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I didn’t realize I was a splitter.

When I first found out that I have borderline personality disorder, I was confused by the part about “splitting” until I realized it was the same thing I’d been experiencing as all-or-nothing” thinking. A therapist told me about those types of thoughts 28 years ago after I had postpartum depression with my first child.

At first, I thought splitting was one of the symptoms of BPD that I didn’t have, but something happened yesterday that changed everything.

I was texting with a friend I’ve known since right after high school, and she made a few rude comments to me during the conversation. She is usually very supportive and loving, so it caught me off guard. I didn’t point it out to her, but I stewed about it long after the texts were over.

God, that was so rude, I thought angrily. I should just block her and never reach out to her again if that’s the way she feels. It wasn’t the first time I’d done it to somebody who pissed me off, and I normally never changed my mind. Better to cut them off before they cut me off.

It was a classic case of splitting made worse by abandonment issues, only this time I caught it in the act.

I had been reading earlier in the day about balancing, which is basically taking your extreme feelings about somebody or something and bringing them down to a reasonable level. For instance, instead of things being “terrible” or “horrible,” refer to them as “unfortunate” or “too bad.” That helps balance your feelings about it more gently.

So I “balanced” my friend who had been so rude. Yes, what she wrote did hurt me, but it wasn’t the end of the world. It didn’t change the fact that she sat on my couch with me and held my hand through postpartum depression. She was still the one who stayed awake all night at my house after my divorce so I wouldn’t wake up and do anything rash. She wasn’t a horrible person. She just said unfortunate things, but that was no reason to block her and cut her off.

Another example that happened recently involved my birthday. My two sons sent me a beautiful stained glass hanging that looks awesome in my kitchen when the light shines through. I can tell they really took their time picking it out, and I am so grateful.

It reminded me of being little. My mother used to weld stained glass and make all kinds of hangings in all our windows. I remember all the sparkly and colorful stained glass pieces all around our house and how hard my mom worked to put them together. It’s a nice memory.

Contrast that with my previous belief that all my mom ever did was abuse and manipulate me. When she was alive, we were mostly estranged and hardly talked at all. I thought I could never forgive her for all the mean things she’d done, even after she passed.

However, she actually saved my son’s life right after he was born. She came to me saying that my baby seemed listless and warm and, in the ER, they said he had kidney reflux that led to an infection that could have killed him. We had gotten there just in time.

Therefore, two things can be true. She was not the best mom, but I have good memories of her, too, like when she let me skip school to go see Cinderella at the movies. There’s no reason I have to hate her anymore, if there ever was. Carrying around all that resentment was only keeping me sick.

I’m learning that nobody is all good or all bad, and that bodes well for my relationships in the future. Like most people with BPD, I have an intense fear of abandonment, but I’m beginning to realize that a harsh word here or there doesn’t mean I have to completely cut that person off. Of course, there are certain people who need to go if they are terminally toxic, but not somebody who is kind but sometimes makes mistakes.

I’m going to move forward with the “two things can be true” concept to see if I can improve the relationships I already have and maybe start some new relationships so I’m not as isolated all the time. It’s becoming another tool in my arsenal to minimize my BPD. I just wanted to share it here to see if it might help somebody else, too.

The day my boys had to leave me

I held it together until they were gone

And then, right there in my living room

I died

They were my sunshine

They were my life’s purpose

So many things to teach them

But I didn’t get the chance

I wanted them to know

That life doesn’t always have to be hard

And they don’t always have to be a “tough guy”

And to be kind and compassionate to everyone they meet

I lived my whole life afterwards

Desperately searching for information

“Did they have a quiz at school?

Any boo-boos, scrapes or cuts?”

“What do they say they dreamed about?

What do they want to be when they’re men?

What fun things have they been doing?”

I asked but was met with silence

I imagined what it would have felt like

To teach them how to ride a bike

My hand on their shirts as they pump their little legs

I let go… and they ride away from me

Bedtime was the hardest to think about

Every night, I would ask them

“What was your favorite thing today?”

It was always the best way to get them talking

I didn’t know my boys’ favorite things anymore

I wasn’t there to hear them

Instead, I was screaming into the void

Of the two kid-shaped holes inside my heart

They are older now and visit me

They love me, and they have forgiven me

Their presence fills me with the highest joy

And yet…

They’re too old now for bubbles and playgrounds

Too big to hold on my lap

And it would seem silly now

To ask them to “give me some sugar” and get a sweet cheek kiss

I’m so unbelievably proud, but I still cry even now

For all the things I had to miss

I know I have to learn to accept their absence

My hand still holding their shirts as they ride bikes…

but this time I can’t seem to let go

This week, I confirmed something that I had already suspected. I took a screening for borderline personality disorder (BPD), and my score was at the cutoff between “high” and “very high.” My therapist said the test was a good indicator that I, indeed, have BPD, although she wants to send me to a psychologist for more testing and a formal diagnosis.

All week long, it feels like my brain has been flipping through every memory I’ve ever had, except this time through the lens of BPD. There were times when I felt so lost and alone, not understanding why I couldn’t manage my life when everyone else seemed to do it just fine. BPD can cause intense emotional mood swings, so when I felt down, it felt like being buried alive.

My mother’s borderline personality disorder went undiagnosed for her whole life. She lived in complete chaos and sometimes was cruel to me growing up. The family seemed to know something was really wrong with her, but a doctor only diagnosed her with ADHD, and she never got the help she needed.

Sadly, that chaos was passed down to me, and I spent years doing really dangerous things that honestly should have gotten me killed. I attempted suicide two times, one that was mostly a cry for attention, and one that was dead serious. I’ve been hospitalized about four or five times for a day here or there. I got good at pretending to be well so I could get out earlier.

My daughter also has to be screened because there is a genetic component. I hope she doesn’t have it because I know it can make life really hard and painful, but the odds are not on her side.

I actually am the mother of three children, two boys and a girl. All are grown up now and living their best lives. When they were just little kids, first the two boys and then the girl were taken away from me. Now, factoring in the BPD, I understand why. I could barely even take care of myself, and they were better off living elsewhere.

These decisions blasted a hole in my heart so big that it could never be filled. I thought about my children every day. I loved all three of them more than my own life, and I did get to see them now and then, but my life was not stable enough to keep them for any length of time. I would take them to lunch and then sob hysterically all the way home.

Every time I thought about taking my own life (which was often back then), I’d think of the kids and how much it would hurt them after they had already been through so much, and I wouldn’t do it. They don’t know how many times they saved my life, but I’m glad they did because now we have all been close since they became adults.

A mother without her children is likely the saddest situation I can think of. When they were born, I thought I’d finally found my purpose in life. I spent hours holding them, playing with them and showing them everything in their new world. Then, after my husband of 16 years and I got divorced, I completely fell apart.

This led to years of spiraling. I tried to be stable enough to hold down a job and pay bills, but I failed every single time. I didn’t understand why everything seemed so easy for other people, but I couldn’t handle it. Now that I understand the full weight of untreated BPD, it makes perfect sense.

I’ve been trying to accept this diagnosis because there’s nothing I can do to get rid of it. I go to therapy and take my meds and use my tools, but sometimes nothing works, and I’m crying in the shower over all the bad things that happened but, most importantly, what didn’t happen and the memories I lost.

I’ve never been hugely into religion. I came to God by learning about Him on my own behind my atheist parents’ back. However, I have to admit that I’m struggling not to be angry at Him. I wish I could talk to Him because I have a question that’s been spinning around in my head and won’t go away.

What kind of God would give a woman children and make her incapable of taking care of them?

I feel like I’ve spent half my life running around with a full heart and empty arms. When people would say, “What kind of mother would give away her children?”I never had a good answer for them, but as much as it hurt, I knew it was the right thing to do.

If somebody asked me the same question today, I would tell them it was mother’s intuition. Deep down, even back then I knew there was something really wrong with me mentally, and I let the kids go so they wouldn’t have to be affected by it and could grow up with happy lives, which they did, even if it was going to break my heart in the process.

I just don’t understand a God who would make me so mentally ill that I couldn’t live alone and then hand me three beautiful children only to have them ripped away and leave me annihilated for the rest of their childhoods. I missed every birthday and every holiday with them. Sometimes, I got to take them out to lunch, but it’s really hard to get to know your kids over a one-hour meal.

They all live in different states now, but they come to visit me and my current husband these days for a week or more each time. Every time they come, they bring me absolute joy and heal me inside just a little bit more.

I had so many plans for them growing up. I wanted them to have play dates and learn to be kind and compassionate. I wanted to take them places for fun vacations or to the beach and watch them swim like fishes. I wanted to read books with them and show them movies that I loved as a kid to see their eyes light up. I wanted to hold them, hold them, hold them until they got “too big” for it.

I don’t think I’ll really ever get an answer to my question. Maybe these feelings of resentment will cut less deep in time. My children are happy, healthy and safe, so maybe I should just be grateful for that. Because as much as I want a do-over, it isn’t going to happen. Even finally knowing that I have BPD can’t change that.

Six years ago, I self-published a book with a subtitle of “A Mother’s Struggle With Bipolar Disorder.” I was given that diagnosis in 2002, right after my second child was born. I believed it because it came from a doctor, even though some of my mental health struggles didn’t really seem like the bipolar symptoms I was told about.

I spent about 20 years with that belief. I was put on medication that seemed to help somewhat, but I continued to have mental health episodes like anxiety, deep depression and an annoying freeze response when it’s activated. I often felt like I was “too much” for the people in my life and began to isolate more.

In 2021, when we moved out of Florida, a new psychiatrist screened me for complex PTSD, and she ended up diagnosing me with it and said it was probably never bipolar disorder. The new diagnosis was consistent with my long history of abuse as a child and an adult, and I had just about all the symptoms. It made more sense to me than being bipolar.

Then, in the summer of 2023, my family and I moved into a hideous house because our old landlord wanted her house back. I just felt miserable all the time, and we were stuck there for a year. So, I made an important decision.

Since we were going to be stuck there for twelve months, I decided I would get my life back in order. I started reading self-help books and meditating and doing EMDR with an app all on my own. I made up breathing exercises and mantras and did them religiously. It took a long time, but I started to feel more stable and a little less fearful day by day.

Here’s where I want to pause a minute. I want you to know that I’ve always given you my most honest stories in the way that I can remember them. You have seen me, warts and all, at the highest and lowest points of my life.

