unmowngrass

It's alarming to realise, sometimes, how deeply things degenerate without attention. Habits of the mind become so entrenched, so difficult to change. Even whilst you're in workshops reminding you that it's possible.

Cry, out of agitation, when all your people are all up in your face, no space to breathe, trying to run your life. How they cut you and try to pour themselves into the gap.

Cry again, with desperation, when they take their own space to avoid you. When they stop letting you cut them in return. (No-one's perfect.)

Cry about this, cry about that, cry about the other thing.

It is alarming to wake up one day and see that you've just been really, really miserable for a long, long time.

Things lose their meaning, and the longer the void stretches on, the deeper it gets.

As the colour runs out of your world, eventually even tv gets boring.

When this happened to me recently, I was all out of everything, no inspiration to be found.

Nothing.

Empty.

And in the emptiness, there is only instinct. Instinct gives you only one option:

make the current run the other way. 

Stop consuming; create.

For the first time in a long time, I picked up a musical instrument.

And I'm not very good at playing it yet, and I didn't do it for very long, and nor did I write the tune, but I did play it!

And for ten minutes...



... I was happy. 

Been a long time since I've updated. What's changed?

• I've moved house, I live on my own now. It's...ok.
• There's been some shake up of relationships. Some people taking a step away (mostly family), some taking a step forward. I am starting to get a sense of who my real friends for life are, whom I should be investing in the most. Most notably, Anne-Marie. A distant relation, but also, maybe my closest relation.
• I've been going to a support group. Currently twice a week. I'm having counselling there, and they do workshops to increase self esteem and things like that. The name of the support group is Number 11.
• It's because of them and the aforementioned self esteem workshop that the perhaps biggest change occurred. I've changed my name! I now go by my middle name as my main name. Elizabeth. That was a year ago this weekend. It's not why I did it, but it has definitely separated the people who respect me from those who don't. But maybe more of that on another day.
• Also, in part because of Number 11, I've uncovered the big dream for my life. I want to be a foster carer! I don't know how I'm going to get there, because I currently live in a very small flat that does not have a child's bedroom, but that is where I want to go.
• I've moved churches. Still getting settled in. I've always been a pentecostal at heart, although I went to the baptist church for a long time. And now I'm at a church that is a bit more pentecostal, I think.
• I've been on a date! It was the first one in a long, long time. And that one didn't work out, but I am looking forward to finding someone else who I can maybe be in love with again.
• Did I have a niece last time you heard from me? Well she's 3 now, had her birthday party recently. She was just starting to love me and then there was a pandemic and I didn't see her for over 6 months and then I moved house so even when she was back to going to my Mum's every Thursday, I wasn't there, and now she doesn't really love me anymore. Unfortunately. But I still love her. 💕

That's it, I think, for the time being.