I am....

Flashback photo memories are a bittersweet gut punch every morning. I’ve considered ignoring them but I think it’s important, for me at least, to see the reminder, feel the feeling(s), and acknowledge both the joy and the grief that the photos bring me.  Pete and I went on some incredible trips. There are a lot of photos. A LOT.  Right now I’m in the midst of the four year anniversary of our one month trip to Europe. We were going to go back next year for our ten year anniversary.  What I’ve struggled with this week is this question: “How do you bail on a life that includes Trdelnik ice cream cones?”  Obviously, it’s not just the cone. It’s the vacations, the ballgames, the family events, the quiet walks on the perfect spring evening when the clouds are so puffy and white they look like they were drawn by Pixar artists? How do you tap out of that life? How do you make that choice? Then you remember that mental illness doesn’t give a shit about an ice cream cone.  Prior even to his fina

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 said “maybe that

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 fix and because