When I started writing this article, my first plan was to make a new account and write under a pen name so nobody would know it was me. In a way, though, I don’t think it’s fair to me (or the reader). I should be able to be who I really am whether here or in person.

I do have some haters who read my Substack and, once they read this article, they’re probably going to leave some nasty comments, but I don’t have to care about that. The people who have cared about me and offered support matter to me much more, and I’d like to give them honesty just like always. Being able to express myself through writing matters to me, too.

Back to the story, my psychiatrist recently retired, and she referred me to another one plus a therapist, which I hadn’t had in a long time. We went over my history, and I told her about the past abuse and also admitted to some of my own dangerous mistakes as an adult. I tried to talk twice as fast because I knew I only had an hour.

Towards the end of the session, she asked me to take a screening mental health test, which I did. By the end, she said she didn’t think I just had complex PTSD but another diagnosis to go along with it. And this is the part that is very scary to tell you.

I have borderline personality disorder.

In order to receive this diagnosis, one has to have at least five of the nine symptoms of the illness. Here’s what they include:

· Abandonment fears

· Unstable relationships

· Identity disturbance

· Impulsive acts

· Self-harm

· Mood swings

· Chronic emptiness

· Intense anger

· Dissociation

My screening score was eight out of nine. I don’t really get the intense anger, or if I do, I usually end up turning it back on myself instead of other people. But, looking back, I was dissociating while still in diapers. I’ve done a lot of impulsive and stupid things in the past that could have gotten me killed and for the longest time had no sense of who I was as a person.

On the screening, I scored “very high,” 99.9% in the non-clinical percentile and 85.8% in the BPD percentile. It was finally something that made sense, a reason why none of the medications or tools I’ve tried haven’t worked well or “fixed” me. At the same time, hearing that diagnosis was devastating.

BPD is in the Cluster B of mental illnesses, which is the really bad cluster that includes pathological narcissists and sociopaths. The idea of it scares the crap out of me. Thankfully, I have never been a violent person or anything like that and choose compassion more often than anything else, so there could be hope that will never happen.

Borderline personality disorder is also associated with reduced life expectancy at about 10 to 20 years shorter than the average person. It’s not that having BPD is fatal, but instead that the rates for substance abuse, self-harm and suicide are so high.

I remember some of the things I did or said in the past that were hurtful that I could never give an explanation for because I honestly didn’t know why I was doing them. I recall feeling confused at why everybody I knew seemed to be able to manage their jobs and bills and lives, but I failed every time I tried.

I realize now that my BPD was “quiet” during my first marriage and “raging” in my second marriage. I’m with my third husband now (did I mention I’m impulsive?), and we’ve had our ups and downs, but somehow it feels more stable and happy. People with BPD feel all their emotions at astronomical levels, so my husband has had to deal with that, but he tries really hard to understand.

I grew up in a family where my mother didn’t want me and my father didn’t need me. I was an accidental pregnancy during an affair my parents had, and they ran out of town before I was born because they were ashamed. That shame was often projected on to me. I didn’t meet my grandparents until I was three years old.

After my mom and dad split up, the two of them tossed me back and forth like a frisbee, neither one fully wanting to commit to taking full-time care of me. As a result, I felt out of place wherever I was and began to isolate.

In my second marriage, my husband threw me around like a rag doll, fed me drugs and told me I was worthless every day. I left him seven times before it actually stuck because I’d get on my own and become confused and overwhelmed. Even now, I don’t think I could ever live by myself for long. Going back to that monster would end up feeling less scary than being alone and empty inside with my demons at my heels.

Even to this day, I haven’t been able to hold a job. I spend a lot of days on the couch shaking and being too hard on myself because I struggle to get up and do things. After all the healing work I’ve done, I almost feel like I was rewarded with the booby prize.

Thank God, I do have a few things in my arsenal to deal with this. I’m going to see my therapist once a week to learn dialectical behavior skills (DBT), which I’ve heard is the gold standard for BPD. My family is supportive and are understanding on the days when I have trouble. I can take deep breaths, eat healthy and make sure I get enough sleep.

I think of my children as the source of my greatest joy. All of them were taken from me when they were little because I couldn’t keep it together. The pain of that has lingered and hurts so badly that I can’t stand it sometimes. But now I don’t blame my ex-husband and my daughter’s aunt for getting them to a safe place when I was so out of control. Going even further, I am grateful for them.

Part of me is disappointed because I wish I would have gotten the correct diagnosis sooner (I’m 57 now). I think I could have developed skills that helped me stay out of trouble, although I can’t be positive. Back in those days, I didn’t have a therapist or any support like I have now, and I’ve lived with three giant children-shaped holes in my heart for most of my life.

Here, at the end, I’m glad that I shared this with you. I shouldn’t have to hide away from people who care about me. I just want what everybody else wants: acceptance, compassion, connection and love. No matter what illness a person has, I think that’s universal. There is so much unnecessary judgement and insensitivity out there when instead we could be loving and helping each other. That’s what I’m going to focus on.

Thanks for reading. More to come.

I had to force myself to eat breakfast and decided on cereal, my hands shaking as I poured milk in my bowl. I began to argue with the voice in my head that bullies me and makes me feel small. That was a big mistake because after a while, I wondered if the bully was actually being convincing.

Of all days to be on the verge of a humongous panic attack, this day would be the worst. I had an opportunity to start equine-assisted therapy (see more), which I’d never done before, and I’d been excitingly counting down the days until it started. I couldn’t wait to meet the horses and the people I’d be working with, but the little bully in me was relentless, telling me that neither the horses nor the people there were going to like me.

There was a point where I contemplated not showing up at all, if only to bring down the tension in my body. When I thought of the alternative, sitting on the couch all day with no friends and nobody who understood me just like every day, I redoubled my efforts and left the house and started driving to the farm.

When I got there, a group of women were standing in the parking lot. I walked up and introduced myself and gave a few hugs. There was one woman that I hugged who I thought was part of the staff, but she was actually a client like me. After we hugged, the woman gave me a strange look as if she had noticed something I hadn’t. I wanted to ask her why, but my usual awkwardness took over, and I just smiled at her.

The therapists called it an introduction day, meaning we would just walk around and pet and brush the nineteen horses in the pasture. I was suddenly so excited I couldn’t stand it. The horses were trained to work with trauma survivors, and the therapists explained that a horse would see right through any mask you wore down to the “real” you. I was already desperate to drop my mask and let myself be seen, at least by animals to begin with.

I’d always loved all kinds of animals. In fact, I grew up so introverted that I would have walked past a hundred people just to get to an animal. It was an unfortunate trait of mine that lingered well into my fifties. As I walked into the pasture, all I could see were the beautiful horses. In my mind, all the people had disappeared.

A horse walked right up to where I was standing, and I pet his mane and looked him in the eyes and told him he was a good boy. That same horse followed me around everywhere I went until the end of the first session, and when I went back for the second, he was right there waiting for me.

I stepped away from the group and went to stand under the barn for some shade. My favorite horse followed me inside, and another horse was already in there. The two of them competed for my attention, putting their heads on my shoulder and drawing me in for hugs with their giant bodies. One of them started kissing me repeatedly on top of my head, and all of a sudden I burst out laughing. It felt like a big stress release, like getting scared in a dream and waking up abruptly and gratefully realizing I was safe.

In that moment, I had never felt safer.

For a person who doesn’t trust anybody, I trusted that those horses wouldn’t hurt me. I trusted the two therapists as well. Somebody diagnosed with complex PTSD may feel that the world doesn’t have very many places for them to feel safe. When such a place is found, it must be loved and cherished.

When we were almost done with the horses and started packing up, the lady who had given me the strange look after our hug came up beside me with a slight smile.

“I see you, you know.”

I was so stunned that I froze up and couldn’t ask her what she saw. I just stood there probably smiling like an idiot.

“You’re gonna be okay,” she added as she walked away. I wished she would come back so I could ask her how she knew.

This equine therapy program is once a week for five weeks, so I will have an opportunity to ask her if I get brave enough.

On the drive home, I imagined what the therapists must have thought of me. I petted and spoke to nineteen horses and barely any people. Even so, I found it very healing and felt the safety my nervous system craves more than anything. It also made such a difference that the horses saw through my mask down to the real me, especially as I’m just figuring out who that is now.

I’ve been trying to manage my complex PTSD symptoms alone in earnest for more than two years. It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do. There were days filled with grief and crying and shaking like a leaf and being afraid of every single thing in the world. There were many times I wanted to give up and forget the whole thing. I’m so glad I didn’t.

If you’re standing at that edge right now, where everything in you wants to quit, where the fear feels bigger than any possible good outcome, please just take one more step. Show up scared. Do the thing your body is screaming at you not to do.

Because here’s what I’m learning: the moments that change everything often wait just past the point where we want to turn around. Being seen, the unexpected gentleness, the love that meets us exactly where we are, all of it can be waiting on the other side of fear.

You don’t have to believe it will all be good. You just have to not quit before you find out.

They are still my favorite memories.

My son, Brandon, was just a baby. He didn’t sit up by himself or crawl yet, so I would lay down a fluffy blanket on the carpet with all his little toys and play with him. His giggles sounded like angels singing, and the laughter traveled all the way to his bright blue eyes that beamed with happiness and curiosity.

Four years later, I had the same awesome experiences with Shawn, my younger son. He had the greatest belly laugh, and I would look as silly as I had to just to hear it. We’d play up until naptime and, when he woke up, we’d play some more.

During one playtime with Shawn, my then-husband came into the room and watched us for a minute. “Does that really make you happy?” he asked as if he felt sorry for me. I looked up at him and told him yes, because it was the happiest time in my life. I’d found my life’s purpose, being a mommy, and it completely fulfilled me.

I read all the parenting books. My favorites were “The First Three Years Of Life” and “The Baby Whisperer.” I took the boys to Gymboree and held and rocked them for hours when they cried. I would have sacrificed anything for them, even before I knew how painful it would be for myself.

I had postpartum depression after Brandon was born, which kicked off a lifetime of episodes of shaky mental health. I had periods of stability, but I started having bad panic attacks and numbing depression. My husband was understanding until he wasn’t, and he eventually moved out of our house and in with his girlfriend who worked at his office.

