Over the last 3 months, I’ve had a dizzying array of personal and professional realizations. I’ve had to revisit and revise still more memories in light of these revelations and I do not like it. Not even a little bit.

Not that the realizations themselves have been bad, quite the contrary, but the work to work through all of them and to look back at my life and see how I missed these things for so long and pushed feelings aside… well, it’s a bit overwhelming.

To complicate everything is that I feel ill equipped to even put several of them into words.

This is a problem because I’m a writer. Usually words work pretty well for me when I’m writing them down. Speaking them is a different matter, but writing has generally been reliable for me in the past.

Last night, though, a dear friend pointed out to me something that I told her over and over and over again as she was getting out of an abusive marriage of nearly 2 decades and was frustrated that stuff she needed to work through kept popping up even after a couple years of being divorced.

This friend reminded me, as I reminded her years ago, that it takes time to work through that many years of trauma, abuse, gaslighting, etc.

She pointed out to me that I was also getting out of an abusive relationship, much the way she had, but mine lasted over 3 decades and it was with myself. Yes, I found out I was probably Autistic right before I turned 29, but I didn’t really really accept and deeply look into what that all meant until I was 33 years old.

That was 33 years of me abusing myself. Thirty-three years of feeling as though I was defective and toxic. Thirty-three years of gaslighting myself and second-guessing my intuition. Thirty-three years of various self-harms without knowing why I was doing them. Thirty-three years of self-doubt and self deprecation.

Of course there are still things popping up. I’m 100% fucking sick and tired of these things popping up, but at least it makes sense that they still are.

Everything that’s popped up in the last few months is plenty to keep me busy for a good long while so hopefully nothing else will come up anytime soon. I’m ready to be done with it all.

But I suppose that’s not how life works. Constantly reevaluating and growing and realizing seem to be the way of things and I guess I wouldn’t want to stagnate, if that’s the other option, so this should a good thing in the long run and over all.

I’m still feeling extremely done with it all though.

I may or may not be around much online and on here for a bit while I work through all these things and possibly turn my life upside down in ways that I either never dreamed were possible or in ways that I thought were never going to happen and that I gave up on long ago.

Life is weird. I’m not sure I like it, but the only way to go is forward so here I am even though I have no idea how I even got here.

Finishing this up with my favorite cover of the Talking Heads’ song “Once in a Lifetime” because it feels so very fitting right now: