Be yourself, don’t take anyone’s shit, and never let them take you alive.

She stops me in the hall as we leave.

“Are you Vivian’s Mom?”

I’ll admit that,  considering my scholastic history, these words have a tendency to stop me in my tracks, recalling that the only points in which these types of words were asked tended to be ones also including the words “suspension” or “detention”. Vivian also recently managed to break the collarbone of a friend so bad that the radiologists questioned the parents about abuse, so I’m a little on edge at the school.

“All day long!” I crowed, patting Vivian on the head.

At this point the teacher grinned and stopped walking. She stretched a soft hand out to me, and smiled wider.

“I’m her french teacher. And I just have to talk to you about how smart she is! She’s so brilliant-she has an ear for the french! She’s picking it up quickly. Smart as a whip this one.”

I know these things so I smile, feeling that warm glow inside that roughly translates to “holyshitmykidissoawesome!Ihaven’tscrewedherupthatbad!WOO!”.

“You really need to think about immersion in Grade 3.” she tells me “She’s pretty far ahead of a lot of the other kids anyway-it would be good for her. “

She bends at the knee next to Viv. “Can you show your Mom how good you are? Comment ca va? Vivian?”

Viv turns her face into me, suddenly shy. I laugh.

“Vivian, you have an audience, and I totally want to see! What gives.”

“I’m too shy.” she states, blushing.

I smile at the teacher, tell her we’ll spend some extra time with the french english dictionary this week, thank her. We walk outside as I ask Vivian why she’s afraid to show me she’s good at something.

“Cause it embarrasses me.”

I can’t help it. From my mouth flies

“If you were a boy, you would not be ashamed to be good at something. And this world you’re growing up into, you NEED to be proud of what you do. You SHOULD be proud of being good at things. Don’t ever be ashamed of being good at something.”

She tries to shrug my words off.

“Vivian. This matters more than I can explain. Be proud of you.”

She mumbles yes, and runs off to the playground, leaving me holding her bag.

***

I can’t take a compliment. Never could.

Someone says they like my writing, I feel conflicted. Should I acknowledge it? Should I ignore it? Does it mean anything?

Someone tells me I look pretty. I blush and feel perplexed.

Maybe they like my cooking. I downplay it, say it’s easy.

I do not want this for my daughters. I want them to feel pride in themselves. I want them to be proud when their abilities are acknowledged. I want them to never, ever be afraid to say “Yes, I AM good at something.”

But how, in a world where she’s already internalized that pride is something to be ashamed of, that talent should be hidden, do I teach her this? I am slowly learning to be able to say sometimes that yes, I am able and good. I can turn a phrase, occasionally. I can good a mean tagine or puff pastry dinner. I can learn quickly new skills. I am unafraid to try. I will push myself to try new things, past that burning in my belly of worry.

But how do I make sure she knows that a little ego, a little fire in her own belly is a good thing?

***

She runs through the school yard, unfettered by any of my worries. In her world, she’s the fastest runner, well, except for Josh she might tell me. She’s a great reader, but she won’t lord it over any other kid. She yells when I ask about boyfriends, becomes quiet when I ask about girls. She runs through the house in her new black boots, kicking ass and taking names. Her grin is like a new moon rising over the countryside.

I can’t trap her here, but dammit if I don’t want to try.

Cautious, or Crazy?

Sometimes this whole break up thing isn’t so bad. Somedays, I’m meeting new people, enjoying the quiet, working on projects around the house. It’s pretty cool.

Other days, I’m having discussions about how just because you’ve been chatting with someone in another country online for a few months, it doesn’t mean I trust them watching my children if they visit.

No offense, but most of you? I’ve known for years, and I still wouldn’t want you watching my children alone. I don’t necessarily know you, not really. With the exception of a few of you who are near me physically, who I’ve spent actual physical time with and trust (mostly) to not do anything foolish or crazy with my kids, I don’t trust that knowing you online means TRULY knowing you.

Yes the world has changed. Yes, I connect with others online. However-I still firmly believe that you cannot necessarily trust, 100%, someone you have never met in real life. How many times do we hear about people misrepresenting who they are online? Pretending they have dead children for sympathy-stealing photos to create families that aren’t real. How easy is it to be someone or something you aren’t online?

It’s very simple. I tend to be honest-but I’m still not exactly the person I am in reality on this site. If I chat with someone online, even for weeks, they still don’t really know me in terms of my behaviours. I may not disclose all the idiocy that makes up my day to day life. I may leave out the little bits about being on the psych ward. I may omit a number of things because they are not necessarily relevant, and lets me honest, because I don’t want them to force a preconception about me.

End of the day, our online life, the “us” online is NOT absolute or transparent. It’s a facet of us that, while close to who we truly are, is still not the entirety.

So when I’m asked if I’m ok with someone known only online for a matter of months watching my kids, someone who is young, and without children of their own, someone from a completely different continent, and then treated like I’m not “with it” cause I don’t trust my children around a stranger-I become more than a little angry.

This is not about me. This is about my children. This is about a reasonable expectation of their safety. It’s about making a judgment about safety. Could we use the break money wise? YES. I’m not looking forward to a summer of no breaks and Mr. Noodle at this rate. Do I feel comfortable with signing off, at this point, on a stranger watching my kids?

No. I don’t.

The point I can’t seem to make clear, and maybe I am in the wrong, is that online relationships are NOT 100% real. They are friendships sure, and I may feel connections to some people, but they aren’t the same as knowing someone who lives down the street from you, whose house you’ve been in, who you’ve interacted with in everyday situations.  I do not trust most people in normal life, not with my children. So trusting people who I cannot always validate in reality? Scares the ever loving shit out of me.

I was hurt by the real people in my life. I go to many lengths to ensure my children are safe, and this? Feels like I’m holding a door open to any possible scenario happening.

So the question is-am I weird to be so distrustful of online relationships? Do any of you feel that online relationships are just as, if not more so, trustworthy than “reality” relationships? While I know you cannot really know anyone if they want to hide things, I just strongly believe that it’s a LOT easier to do online, and much simpler to protect your motives behind so much technology.

21 Years

I’m not there but I can trace the streets with my fingers. Technology gives me tentacles, allows me to walk the streets of my home town yet again, stare at the front door I open and closed so many times, the curb I drove my brother’s bike off one dewy spring morning, into the side of a passing car. The steps I sat with friends on fiery summer nights, or with my mother on cooler fall afternoons.

The shutters are falling. The siding is grimy and stained. If houses are metaphors, this one matches my life. Full of memory, dingy at the sides, but still standing.

***

She’s there.

In my mind, in my frosty memory, it’s April 1989 again, and she’s laying in the front room, her blue room, on the hospital bed my parents procured from somewhere, her body wasted and yet bloated. She had come home the week before, her doctors forcing her hand, blunt with words “We can’t help you. You are dying. Give up.”

It was not in my mother’s nature to give up on anything. And so her last wish was not denied, to die at home, to spend her last days in the home she built with her lover, her husband, the one she brought her children home to, my first home. Her beautiful sitting room, strewn with the chaos of death-the drugs, the gauze, the tiny cans of near food in vanilla. The pale sky of carpet she laboured over choosing became compressed and dirtier by feet, vomit, life.

I watched her final days there, much as her sister and my father tried to shield me. I saw my mother naked for the first and only time there, flailing and seizing on her bed as her, the woman I knew, finally left me. Some of me expired with her, sailing towards a sky, cloudy.  A crack in a lifetime, the line in the sand of before and after.

I stare at the house I grew up in. The house she died in. The house I ran away from, feet pounding on distance and action-had I the ability to sprout wings I would have, and flown straight into the sun. Even my dreams rarely brought the solace of her, and slowly I have forgotten her voice, her touch, what it meant to be her, to be my mother.