Not only did I lose my husband, I lost his entire family that I had been a part of since I was seventeen. My mother-in-law was the only real mother I’d ever known, and she always cooked big Sunday dinners every week when the whole family came over. Of course, they still cared for and helped with the boys, but deep down I felt so alone. My own family was basically non-existent, so I couldn’t look there for support.

Raising the boys without my husband’s help was overwhelming at times, but they were the most loved and important people in my life, and I didn’t want to let them down. At the same time, I felt the sting of rejection from the breakup and hated myself for not being a good-enough wife. I had terrible insomnia, drank a little too much wine at night and wasn’t eating properly, both of which contributed to my growing instability.

Unfortunately, around this time, I started a relationship on a dating website just because the guy paid attention to me. My self-esteem was so low that I let Micah abuse me and insult me every day after the initial “love bombs” were dropped. He mostly ignored the boys, but when he started saying mean things about them, I packed them up and moved them to the other side of town.

Micah did not get the hint. He called every minute of the day and night, and eventually he found a way to break in to my house through the cheap lock on my sliding glass door so he could profess his love for me. I begged him to leave. I threatened to call the cops, but I was too weak and afraid to see him arrested. Micah went into the bathroom, and when he came out, he was face-to-face with the boys.

Thank goodness, he hurried out right after he was spotted, but I felt like I betrayed my kids. I told them they wouldn’t have to see Micah anymore, but there he was right in my hallway. I apologized and said it wouldn’t happen again, but I worried it was a promise I couldn’t keep if Micah kept stalking me.

No matter how badly I wanted to do right by my sons, I eventually had a big crash. My depression was so bad that I had to be briefly hospitalized. They readjusted my medication and sent me home two days later. About an hour after I walked through my front door, my ex-husband called asking to stop by. He had been watching the boys while I was in the hospital, but he didn’t mention bringing them home.

I wouldn’t remember what he said to me that day, but I remembered the custody papers. I couldn’t really read them because I had tears in my eyes, but I had always trusted him with paperwork and that sort of thing, so I signed them quietly and said nothing else until his car pulled away.

After that, I cried so loud that I worried the neighbors would hear me. The pain was so horrible, it felt like I was having major open heart surgery without anesthesia. The most loved, most cherished little people in my life were gone. My ex-husband now had full custody and would decide where or when I saw them. I didn’t even get a chance to talk to them and explain things.

I blasted myself for being so unstable. I desperately wished I had kept myself under control and hadn’t reached out for the help that led to my hospitalization. My insomnia intensified, and my depression was off the charts. The only thing that kept me alive was knowing it would hurt my boys even more if I didn’t. So I moved through the world alone, watching them grow into men from far away, my wound getting bigger with every life event I missed.

No matter what I managed to accomplish after that, the overwhelming shame never left me, and I was never able to forgive myself for letting them go.

There was a huge cost to spending my whole life hating myself. I didn’t believe I deserved good things and settled for way less. I felt like the life’s purpose I discovered as a mother was taken from me because I was a bad person.

I was anxious whenever I saw my boys because I never really got to know them as they were becoming teenagers and then men. I was afraid of hurting them by saying the wrong thing. I worried about them constantly to the point where it annoyed them. I couldn’t relax in the role of mother without feeling like I didn’t deserve it.

The boys are grown up now, 28 and 24. I’m grateful that they have allowed me to be part of their lives now. I apologized to them long ago for not being the mother they needed growing up. They were so quick to genuinely forgive me that, for a moment, I felt like a mother instead of a monster. When they did, it felt like the first little speck of light in the depths of my sadness, and it made me want to get better for them.

I learned to be consistent with them and do what I told them I would. I didn’t force them to bond with me, but they always knew I loved them more than anything and would have given them everything in the world if I was able. I kept my word, listened to them when they felt like talking and told them funny stories about when they were little. They always begged for more stories.

I finally realized one of the most important things I’ve ever learned about being a mother. Kids don’t just need to be happy, they need a happy mom, too. I vowed to do whatever I could to heal from the past and live a life where they didn’t worry about me all the time. They had seen me panicking and depressed and dissociated when they were little, but I felt that what they really needed to see from me as adults was calmness.

I also looked again at how I’d been framing the story of losing my children. For years, I believed I was a horrible person and too messed up to raise my own children, so I just let them go. I dealt with the “what kind of mother would do that” emails and phone calls from various people all while the boys were growing up. I never even stood up for myself because I hated myself much worse than anybody could hate me.

Even though I didn’t remember what my ex-husband said on the day I signed over custody, I recall exactly what I felt like inside. Time was moving normally, but for me it slowed way down, and several things occurred to me at once. Of course, I wanted my boys to stay with me forever, but what was really best for them?

My ex-husband had a huge family while I had extremely little support from mine. He lived in a beautiful development in Jupiter Farms, which was a bit country-like with horses everywhere trotting up and down the streets. The boys’ grandparents were a few blocks over, and they were still young and active and excited to help with the boys.

There was really no use in taking my ex to court. His family was loaded, and I couldn’t even afford a lawyer. Plus, I wouldn’t have dragged the kids into something like that. More importantly, I knew he truly was the stable parent, at least at that time.

I knew the boys would have many more opportunities to do things with my ex like traveling to Disney or even to Europe. I rarely had the money to take them out for ice cream even though it hurt me to say no. They would have birthday parties and play dates and afternoons in the pool without a mother who was too anxious to take them places.

As much as I wanted to keep them with me always, I let the boys go live with their dad because I knew they would have much more happy and fulfilling lives. I didn’t want to be the mother they felt like they had to take care of. I’d already lived that experience with my own mother, and it was no way for a kid to grow up.

I won’t pretend it didn’t hurt. It still hurts in ways I still don’t have words for. Somewhere along the way, however, I stopped calling it an abandonment story and started calling it what it really was, a mother’s love wanting the best for the children she loved the most. Real love has always had a long memory, and so does healing and returning to it.

That’s really all Brandon and Shawn were asking for anyway, for their mother to love them and love herself.

If you’re in the middle of the hardest chapter of your life right now, I just want you to know this isn’t the whole story. Not yours. Not mine. There are pages still being written that we can’t see yet.

Keep going in search of peace. You are a lot more than your worst moment. And so am I.

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“Glenna doesn’t know who she is.”

Ex-husband’s best friend, Jason, June 2011

I never forgot those words, not even when they were true. My ex-husband, Micah, looked strangely confused when he told me what his friend said about me. I guess it did sound weird. I mean, what kind of woman doesn’t know who she really is by the age of 40, the age I was when he said those words? Micah may not have understood, but I got it completely. What Jason had said was startlingly accurate.

I honestly didn’t know who I was, and I couldn’t remember a time when I ever did. I was anything anybody wanted me to be, starting with my parents who were basically neglectful unless I was entertaining them or being their sounding board. I’d been married twice, and in both marriages I was whoever my husband wanted me to be. In the former case, I was the quiet and docile housewife while in the latter I was an out-of-control, mentally ill drug addict who was being severely abused in some form on a daily basis.

I eventually ran away and divorced Micah, which is probably the smartest thing I ever did. Although his abuse and manipulation were over, I still had no sense of who I was. Whether I was with family or friends, I mentally scanned them to figure out who they wanted me to be, and then I became that person for better or worse.

Starting at the tender age of five, I became an instant “performer.” My mother and I lived in California, where dreams were made, and she was determined to make me a star.

She took me out on all kinds of auditions for movies and TV. In the end, the most “famous” things I did were a bank commercial and a Sunmaid Raisin ad that was in national magazines. I didn’t think it was a big deal, but my mom bragged about it to every stranger she met on the street.

I was so young, but already I knew what was expected of me: big smile, look and act my cutest and no whining ever. My mother’s dream was the first mask I ever put on, and I’ve been putting them on ever since. She wanted a performer, so that’s who I became, not just for her but for everyone I encountered until I was in my fifties.

Years later, in high school, I remember this girl who didn’t like me was having a party, and I was definitely not invited. A mutual friend suggested that I try to talk it out with her and make up. I agreed even though I didn’t have the slightest idea why the girl was mad in the first place.

When I asked her what the problem was, her eyes rolled back so far in her head it must have hurt her, and she let out a disgusted sigh.

“You’re so fake and phony,” she announced. “Everybody thinks you’re sooooo nice, but it’s all a lie.”

I shook my head slowly in response, my brain trying to remember where she could have gotten this idea. I recall that it hurt my feelings, but I didn’t understand why. If I really thought I was acting fake, I would have apologized. Before I could ask the question, the girl was halfway across her lawn and going into her house, leaving me standing stunned on the sidewalk.

I don’t remember the “fake” issue coming up again until I was in my thirties. I’d been drinking wine with a friend of mine, and she ended up getting hammered and needing me to drive her home. She felt really sick, and as I drove I tried to offer her words of comfort.

“YOU ARE SO FAKE!”

She yelled this at me out of nowhere from the passenger’s seat, cackling in my face, and then added, “You’re like one of those Stepford Wives, completely phony!”

At the time, I chalked it up to her being drunk, and I dropped her off without another word. Still, what she said really bugged me, especially since we had been so close before. She’d never said anything to me like that before, and I started to sincerely wonder if there was some truth to it since it wasn’t the first time I’d heard it before.

Today, I realize that I absolutely was masking myself with both of these ladies, being overly polite and sugary whenever I saw them, as a way to protect myself. My extreme cordiality was like a barrier that ensured I wouldn’t slip and tell them something personal they could use against me. In their cases, I was definitely right to protect myself because they both ended up trying to hurt me badly later on. Somehow I knew they would.

In my world, nobody could be trusted. This was probably the result of growing up with parents who both manipulated me to get what they wanted, narcissism in its most primitive form. As I became an adult and battled social anxiety, not only did I use my politeness to deter threats, but I “performed” for everybody I knew and loved.

I could fill an awkward silence with word garble like nobody’s business. I turned every subject back to me and my victim stories, glossing over everybody else’s. I was the funniest person all my friends knew, but it was based on my desperation to be liked. I thought giving away these pieces of my soul would ensure that people would never leave me.

Once I was in therapy for complex PTSD, I finally realized that my sense of self never developed because I was constantly in performance mode with every single person in my life, sometimes because they demanded it and sometimes because of my brutal fear of abandonment. I pictured an onion where the “real” me was trapped under all the different layers from my past. I wondered how long I’d have to peel it before I would feel free and experience happiness and joy instead of constant anxiety and despair.

