January 29, 2023 by Amy
An Update. And a Story.
Mostly because the outpouring of support from friends and family after my last post was overwhelming and lovely, so I want to be sure y’all know that I’m doing better. (And give you all credit, because all of your support has helped me in so many ways.)
Therapy has been going really well, and the CPAP has helped immeasurably. Overall, I’m feeling much, much better. I created a list of intentions for 2023 and have already started ticking them off, and each week I create my lists of tasks. I am plowing through those left and right, and it feels awesome to check things off. Productivity is through the roof and I’ve had more energy than I’ve had in years.
Then my therapist gave me homework this week: reflect on what has worked for me since starting our sessions, so I don’t lose it or forget it the next time I find myself over the edge of the cliff. “What has taken place? What has been working?” she asked. Cool. I wrote down my assignment (another line on the task list!) and we wrapped up the session.
I’ve given it a ton of thought since then. I wonder if the making of the lists and the checking off of the tasks is just my new way of pushing the crap under the rug and behind the potted plant. Am I keeping myself so busy that I don’t have to sit with my feelings? I also wonder if getting more sleep has given me the rest I need to have energy and the way I’m using that energy is to hide in productivity.
Is the productivity boost a result of the emotional work I’ve been doing, or the screen behind which I hide?
Well, this is gonna fester for a while.
Yes, I have been walking or practicing yoga daily, since my therapist instructed me to. That, of course, helps. Movement always helps. It can be hard to get myself up and out the door or on the mat, but I have never, ever regretted doing it, which is what I tell myself when I’m trying to get out the door or on the mat.
Yes, I’m doing a better job of explaining what I need in terms of support to my little family. And, in turn, therapy is helping me understand them better than ever. We’ve always been highly connected and communicative, but it’s slightly different now, in a good way, at least from my side.
Yes, I find that knowing I have another appointment set up (or several, rather) with my therapist is comforting. I have a place to go with my shit, someone objective who can help me sift and sort and make sense.
Yes, it helps to admit (to myself) that I struggle and need help. It’s like a burden has been lifted. I don’t have to do this alone. I don’t have to buck up and grin and bear it and muscle through. And it also helps to know that plenty of you have also struggled. Like the “I’ve lost a parent” club, it’s one of the world’s shittier clubs to be a member of, but there is solace in shared grief, comfort in community.
Is it really that simple? Sleeping, walking, and talking? If so, I feel a little sheepish that I couldn’t figure this out on my own. Or realize sooner that I needed help figuring it out.
A confession: it is hard for me to write as confessionally as I used to, and it’s something I’m working on in therapy. Correction: it is hard for me to write and share as confessionally as I used to. I have written whole books about my feelings, but they stay comfortably in my files and aren’t posted here.
***
Long ago, when I first started blogging, it was with the intent to share photos and stories about my child, mainly to avoid clogging up the family’s inbox. I figured I’d throw some crap out onto the internet and if people wanted to read it, fine, and if not, also fine. It was there when and if they were ready. With years of writing, it turned pretty introspective and became closer to a diary of my entire life, not just a chronicle of my child’s cute stories (although those were still liberally sprinkled in). My old blog wasn’t under my name, and perhaps that granted me some sense of pseudo-anonymity, freedom to maybe share more than I would otherwise. I wasn’t trying to hide, but it’s not like I had a billboard in the city advertising my site. My audience was almost entirely friends and family and I was perfectly fine with that.
Then I went through a series of fairly traumatizing experiences at work. I mean, it was your standard good old-fashioned bullying going on, yes, but I had never experienced this in a professional setting where a group of grown-ass men trained their sights on a colleague and unloaded for bear in a variety of grotesque ways. It’s one of those situations where only after you get out of it, and decently far away from it, can you look back and recognize the severity of what actually happened. It was bad, friends. Like, textbook “crappy videos HR makes you watch each year so you don’t do something that makes your coworker sue the organization” bad. (I could make an entire library of videos based on the various shitty things that happened to me at this one place.)
