Grow Beautiful Things In The Desert of You [Journal]

My stepdad sent me an email the other day, telling me that my mother was very sick (She has been “very sick” ever since I can remember, from mysterious diseases that are conveniently difficult to actually verify) and that they wanted to see me again. That they knew they made mistakes as parents but they always had my own best interests in mind.

There are so many things that I want to say - but I know that none of them will satisfy me or do anything to lessen the pain.
I don’t think I’ve really talked about my mother here, but she isn’t even the point. That, I’ll get to later.

I remember being 19 years old, at the lakeside cabin, and I was wearing a halter dress with flowers and feeling pretty maybe for the first time in my life. I remember jumping and running on the pier and feeling light for a brief second until I turned to meet my mother’s enraged face, because “my dress lifted up too high.” I remember her constantly smoothing my hair and pulling my shirt down and telling me the proper way to act until I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Maybe it was because I was high on endorphins from having a new boyfriend, maybe it was the anti-anxiety medication in my system - but it struck me maybe for the first time just how constrained I was, how much I wasn’t allowed to just exist. I went to her that and told her I wanted to be treated like an adult, like I was a real person.

“Oh, Autumn,” she said. “You’re just tired.”
That’s when I knew I needed to leave. I won’t tell you the worst of it, because what I’ve mentioned isn’t even a fraction of it, but that was the moment I knew I needed to leave.

Enlightenment is a good word - because that’s how it feels, en-LIGHT-enment. Like a flash, like light, illuminating all the surfaces that previously were dark. A lightning strike inside the brain, the blood glowing.

I had my first kiss that night, 4 A.M and shaking from exhaustion and adrenaline on the balcony, I asked my boyfriend to kiss me and when he asked “Where?” I closed my eyes and touched my lips and there were tears running down my face with the weight of 19 years of a life pushing down on my ribcage, sitting so fucking heavy on me I knew I was going to burst.

It’s been nearly eight years since I left, and the memories are in ways worse now because I know how the slightest actions can create devastating ripples through a person’s life. When I was 19, I thought that once I left everything would be better - and in many ways it was - but I can’t just pick up the threads of a ruined childhood and unlearn everything that helped me survive. The disassociation, the nightmares, pushing people away, hiding my true self, hiding my feelings, the confusion, the emptiness, the self-harm, the rage. I wasn’t built wrong, I was built in just the right way the situation I was in required. I built my body to survive and survive it has, through all the years of pushed out pain and tears and nights spent wracked with guilt and fear and a pulsing noise right behind me, like someone is waiting. Waiting to tear my throat out.

I was built to survive, but I wasn’t built to sustain.
To have a home.

I’m nearing an anniversary of sorts. It’s been close to three years since I was forced to pick up the broken pieces of me and try to assemble them into a life worth living, and it’s been nearly a year since I truly focused all the effort inward, when I woke up and exhaled and everything began to have color again. When I truly made it my life goal to stop running away and tearing apart all the things that mattered to me.

I’ve lived in a fog for so long, a shield pushed outward, that I’ve grown thin like paper. The slightest breeze seems to threaten to tear my skin apart.

I used to just delete those emails and sometimes I’d cry - but not really and truly feel the pain wracking its way through my chest. Feel all the years wasted living inside of its spell, all of those long nights recreating a drama that I didn’t even understand, steering a ship toward the Odyssey of pain. I feel it all now, it’s complexities, it’s true horror.
But the colors are returning as well.

It’s not an easy thing to be human. I have to feel all the things that I’ve denied myself to feel for so long. I have to continuously push my head upward only to be hit over and over again, because it’s the only way to learn - to be in the center of things. I have to unwind all the dirty things that make me feel ashamed of myself, and force myself to not look away any longer. To no longer be a witness to my own life.

There are beautiful things here. Dangerous animals that want to make my heart bleed, but also sunlight, and puppies, and the texture of emotions that aren’t just flavorless -pain-. And if I keep going the way that I have, I will reach my goal. The thing that I’ve always wanted, from the very beginning.

To be my own human being. To be free.

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