I had been living in total survival mode. A loud noise could trigger me so badly that I’d cry. Somebody changing their tone with me activated my fear of abandonment and caused me to shake uncontrollably. The shaking problem wasn’t new. I’d been doing it since I was a nervous child, but back then nobody talked about anxiety or PTSD, so I was just left to shake on my own.

I began working hard to calm my nervous system, trying to tolerate all my “big” feelings for as long as I could stand them. I used breathing and complete silence to bring my panic down to a dull roar. I still had bad days where I couldn’t do anything, but they were decreasing as well. I kept reminding myself I was safe in the present whenever I flipped back to the past.

This work didn’t make my complex PTSD symptoms disappear a little more every day. It was more like one step forward, two steps back and then little breakthroughs that changed the way I thought about my diagnosis and how I wanted to move forward. Then I realized something that was a game changer.

There was no “old” me buried in the layers of the onion because I was never given the chance to develop my own personality. I was whoever anybody wanted me to be, but it erased any dreams or preferences that I might have had. Instead, I suddenly had the opportunity to build a “real” life in present time any way I wanted. I could decide things for myself, set boundaries that lasted and stop carrying around so much unnecessary guilt and shame. I could be whoever I aspired to be.

Honestly, none of this work would have happened if I hadn’t first learned to love the little person inside me who was so hurt and abused. I know it might sound cheesy to say “love yourself,” but I believe this is truly the key to all recovery. I intensely hated myself since I was old enough to ride a bicycle. It didn’t change overnight, but every little kindness I have shown to that little person reassures her that I wouldn’t leave her or neglect her. She’s able to just relax and feel completely safe, knowing I would protect her with my life.

Everybody’s healing journey (or any journey, for that matter) looks different, and the things that have helped me may be different that what other people have done, and that’s okay. I believe we’re here on earth to have experiences that God can see through our eyes and also here to help and love each other. That’s my motivation in sharing what has helped me, and I hope people know that it’s possible for anybody.

My life is no longer controlled by depressive episodes, self-hatred and mini-suicidal gestures all the time. I’ve grieved the things I lost, especially when it was my fault. I’ve tried to make things better where I can. The new foundation underneath me is getting stronger while my triggers get weaker. None of this is to brag but just to say please don’t ever give up hope. Things really can and do change for the better.

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Last week, I admit I vented.

I was angry about a trip my husband was taking. I was hurt that he wouldn’t talk to me about it. I felt unloved, discarded and like my feelings didn’t matter to him at all.

So, yes, I vented.

I’ve been writing on Substack for a few years and on Medium for five years before that. I tell stories from my past, how I learned to survive and how important my family is to me. However, it’s rare that I ever complain about my husband. We’re currently talking, which I wish we had done all along.

I wrote that “vacation” article (now deleted) about an hour after he left for his trip. I was furious with him. Everything I wrote that day, I had already told him to his face with no response. I never felt so alone. That was me screaming into the void and wanting to be understood, or maybe just to understand myself.

As it turned out, I was never alone. Somebody was watching.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to refer to them as SFM (sneaky family member). You know the type. They secretly read everything you write so they can get a dopamine hit off your misfortune. You’re perfectly nice to the SFM in public, but you constantly get the feeling you shouldn’t trust them because the vibe is always off.

Well, SFM got one look at my “vacation” article and broke record speed to tell my husband about it.

I should point out that virtually nobody in my “real life” friend group subscribes to my Substack. It’s mostly read by other writers because that’s who hangs out here. My husband also doesn’t read my writing unless I ask him to. Therefore, I figured the article would simply come and go with all the others, and it would have if not for SFM.

Honestly, him seeing it does not make me mad. Like I said, everything I wrote was said to his face before he left on his trip. I never used his actual name, so obviously I wasn’t out to ruin the guy. In a way, a small part of me hoped he would see it and realize that my feelings were important, too.

My husband did not mention it (or much else) to me for a few days until he finally blew up and told me to “go write another article.” I didn’t even have to ask how he found out. Instead, I wanted my husband to contact SFM to tell me which email address they signed up with so I could block them.

My husband didn’t do this, so I did. I texted and simply asked for the email address.

The first thing SFM did was throw her own husband under the bus, claiming that he was the one who pointed out the article. Knowing that her husband and I have never had an actual full conversation in the 13 years I’ve known him had me calling BS.

She then told me, “I’m just the messenger, and I don’t want to get involved in your marriage.”

WOW! Just wow.

I finally blocked her without her giving me the email address I wanted.

From what I’ve been able to gather over the years (because we’ve only been together a handful of times), SFM believes that I am an “emotional cripple” due to my mental health issues. She’s under the impression that I’m fragile like a little snowflake. She’s partly right, I am fragile. Fragile like a bomb.

Here’s my dilemma, friends. There is no doubt in my mind that she is reading this piece right now (heyyyyyyyyy girl). While I have blocked her everywhere else, I don’t have the golden email that stops her from being able to spy on me. How am I going to be able to share about my deepest truths when somebody who doesn’t like me is reading every word?

Somebody suggested I write on another website, but I have a whole supportive and loving community on Substack that we’ve all built together over the years. I don’t want to have to censor myself because she doesn’t respect boundaries. It’s like she has a death grip around my neck trying to take my voice from me.

It’s very telling that she didn’t give me the email. She wants access and wants me to know she has it. That gives her too much power over something that belongs to me.

Another person said I should make people be paid subscribers to access my work, but I didn’t want to do that either. I want my articles to be free to everybody, and then if they feel inspired to be a paid subscriber, all the better. I’ve never been a money hustler with my writing, and I’m not going to start now.

I’d love to know as writers what you think I should do or if you’ve ever been in a predicament like this.

P.S.: I need to make a special apology to . She was gracious enough to put the “vacation” story in The Memorist, and I’m so sorry that I had to take it down. I hope you can forgive me.

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“You let men treat you like shit, and you either excuse it or don’t say anything.”

The words would have stung no matter who said them, but it wasn’t a close friend or a therapist. It was my 19-year-old daughter who made this announcement when we were alone one day in the kitchen. The person I wanted most to admire me had just stopped me in my tracks with the ultimate truth bomb, because it was nothing if not devastatingly accurate.

It wasn’t new information. I just didn’t think anybody else ever noticed.

My daughter said this and then went on with her day while I was left with deep feelings of shame and failure. I thought I had gotten better about sticking up for myself in certain situations. I’d promised myself I’d never let another man boss me around, insult me or stomp all over my heart like before. However, according to my daughter, I still had a long way to go.

At the tender age of five, I was about a month into kindergarten when some boys started chasing me and my friends at the bus stop. The ringleader, a redheaded boy with an ocean of freckles named Clifton, would assemble his brutes and yell, “GET THE GIRLS,” and we would all yell and run away. I didn’t understand why some of my friends giggled at them because I was downright terrified. I fully believed that those boys, Clifton in particular, were intent on hurting or even murdering us.

They surrounded me one day, three of them with their fists closed and their eyes angry. I waited for one of them to shove me or punch me, but the most they did was step forward and pretend like they were going to smash my foot. When they were distracted for a moment, I broke free and started running home, but not without hurting from the sharp pains in my legs where Clifton was throwing rocks at them.

The next morning, my dad (my HERO) walked me to the bus stop and said something to Clifton that made him look at the ground with his eyes welling up with tears. Right after that, Clifton walked up to me and told me he would never bother me again, just like that. True to his word, he stopped chasing and threatening me and instead almost looked afraid of me.

A few weeks later, Clifton sheepishly asked me if he could walk me home as I got off the bus. I didn’t want him to, but I was afraid of what he would do if I said no. When we got to my yard, Clifton led me by the hand to behind the house and asked if I wanted to kiss him. Yuck! It was the last thing I wanted to do. Boys were gross, and Clifton was right on the very top of that list.

Instead, I told him he could and shut my eyes, feeling his rough, chapped lips touching mine for the briefest of seconds. I told myself it wasn’t so bad and convinced myself it was better to get kissed than punched, but just barely.

Clifton said I was his girlfriend after that, and I was too afraid to correct him. We held hands whenever he wanted to, sat together at lunch whenever he wanted to and kissed behind my house whenever he wanted to. I never had two words to say to him, worried I would say something wrong and make him angry.

One afternoon at recess, a girl I didn’t know walked up to me and announced that Clifton said he didn’t love me anymore. Whatever her motivation was, I’m sure she wasn’t expecting me to burst into tears and start shaking like a leaf.

“I don’t feel good,” I said over and over as the girl walked me to the nurse’s office. I clutched my stomach, which really did hurt, and cried as the nurse told me to lay down while she called my mother. My little pounding heart just knew that if Clifton didn’t want me as a girlfriend anymore, he’d surely want me to be his punching bag again.

My mom was mad at me for making her leave work, so I played up the “sick” angle and didn’t tell her of my fears about Clifton. She ultimately decided that I wasn’t sick enough to stay home another day, and my heart sank and my nerves twitched. I walked to the bus stop in silence, afraid that if I tried to talk I’d cry again. When I saw Clifton, my tiny hands involuntarily balled up into fists as I waited to learn my fate.

Instead of scaring me, Clifton completely ignored me. When he noticed me standing there, it was almost like he looked past me. He never said a word to me, not that day or any other day until my family moved away two years later. He seemed to have forgotten the whole thing, unlike me who continued to fear him every single day. I also swore I’d never have a “boyfriend” again.

With every subsequent romantic relationship I entered into after Clifton, there were always rules. One of my high school boyfriends insisted I stop smoking before we could go “steady,” and I tossed my pack aside without a second thought. Guys liked attention, but not too much attention that they thought I was clingy. They doled out little love crumbs so I didn’t stray too far but never put the same amount of effort into the relationship that I did.

With my first true love at age sixteen, I learned to wait it out while he took “breaks” from me and ignored me and made fun of me and cheated. He’d always come back as if nothing had happened, and I felt grateful and lucky to have him part-time. I said I loved him (probably too much), but it never occurred to me that somebody who really loved me would never treat me that way.

I was married for fifteen years to my high school sweetheart (not the one who took “breaks”). We had some good years together and two beautiful boys. However, he also lusted after the receptionist at his work with the pink hair, eventually leaving us for this woman. When we divorced, he told me he wanted to be “friendly but not friends.” I felt like my heart had sprung from my body and lay writhing in agony in front of me as I agreed to his terms.

