![[Lamb_Slaughter_5_12-2-22.jpg]] {someone with bloody hands holding a sheep’s eyeball} Oh my god, I’m waking up from life’s long slow sleep. I feel like I’ve been in a fog and slowly I’m coming to. To what exactly, I’m not sure. Trusting myself is the hardest part. I don’t always know what I want. My anxieties have been focused on this question: “What if I make the wrong decision?” I hate that I fear rejection. Over the last five years, I’ve lost my chosen family, best friends, former partner, and family members. I’ve fractured relationships now barely hanging on. Listening to podcasts and reading posts about victims of the loneliness epidemic, discovering I am one. I want to puke. Each day I wake up wondering what I should do next. I quit my job last year hoping to make a better income only to discover the journey through self-employment is hard. I don’t like hard. I don’t like hard because everything has been mentally and emotionally hard over the last 8 years. Since my daughter was born 8 years ago, I have earned two master's degrees, worked as a public school teacher, gotten a divorce, come out as queer, and gotten remarried. It’s all too much. On the phone with a friend, she asked me how suicidal I was because I struggled often with suicidal thoughts: “If I get sick with a terminal disease, I might kill myself.” This was before the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve always been hard on myself. I don’t know when to quit. I’m a pendulum swinging hard to the right and then the left. Centered, I am not. Becoming an influencer and establishing a strong social media presence was my goal for a while. I like photography. I tried to include photography in my MFA thesis. I like videography and telling stories. But after divorcing my ex, with whom I was building a tiny house, and immersing myself in school to get a second graduate degree, I lost it. I rarely sit down to string two sentences together for myself anymore. Everything I’ve been working on over the last five years is for other people, apart from my mental health. And this is what I was trying to avoid when I finally decided to date women. Reckoning with my past is no small feat. I’ve been unintentionally stuffing my past under the rug for years. “Why do we have such a bad relationship?” was my mom’s question to me when I told her I was getting a divorce and planning to date women. “You’re being selfish,” the godmother of my children said. I do not feel this. Both of my grandmothers died this year. And for the first time in my life, I wept at someone’s death. I loved my grandmothers. They were the only women in my life I truly felt loved me unconditionally, and I no longer believe in unconditional love. I tattooed a wild goose on my arm, not because I love the movie Fly Away Home or because a goose is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, but because of these lines in Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese”: > You do not have to be good. > > You do not have to walk on your knees > > for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. > > You only have to let the soft animal of your body > > love what it loves. > > Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. > > Meanwhile, the world goes on. I cry reading those lines, unable to contain the freedom I feel in my body. It’s mingled with a sense of longing and shame. I do not understand why I am the way I am. I struggle so deeply with feeling like I disappoint people. My mother told me she was disappointed in me when I came out as a lesbian. She did not congratulate me or celebrate me for any of my graduate degrees. My grandmother was the only member of my family who told me she was proud. I constantly delegitimize my struggles and losses, never wanting (always wanting) to be the center of attention. Never wanting to be the cause of confrontation. Always fighting for what I need. I dread being the next sob story.