The Things I’m Still Learning to Process

I feel like the only time I write lately is after therapy.

writing has always been my escape. It’s how I process things, how I make sense of my thoughts, and how I try to untangle the mess inside my head.

This past weekend, I got some terrible news. And processing things has never been easy for me.

Silence has always felt like a burden. I tend to talk when I probably shouldn’t, speak before I think, and share way more than I probably need to. But when I really need to get my thoughts out, when I am deep inside my own head, the words don't always come as easily as I wish they would.

I have cried more tears this past week than I have all year.

Between work, my own children, and the news I received this past Friday, I have felt completely overwhelmed. There is so much happening around me, and I am trying to keep up with all of it while also trying to figure out what I am feeling.

And right now, I am scared.

My instinct is to protect. It always has been.

When I love someone, I want to protect them from everything that could hurt them. I want to take away their pain. I want to walk through their trials for them, even if it means taking on more pain myself.

I know that might sound stupid, but it’s the truth.

If I could somehow take the hurt away from the people I love, I would. I don't want my children or my family to suffer. I don't want them to experience the kind of pain that leaves you feeling broken or changes the way you see the world.

Sometimes I wonder if that means I have a savior complex. Because that is not what I am trying to be. I don't think I am trying to rescue people because I believe I know better than they do. I just genuinely don't want the people I love to hurt.

Logically, I know pain is part of life. I know we all have to experience hard things. We all have our own trials, and as much as I might want to, I can't take those experiences away from someone else.

I have been through so much shit in my own life that sometimes I think, I can handle one more thing.

But what if that one more thing happens to someone I love?

That's where I am right now.

Trying to process my feelings. Trying not to let my mind run too far ahead. Trying to find extra hours in the day to edit photos, work, write, get to the gym, and somehow still take care of myself while everything else keeps moving.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I am supposed to be working through my past, too.

Going Back to High School

My homework for therapy is to find a journal entry from when I was in high school.

You would think that would be easy. I have journals. I have memories. I have pieces of my life written down, and other pieces that seem permanently imprinted in my brain.

But I can't seem to get past the middle school years.

I have written down a lot of what happened in high school. I know the stories. I remember so much of what I went through. But I haven't really wanted to dive back into it.

I don't want to remember how terrible those years felt.

I don't want to revisit how much Anthony hurt me. And if I am being honest, I am sure I hurt him, too.

We were young. We didn't know what we were doing. We were trying to figure out life and relationships while dealing with things that were far bigger than we were prepared to handle.

There was the teen pregnancy. The months of going through things alone. The people I loved trying to convince me to give my baby up for adoption. The fear, the uncertainty, and the feeling that I had to figure out so much of my life before I was even old enough to understand it.

Maybe that's where I need to start.

I know Anthony always came back. But I also know how much I struggled with my own self-worth during those years.

I hate that I had so little self-esteem. I hate that I was so desperate for love and acceptance that I sometimes felt like a puppy dog, waiting for someone else to decide whether I was worth choosing.

I hate some of the decisions I made. I hate how I treated some of the other boys I dated before and after Anthony. I look back now and wonder why I accepted certain things, why I acted the way I did, and why I didn't value myself enough to make different choices.

But I was a teenager.

I was young, emotional, and trying to navigate relationships, pregnancy, family expectations, and my own complicated life. I didn't have the perspective I have now. I didn't know what I know now.

I can recognize that I made mistakes without pretending those mistakes didn't happen. I can acknowledge that I hurt people without deciding that the girl I was back then was somehow unworthy of love.

I am still learning how to do that.

Because it's so much easier to look back and hate the choices I made than it is to understand the girl who made them.

The Pain and the Blessings

Sometimes I have to remind myself that if my life had gone differently, I wouldn't have the life I have today.

I wouldn't have my eight beautiful children. I wouldn't have met my best friend. I wouldn't have so many of the people and experiences that mean the world to me now.

That doesn't mean everything that happened was okay. It doesn't mean the pain was necessary or that I should be grateful for the things that hurt me.

It just means that even in the middle of all the pain, there have been blessings.

There have been moments of incredible happiness mixed in with the hardest seasons of my life. There has been love alongside heartbreak. There have been tears, regrets, and decisions I wish I could go back and handle differently.

And there has been a whole lot of life in between.

I don't want to rewrite my past as if everything was terrible, just as I don't want to pretend it was all wonderful. Both things can be true. I can be grateful for the life I have and still grieve the things I went through to get here.

I can love the family we built and still wish some parts of our story had been different.

And I can look at my younger self with a little more compassion than I have been giving her.

At least, I hope I can learn to.

Trauma, Love, and Everything In Between

There is something else I have been thinking about.

Anthony and I have been through a lot together. We have experienced pain, difficult seasons, and things that have shaped who we are individually and as a couple.

We have for sure trauma-bonded, and I am not sure how healthy that is.

I know that sharing difficult experiences can create a deep connection between two people. But I also know that a relationship can be complicated when pain, fear, and the struggle to feel secure become part of the story.

I don't want to confuse surviving hard things together with having a healthy relationship. I don't want to assume that because we have stayed together, everything we have done along the way has been good for us.

But I also don't want to discount the love, friendship, and life we have built.

am I finally at a point where I want to understand our story better? Not to blame him for everything or to blame myself for everything, but to look at it honestly.

What was love? What was fear? What was insecurity? What were the choices we made because we didn't know how to do things differently?

And what do we want the rest of our story to look like?

I don't have all those answers.

Right now, I am just trying to sit with the questions.

Maybe that's what this stage of therapy is supposed to be. Not finding all the answers at once, but being willing to ask the questions I have spent years avoiding.

I know I can't protect everyone I love from pain. I know I can't change my past. And I know I can't keep running from the memories that make me uncomfortable if I truly want to understand myself better.

I don't have to figure it all out today.

For now, I am going to keep writing when the words come. I am going to keep showing up to therapy, even when I leave feeling icky or overwhelmed. I am going go keep going~