Then came the second husband, the monster. He was cruel and knew exactly the right buttons to push to hurt me since I had stupidly given him the map. When I sent the boys to live with their father to get them away from him, which was something I could do for them but not for myself, the second husband encouraged me to forget them completely. He told me I was a horrible mother and that the boys truly belonged to their father, not me. Living in that situation was so traumatic that I started to believe it, and that belief continued long after I packed my stuff and left with our daughter while he was at work.

Every cruel word, every side-eyed angry glance and all the silent treatments I’d endured wore my self-esteem down to a nub, not that I had much to begin with. In the broken household I grew up in, actual love and affection were in short supply. Desperate for connection, I threw my heart out there for anybody to take and felt grateful when somebody did. I abandoned myself day after day to ensure I wouldn’t be abandoned by others.

It wasn’t until the last few years that I took all the love I felt in my heart and poured it into where it should have been all along, to the little girl inside me who wanted and needed that love most of all. I’m getting better at standing up for myself and remembering that I matter, too. I don’t always succeed, but I know my daughter is watching me, so I don’t want to set a bad example for her. (more than I already have, anyway).

I’m married for a third time now. He is a good man, but even he is sometimes quick to judge me or put me down. Because of the things I’ve learned, I choose my battles and try not to let the mean words pass without comment. I do believe he loves me and tries hard, but I am still so sensitive to rejection that I take everything he says to heart. We try to be patient with each other and talk things through, and I think that has made a difference.

While my daughter has a heart for justice in all forms and wants everything to be fair, she’s still too young to realize that things don’t always work out that way. I can’t fight every battle she wants me to fight, and she doesn’t quite look at circumstances in the long term or the entire situation. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t keep standing up for myself, but I hope she grows to allow some room for grace and believes in the kind of love that is willing to work things out.

Still, once in a while I have dreams where it’s just me. I live in a little house that is clean and organized, and nothing is out of place unless I put it there. My three grownup children come to visit me every day to chat and laugh for hours, but sometimes in the dreams they are little and full of love and kisses and hugs all day long. There are no rules, and I don’t have to walk on eggshells and feel like I’m in trouble all the time.

There is music, and I’m dancing wild and free, letting all the love I have flow through me, comfort me and make me sublimely happy. The world is beautiful, and my children are beautiful, and maybe I am beautiful, too.

As a child, whenever I hurt myself and cried, my mom and dad would always tell me, “Go ahead, say it!” That was the only time I was allowed to say a curse word, the absolute worst word I could come up with. I even got to yell it as loud as I wanted.

Being so young, the majority of the time my words were on the level of “dang” and “poop,” but as soon as I said the offensive word, the three of us would dissolve into giggles. I’d laugh the hardest with my physical pain already completely forgotten, and I’d skip away to play again.

I didn’t know it then, but those were my first experiences with the “pause.” We’ve all heard the advice to “just take a pause” when we’re feeling overwhelmed. Counting to ten, taking a deep breath and stepping away for a moment are the most commonly used pauses in our culture. However, what if a pause could be more than just a temporary escape? What if it could become a gentle sanctuary, a loving space where we can meet ourselves with compassion instead of judgement?

If you and I had met a year ago, I wouldn’t have been the same person I am today. Living through many years of traumatic memories had me afraid of my own shadow. Alarms would go off in my head all the time signaling danger (even when I was alone at home), and my body would react with a racing heart, shaking all over, dissociation (once my favorite escape) and shallow breathing.

For years, I used illicit substances to regulate my nervous system. I have swallowed more uppers and downers than poor 1940’s Judy Garland just so I would be “okay,” not too hyperactive (climbing the walls) or hypoactive (frozen on the couch in fear). I’d try different things until my mood was at a level I was comfortable with, but then a brand new panic attack would make me have to start all over again.

The whole thing felt like being a hostage. I hid and masked myself around other people, afraid to trust them to get to know me. I scheduled my entire days around my anxiety. A bad memory would come up, and I’d rush to push it away, but I was never fast enough before I was floored by fear. There was no rhyme or reason to it. I thought something was terribly wrong with me that my body couldn’t handle stress and that even the tiniest morsel of anxiety could ruin my whole day.

Back then, I thought this was something that would just randomly happen for the rest of my life because of the past trauma I experienced. Still, I tried various methods to stay calm as often as possible. Sometimes, I admit that this involved alcohol or drugs. Other times, I tried to meditate or listen to music. These things helped to a certain extent, but I was always left feeling desperate and wondering why I kept being plagued with these attacks.

Finally, I came to realize that the panic, fear and shaking were not my body trying to hurt me. They were my body trying to protect me. They were the same reactions I had to being in actual danger long ago, but my body didn’t realize I wasn’t in danger anymore and still tried to keep me safe from my triggers in the only way it knew how.

Letting that knowledge settle in made me feel great compassion for the young girl and woman who kept finding herself in danger at the hands of other people and worrying it would happen again. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop so intently that I didn’t enjoy the good times when I had them. There were so many years I blamed myself for not being able to get my act together without realizing that it was a process I developed to keep myself safe, which it did in the old days but was completely unnecessary in the present.

When I learned to view my responses as protective rather than threatening, something remarkable began to happen. The pause in between my triggers and actions became something I could work with by creating a deeper peace in that space. Using a gentle approach felt unfamiliar at first, but I learned that when I led with self-compassion instead of judgement, both my body and mind began to respond differently.

The “pauses” in my life slowly became little opportunities for me. I worked on trying to sit with my triggers and emotions and letting myself feel them fully. This took some practice because it’s hard to be calm when feeling like I’m jumping out of my skin, but I noticed that the longer I sat with a trigger, the less intense it was the next time it popped up. Every single time that I was able to fill my heart with the love and compassion that I sorely needed, the anxiety would dissipate and I’d feel actual peace.

Today, my shaky hands are steady as rocks. I’m getting better at taking off my mask and talking and especially listening to other people. I’m certainly not perfect by any means, but I can’t deny that I’m calmer and happier. I think of all this like a journey I’m taking, and I know I’ll be okay as long as I stay on the path.

Creating a compassionate pause isn’t about perfection or following a strict set of rules. It’s about discovering your own unique way of making space for yourself where you can meet your thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations with understanding instead of fear.

I remember the days of hating and punishing myself for my mistakes with the ferocity I would never do to another person. However, I also know that I did the best I could at the time with the tools that I had, and I did better when digging deeper and tending to the tiny seeds of love that somehow still remained. Showing myself compassion allowed me to grow in the pauses, creating a beautiful space that can be anything I want it to be.

Feeling compassion for ourselves isn’t about self-pity; it’s an acknowledgement of the the innocence we were born with before the world got its hands on us. We can let go of guilt and shame that never served us anyway and instead experience new moments with that same type of innocence, heart wide open, opening a gift given from above just for you.

I promise the payoff will be worth it.

Looking back now, I realize that the little girl who could turn her scraped knees into a moment of laughter already knew something profound about healing. She understood that pain didn’t have to have the final word. In the space between hurt and healing, there’s room for transformation.

Maybe that’s what the pause has been teaching me all along, that just like that child who could forget her wounds in a burst of giggles, we all have the innate ability to shift our focus from pain to possibility, especially when we meet ourselves with the same loving playfulness our younger selves once knew.

If you'd like to support my work, please consider buying me a coffee. Much appreciated!

Hello to my wonderful subscribers!

I’ve been thinking about hosting a chat room like this for some time, mostly for all of you. I wanted to create a gentle space for deep and authentic connections where people truly feel heard and can share their wellness journeys with emotional, spiritual and addiction recovery in the midst of mental illness.

A little about your host (me), I was diagnosed two years ago with complex PTSD that stemmed from child abuse and a marriage later on where I was abused, manipulated and got addicted to anything my abuser would feed me. I barely survived, and I definitely wasn’t thriving.

In the span of my ten-year writing career, most of my articles were “victim-centered,” meaning I would blast all the horrible things that happened to me right on the internet for everyone to see. It equaled pity for clicks and comments, and I hated every minute of it. I think it was a misguided effort to “get the record straight” and tell my version of things in my own way, but every post was eating at my already fractured soul.

I spent most of my adult life anxious and dissociated until a therapist friend actually pointed the dissociation out to me, following which I became “present” for the first time in years. This happened in early 2024, and I’ve spent every day since then attempting to heal my mind, body and nervous system. Much of it has been beneficial, although I still have lots of things to work on (don’t we all…lol?). I’ve also tried using all different kinds of healing “tools,” some of which worked while others failed miserably.

I’d like our chat (which I’ll host at least once a week) to be a gentle place for people to share where they are in their healing journey and receive support and be listened to. I’m not a therapist or wellness coach by any means, just somebody who is going through the mess right along with you.

I don’t mean to toot my own horn at all, but I’ve come a long way with my CPTSD recovery in a year and a half with far fewer panic attacks these days and the ability to enjoy my life more instead of always fearing it. However, I know that everyone is different and may have their own ways of healing. I’d love to hear them, too.

CHAT ROOM “MISSION STATEMENT”

This chat will be a gentle space with authentic connection and healing, where your story matters and your voice will be heard. Together, we’ll explore recovery, growth and hope through weekly guided discussions that honors each person’s unique journey. Rather than advice-giving or trauma comparisons, you’ll find deep listening and compassionate understanding as we walk this path together.

I hope you will join the weekly chats, support others and find support of your own. When one of us does better, we all do better. For the time being, the chat is limited to paying subscribers due to safety concerns where people are trying to be vulnerable. The chat is for you guys. No trolls allowed!

Thank you so much. I learn so much from all of you every day. Let’s meet at:

It was the summer between kindergarten and first grade when I first learned about God. Our family lived in a trailer park, and a young family had just moved into the one next door to ours. They had a new baby girl, and my little neighborhood friends and I would argue over who got to touch her, hold her and make her laugh whenever her parents brought her outside.

One afternoon, some of us were invited to visit their trailer. Once inside, they showed us their giant collection of children’s pop-up books. We spent at least an hour that day reading them and turning the pages to make them pop. All of the books were about Jesus and his apostles, stories I’d never heard before.

At one point, the young wife turned to me and said, “Did you know that you don’t have to be good to get into Heaven? If you believe in Jesus and that he died for our sins, you never have to worry about it again.”

I was so caught up in the ideas of sins, Heaven, Jesus and the pop-up books that I proclaimed my love for God on the spot, mostly because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t.

