Late Night Thoughts

This might be one of my late-night posts since I can’t sleep because I need to process my feelings. If you’ve been around, you know these tend to happen less these days. Then again, it’s kind of fitting for how I’ve been feeling lately.

Deep down I believe people are where they are for a reason. This time of year is when I feel it the most and I am aware of that but I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to handle being where I am. I’m sure the people around me can agree that I have grown in recent years. I have healed in ways because I’ve been close to people who aid that. I know that would have looked different if I had moved to any of the places I thought about over the years. I think I hide (maybe) how I truly am feeling. To some, they might think, “Girl, you are not hiding how you feel.” That’s the thing I struggle more in this place than people realize.

This time of year especially. It is like something in the air shifts and I am back in college. I try to downplay it because I did get some good out of it, but college was the worst time of my life. I also begin to hit the anniversary of when my aunt got sick. Each year by choice or not, I am back in that time. I live on the same road as I did when she went into the hospital. The other day I looked a couple of blocks up remembering when I had called 911. In the middle of the night watching the ambulance not drive away. Later on I learned the paramedics were working on reviving her for quite a few minutes.

I am not naive. I know no matter where I was I’d have my struggles.

I believe given everything I’ve come a long way when it comes to not living in the past. I won’t ever get away from it because I’m always going to have an anniversary and a list of things I grieve over. Grief will always be there and will come up at random times. I have accepted that and continue to work through how I respond to it. I also wholeheartedly believe I’d be a whole different person if I got to leave. I try to not publicly say that because I don’t want to sound ungrateful. This is a wild thing to think too, to be honest, since it’s my mental health we are talking about.

The thing is I used to have places I’d want to move to and I’d spend hours looking at houses and jobs. I have a place or two that I go back to but most of the places I’ve lost interest in. For years I wanted to be a cop and I was willing and planning on sacrificing everything for that. I decided for personal reasons to give that dream up though a part of me will always mourn not becoming a cop. I get asked, today being the most recent, what do I want to do with life? Though part of it is probably a defense mechanism, I say nothing. Partially because I’ve had to figure out what I want and enjoy that isn’t related to being a cop. I haven’t let myself truly want anything until I get to leave. There aren’t too many options where I am either way. I’ve also never expected to be alive this long and still struggle with just wanting it all to be over.

I’d say the thing I like and enjoy doing the most is writing. Creating in general, but writing is the outlet that allows me to express the most. It’s the thing I’m most recognized for within my circle. I watch others who are doing things that are related or part of what so much of their life has been about such as drum corp. Things that being a cop was for me. I struggle with feeling like I am starting late in whatever I do unless I stay with higher ed since it’s what most of my professional work experience is in.

You hear about those who were in school or had graduated during COVID years. I am forever grateful I graduated from college before any of it. I was freshly in the work force when it happened. It was the time when I was expected to take chances and go for things that maybe seemed unrealistic. Jobs were being lost and mine was able to be transitioned to a work-from-home situation. I was afraid to go for a job where I was unsure if it’d survive the pandemic. Let alone move to a different city, which at the time where I wanted wasn’t that far away. There was still so much unknown. Already fresh out of college is a time of unknown for someone to then add the unknown that was the pandemic. Now, I am years out of college. Some of the experience that I received during college is less relevant to employers than if I was only a couple of years out. Covid skewed a lot of it.

I do believe I am more afraid to take chances because of it. I have made it a goal to go for what feels right despite how afraid I may feel. I am working on saying and fighting for what I believe and want whether it might be different than those around me. Whether it might change how others might think about me. I am never going to make everyone happy. Only I truly know what I am thinking or feeling. This is my life. No one else’s.

I might not know until I am out of it, but I am trying to figure out the point of this part of my life. I started the year wondering if this is the time I focus on my writing and the things that bring out my creative side. I’ve been told to write a book. I’ve had a couple of people suggest the idea of me writing a book for them. Aside from feeling like I am seconds away from drowning where I am, I have a life that gives me room to focus on my writing. My biggest struggle is my depression. I have functioning depression but it has been some of the worst it’s been in years. The times it seems containable are the times when I have the hope that I’ll get to leave this place. That I’ll get to start fresh. Have hope that someday I won’t be in a place that has a cloud full of my trauma and abuse around me.

The difference between me hoping for that now and a few years ago is that I am trying to embrace the present. For one, whether it’s soon or not, I only have so much time with those around me. Life changes rapidly. I think about this time last year and I’m a whole different person for better and worse. If I think about it too much I will cry instantly. Things that changed me which I will not be sharing at this time (lol while I am now crying). Despite knowing that version of me and the events that happened shortly after that would change me, I’d do it all again. It’s another reminder that I’m never going to get the time I have back. I’m going to look back at this time and miss parts of it.

I’m going to look back at this time and see how I learned how to be alone with myself. I will see the time I did jury duty and I stood on what I believed even if it created a hung jury. I will be glad I kept choosing me no matter how broken l felt. I will have to be enough for me because people come and go and I have no control over who loves me.

People are going to change (myself included). There’s no avoiding it. That’s a hard thing for me to deal with. More harm is done if you hold on to expectations. Such as me expecting someone to look a certain way in my life. That’s simply impossible. It’s letting go of it all. I’m learning how to let go but not forget it. I don’t want to forget the people I have lost. The parts of me that no longer exist. I want to embrace it but not where it doesn’t let me embrace the good that is to come. The versions of people I’ve yet to meet or love. The versions of me I’ll become.

Ah, that’s the shift. The shift in my brain when I do these kind of posts where I start off crying or wanting to do a Britney Spears move and shave my head or throw my phone against the wall. The shift my readers don’t feel, but the shift I feel inside me. The shift where I might still feel sad but I start to believe everything will be okay again.

Thanks for coming to my late-night thoughts. They will probably happen again.