The ocean tides that have made up the last six years of my life came and went, sometimes with a ferocious rage, sometimes with a feeble attempt to crawl towards the shore while drowning.
Facebook memories has a funny way of either showing you the best moments of your life, or crushing you with the lowest point you have ever been at. As I scrolled through mine today, this one showed up:
Six years ago, I had that song on repeat as I emerged from a marriage as broken as it was, looking around lost, letting the withering petals of what remained on the foundational stem flutter to the dirt and die. The following era of my life would become one of soul-searching, drunk nights, single girl shenanigans, a pandemic that isolated me more than I could do so to myself, severe depression, and finally crashing so hard to the rocks peaking from the blue-green waves it left me unsure if I would ever feel steady on my own feet again.
I worked evenings at my school janitor job, and clung to that like a lifeline like it was all I had left. The last piece of an identity I no longer recognized. The night owl lifestyle became my norm. Work until 10:30 p.m., get home at around 11, write until three or four, go to bed, get up and do it all over again. It left little room to socialize or go to any art or dance classes like I thought I might want to, or to do, well, anything that typically happened on weeknights.
Weekends I either spent holed up at home, writing, or out at the bars, drinking and partying the pain of a lost marriage away. Dancing, surrounded by other drunk single ladies, high on vodka (I couldn’t drink rum after my ex-husband and I split up, too many memories attached), weed, and the intoxication of artificial escape.
I was unravelling the life I had wrapped around someone else, and felt like I had nowhere to go. So, I dove into vices. Cigarette smoke in neon lights. Vodka and crans, so many that, as the meme says, by the time Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” played, we were all small town girls living in a lonely world out on that disco-ball-lit dance floor, spinning around until the rainbow colours all blurred together.
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And how that lonely world crept over me in mocking shadows when I’d stumble out of a cab and into my front door, greeted by the silence of my sleeping cats, and the suffocating emptiness of my house, the only sign of life being my excited dog.
Surrounded by weed smoke in the early morning tinge of light, wondering if my life would only ever consist of going out to the bars alone, becoming one of the single older women with whom I partied at the time at the 21 and over bar. I often felt like the youngest member of a real “Sex and the City” cast. Too much vodka. Too many cigarettes. Too many men. A toxic attachment to escape and casual sex. Not enough genuine soul-searching and healing. I only wanted to disappear.
Six years ago, I was crying on my kitchen floor because it seemed my world had crumbled down and would never get better. The landslide took me down. Buried me in my own misery, agony, and self-destruction. Soon, the drinking didn’t help me forget. It only made the pain worse. I wish I could go back to that girl who listened to this song on repeat until she felt numb. Until the tears stopped and she could only stare off into nothing. Blank. At the end of emotions, and on the edge of ending it. I wish I could hold her, there on the kitchen floor, and let her know we were going to be okay. To give her the light at the end of the tunnel she needed to get up off her knees and carry on long before she actually did. I wish I could hold her hand, soothe her the way no one else but the cats and dog did through the dark two years during which I was suicidal and drowning.
It was difficult to write during this time. The book I’d worked on for years, “Edge of Glory,” felt like a broken story I couldn’t complete. I could barely get a poem out of my soul. Was that it? Could I no longer even write? And if I couldn’t write, did I even have a reason to live?
(Image by Yerson Retamal from Pixabay)
I’d be driving home from work some nights and glimpse the lights of a semi-truck. Some intrusive thought in my head whispered that if I were to swerve into that lane, especially on an icy winter road on a -40 C night, it would look like an accident when the semi crushed me to smithereens. I remember the night I nearly did it. My hands shook uncontrollably. No tears. No emotions. Not until flashes of my pets at home hit me, sucking the breath from my chest. The headlights approached. One question hit me.
What would happen to them if I never made it home?
