well, hello tumblr. i ended up back here tonight after transferring my phone photos, a short walk down memory lane. then a longer one, looking through older photos, and what precious few i have of myself. and finally here, looking for one of my mother, whom i can now name as my abuser - and with whom i’ve now cut off contact - that i couldn’t find in my files.
and it’s a strange, displacing, grief-filled experience to go through my blog, even scroll briefly through the archive. it’s... big. very big. i can only feel the edges of it. it’s an odd, sharp contrast - i spent the worst years of my life addicted here. i couldn’t leave the house. i ate and i scrolled and ate and cried and scrolled and ate. and yet it strikes me how much colour and beauty and how many morsels of life i collected, saving them up, hoarding bright fragments of a world i was terrified of. things that made and still make me ache in a way i can’t quite describe. things that got me through, allowed me to survive. things i posted, and the memory of all the things i wanted to but held back in shame and fear. a few tentative connections i made with others here.
so hi. age 23, i am 35 kilos lighter than on my 21st birthday. my skin no longer fits the body under it, a reverse snakeskin i can’t shed, a reminder - but i’m healthy. i move with ease. i moved my life to a brash but expansive city. i made a best friend (who got deported), and i found a sane substitute father, who helps me wrangle my still-twisty brain (as have many, many hours of group therapy and a couple of individual therapists). i have people in my life. i have my own place. i can speak to people without crying (unless i’m choosing to be vulnerable). i’ve held my job, with ease, for a year and a half - gone from trainee lvl 1 to highest trained. i completed my first qualification since dropping out of high school, and started another. i spend my days studying plants & rocks & dirt & maps & fire - or crawling around the bush, in love with the multitudinous plants, listening to the world, talking to others, sometimes. i have hundreds of plant names in my brain library these days. feels good. pulling out weeds, from the dirt and from my mind. i fell into this industry accidentally, and i couldn’t have chosen anything better - something that forces me to be in my body, outside, among fellow weirdos or alone when i need to be. the work often feels like putting bandaids on the disembowelment of someone also on fire, but it’s good for me, for now. i kissed someone for the first time. i’ll be taking my driving test in a fortnight. i’m growing, slowly - or maybe at just the right pace. learning to be in reality and in my body and in my own truth, inch by inch. there’s a long way still to go, but i’ve started walking.
and i don’t write any of this as a boast, but as an assertion. a post for my old self, who scrolled through images and quotes and videos in agony, helpless and very, very nearly hopeless.
we made it through, girl.
i’m so proud of us.