One day, a friendly colleague came to my office.
“Amy, do you have a blog?”
“What? Oh, yeah, I do, but it’s pretty private. My last name isn’t on it and it’s pretty much just for friends and family. Why?”
“They found it.”
My tormentors, I suppose because they had nothing better to do in their meager little lives, had scoured the internet looking for…I don’t know…dirt? Something? (One had already discovered that a hundred years ago I had dyed a small section of my bangs purple—scandalous!—and confronted me about it, and I was so shocked in the moment that I forgot to point out that stalking a woman online is much more egregious than purple hair.) Anyway, my friend, with tears in her eyes, proceeded to explain that not only had they found it, they were having a great time making fun of it (i.e. me). I’m not sure how it’s possible for the human body to simultaneously sweat and run ice cold but reader, mine did.
It’s not at all like I had anything to hide. (I still don’t…every one of those posts, every last one, now resides here on my own site, under my full name.) It was more of the idea of someone rooting around looking for something, like an uninvited guest snooping through your medicine cabinet and poking around in your underwear drawer. (Invited guests, to be clear, have full refrigerator rights and are welcome to help themselves to anything they might need.)
I logged into my blog from work and figured out how to take the entire thing private, which I immediately did (and which also felt gross in a thousand different ways). I called M at work and asked him to look for it, just to ensure that it was gone. And then I sat there and cried, for probably the twentieth time, over how terrible human beings can be to each other. Or how terrible these particular garbage human beings could be to someone they hadn’t even bothered to get to know. (I still, after years of thinking about it, don’t know what I did to draw their mediocre-white-guy rage.)
I read through my last post over and over, parsing every word and trying to figure out what they had laughed at. It was a photo of M that I had taken from the patio, when he was sitting at the island still hard at work even though it was hours past the end of the business day. It was a love letter of sorts, appreciation for how hard he works to support us. I couldn’t imagine what was funny about that, except for maybe those men at my work were sad that their wives never said thank you. (Yes, they were all married, and some had children. I have often wondered what they would think if their wives and children were harassed at their jobs as they had abused me.)
Ever since then, I have found it hard to be as completely open in my writing and posting as I once was. I have written pages and pages of things that I can’t bring myself to share, because what if someone (or rather, what if one of those assholes) reads it and laughs again? I never want to feel that way again. Every time I think I’m over it, I get a nagging little voice in my head, and I pull back from posting.
So this has been fun to tackle and since my therapist is brilliant I feel as though I am making great strides in overcoming this damage, which at this point is self-inflicted since, like, only one of those fuckwads even still works at that place and I never see any of them anymore. (Although, wait, I take that back. There is one guy who made amends before he left. He was the only one to step forward, apologize, and I swear to God, ask for mercy. I accepted his apology, of course, because that’s how I roll, and although I am not sure it’s my job to grant mercy since I’m not near holy enough to think I am capable of that sort of power, I could at least be the colleague that he needed and that I had tried to be from the very first. He left the organization a year before I did, and reached out with kind words when I departed, and I ran into him a few months ago at Starbucks and was very happy to see him and quickly catch up. But yeah, that’s only one guy. The rest of them can still go fuck themselves.)
I won’t get into how my therapist got me to pull my head out of my own rear end to move past this (although I am happy to share her contact information should any of you need help), but one of the ways that helps is to simply start posting again. Write and figure things out and then share it.
So, here I am. Sharing it. Sharing me. (This feels a little bit like stepping in front of a firing squad and saying, “Here I am! Fire away!” and also a little bit like flipping the bird to several guys who, added up, don’t even equal a tiny fraction of a man.)
Editor’s Note: The header image is of a beautiful sunrise one morning this past week. It was spectacular, but the best part was that my sister was simultaneously photographing it from her own home and she texted me her image. I love these little cosmic connections.
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