Off

I turned off my phone last night.

At first I couldn't even remember how to do it... not that it should be difficult, the darn thing has two buttons... but still. I can't remember the last time I turned it all the way off.

Me too, I thought.

I can't remember the last time when I turned myself all the way off. The last time I was unreachable.

The Universe listened, as she tends to do, with most of the texts that came in over the night cancellations of obligations today. Meetings where I would have had to Listen Deeply or Bare Parts of My Soul that might still be catching their breath from the marathons of the past five or so years, since I've been outrunning the grief and healing that were seeking me.

And I slept – with interruption, mind you – for twelve hours. I woke up and cried a few times, too. Echos of the unanswered cries from 37 years ago, feeling unreasonably far from everyone I love, but with quite a few more tools than I used to have.

(And none of them The Phone).

Monday I went to a meeting of The People In My Shoes, whose stories are different shades of my own. How can it be so simultaneously healing and terrifying to hear that the fears and behaviors I've adopted have shared roots?

That the other women in the room are lost in the same confusion – how did I love someone so much that I'd let them do this to me?

It is tempting to look at What Was Wrong With Him, but it's a fools errand. Because I give zero fucks about what happens to him, and that's the truth. That's his job, or the job of society, to hold him accountable for the terror he has unleashed.

My job is to find the weak spot in me, the deepest root of this weed, the unanswered cries in the night that he responded to. And respond to them.

I am an example of the damage caused by generations of cry-it-out.

By Big Girl Pants.

Take a good, long look.

(I wrote a book about it)

My mother did the best she could, as did her mother. And now I get to Do The Work of understanding the roots, unearthing them, and healing them. Putting myself back to sleep, rather than distracting myself with The Needs of Others.

No one can or will complete you.

(except you).