This is not going to be a feel good post.

This is the writing that I started after the trip home, while I was emotionally purging. I feel it is important to keep it, to keep a log of the emotions just as much as it is important to keep the good ones.

Not everything is sunshine and rainbows, but just because it is darker, or just because it hurts, doesn’t mean it is bad.

This, I feel, is where my healing truly started, and I would like to have a record of my beginning so when I next I stop and look back, I can remember these feelings and see how far I have come.

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Post Travel Writing

I made it home in one piece. It was a nice drive and I listened to Catching Fire the whole way. The book is so much better than the movie. I absolutely love it.

I don’t know what to write.

It’s not that I have an aversion to it, or that I don’t want to talk about the squirming, tangled jumble of feelings inside me. It’s more that I don’t know where to start.

There’s so much. Some of it hurts, so I don’t want to start there even though it’s the easiest to find. The other strands are confusing and require thought, which is effort and taxing and could in the end lead to more pain, so lets avoid those…

I know there are good stands mixed in, but they are so corded around and inside the other strands that I can’t find them well enough to start there.

So I’m left with what feels like I giant yarn ball in my lap with no idea how to unravel it.

The drive was fine. Everything was fine. I didn’t go home right away because I wanted to get mounting board for my cousin’s gift. I wanted to be able to wrap it for her so it would be more than me handing her a piece of fabric with thread in it.

I stopped at the Michael’s I so often bought my craft supplies at. I lived here for years, I walked in and out of this store so many times. This is home for me.

They stopped carrying the mounting board I needed, so I had to go to another store which was recommended to me by the store associate.

This is another thing I have sorely missed. Southern hospitality.

I hadn’t noticed how detached Florida is. I suppose that’s why the waiters I have gotten recently have made such an impression on me. How kind they are, caring.

My home always had that. It was rare that you spoke to a person who didn’t genuinely care how your day was going. Who wanted to help you. Who was, just in general, nice.

I had never met the store associate before in my life, but she made me feel like a person. I felt welcomed. Validated that I was alive simply in the way she acknowledged me.

I got the mounting board I needed then went home. Truly home.

As soon as I got off the interstate I knew I was going to cry.

For no reason at all.

All of a sudden, like the very action of turning onto the parkway were some significant act, I was crying.

Sobbing really. Poor Scarlet in her cat carrier probably thought I was going to die.

And I don’t know why.

There were so many emotions that just suddenly hit my chest. Like I had a dam built up inside of my heart chakra and seeing my home set off a detonation inside me, allowing all of those emotions to flow out of me in the form of tears.

It hurt so much. But it wasn’t a bad hurt. It felt like a healing hurt. Like I was safe and finally able to let go of everything inside me.

All of the uncertainty with Jarrett, all of the negativity with Sir, all of the frustration with work, the feelings of isolation and aloneness. All of it I could finally let go of. I could take the world off of my shoulders and vocally cry out all of the anguish that I had never been able to in Florida.

Alone in my car, for those five minutes that it took to pull into my mom’s subdivision I was allowed to cry as hard as I wanted. I was safe. I was home. Nothing bad could hurt me. None of the worries I have can touch me here, or for the next two weeks.

I felt like a child, finally rescued from all of the evil monsters lurking under my bed and in my closet. All of those things that I knew were going to eat me alive. They’re finally gone and I’m safe, and I’m crying from relief.

That’s what it feels like. It feels like I’ve survived some horrific ordeal and that I’m finally being given the chance to come to terms with the trials that I have been faced with over the past year.

More emotional baggage being sorted through.

The only thing I remember clearly enough was thinking that I was home. I’m home. I made it.

I want to stay here, hiding from the world and not have to go back to being an adult and responsible. And even as I type that I know it isn’t true.

I don’t mind being an adult. I don’t mind my responsibilities.

I mind that so many of them revolve around other people. How it isn’t enough for me to take care of myself, that I must carry other people as well, as if they are wounded and I am trying to drag them off of the battlefield of life.

I’m tired. So tired. I have run for so long, tried so hard.

I have been strong for others. I have held in my hurt so I could keep functioning. I have forced myself to keep the tears back to the point where most of the time they don’t come anymore.

Not until it is an unstoppable force. Until I couldn’t hold it inside if my life depended on it. Like today. Like how seeing the Chinese place I played Magic at so many times made me realize how amazing I had it growing up. How much my mom loved my brothers and me.

How trivial my problems back then seem now. I was so ungrateful growing up. And part of me feels awful for that. Part of me wonders how my mom could love me after some of the arguments we’ve had in the past.

I see my brothers tomorrow and I know that I’m not going to be able to hold everything in when I see them at the airport. As soon as I see John I know I’m going to be a mess, and I’ll totally lose it when he hugs me.

My little brother who I fought with so often. Who I yelled at and was so mean to for no reason, and all I can think of is how two weeks isn’t enough. In two weeks he’ll be gone again to Germany and I don’t know when I’ll see him again.

it doesn’t seem fair. All I want in the world right now is my family, and I’ll only have them for two weeks and then I’ll be alone again. So horribly, awfully alone.

I shouldn’t be thinking of it this way, but I can’t stop those thoughts. They want their voices to be heard too, and I can’t argue that they have a right just as much as any of the others.

I know I am where I am supposed to be in my life. I don’t dislike the apartment, I don’t dislike my job. But right now I feel like my family, my clan, is the most important thing in my life, and I cannot stay with them.

All I can think of is how I will have to leave.

That this is just a small shallow bubble of time that will end.

It hurts. I hurt. And I don’t know why.

When I first moved to Florida I thought I would cry as my mom and older brother drove away, leaving me alone in my new apartment. Alone, in a city I had never lived in, in a city that I literally knew no one.

But I didn’t.

I felt amazing. I felt like I was where I was supposed to be. This was meant to happen. I loved that I was alone. That I had my own space. That I was doing something I was passionate about. That I was going to be successful at.

Why is it so different now?

I don’t know. I wish I did. I wish I knew why the thought of leaving bothers me so much. So much that it’s hard to keep writing.

Am I broken? Is this some dependency that I didn’t know I had? Some crippling weakness? Is this normal? Is this an INFJ issue? An introvert issue?

I know that everyone needs human contact. Is it that I have been without meaningful contact for too long? Is there such a thing?

I saw Jarrett the other day to get the $30 he had to put towards the bills, and as I left we hugged each other.

It was the first hug I have had from someone outside of work, someone who truly knows me, in I can’t remember when. Months.

And even that was tense.

He said that he thought about not giving me one, but that he couldn’t say no because he wanted it too.

It’s all so complicated and doesn’t help with trying to figure everything out.

And I just got a text message my from mom saying she is on the way home and that, a simple text message, words on a screen with no tone or feeling, no non-verbal communication makes me want to breakdown.

I feel so broken right now, so unable to keep anything under control.