I am....

This may seem sacrilegious to say but I did not like my husband the day he died. Or the day before. Or maybe even for most of the few weeks ahead of his death. I loved him, yes, but I did not like the version of him that I was living with at all. Not even a little bit.  I was hopeful that after he worked through the grief, and the mania, and the relapses that I could figure out a way back to the comfortable camaraderie we had for much of our marriage but that I also needed to be a realist and understand that I was losing a lot of my own mental health gains in this relationship and needed to protect myself.  This may seem insulting to the dead but when I bemoaned to my therapist that “I did not understand how spouses who actually liked their partners went back to work quickly after their death because I still feel somewhat disembodied by the whole thing” she said “It’s actually often easier for people that are in healthy relationships.”  I sat with that for a minute and sa...

There’s nothing quite like when you find yourself having a full conversation about the day with your dog and truly wonder how long you’ve been talking.  My brain, even prior to the death/cancer/suicide trifecta of 2022, was never been a quiet place to exist. I’ve described the world in there as a place where I’m reading an entire orchestral score, with a stock market ticker tape running across the top, a perpetually refreshing Instagram feed on the side, but I’m riding a unicycle while doing long division and juggling Rubix cubes. On the outside, generally, I appear fairly calm. I have a reputation of being a very aggressive (and creative) problem solver.  Navigating those worlds, internal and external, takes a lot of energy.  I’ve been very open that I see a therapist regularly. However, I did not initially visit her for the chaos in my head or even the sexual assaults I’ve experienced. I went to her because I was having bad dreams about a jury trial and wanted a quick f...