[wipes proverbial dust off her long abandoned tumblr]
Is anyone even still out there and following this blog? I’ve been feeling the need for a completely unfiltered creative outlet for all my messy experiences and emotions of late, and so I decided to resuscitate this old thing. I’m sure for those who were keeping up three years ago, it seemed like an abrupt disappearance that I suddenly stopped posting here. I can’t say I’ve never pulled that one before on people in my real life. The times when I have gone MIA before, it’s been because there was something really really wrong. I’ll try to give you the Cliffs Notes.
Since you last heard from me, I:
Fell into a deep, dark, months long depression. The kind where you stop eating (except here and there so you don’t actually die), stop going to work, stop going outside in general, stop bathing, stop responding to concerned calls and messages from your friends and family, and essentially stop functioning as a normal human. I’d been through a couple of these terrible spells before, and I can’t say that this one was spurred by anything specific but an awful combination of brain chemistry and the circumstances surrounding things just not working out the way I wanted them to in every aspect of my life: professionally, personally, romantically.
Got intensive treatment for said depression thanks to the much needed interference of my amazing friends who were rightly worried and reached out to my ex, who was the one who made me get help the last time this happened and knew what resources I needed from the legwork he had done to find them before. This time was a lot harder though and I wasn’t the model patient I had been before. It seemed like I was getting better but then I kept ghosting on my group therapy program and then I’d make more effort and then less again and then I had to switch to a different treatment place/plan once I “graduated” from that one and then I kept dodging more appointments and was slipping back into the hole, when the unthinkable happened: I…
Had one of my parents come very close to dying. An emergency flight home turned into a permanent move. I’ve had a lot of turmoil in my life since basically birth, but this was one of the hardest things I’ve ever experienced as an adult. In one sense, it allowed me an out from a life that just wasn’t working for me in a city that can be very punishing. Health-wise, I got better very fast because I basically had no choice but to step up and be there. It was quite the flip to go from being unable to take care of myself to having to be a caretaker and advocate for my parent, spending months at their bedside in the hospital and then in rehab and having to make some really difficult decisions on their behalf. While this was all happening, I was incredibly lonely, so I got on a dating app as a distraction, where I…
Met someone who even further altered the course of my life. Not only was I suddenly thrust back into a home I hadn’t lived in since I went away to college, but I was thrust back into the very Muslim family and extended community that I dropped out of college and moved states in order to get even further away from. What started out as a simple need to connect with someone who was not part of my family or this community of people who were always around (one thing I will say is that despite all my criticism of my family and of Islam and my shunning of their mosque community, these people really show up for you in times of crisis) ended up taking me by surprise. It was an intense connection from the get go, and it spiraled out from there in all sorts of directions. Eventually, I:
Moved in with this boyfriend and then moved to another state with him. I’m sure it’s telling that of the two boyfriends I’ve lived with thus far, I moved in with them in part because I was seeking sanctuary and love and acceptance that I didn’t feel like I was getting from my family. Once my ill parent was recovered enough to return home, things got really uncomfortable and oppressive really fast. The boyfriend told me he loved me within weeks of us meeting and spending as much time as we could together, and I loved him (or at least the only version of him that I knew then) too, so I decided to try to build a life with him. The thing is though, when you go from being as depressed as I was, to going through the major family trauma that we all did, to getting immediately into a relationship and moving in with that person way too soon, it’s easy to miss the fact that you never fully recovered your own identity and mental stability. A few months into moving states with the boyfriend, I:
Ended up leaving him because the relationship turned emotionally and verbally and in some ways, although he didn’t beat me up, physically abusive. It required my filing multiple police reports, the kindness of so many people who let me stay with them while I got back on my feet, the help of a great therapist, and a restraining order in order to fully break free. This relationship is something I would like to unpack in a string of more in-depth posts, but in the interest of brevity, I’m trying to keep this moving. The important thing is that, although I feel like my psychology and view on relationships in general was permanently altered as a result of what I went through, I got out alive. Not everyone does. I…
Decided to stay in the city that the now ex-boyfriend and I had moved to together instead of moving back either home to where my parents live, although they desperately wanted me to, or to where I was living before, or to literally anywhere else. I took some time to recover from yet another majorly traumatic experience, and then I:
Started dating again. Probably too soon, even though I gave myself months before even trying, but what’s a lonely girl to do? I missed having sex, and I also wanted companionship. I don’t even know how many guys I went out with; at one point, I was going on 1-2 or more first dates a week. I was endlessly frustrated by not being able to get past that point with anyone. How can you even get to know a person and whether or not you *might* want to date them if you don’t get past the point of having a couple of drinks or a single meal together? Of course, there were some people I was not interested in pursuing anything with either. I was also not getting fucked. At all. So about once a month, I
Picked someone to have drinks with or show around who was just passing through town and not worried about getting tangled up in something more complicated and had some casual, detached fun. There was the old high school classmate who was supposed to sleep on my couch and, well, didn’t. There was the guy on a business trip who waited until we were making out in his hotel room to tell me that he was in an open marriage, who I chose to believe and slept with anyway since I didn’t plan on ever seeing him again. There was the tall, beardy German on a business trip who was staying at one of the fancier hotels in town. There was the stand-up comedian who I coincidentally had some mutual friends with and was in town as a stop on a live podcast tour. There was the photographer in town for a music festival. These fleeting escapades with smart, funny, interesting, creative, good-looking dudes were the fun part of being single, but I was craving something more substantial and wondering if I was ever going to find it when I…
Met the guy who I have now been with for the last six months and change. I am hesitant to say too much about him as most of what I used to write about on here and everything that I just wrote about above were reflections on or recollections of the past, or else it was written in the context of casual sex and dating and not giving any fucks. I give quite a lot of fucks about my now boyfriend, and I am not yet sure that I want to delve into the intricacies of our relationship as it’s happening…but we shall see.
In any case, that brings us up to the present. More to come!
[Image via Embroideries by the great Marjane Satrapi]