Later that day, my parents and I headed to the grocery store. I sat in the middle of the back seat as usual, but I was thinking hard about what I’d heard earlier. Taking a deep breath, I piped up to my parents in the front, ready to ask the ultimate question.

“Do you guys believe in God,” I asked in my most hopeful voice. After all, if I was going to heaven, I would want my parents to be there, too.

They looked at each other, then back at me. My mother said no in the voice of somebody who didn’t want to disappoint but was annoyed by the question.

I immediately started crying in the back seat. “But you HAVE TO! You HAVE TO”!

They got the story out of me about the neighbors and the pop-up books and what the wife had told me. I was never allowed to visit their trailer after that, and the subject never came up again.

That is… until fifth grade.

When my parents split up, my mom took me 3000 miles away from my dad and brought me to live in upstate New York with my grandparents. First thing, they enrolled me in St. Augustine Catholic School, an ominous brick building six stories high that I had to walk twelve blocks to get to every morning. Apparently, the fact that I grew up without learning about religion was an abomination, and they sent me in an effort to give me the religion I “needed.”

I only stayed at St. Augustine’s through the fifth grade, but my most vivid memories were of the school’s principal (an extremely strict nun named Sister Geraldine) yelling at me in the hallways for never being baptized or having my first communion as if these were things I had control over. When we walked over to church on Fridays for mass, she made me sit alone in my seat while the other kids went up to take their communion.

I had a teacher, Mr. Basil, who was a bit of a hippie compared to all the other teachers there. He would read us the Bible, but he’d make sure to point out that all the stories were parables and didn’t actually happen in real life. That made sense to me, but I didn’t realize how much my family took it all literally.

When I repeated what Mr. Basil had said, my grandparents rushed down to the school and dragged him into a conference that included the unforgiving Sister Geraldine. I’m not sure what the outcome was. He was still a teacher the next Monday, but my little heart felt the injustice of a person being yelled at for what they believed (and were probably right about).

St. Augustine’s God was strict and unforgiving and could take away His love if I screwed up badly enough. He didn’t seem to be the kind of God that I could love or trust, and when we moved to another city and I had to change schools, I promptly forgot everything I’d ever been told about God there.

The subject of God didn’t come back up in my life again until I was sixteen years old. My mother and I had moved to Florida by this time, and my father moved down near us after that and got his own place so he could have me visit on weekends. I was a big-time Daddy’s Girl, and I always looked forward to the days I was with him.

One weekend when I was visiting him, my dad came into the room with several notebooks in his hands that he wanted to show me. He said they were messages from God that he was told to transcribe by God Himself. I was too afraid to read what was written, but my dad described a spiritual awakening and vowed to become an Orthodox priest through the mail.

I adored my father above everything else, so who was I to call him a liar? After all, why couldn’t my father have been talking to God, and who was I to judge him? I almost thought it was special that He had chosen my father to communicate with. The other alternative, that my father had lost his mind, was much too scary to consider.

It took about a year before my dad stopped believing he was getting messages from God. I’m not sure what shook his faith, but one day he told me those messages were really from the devil. I tried to be as supportive as I could, but at the same time he was scaring me with all the talk about religion and God’s connection to him. After that, he just dropped the matter completely and never spoke of it again, so neither did I.

As an adult, the only relationship I had with God was using Him as a fire extinguisher. Something terrible would happen in my life, and I would drop to my knees, smash the glass for emergencies and pray as desperately as I could. I’d say things like, “Please, please help me and I’ll never do anything bad again. I will become Your child and let You lead the way. I’ll do anything!”

They were foxhole prayers, declared one minute and then forgotten the next, to a God I didn’t really know at all beyond his capabilities to fix things and punish people. There was no real relationship between us except for when I needed something. I believed wholeheartedly in Him because I was too afraid to reject Him and spend eternity in hell like those old pop-up books said I would.

Still, even though my life around religion was complicated, I was aware of the presence of something. Growing up, I survived things a child should never have to go through, but inside I felt a power greater than myself who was looking out for me at every turn. That is what inspired me to search God out on my own. Maybe He couldn’t be found in a judgemental pop-up book or at St. Augustine’s or in my father’s notebooks.

Maybe I should have instead looked in the most obvious place He would be… inside my heart.

There was a moment, just a moment, when I felt His presence clear as day. I had become a junkie and the victim of domestic abuse. When the abuse got physical, I decided to leave my husband for good after several years of halfhearted attempts.

My big “escape plan” was to move downstairs from him in our apartment building to live with our drug dealer. She was an elderly lady who was also an alcoholic, and I’d already imagined looting her prescription pills when she was passed out. I had gone as low as a woman can possibly go, willing to lie and steal to get the drugs my body craved. Feeding me pills was just one of the ways my husband abused me, and I found I couldn’t live without them.

The morning after I left, I woke up in the older lady’s apartment. I sat down on her couch and saw her sleeping on a foldout bed across the room. Her mouth was hanging open, and she looked well beyond her actual years from what the alcohol had done to her. Her apartment was in shambles, and she was addicted to the same drugs as I was.

All of a sudden, I realized I was looking at my future self in a mirror if I didn’t change my ways. A certain bravery rose up in me that had been inactive for years, and a feeling inside my heart suddenly told me to “save myself.” I grabbed my stuff and left her passed out and snoring, and I never once looked back. I became a grateful resident of a halfway house by that evening and began my journey to wellness.

Some people might call that a “God” moment, and I probably would as well, but I was also dealing with severe PTSD from everything that had happened. God still felt out of reach to me and too scary to have a real relationship with. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I fully trusted Him, but in those days nobody had my complete trust. I’d been burned one too many times.

A few years ago, a good friend of mine had his own spiritual awakening after denying God his whole life. My friend grew up with cystic fibrosis and had seen it take two of his older brothers, and he couldn’t imagine a God who would do that to children. He sent me a copy of the book he said changed everything for him. It was “The Untethered Soul” by Michael Singer. My friend knew how I had suffered in the past and really wanted me to get it so I’d feel some relief instead of the anxiety that plagued me all my life.

The first time I read it was mostly just skimming. The concepts seemed too deep for me to ever achieve, much less the connection to God I would need to carry them out. That book sat on my shelf for a long time. I was interested based on the positive changes in my friend, but I was too scared to believe the same would happen for me.

About a year later, I was in my car listening to a podcast where the hosts were sharing their favorite quotes about life. They were all good, but one in particular stood out to me:

“You are not the voice. You are the one who listens to the voice.”

Those words felt important like they penetrated my soul past all of my fear and panic. It was the first time I felt that, indeed, something bigger than me existed. One way to say it is that I finally remembered who I really was, not a mentally ill addict who was too afraid to even leave the house, but part of something so divine that it brought tears to my eyes.

When I got home, I Googled the statement to find out who actually said it. To my surprise, the author was Michael Singer, and his quote was in the book collecting dust on my shelf. I picked it up again, and this time the concepts in there seemed so much more true. Maybe I wasn’t my intensely racing negative mind or my body that shook so badly when I was scared. What if I was part of a higher power here to experience the world through my eyes? What if everyone on our planet was like that, too?

My terror about the world slowly turned to my acceptance of all fears, emotions and experiences. I spent years running away from bad memories or shoving them down and not dealing with them, but they just kept returning over and over to trigger me in the form of panic attacks. Instead, I now let the scary feelings sit inside my body and feel them until they pass, and this is how I truly let go of them for good. Smashing each of those “bad memory” bricks is how I’ve allowed more of the real me to show up, and that “real me” felt safe in God’s love. I now know He has been here all along with His love and protection. I’d just been too afraid to look.

Everybody finds out about God in their own way. They could have grown up in a religious (or even a toxically religious) family. They may still be in those foxholes praying to a God they fear. They could reject the idea of God entirely based on the way they were forced to believe in Him. I don’t think God needs to mean the exact same thing to everybody for Him to exist. We can each have our own personal relationship with God based on the experiences we’ve had with Him. All we have to do is seek inside ourselves to discover our truths.

Today, I don’t think of God as a fire extinguisher anymore. Instead, I imagine Him as a sturdy hammock swaying between the trees. The hammock is full of my favorite things like fluffy pillows and blankets and books. I imagine my children as babies again, and I’m reading to them or petting their newborn wrinkly foreheads as they sleep outside under the sun. The outside world can’t hurt me if I stay safe in the hammock, which I’m learning to do all day, every day.

Having this imagined hammock to rest in feels like security, like God wants me to feel loved and safe all the time. It’s also beautiful just like He wants my life to be. He isn’t here to judge or shame me but to support me in everything I do, and He makes sure I’ll always find my way home.

Your special relationship with God doesn’t have to be the God that others have told you about or forced you into believing. He was right there waiting when I searched Him out myself. Only then did He shine His light on me, telling me that He had been here all along, everywhere, even sometimes in the form of a comfortable hammock so I can gently rest and forget my worries.

As always, I remain forever grateful.

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I didn’t really “discover” Sinead O’Connor until after she died. Of course, I’d seen her lovely face up close on MTV almost every hour in the 90’s as she sang “Nothing Compares 2 U.” She was super famous, but she was also the infamous woman who ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live to protest child abuse in the Catholic church. To me, she seemed to be a combination of a wild spirit and a frightened little girl.

She did interviews and spoke about her own horrific abuse at the hands of her mother, things I wouldn’t share here because they might really upset sensitive people (of which I am one). I’m amazed she survived it all, and I wonder if the music she wrote later on healed at least the emotional scars that her mom left.

When her head was bald, there were physical scars on her scalp where she had been beaten as a child. Something about that touched me, this powerhouse of a performer who was still that little girl hurting inside with the scars to prove it. Looking back, I think I pitied her. I didn’t realize then that not only did she have the power to heal herself through her music, she had the power to heal other people.

The first time she healed me was about two years ago when I happened to hear her song, “Three Babies.” In truth, it was reportedly about the three miscarriages she had suffered in her life and how she still held those babies close to her heart. However, to me, the words mean something else entirely.

I happen to have three babies. They’re all grown up now, but for years I tortured myself over the way I treated them. My mental illness did not afford me the tools every mother is supposed to be born with to care for her children. I felt a holy outpouring of love for each one of them, but it was all I had to offer. I wasn’t well equipped to take care of their practical needs and, one by one, they were taken from me.