I choked on a sob, and remained in my lane when the semi thundered past me. Silence descended on me in the seconds following. My heart pounded. Darkness swallowed the highway beyond my headlights. My hands clutched the steering wheel until they were white. I turned on “Landslide” once more and left it on repeat for the remainder of the drive.
When I got home, I looked around: the cats, sleeping, until the dog’s ecstatic barks at the door awoke them. None of them aware of what I had almost done. I once more collapsed to my kitchen floor and sobbed for hours. The dog sat with me, his head in my lap, his big brown eyes compassionate and worried. The cats circled me, purring and consoling. My babies. My reason to live, even if I couldn't write again. They needed me. At least someone did.
It would take until New Year’s 2019 for me to begin emerging from that dark road. I quit drinking for a few weeks, and when I started again, I had cut back considerably. I quit smoking cigarettes for good. Once weed had been legalized in Canada in 2018, I continued that within moderation, as it helped more than the prescription anti-depressants had. Enough to ease the anxiety of every day life, to function, to clear my head. To think with clarity for the first time in two years. I journalled, read books about healing from childhood trauma and mental illness, and really explored the depths of myself and why I had gone down a road so ominous and foreboding, it was no wonder it felt like I had no one watching over me: why would anyone, human or angel or spiritual guide, want to travel that one with me?
That summer, I decided on a transformation. I changed my wardrobe, dyed my hair a dark cherry red, and it would remain that shade for a long time. It felt so me. So new, yet familiar. So liberating, yet so grounding. That I could, in fact, change, both outside and within. Big floral patterned maxi dresses, red hair, and a soul still under construction.
That winter, I shelved “Edge of Glory” and gave myself another chance at writing. I switched genres to mystery/crime fiction, and started my “Beyond Dark” series. This was it. The outlet I’d needed. It fed my long-time true crime obsession, and allowed me to explore a main character that had been in my head for many years. It felt as liberating as my self-transformation had. In 2020, I published “Beyond Dark 1: Belladonna.” And, in 2021, I published “Martha Holmes Mysteries 1: The Lost Girls.”
The two series allow me to explore two avenues of my life. “Beyond Dark” enables me to delve into not only my true-crime obsession, but my trauma and the darkness that envelopes one’s soul in the agonizing aftermath. “Martha Holmes Mysteries” is a novella series that is allowing me to explore my feelings and journey from being divorced and desolate, to being single and wild and the soul-searching that accompanies it all.
In 2022, the unthinkable happened to me: after those six years of being single, of dating around, screwing around, hitting rock bottom to climb back up again, a June night came around where I would discover the answer to Martha’s question: is there life after love?
The answer is, yes. Both in being single, and in finding it again. For on that June night, I met the man I would fall in love with that summer. It changed everything I knew about relationships. Someone calm, reassuring, compassionate, funny, and who actually put in the effort to show he cares. It’s taken so long for my nervous system, between the childhood trauma and the marriage in which I was used and cheated on, to become accustomed to the newness of genuine human connection and compassion. In many ways, I still have a long ways to go.
But, God, if I could go back to that version of myself bawling on kitchen floor, wondering how to end things. How to stop the pain with death. To let her know that love comes back around. Do the healing work, dear girl. Cut ties with toxic people, even family members. Become your own person not built around another human being. Discover an authentic self not tied to your trauma and mental illness. Become another genre, as did your writing. Love will come back in a new form. Healthy. Genuine. Compassionate. Gentle. It comes back, and envelopes you in a safe haven that doesn’t have conditions attached.
It comes back, and loves you in all the ways the person before couldn’t or wouldn’t. In all the ways you learn to love yourself, even if you aren’t yet whole or completely healed. Because you don’t need to be either to receive love again, be it platonic or romantic. We deserve it regardless.
That mirror in the sky Stevie Nicks wrote of is merely a reflection of who we are when we look up to see how far we’ve come. It isn’t the complete reflection of who we will become after we survive the landslide.
(Image by Tatjana Posavec from Pixabay)
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