What We Don’t Know

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Hello, can we be friends?

I have been through several versions of hell and remained myself. But also not myself. Not the same self. A different self. I have shed each self like a skin, slithered out, tender and grieving and not even knowing the newest version.

What are the features, what are the bugs?

Have you done this also? I bet you have. I can see a familiar knowing in your eyes. (You look a little haunted, to be honest. It’s okay.)

These experiences have rocked me and shattered much that I love but I have not given up. I have not lost myself. I still know and love myself. I still feel and recognize the little girl I was — she is here. I have kept her safe all these years. I have kept her alive.

You have done the same: kept yourself alive, through so much, maybe even when you didn’t want to. I’m so proud of you for doing that, for staying here. It’s so difficult. I know.

Yesterday I was sitting with my son who not so long ago didn’t want to be here anymore. We were just chatting. He said, I really like my life now. I’m enjoying it. I’m so glad to be here.

I didn’t cry because there’s no faster way to shut down a conversation with a teenager than cry but I did on the inside, if you know what I mean.

Because things can go so many ways. You just don’t know.

You don’t know how it’s going to work out, if it’s going to work out. Sometimes it becomes obvious that it’s not going to work out, and then you stare at it like, Well what now?

And you don’t know. You have absolutely no idea.

I have made mistakes. So many mistakes. But I have lived through them all. I own and acknowledge them, and they are mine and they teach me what I need to know next.

Well, that’s not quite true.

Some of them seem incredibly random and unhelpful. What the fuck am I supposed to learn from this?

Not everything is a lesson. Some things you survive, and that’s it.

There have been long stretches of time when I would wake up with anxiety shrouding my mind, panic attacking as sleep drained away, tension knotting my shoulders. But I kept waking up.