My two boys went to live with their father for good, and my daughter went to live with my mother for “a few weeks” that turned into two years. I’m not sure why I trusted my mother because we both shared the relentless mental illness that did not allow for raising children, but at the time I thought she was a better choice than me because I was an evil, piece-of-shit monster.

For years, I hated myself and wished I was dead. Every morning, I’d wake up and remember first thing that I was a mother with no children. I loved them fiercely, but my love wasn’t enough to sustain them. In order to both cope with the pain and cut short my time in this world, I turned to hard drugs and married a man who abused me in every way one can imagine. I managed to get rid of one and then the other eventually, but the guilt and shame were still branded onto my soul.

My three children always felt my love whenever we were together and loved me despite everything, but I didn’t know how to love myself.

What follows are the lyrics to “Three Babies” and how the song healed me:

THREE BABIES

Each of these
My three babies
I will carry with me
For myself
I ask no one else will be
Mother to these three

And of course
I'm like a wild horse
But there's no other way I could be
Water and feed
Are not tools that I need
For the thing that I've chosen to be

In my soul
My blood and my bones
I have wrapped your cold bodies around me
The face on you
The smell of you
Will always be with me

Each of these
My three babies
I was not willing to leave
Though I tried
I blasphemed and denied
I know they will be returned to me

Each of these
My babies
Have brought you closer to me
No longer mad like a horse
I'm still wild but not lost
From the thing that I've chosen to be

And it's 'cause you've thrilled me
Silenced me
Stilled me
Proved things I never believed
The face on you
The smell of you
Will always be with me

Each of these
My three babies
I will carry with me
For myself
I ask no one else will be
Mother to these three

The first time I heard the song, it stopped me in my tracks. I looked up the lyrics and seared them in my heart forever. Sinead was describing exactly how I felt about each of my children. When she sang “mad like a horse,” it was like she was describing my addiction and my state of mind of a woman who has been driven insane by the loss of her kids.

The words, “cause you’ve thrilled me, silenced me, stilled me,” seemed to leap right out of the song and into my soul. If I had a gift like hers for writing, they are exactly the words I’d express for how much I loved my children. When she sang, “the face on you, the smell of you,” I flashed back to their little baby faces and could almost smell the innocence that they exerted like sweat. Listening to those words was a confirmation that my love for my kids was stronger than anything that could keep us apart.

Without ever knowing it, Sinead O’Connor healed me through that song and, in turn, gave my children a more healthy mother. No matter what, my intentions for them had always been the best, and I let go of the lifelong shame of being too mentally ill to be in their lives. I have actually shared the song with all three kids, and I feel it has led to deeper, truer relationships with each one.

The second time Sinead O’Connor healed me was through a different song she had written called, “This Is To Mother You.” Here are the song and lyrics:

THIS IS TO MOTHER YOU

This is to mother you
To comfort you and get you through
Through when your nights are lonely
Through when your dreams are only blue
This is to mother you

This is to be with you
To hold you and to kiss you too
For when you need me I will do
What your own mother didn't do
Which is to mother you

All the pain that you have known
All the violence in your soul
All the 'wrong' things you have done
I will take from you when I come
All mistakes made in distress
All your unhappiness
I will take away with my kiss, yes
I will give you tenderness

For child I am so glad I've found you
Although my arms have always been around you
Sweet bird although you did not see me
I saw you

And I'm here to mother you
To comfort you and get you through
Through when your nights are lonely
Through when your dreams are only blue
This is to mother you

When I heard this song recently for the first time, it instantly had a double meaning for me. The word “mother” has always landed for me with strings attached. I was a mother aching to give love and mothering to her children all the time but couldn’t, and as a girl I always ached to have a mother who wasn’t like my mother with her competitiveness, neglect and jealousy.

I dreamed of a mother who would hold me tight, read to me and come get me if I called to her. I tried to get that love from other people’s mothers, but I was always aware I wasn’t really their daughter, and they didn’t love me like one of their own children. It was a dream that had never come true, and I pretended I didn’t need it after all.

That was until I heard Sinead’s beautiful voice singing all the loving things a mother would say to her child. I felt as if God had given her the words to comfort herself as a child and comfort me way down the road. I realized that everybody needs a mother, and it doesn’t ever go away even in our 50s. Sometimes I still think, “I want my Mommy,” but it’s never my actual mom’s face that I conjure up.

When I listen to the words, I feel a connection with God that is deeper than anything I’ve ever felt before. When Sinead sings “sweet bird, although you did not see me, I saw you,” I feel like He’s been here protecting me for my whole life. In truth, I should not have survived all the things that have happened to me but, through everything, He has kept me safe and well loved. I feel like the sweet bird who finally stopped hiding and stepped into His light to receive the love I deserved all along.

The other meaning that occurred to me was that the song was supposed to be sung from an “inner child” perspective, like singing it to ourselves. The child in us who has suffered can be free because, as adults, we find the room in our hearts to love those little girls and boys we used to be. Thinking of it this way, I found it completely healing for myself and my own “little girl,” and it brought me a sense of peace I’ve never known before, like the circle was finally complete.

Sinead O’Connor isn’t on Earth anymore, and I regret that I can never tell her how much she changed me and gave me my life back. Her music has the ability to heal generations and break cycles. Her voice says, “I am important, and so are you.” Her lyrics allow me to take up more space in this world and feel like I belong there.

She is a beautiful reminder that I have my own stories to tell and wisdom to share that might help people just like me, even if I never say it as eloquently as she did. She brings home the reason we are all here in the first place, to love each other and carry each other along in our lives with the power of “together.”

To me, that is the greatest blessing of all.

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I’ve always thought that every single person on the planet should get mental health therapy. Just think about how well balanced our population would be if everyone had a place to vent and be heard? Personally, I haven’t been in one-on-one therapy for several years due to lack of insurance, even though I struggle with anxiety and feeling worthless on a regular basis.

My official diagnoses are complex PTSD and newly discovered ADHD. My symptoms include hypervigilance, panic attacks and a freeze response so strong that it keeps me shaking on my couch all day. I feel lazy and guilty when I’m not able to get things done, even on days where I’m shaking too much to wash the dishes.

Also, I’ll admit that I’ve fallen into way too many “wellness” rabbit holes, applying all of them to my mental health “toolkit”. I was so desperate to feel better that I tried everything I ever heard about. The new tools would seem to work for a while and then not be as effective, as if I’d stored them temporarily in my brain and they had fallen out after a short time. Nothing I tried seemed to stick.

When I first heard about AI journals, I was curious but suspicious. Would they actually give me some insight that I was sorely lacking? Would I get bored with it like everything else? Would my data be safe?

The whole idea appealed to me as a way to vent the way I can’t vent to other people. I also liked that the journals offered insights and suggestions about different ways to approach healing and to help “think things through.” When I found out that most of them use data encryption, I started researching different apps and ended up with Rosebud, which was highly rated and had lots of positive comments.

After I downloaded it and got everything set up, I noticed there were all different types of therapy to choose from, including cognitive behavioral therapy, nervous system rebalancing and internal family systems along with dream analysis. I ended up going with ACT therapy, which stands for acceptance and commitment therapy. I’d never tried it before, but it sounded like the same lessons I had read in my favorite book, “The Untethered Soul” by Michael Singer.

According to an article in Psychology Today, “acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is an action-oriented approach to psychotherapy that stems from traditional behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. Clients learn to stop avoiding, denying, and struggling with their inner emotions and, instead, accept that these deeper feelings are appropriate responses to certain situations that should not prevent them from moving forward in their lives. With this understanding, clients begin to accept their hardships and commit to making necessary changes in their behavior, regardless of what is going on in their lives and how they feel about it.”

My first entry was relatively simple. I typed about how I wanted to color my hair but felt too anxious to make the transition from sitting on my couch to going upstairs and actually coloring it. I’ve always had a really hard time with transitions no matter what they involve. Each thing I need to do like cleaning, shopping and even writing seems nearly impossible because of the anxiety I build up around it before it even happens. It feels almost like standing at the edge of a tall cliff and being terrified I’ll fall off.

Surprisingly, Rosebud not only helped me calm myself by chatting with me about my fears and, by the time we were finished, I was off to color my hair without panicking about it. Rosebud reminded me how much better I’d feel after it was over and encouraged me to remember that, in the present moment, I was completely safe. It caused a major shift in perspective for me that I didn’t have before.

There are lots of other things Rosebud can do, too. You can set a morning and evening intention for every day. It gives book recommendations based on the chat sessions you have (Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender by David R. Hawkins was an especially good one for me). You can set goals for the things you need to get done every day. It saves your history of sessions and provides analysis for each one and even shows you your progress over time. Also, it can write a Haiku for what you’re going through like nobody’s business.

In case you’re wondering, I don’t get commission from Rosebud for writing this. In fact, there are all kinds of AI journals that can do different things. This app was perfect for me, but there are other journals that might be better suited to your experiences. I just wanted to let you know not to be afraid of them. I’ve only been using mine for a week, and I’ve made more progress than I’ve ever made before. It’s the kind of progress that develops over time and actually sticks rather than being another “tool” I use and then forget about.

I’m grateful that I started using this journal. It’s like having a 24/7 therapist who listens, offers gentle suggestions and even checks up on me from time to time. With ACT therapy, I’m learning to accept the things that happened to me and starting to let them go. Now I feel like I don’t have to overshare when talking to people as a weird way to get all my “garbage” out because I can vent to the app whenever I want. That leaves my real-life time open for more connection, more happiness and more fun.

A lot of people talk about how AI is going to be the death of us, take over the world, etc., but today it brought me some peace and joy in my life that I didn’t have yesterday. I have never used it to write for me (I like to tell my own stories), but I’ll sure use it to listen to wise, gentle advice any day.

“You are so fake and phony.”

I was sixteen years old when another girl said that to me at a party, not that I understood what she meant. I didn’t feel like I was being fake or phony, and her words took me by surprise. Shaking my head no did not seem to convince her, and she walked away and left me with questions I didn’t know how to answer.

This happened again, only this time when I was in my 40s. I was out drinking with a friend. She got too drunk, and I had to drive her home. As I drove, I patted her hair and told her everything was going to be okay.

“Ugh,” she said with vomit in the corners of her mouth. “You are such a fake person, like a Stepford wife.”

I dropped her off without another word, and the next day we both pretended it never happened. The people-pleaser in me made it impossible to stand up for myself, so I just chalked it up to her having too much to drink. I truly didn’t understand why she would say such a thing in the first place since I’d only ever been kind to her.