But her ghost still echoes, across these years. Sunlight around her like a halo, possesses my memory. Her distant smile, haunted somehow, wistful.  The heft of her, the sense of solidity, security, like a vault I could land in. Years I never got to know, stories she never told me-all hover like fireflies over a night field in that house, beautiful and untouchable.

It’s been 21 years. I am not a small girl any longer, rigid in my strength, weak behind those doors. I have been alive for longer than she was with me, only pieces of her left to remind me, whisper gently that I have a mother, that she loves me, and she misses me more dearly than I can imagine.

I love her still, and that house, and that yard, all the places our hands and feet touched, even silent on that burgundy couch lazy Saturdays, watching movies as the rain poured. She’s in that house, her breath trapped in the corners, behind the blue wallpaper, inside the steel stairs.

And she’s in me, forever.

She’s home.

Mornings

I want to break your heart.

I reach out to grasp the golden arc of sun as it lights on my hair, the glow effusive, effortless. It’s like 4700 tiny fairies are blessing the air with kisses, the evening dappled. I smile gently to myself, hold this light in my eyes and my heart.

But it reminds me of the beauty I sleep through each day. The new buds on a maple, silhouetted against a cornflower sky. The angle of three buildings close together, a honeycomb confection of concrete, brick and glass, it’s angles calling to me each morning, seductive in the dew-lit light. The tired face of 8.5 months pregnant, shirt taut, eyes grim, but oh! the life bursting forth, the change, the absolute drive thru wreck of chaos approaching that she, standing tired against the coffee shop wall, needing to pee again, cannot see!

The simply wrenching beauty of the creature she will soon be.

I want all of it-I want to absorb into me the sweet new wind that blows the dust from the road. I want to inhale the flowery scent of all the fleshy women I pass. I wish I could touch the sandpaper face of the man who smokes one cigarette each morning, coffee in hand, ash pointedly away from his suited small body. I want to tell him my secrets, instead of darting past, pretending oblivion.

If there was a thread, and the street before me carpet, we’d all know our secrets together. Ash into the wind, temper soothed by corners, love bred in shadow.

I could break your heart with the love I feel for strangers, the ache I hold close to my chest each day as the ground crawls greener towards me. I could shatter glass with the singleness of mind I groom as I stare in the mirrors, growing eager and firmer each day.

Maybe I’ll reach out and pull her through to meet you. She’s blinding.

“If I nurture the newness while I have it, perhaps, I won’t lose it — at least not for something less. And if I nurture what I keep, perhaps, I won’t miss what I have lost.”

And just as soon as it was, it isn’t.

A message in my Facebook, the modern Dear John, hey, it’s not you, it’s me letter. The shrivelling of  the small kernel of hope. The sigh of starting, again. The gladness at not opening up as far as my initial reaction.

This is dating in 2010 isn’t it?

(and no, I’m not really that morose about it. I dug the dude, but damn, there’s issues there I’m not able, or frankly willing to work on anyway. Irony is, I was starting to have the “maybe this isn’t cool” thoughts myself, kept to myself, quietly hidden. Gross irony is it ending on what would have been my wedding anniversary.)

So I dust myself off, smile, put on the best boob shirt I can find, and get back out. Nothing ventured, nothing gained after all.

Twelve

I await the shoe.

Historically my life has been earmarked by catastrophe. Heartache, pain, sorrow, incidents. I can track back the abandonment, the fear, the loneliness, the aching terror. I can link it all, daisy chained, without the petals. One leading to the other in a long line of problems.

I have coped. I have been better and I have been worse.

It occurred to me, tonight, that this weekend would have been my 12th wedding anniversary.

And suddenly, I feel broken all over again, and the throb I have felt this week makes sense. This wasn’t supposed to end this way. I wasn’t supposed to mark 12 years terrified about money, about my house and my life and feeding my children.  I’m terrified. If one thing goes wrong, one major thing-the house of cards can collapse. Not a “I can’t go to Blogher or Maui” collapse, a “I can’t pay my mortgage or feed my kids” collapse.

