with him. I would still be tethered to the realness of that life. What happy memories I could salvage or could have gone on to make with him. It feels like I lost that life and my dad’s death was the end of any good memories I could have kept living in. I was only left with my mother and all the sadness and hurt. I was left with the bad parts.
Unfair to my mother who certainly tried as best as she knew how.
I also think of the rampant mental health issues in my family. The horrible desperation of poverty still clings to my bones and fills me with anxiety and hopelessness as I sit in a beautiful house like this.
Something I don’t believe I will ever attain in my life.
Something that feels so much like make-believe that I don’t ever think it could be something I deserve to experience.
My dad died and it transformed my personality into something else. It was the final door closed at the end of multiple traumas in a row and left me in this life that feels like I am a different person entirely.
Like I am lost. Nothing. A ghost.
Like I am the ghost of events long forgotten. Here floating, reliving the same trauma every day but never moving forward although life continues to swirl around me.
That’s where the grief sits.
Standing, facing the past, crying into the void about the things I could have had or been without trauma, instead of turning to face forward and figuring out what to do with what I have left. I don’t want to forget.
Everyone always told me to never forget what I come from. How could I ever forget?
The trauma that shaped my DNA, rewired my brain and my sense of safety, implanted the belief that something must be inherently and seriously wrong with me for me to have deserved it in the first place.
I will never forget where I came from.
But I am afraid of forgetting what I loved about it, because all those moments were shared with only one other person and he’s gone.
Is it as deep as that? Do I remember things with rose-colored glasses?
No. My dad really did love me. He treated me with so much kindness, respect, and trust. He was a good parent to me - as good as he could be with the tools he was given. He genuinely tried to be a good dad, despite being so mentally ill and disabled from his own trauma. He was so violent. And tried so hard not to be that way with me.
My mom, on the other hand, seemed to hate me, despite always treating my brother so well. She also didn’t treat my sister right obviously, but my sister didn't grow up with my mother - didn't have it instilled in her from childhood. I don’t know why my mother picked me. I don’t know why I didn’t get the same level of love and attention. The kinds of things she said to me deeply hurt me. They shaped my inner voice. That echoing voice is sometimes so convincing that I keep seeing her face staring back at me in the mirror. The ways she made me feel about me, who I was, my thoughts, my intentions - that has stuck with me all this time so unconsciously, even though I am fully conscious that she's the first person who said those things to me. I don’t know why I believe it so much, knowing she was just a hurt person hurting others.
So… I am 27 today.
And I feel like I’m in year 0 of getting to know myself. Year 0 of figuring out what I want my life to look like. Figuring out what will make me happy. Am I already happy? Was I happy back then?
Will I be okay? Will I get better?
I wish I could talk to me at 28. At 29. At 30.
I wish I could know if it gets better. If I will ever be able to appreciate the better.
If I will ever feel good enough.
Successful enough.
Safe enough.
Responsible enough.
Healed enough.
Will I get better?
I wish I could see how my teenage self would react to where I am now. I know I was her, but her mindset seems so far removed from my own.
I hope she would like where I am. I hope I am where she dreamed of being. Because then I can only move forward with more dignity. Less comparison.
I cry reading this entry back because I remember what it felt like not so long ago. For anyone who has read Sylvia Plath’s, The Bell Jar, the metaphor of the jar and the feelings of being inside it, suffocating in isolation while struggling with depression, is what I liken these periods of my life to. It’s an apt descriptor and certainly sums up the way the world becomes inaccessible and distorted inside episodes of mental health relapse.
I cry for that person. And then I realize that she wanted to ask me, at 28, if its okay and if it got better.
But that’s not really a yes or no question. Perhaps it’s that simple for a lucky few who are elevated above us all, but there’s no baseline or benchmark for what okay can be/could be/should be for me. Not after the oppressive layer of trauma I have sifted through to breathe the fresh air again.
I don’t think I will be making any more exit plans - I certainly have found reasons to live that feel permanent and unbreakable.
I also learned I am already good enough. Mistakes can be made with grace and without indicating that I am some fatally flawed person who is bad and who deserves to feel bad all the time. Like… yikes! I was living that way?
However, I still feel a sense of isolation. I am largely surrounded by people who manage day-to-day emergencies or inconveniences with no idea that it can be worse than this. And looking around my life, the things that others might turn their noses up at are things I could have never imagined having. It’s hard for them to understand I could be happy here.
While the opinions of others sometimes make me question if I should be happy here, I am learning to disengage from the judgment. Just because others with more privilege might not be interested in living a life like the one I am building, it doesn’t take away the joy that’s continuing to form and grow.
And once in a blue moon, I meet someone who has been there. Someone who gets it because they’ve lived through horror.
The world through our collective eyes is no longer twisted and distorted. It’s simply a shared sad truth and we grieve it together. In communal grieving there is healing.
So am I better? Am I okay? Am I any of the enoughs?
What I can say is I am growing out branches from a gnarled stunted trunk. Shooting out leaves and blossoms. Maybe the bark (the bones) tell the story of the past, but I am happy to be living in the present.
I wish I could tell my 26-turning-27-year-old self: The trauma isn’t mine anymore. I don’t need to keep bringing it along for the ride or navigating myself solely as an aspect of past experiences. That doesn’t belong to me and it never did. I can leave it behind and move on lighter.
While it seems everyone approaching their 30s thinks they are running out of time, I feel time stretches ahead of me in a way I never thought possible.
I am very excited to see 28.
Thanks for being here. As always your thoughts are so very welcomed and encouraged.
xoxo,
Lash
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Love this Lashonda thank you for showing us you.