Pause.

It’s been two and a half years since I wrote a blog post. I’ve had this online diary for years, for more than a decade, and it’s been two and a half years since I’ve bared my soul to the internet. You may have found me on Instagram or TikTok. But this is my medium. So let’s start in the middle.

September 2021: Pain comes when what you believed is suddenly tested. I’m standing at the bar, it’s two in the morning and there is a sharpness to the interaction. In the grand scheme of things, it’s nothing. Or is it something? I’m supposed to be up in 10 hours presenting at a church. But I’m still at the bar, trying to get home. Once home, I cry until 4am, then wake up at 9am to go to church. I make a tiktok in the car about how I forgot to pack a lipstick, despite having 20 in my make up stand. I present. I go home. I explain. An apology is given, and I believe that maybe it won’t happen again.

September 2022: Strain isn’t a moment, but a series of things that have happened. None of them are “bad” enough, but none of them are good either. We’ve paused on outside influences, made friends who are a little healthier, tried an online class together. Nothing is really helping, but nothing is getting worse. Until it’s worse. And the worse is too much to really bare in all of it, so I check out. I hit pause of the emotions. There is too much to do, not enough time to do it in. And so I phone it in for the next 4 months. I just need to get through grad school, and this season, and these events, and after that, we can try again.

January 28th, 2023: It’s minor, until it isn’t. They are little things, until they are not. And suddenly, the carefully currated web of nothing that has been build over the last 18 months comes tumbling down around us. We’re a vase, shattered on the floor, and no amount of glue and gold paint can make the cracks seem like they aren’t there. I replay the last 18 months in my head, “what could I have done different?” What could I have changed?

May 5th, 2023: I’m sitting and explaining and trying to be delicate. I am trying to be kind as I say the words.

October 8th, 2023: Cruelty comes in many forms. It comes in broken promises, shattered dreams, and behaving in ways that aren’t incumbent of promises that were meant to be kept. Was any of it real? Did anything that was said to me mean something? Anything?

Turn the clock back. Maybe not to September of 2021, maybe before that, when the cracks were forming. Maybe to February of 2021. Or sometime in 2020, or 2019. Some where, some how, looking back, maybe there is something I said or did that caused it all to fall apart like this. Maybe it is all my fault. Or maybe it isn’t. But the dates are stamped into my brain. The visceral sharpness of it all comes into focus when I stand in specific spots.

It hasn’t even been a year since it all ended, and a line in the sand was drawn between “before” and “after.” My life is different. It looks different. It feels different. It behaves differently. There are new things filling my time. Book clubs and 5k training and reading and writing and journaling and adventures and movies and random things. But then I pause, and the timeline floods back. Turn the clock back. Was there anything I could have done?