And I question my ability, and ultimately, my ability to stay healthy. Once broken, always broken. And I’m so fucking scared.

This is not the path I envisioned. Yet while it doesn’t feel wrong, it scares the hell out of me. Not because I am alone, not because dating someone new is completely fucking terrifying and how do you figure out if he is right, or if anyone will ever be right after you go it so fucking wrong, but because I can just foresee this constant state of panic over money. Feeling like I had to scrimp and scrape just to get groceries today..was humiliating because of the fear. What if? What if I cannot do this? What if I need new shoes to walk to work because I have to work nights for the summer because I cannot afford daytime childcare, but I can’t afford to even buy new shoes-and my arches have fallen to such an extreme that cheap pieces of shit won’t do, even if I could find them in 11W. What if the toilet leak becomes a structural issue, because I just do not have a spare few hundred?

What if I can’t do this alone? It’s not even a matter of not wanting to-it’s a matter of being terrified that I just plain cannot do it. Even adjusting my job circumstance is a huge issue because I have to pick my kid up from school-too far for her to walk, too close to take the bus, no one I trust to take her home.

I am fucking terrified, of so many things. And I am rarely ever frightened. But mostly I am scared of a future where I am all they have, where there is never a family ever again, just two halves they bind to occasionally. I am scared that I will have to let this house go, and my dream in my lush backyard is lost forever.

I don’t want much. I just want to be happy. But it seems like I find a way to get it all muddled, and ruin it. Everyone else seems to do it. Why can’t I?

The worst part of this weekend is knowing that I am the only one who feels that loss, that grief over something else that died.

I am so incredibly tired of being alone.

Your Kiss? How about The Kissa?

I’ll admit it. I’m a bit of a drool hound for glass sex toys. I mean, look at this! Since companies started pushing them, I’ve wanted a glass dildo. They’re so pretty, and simple and they don’t have that smell.

You know what I’m talking about.

So when the chance came up to review the Kissa, I was totally game, since Eden Fantasy also has such a fantastic selection of glass toys.  The Kissa is a new vibrator from EdenFantasy, and I let out a little “squee!” when they said I could try it out.

The Lowdown:

Oh sweet lord she’s purty.

She’s glass, 6 inches, 4.5 of which are insert-able. Personally, I would have preferred longer, say 8 inches. But then, I’m tall and I have short arms.

The Kissa is very light, at 0.4lbs  your arms aren’t going to fall off or anything using it, but not as tiny as a pocket rocket if you like a little more in your hand. Noise wise-really not too bad. The vibrations aren’t loud enough to rock the bed or anything-like any vibe it can get loud when up against something, but it’s fairly quiet. Instead of the usual screw cap to change the speed, it has a handy little button to cycle through the 3 levels. However, these levels don’t go from lullaby to screaming meanie! like some. I liked this-my clit didn’t burn out in seconds. But if you need something a little stronger to get you up the mountain, The Kissa may not work for you.

This toy is highly textured, so not a personal choice for insertion. However, if you do like a lot going on that way, this is totally for you. Being glass, temperature play is highly recommended, and lube makes a world of difference. And it’s hypo-allergenic, so for anyone who has problems with certain materials-this would be perfect.

It’s easy to clean with soap and water-make sure to pay attention where the cap screws in for fluids. After one use I could foresee a buildup if you aren’t as careful about clean up as some-remember to clean the thread while removing the battery for storage. The nubbies on the tip, while fun, can be a pain to clean if you wait long enough for anything to dry. So perhaps, keep an extra toothbrush handy?

The Kissa comes with a handy pouch-which is great on two fronts. It keeps it from banging around the drawer, AND is convinient if you have kids like mine who root THROUGH the drawer and then ask their father why Mommy has handcuffs.

