Healing is a full-time job

And now, I am healing the wounds you inflicted. Learning a new self, a new identity without you. Learning to live a new life that does not include you. Hoping and begging the universe to let me find peace and joy in this new world.

It has been almost five months since you broke the news to me, and I am ready to expose myself to the greater world. Ready to find new community, offer support through sharing the intimacies of my struggles, and take support from the reader.

My healing has been a full-time job. I marvel at other people's abilities to continue with a full-time job or parenting at a time like this. I have been consumed by my pain and suffering, and struggling to move beyond that and grow. I am told that if I had a job or children it would be a welcome distraction, but I do not have that luxury. That is something else you robbed me of. More on that later.

I am consumed with letting go and healing. Consumed with not giving in to the depression that wants me to give up. The battle is exhausting. Just surviving another day in this foreign existence that I was unwillingly thrust into is debilitating in what it takes from me. Grief, crying, and healing are all exhausting entities. I sleep sometimes for 11 or 12 hours a night, and other nights, I barely sleep, my thoughts and obsessions keeping rest at bay.

There is so much that goes into healing. Meditation, journaling, walking, taking baths, talking with friends, writing every day, thought stopping and a million other techniques I have had to learn, just to survive. It is my intent to share that healing process with you, not just bemoan what has happened, although there will certainly be some of that too.

How could there not? It is because you cheated that I have had to find, learn and integrate these many new practises into my day that literally take a few hours, just in the name of surviving and healing. In the hopes that one day I will move past surviving, through the healing, and emerge into thriving. Find myself a better person for the pain and struggles. A stronger person, more humbled and more human, more understanding of the human condition.  That is my end goal. To not just say I survived this event, but that I found a version of myself that I love even more than the one you killed off. That my joys and triumphs in life will be even greater than they were with you by my side. That the resilience I develop with the passing of time will make inoculate me against similar future damages. Will this happen? I don't know. My friends encourage me and tell me it will, but they could be selling me swampland in Florida. I fear they will tell me anything to get me through another day. That they are blowing sunshine up my ass to stop me from killing myself. Not that I can. I have a responsibility to my son that I take great pride in. I made a commitment when I had him almost 23 years ago, and it is not a commitment I take lightly. No matter how I suffer, I will never abandon him. I might not have a lot to give him right now, but I will not take from him either. He is a constant, a source of strength, a reason to make it through today and try again tomorrow.