I am trapped in a shame spiral, and I can’t get out. I feel like I’ve walked off a metaphorical cliff into an abyss of unknown depths and there’s monsters screaming at me as I fall through the darkness, never knowing where I will land.

I am ashamed of myself for not being stronger, for not being a good mother, for failing at everything in life. I’m ashamed of this blog, of the horrible things I have confessed, things that are supposed to be kept hidden. I am ashamed of my past, of not even having the dignity of genteel poverty but instead coming from the kind of poverty that involves roaches and caved in ceilings and carpets so filthy your feet stick to them when you walk.
The voices from my past are ringing through my head, drowning out everything I try to think for myself.
You’re too crazy to be around my children
You deserve everything that’s happened to you and more
You ruined my life
The world would be a better place if you weren’t in it
You’ll never amount to anything

These nasty, poisonous memories burrow into my brain like worms in an apple, and before long my own thoughts are betraying me:
Your blog is grotesque
No one is reading it anyway
You abandoned your children for nothing
You are an embarrassment
You’ll never go back to school
You had your chance and you blew it
Your movies will never be made
Give up, stop, quit, there’s no point to trying
I didn’t leave my bed yesterday, or the day before.

It’s not like it was before, when I was in bed but at least I was accomplishing things.
I meant to read a book. I wanted to write a scene in my screenplay and work on a blog post about golems.
But my brain couldn’t focus. The whole day is a blur of shaking and sobbing and overwhelming terror. An entire day, lost to the darkness of self-loathing and a deep, soul-crushing shame that left me wishing the earth would open up and swallow me whole just to end my agony.
No self-harm or suicidal ideations though. I don’t believe Norman anymore when he says my children don’t miss me. They definitely miss me, and they can’t wait to see me again.
I may not be a very good mother, but I’m good enough to know the difference between “Mama left for a while because she wasn’t well” and “Mama left forever because she didn’t love you enough to keep trying.”

Better to have a mother who is an embarrassment than no mother at all. I’m basically a failure as a mother, but I can keep breathing for them.
I write these posts primarily for my children. Obviously, it’ll be years, over a decade for certain, before they are old enough to read them. But I want there to be a record, and account of what happened and why I made the choices I made.
I want to explain to them why I broke, why I left, and why I failed as a mother, as a lawyer, as a writer and as a person.
Hardship is supposed to make you stronger. Everyone knows that.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
Your pain makes you strong
Not me. I held it together for as long as I could. I buried all the suffering and heartache and longing beneath a pile of books and pharmaceuticals and tried to pretend that everything was okay. And for a long time, I fooled a lot of people.
But I never addressed any of the problems. I built a life on an unstable foundation. I invented a new person. I lied about my past. I tried so hard to fake it, every day in every way.
It wasn’t sustainable. And when I fell, the crash was spectacular.

I’m having a hard time getting back up again.
Every choice seems wrong. All paths lead to more misery. My dreams are impossible.
The title of this post is also the title track to a solo album by Rob Thomas. Yeah, I’m back on him again. The man’s words have lived in my brain since I was 13 years old. They play his songs in malls and grocery stores to the point that sometimes it feels like he’s following me around as I go through life.
It’s just pop music; a little post-grunge alternative.
It’s funny how things that seem insignificant can weave themselves in to the tapestry of your soul. How a song can become everything.
All those kids that lost their shit when Kurt Cobain died would get it.
Remember walking when you thought you couldn’t stand/
Remember what it feels like
I first heard those words wandering around that horrible, pretentious neighborhood Norman chose for us to live in. Wandering around the marina looking at all the massive yachts and thinking about how so many people don’t have homes and here are people with giant houses AND giant boats who misappropriate funds and defraud the Native Americans upon whose land they live.

The neighborhood is built on a reservation and the land is leased from the Swinomish Tribe. Something I was wildly in favor of until I learned how badly the residents have been ripping off the Swinomish for the last, oh, thirty years or so. They signed the lease back in the 80’s for dirt cheap rent. And as land and home prices skyrocketed, they refused to increase the land rentals in keeping with the value, even though that provision was written into the contract. They just straight up didn’t pay. Even now they resist every audit of the land value as much as legally possible. And it’s not like we’re talking a lot of money here. The rent on our plot is only about $15 a month. They’re just greedy assholes who have plenty of money but refuse to pay what they owe, regardless.
Gosh, doesn’t that sound familiar?
They’re also destroying the land, in spite of protective covenants which are meant to limit what trees they can cut down and what alterations they can make to the natural landscape. The entire neighborhood has a mindset of “let’s just do whatever we want and if they don’t like it, they can sue.” Such a toxic, entitled place. And my children are growing up there.
I should have paid more attention.
So I’m walking around this disgusting marina, which I knew about in advance but thought only consisted of a couple of dozen slips because my dumb ass agreed to buy a house I had never actually been to solely on the word of my now ex-husband, and I’m thinking about how hopeless everything is and how the rich will always control the world and prey on the rest of us and that is definitely not who I want to be in this life, and I hear those words coming through my earbuds.
It was like being punched in the chest. I spent a lot of my life walking when I thought I couldn’t stand. And eventually, it got the best of me.
Help, I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.
That’s from an ancient commercial for a thing called life alert. A little joke that shows my age. Nonetheless, it is true.

I’ve lost my way. I’m deep in a heavy, overgrown forest. Darkness has fallen and every path leads to more despair. There are monsters everywhere in the gloom.
On top of it all is the crushing guilt over having gotten lost in the first place.
Strong people don’t fall down. Strong people don’t get lost. And people who have faced hardship are meant to be the strongest of all.
I feel worthless; a burden and an embarrassment to everyone I know.
And still, I write.

I know you think that they could never understand/
But you don’t want to be right.
Maybe no one will ever read any of this. Maybe my scripts won’t ever see the back of a camera. Maybe it’s all for nothing.
Or maybe someone out there who is also struggling, who has also gotten lost and fallen down in the deep, dark wood, will stumble across it. Maybe they’ll fell like they have company in the bad place. Maybe it’ll give them the strength to get up and keep moving forward.
And now you only want to make it out alive
I’m not doing well with self-care these days. I’m not eating or sleeping, I rarely shower. The number on the scale is getting scary, but I’m just so tired and food feels like so much work.
So much rejection, from jobs, from people. So little hope.
Still, I write.

Maybe no one will ever read any of it. Maybe I won’t get to pursue my dreams. Maybe all I will ever be is a failed writer stocking shelves in a grocery store. Maybe my children will be as ashamed of me as I am of myself.
But as long as I keep putting pen to paper, as long as I keep telling my story in my secret little corner of the internet, as long as I keep trying to create characters as complex and vivid as I sometimes picture my own soul, I can fool myself into thinking that maybe I have a chance.
As long as I am writing, a bit of moonlight breaks through the trees, and I can almost see a road that leads out of the woods and into a life of freedom and joy.
Maybe the words will be enough to save me.
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Lonely No More
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