Yes. This happened. Apparently the pink Brontosaurus is into bondage too.

The Short Version

Would I buy it? Hells yes. At 29.99, it’s a great intro to glass toys, and a pretty great midrange vibrator. So I totally recommend this little lady. (and yes, I’m a girl, she’s pretty. I dig that.)

The Kissa was provided for review by Eden Fantasy, and my lady parts are indebted to them.

It is the face of our own shadow that glowers at us across the Iron Curtain.

I’m running.

My feet seem winged as the ground moves underneath, springy and moist. Except it’s not-the concrete something I pound as I move, my feet solid and strong. I chase a phantom, a mist that prances before me, turns occasionally to meet my eyes and encourage me on.

My lungs do not hurt, nor my knees. The wind purrs through my hair as my body, exultant, sings with each step. I feel each muscle as a part of the whole, a chain of events one on top of the other. My body is a machine, well oiled and proud.

My path leads upside a building, and I pause at the top, unsure I can make it over. That which I chase silently chides me for doubt, and waits patiently for me to find it within myself to heave my feathery body over the top. I stare ahead as he runs inside, the feel my legs leap to life to follow.

My body is nothing more than water in this place.

***

I dream of houses. Not often. But when things change, out comes a home and I become lost in it.

Often it has been abandoned, rickety and dangerous. Holes in the wood floors in empty, musty rooms. Dank tapestries covering walls, stairways which were dark and ominous. Occasionally it would be cluttered and claustrophobic, the detritus of life a trap and a myth, colors that would riot. Sometimes I could wander the place, others, I’d be trapped within rooms. A dilapidated mansion once, the colors muted and watered out, the entire building a sad weeping shell of itself. I became trapped in the basement, next to a festering pool with flashlights which could barely cut through the gloom. Something…hunted me then, in that house, and the exits all led to walls.

But I ran to something different. This house was not underground, nor dank, nor rickety. It was clean. It was above the ground, lit from the inside. Cluttered yes, and full of random pieces of lives-the stacked mess of babyhood in the corned of one floor, the slowly clearing kitchen. Furniture, clear windows which looked out onto a city at night. A house I stood in and whispered “whoa” to.

A clear mind. A new clean home.

My shadow had long since disappeared as I stared around, in awe. It was my place. I belonged there. I was home.

***

Years ago, after a particularly vivid dream where I seemed to be living as a hobbit, I read up on house dreams, and stumbled across Jung. (Hey, I was 12. I did stumble across it.) I was intrigued by the idea that the house dream can be a reflection of our psyche, our self. There was always someone else in those dreams with me, a shadow sometimes, something I would at other times consider myself, or pieces of me, pieces of past and future. The chase dreams started about then, the constant necessity to run, to prevent harm. I would inevitably end up cornered or dead, and could argue with others that dying in a dream does not mean you actually die. I would have been dead many times over.

The house dreams always came when I was becoming. When something was changing, when I began accepting and working with who I was, they would appear, almost like clockwork. Sometimes reassuring that I was on the right track, other times a disturbing reminder that something was terribly, horribly wrong. Our own viewpoint of our minds, of ourself, should never, ever be dank, dark and black, rotted to the core and echoing.

But for so long, it really was.

But then I sat in that dream, after running for miles and feeling I was flying, after feeling my body work itself, staring at this place, this cluttered but new and vibrant. Dark, but changing. Alive. Vividly alive with the pieces of my life.

The times, they are changing.

Piece

We fight.

Even via text, old habits die hard. I say something shitty in the course of making a point, he says something even worse back. I delete the worst of them, knowing we’re angry, we’re deeply hurt and angry with each other, and that for every step forward we make, every cautious stretch of an arm, every moment where we can admit that yes, we fucked this shit up and it sucks, we take one back and suck each other down into a sopping dirty pit of stink and hate.

I’m so tired of it.

