Dear Internet 9: FINALE
Dear Internet,
Hey y’all. It’s been a while. I needed to take a break from all this. Between writing this and going to therapy each week, my emotions were getting dangerously close to the surface. I was feeling pretty raw. The simplest thing would set me off into a corner. Saw a teddy bear on a shelf at Target the other day holding a little basket, surrounded by other bear knick knacks, and I swiped it off the shelf, broke two ceramic bears, bought two ceramic bears and cried my way home. I told my therapist as much and he told me to set this down for a bit, not to overwhelm myself. All this trauma is just being unearthed for the first time, yeah? I guess there’s a rule in therapy to not let the therapy become the trigger.
I don’t know how to end this. I was hoping that through writing this, I’d learn more about myself and where I am in life right now. Turns out, all this has been is putting down where I’ve been. I don’t know where my life is heading, if it’s heading anywhere, because I haven’t been there yet. I haven’t seen the new me, I haven’t gone through the process to its completion, I haven’t lived in anyone’s shoes but my own, and I have only lived so far. I’ve grown only to where I am now, and I have learned only what I know now. No more, no farther, no longer. But that’s not the end of the story, my story, is it? Where is the final period at the end of my book? I sure as hell haven’t written it yet.
I wanted all this damage, all this trauma to amount to something, for it to not have happened just because the universe sucks or because I’m somehow the progenitor of my own trauma. But you know what? The universe doesn’t suck, it’s just indifferent. And while I’m not literally the progenitor of my own trauma, in a way, I am. Growing up, I was almost exactly like my father was when he was a child: scared, abused, neglected, prone to outbursts and fits of incomprehensible sadness. I became him as a moody teen, and him as a drunk young adult with no direction or goal or drive or anything to give my life an ounce of hope. Like his father before him, and who knows how far back that train of trauma goes.
I’m not going to kill myself. I can’t. I still need to figure out who I’m going to be, and that takes time. All the time I have, probably. I’ll keep on learning all that stupid shit about casting crabs in the meantime, because while my trauma may have cycled down to me for no good goddamn reason, I don’t have to keep churning it. I can end it. Right now. Right here. By not ending it.