He’s the father of my children. I’m the mother of his children. We love them. I know, somehow, we both still love each other. And perhaps that’s why it all hurts so fucking much-because at the core of it, beyond the spiteful things we’ve done, beyond the marriage we stretched beyond all limits in an attempt to be something we weren’t for each other, we know each other in a way no one else will ever know us.

Watching the first love I ever had spiral down into nasty messages on a cell phone burns through me like napalm and stays with me. If we hated each other, it would be easier to just let it all go wouldn’t it? If I could just hate him, this would be less difficult, wouldn’t it?

***

I stare at the side of my bed, the empty side in the morning, and miss it. I miss the constancy of a spouse, a partner. Of course, I miss the idea of it, since for months he was never in bed with me, just two ships passing in earnest. But I miss the sense of someone being there when I get home, the shared years, the comfort of knowing exactly. I don’t much like newness-I prefer the solid and familar, and I find myself missing that most of all. The sense of belonging, the safety in arms that wait for you, which draw you in across the bedroom.

Starting over sounds romantic and fun. Until it isn’t.

I don’t like being alone. It has nothing to do with being able to do so-I am perfectly able. But I hate feeling that I’m missing a limb, that something is empty and hollow. I miss being that complete unit. I miss feeling that I had somewhere to belong.

***

I sit curled up on the couch with my new fella, watching a movie. He leans against me and on me, my hands in his. He pulls them to his lips, and slowly kisses each finger. Somewhere inside, I can feel something broken start to mend. It scares me so, this feeling, the idea, the possibility of loving someone, of letting someone else in. We speak of our dead parents as we lie in bed, warmed by each other. It doesn’t hurt as it once did, and I start to feel that maybe this time, I can actually let go into it, become the other half I never really was before. Become the woman I’ve hidden from.

It all makes me want to cry, this new life, the scattered pieces of the old one.

She might drive me batty

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Originally uploaded by thordora

But how could you not love a creature who’s giggles sound like love bubbles?

Every obnoxious act is a cry for help.

It’s a war.

I need help.  NOW!  a terrible thundering hand slashes the water in the tub.

Not until you say please Ros. There’s a nice way to ask. Find it

We’ve hit the impasse for the last 10 minutes. Her voice becomes more shrill with each shriek, her face more contorted, her ability to lasso what she’s feeling less. Her black eyes blaze at me through the doorway as I attempt, calmly, to do what all the books say and model a quiet, reasonable tone.

Apparently, these books have yet to meet Ros.

As it affects her mother, the reasonable tone just serves to infuriate Rosalyn more. I’d like to say I can’t relate, and that I don’t turn to stifle a snicker. She’s so my daughter, even in her anger and frustration. But she’s prone to grunts and slaps when angered beyond what she can control, throwing, stomping, heaving bosoms and spit. She’s been like this since birth, a child of two gears, awesome, and totally fucking pissed off. She doesn’t seem to recognize grey. It’s not in her nature to.

Say please Ros.

I NEED HELP!

Please. Say Please.

NO!NONONO! HELP ME!

Heh. Fat chance kiddo.

I find myself staring into the backyard, the sand recently churned up by my children, released into the wild after the frozen months, the blessing of a beautiful weekend evident. Her voice turns into the trill of a storm, in the background, there, but not. I can hear her moving from frustration to no control, feel her stability crumble as simply as the corners where the pool once sat. Why am I fighting, at 8pm on a Sunday night after a weekend spent playing and walking and meeting people? What am I trying to win-against her, against me? Who is truly served?

I return to the doorway, leaning. Her face is red, and fallen, her eyes helpless and nearly vacant. She is worn, and blank.

Come on honey bear. Let’s get out of the tub shall we?

She fights me, even on this, her will sated, her anger still sore. I wrap her in one towel, ignore the screams as I toss it in the laundry, and grab the fluffy pale blue one instead, fresh from the laundry, and sweet.

I’m cold Mummy.

Come here bubbie. I’ll keep you warm.

Memory Keeper

Memory is a box we bury in time.

My past life blurs past me in moments, as we sit casually talking over Easter dinner, the pressure off,  footsteps after years of running away from each other. We talk of new lovers, and I can’t help but flash back, 12 years of life lived, 12 years of hands and fingers and lips.

The first time he ever touched me still burns in my memory. The first time as his wife, in the morning sunlight of another April.

When our children began. In laughter, in love, in hate. The burning need of newness, the tempered flame of time together.

I see this all, staggered behind him as he talks of a new lover. As I talk of mine, sweetly, both of us. I feel a twinge for the one thing we could do well, the only thing it seems sometimes, the thing I will never touch again. I know him, I know his skin and the shape of his shoulders without looking, without explanation. He’s the old blanket that warms.

It’s hard to stare at one’s past across dinner, and not miss it. Sometimes I do, like then, when it wasn’t hard to talk, but then, I realize it’s only easy because we’re not trying to be something we aren’t. Maybe we should have been only friends 12 years ago, 5 years ago. Maybe we should have realized sooner that sex, that lust does not make a life.

Maybe I should have packed the memory box sooner, and cast it away into the air then. Blessed, but forgiven.

It’s like some days, my brain is flickering through my life,  flipping it’s pages so I can close the book and move on. It barely hurts anymore, except on the days when it burns through me, what’s happened, the betrayal and the sliver of hate we held for each other. I look at my daughter’s then, born of love, ultimately flowered from the love we once had for each other, and I realize it was worth it. That 12 years weren’t all bad, and it’s fine, it’s right to smile at the good years too.

The box can hold so much. But it’s time to let it lie.

It’s good to have goals…

DSCF5360

Originally uploaded by thordora

Scared and Crazy

I’m spoiled. We go to a nice restaurant, the first one a man has ever taken me to without my asking, simple, but yummy. He tells me how nice I look, how he likes my hair, even as I’m snarfing mucus and making it clear without saying that se is the last thing on my mind. He tells me illness does wonders for my completion.

He puts a goofy, silly grin on my face. My heart, literally, feels like dancing, and I struggle to remember when I was ever this happy or simply content. He uses the we word while we talk about my backyard and plans for the summer.

So why am I so afraid to tell him all of my truth?

***

He’s driving me home while describing someone in one of his classes. She’s crazy-”she talks about how she tried to kill herself, twice, how she’s been on the psych ward-and she’s not embarressed! Not one bit!”

I mutter something about how it’s just an illness, and nothing to be ashamed of. I find myself tongue tied, scared. I say nothing about how I could be her, and her I. I think about how lonely it was on the ward, so isolating to be *just* sane enough to know how crazy I wasn’t. How scared I was then, how fucking awful it was to sit on a gurney, wondering if I had indeed done myself in.

I think about how I wonder how much a shitty relationship made me crazy, now that I’m med free over 3 months, and feeling fine.

I wonder if it matters. I wonder if I need to tell him-I feel that I should, if we keep seeing each other much longer. I feel like it’s a truth I need to share. I feel like I’m lying by not just sitting down and having the discussion.

But how do I? “Dear person I really dig-hey! I used to be crazy and tried to kill myself and stuff but it’s ok! I’m all better now!”

yeah, no. Somehow, no.

I know that likely what’s at play is the bias society has against mental illness, the stigma I’ve spent time arguing and fighting against-as I said in the car the other night-it’s no different than having cancer-no one would fault the girl for talking about that. I know that what’s said isn’t even meant maliciously.

But goddamn, I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t say it hurt like hell to hear him say what he said the other night. Because I know the people on that ward are no different than anyone else. They’re just sick. Or sicker.

I know I should level with him and just let it out. But I’m terrified. I became so tired of being looked at like I was defective before. And now, having someone look at me and just see goofy, geeky, bacon loving me-I’m frightened that this could change all that. And I don’t want to run that risk.

I’m scared of my truth this time.