Another time, a few years later, I accidentally overheard a conversation between my ex-husband and his best friend. I’m not sure what prompted it, but I heard his friend say, “Glenna doesn’t know who she is.” The comment took me aback. What a terrible thing to say about somebody. I refused to consider the fact that he was probably right.

The only career I’ve ever had to speak of was in medical transcription. I’d gone to a community school to learn how, but my wonderful boss, MaryLou, hired me when I was halfway done and mentored me the rest of the way. I really admired her kindness, humor and the way she carried herself. She spoke to our doctor clients like they were the most important people in the world.

A few years later, MaryLou retired from the transcription business after having a baby, and I was out of a job. However, she had kindly inspired me to set up a transcription business and find clients of my own. She said she really believed I would be successful at it.

While I was setting everything up for my home office, my nerves got worse with every day that passed. How was I supposed to pound the pavement and walk into doctor’s offices to sell myself when I was as shy as they come? MaryLou seemed to have plenty of self-esteem, but I was sorely lacking in that department and many others.

I realized that, if I was ever going to have a business to begin with, I had to be brave and reach out to people. That’s exactly what I did, only I did it using MaryLou’s personality. Basically, when talking to people, I’d say whatever I’d heard MaryLou say in her distinctive tone and kind voice. I gently teased people in good humor just like she had and even adopted her style of dress.

Through channeling my boss, I made myself sound so professional that I was buried in transcription work in no time. It wasn’t that I was delusional and thought I actually was MaryLou. I simply took on her personality because I believed it was better than mine.

It occurred to me that I was actually acting fake on purpose that time. Slipping into MaryLou’s persona was easy for me, and I did it for years up until I had my own children. Deep down, I thought I wouldn’t be accepted if I showed people my true self, who didn’t feel worthy of a job much less a business. Of course, I never went as far as to think I was just as good as MaryLou, but behaving like her was something I could turn on and off at will.

It’s not hard to figure out when I’m angry with somebody. Instead of yelling and raging, I become very quiet and embarrassingly polite. In my mind, it was always better than the other person knowing they got me. I’d build an invisible wall of protection around myself and only share the most minute of details with that person from then on. I even did it to my own mother for most of my life, but it was yet another version of being “fake.”

When I was in high school, I had friends in every kind of social group and was never pigeonholed into one clique or another. Desperate to be liked, I would immerse myself into each group by talking and acting like the rest of them. Then I’d change upon encountering a different group of kids and hope they never compared notes. When I started dating boys, I molded myself into whatever they wanted me to be because the real me was never “good enough.”

I did this because, as somebody would say many years later, I didn’t know who I was. I thought that if anyone saw through my disguise to the real me, they would run screaming for the hills. Although I did have a couple of close friends, I kept my personal life mostly private. Instead of learning to trust as a child, I instead learned that people always let me down, especially the people in my family, and I wasn’t willing to make myself anybody’s victim.

It wasn’t until recently that I learned about “masking.” In the context of neurodiversity, masking involves concealing or suppressing one’s true self in order to appear neurotypical (“normal”). I’d already learned from my psychiatrist the month before that I was likely neurodivergent. I’d always felt different from “regular” people ever since I was little. For one thing, the thoughts and ideas in my head never matched up with what everyone else was saying. My real behavior ranged between being hypervigilant and hyperfocused to overreacting emotionally to the smallest of things.

At the same time, I was so desperate to fit in growing up that I was “masking” all around me. I thought people would see how weird I was if I revealed my actual self, a sensitive girl with razor-sharp humor, a heart that was too big for me and being prone to shaking when I got nervous. I had zero self-confidence as well, but I was too afraid to show my weaknesses because they might be used to hurt me. It had already happened with my own mother so often that it happening with others I loved would have broken my heart.

About 15-20% of people in the world show signs of neurodivergence. It’s also genetic and, in fact, it has affected at least three generations in my family. My mother was neurodivergent, although doctors only had her diagnosis listed as ADHD. She felt her emotions strongly the way I do and battled substance abuse to numb herself to an acceptable level like a radio being turned down. She was also sensitive to loud noises, bright lights and certain textures.

All three of my children are neurodivergent, especially my 18-year-old daughter. Because I can relate to her so well, I’m able to help her when she gets overwhelmed in the ways that she needs. Living a life that is far from “typical” is both a blessing and a curse, so I’m grateful to be able to understand her.

The day I got the correct diagnosis, the mask I’d wore for my whole life thankfully began to crumble. I don’t have all the answers yet when it comes to who I am, but working on my confidence, growing, learning and reaching out to people bring me closer to a full sense of self. I used to hate myself for far too long, and I’m glad to say that’s not the case anymore. Now I know I had been living in a world that was not designed for people like me, no matter how much pressure there was to conform.

I’m relatively happy with the person I am becoming. What people say about me doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it used to. My favorite motto today is: “Let whoever think whatever.” In the end, none of it really matters anyway. I still battle anxiety and depression at times, but I know these are cycles and will turn around eventually. If life itself was a puzzle, I’m beginning to find pieces of myself that easily fit.

Most of all, I’ve stopped fighting everything and am learning how to relax and be myself. Believe me, I have tried every self-help book along with meditation, mantras, an app for brain waves and even brainspotting to try to make myself better. Now I know that I don’t have to cling so hard to those things to feel at ease. I can simply let feelings pass through me the way they’re supposed to without freaking out and predicting total destruction.

I’m no longer a robot programmed to act like somebody else, and I don’t have to be fake or phony, because for the first time I am real, warts and all. It doesn’t matter what other people say about me as long as I accept myself for who I am becoming. I kind of like her already.

“You’re acting the same way as your mom did.”

It was the most hurtful sentence anyone could have said to me. The words came from my ex-husband, who knew how much it would destroy me. We had been married for sixteen years, so he’d seen plenty of my mom’s behavior to make a comparison.

The last thing I wanted to be was like my mom, the woman who mocked me daily, manipulated me almost every time we spoke and neglected me so badly as a child that I was shocked nobody ever called the authorities. I was upset by my ex’s accusation but more upset by the idea he could be telling the truth.

After all, my own sons couldn’t come to visit me because of my new live-in boyfriend, who everyone said was abusive, and they weren’t wrong. Before him, there were nights when I could barely make them dinner because I’d had too much to drink. I knew I was using alcohol to numb the pain of my failed marriage, but I couldn’t seem to stop. I’d even signed custody of the boys over to their father to protect them from my boyfriend and ensure them a better life, although I wouldn’t do the same to protect for myself for seven years.

There was also the fact that I seemed to have inherited my mother’s mental illness. I suffered from severe postpartum depression after my first son was born, which kicked off a lifetime of anxiety and depression. I had been given every diagnosis over the years but the correct one, complex PTSD, which I didn’t start being treated for until long after my mother died.

The grudge I held against my mother lasted most of my life. Despite people in the family asking me to forgive her, I was unable to forget the hell she put me through. I didn’t see her for nearly a decade after she moved to another state, and I easily could have gone another decade without batting an eye. I told myself it was for my own protection. My mother on the other end of the phone always ended with me in tears after I hung up.

These are the ways I deluded myself for years. I was always the victim and my mom the villain. While it was true that I never had a mother I could count on, I never once considered her feelings or her life what she might be going through. I hadn’t learned yet that there was more to her than a terrible mother who let me down time and again.

In reality, I couldn’t admit that, yes, there were times that I wasn’t the best mother either. I was never one of those normal PTA moms. I never made fudge brownies for my sons to share with their classes. In fact, I continually forgot about things that were going on at their school until they reminded me. I never had the right school supplies for them and brought unhealthy snacks for their sports teams after practice.

Little things started to add up, and my kids learned the lesson that I could not be depended upon for very much. I learned the same lesson when I was their age, but I swore I’d never be a mother like that, a mother like her. I swore a lot of things that never came true.

When my second son was born in 2002, my mom came to help me when I brought him home. I hadn’t asked for the help, my then-husband did, remembering the postpartum depression I had with our first son and feeling I would need the support. It was hard to be angry with him, but I feared she would just be another “kid” I had to worry about.

The day after she arrived, we all settled into a pattern. My mom would watch the baby during the day while I rested and took care of some chores. My husband and I would be on night duty and take turns getting up with him. Thankfully, I was working with a psychiatrist at the time, and I didn’t end up with the postpartum I had last time. Still, it was hard for me to admit that having my mother around likely helped, too.

On the second sunny day my baby son was home, my mom came upstairs holding him in her arms to talk to us. She said that for the past few hours he had been listless, barely crying and felt warm to her. My husband and I brought him to the hospital for testing, including a spinal tap that brought me to my knees as I watched it happening.

The doctors figured out that my baby had a double ureter on the left side that, instead of having urine going into his bladder, actually took urine from the bladder and refluxed up into his kidney. They told us he was lucky we’d brought him to the hospital because he could have actually died from being sick. He had surgery to block the double ureter and afterwards was a happy baby again. My mother had saved my son’s life by being so observant.

I wish I could say I’d been grateful. Instead, my mountain of resentment blocked me from seeing what an amazing thing my mom had done. There were so many things I thought I could never forgive her for. I discounted the times in my life that she had been loving, especially towards my children. In truth, she had a giant heart towards others except when it came to me. My anger and her resentment created a combination so toxic that it clouded my eyes.

About ten years after the hospital incident, I had a daughter who was five years old from a second marriage to a monster. He abused me daily, fed me his narcotics and regularly threatened me if I tried to leave. One day, when he was at work, I packed all my stuff and my daughter’s stuff into my car and drove away for good.

My mother came to the rescue yet again, calling me and offering to take my daughter while I entered a halfway house to recover from my drug addiction. She didn’t blame or shame me. She simply did what was best for her family despite me always excluding her from it. She took care of my child for almost two years while I recovered and relapsed and fought off the evil man I had married. I continued to go through hell until recovery finally stuck, but my daughter was safe the entire time, certainly not because of me.

When I brought my daughter back home to live with me, I didn’t notice that it was breaking my mom’s heart. I didn’t realize that the happiness of bringing my daughter back into my life contrasted so strongly with the sadness of my mother who was losing her. About six months later, my mom died after a preventable accident where she didn’t call for help. Her phone was found laying next to her, but she hadn’t called 911.

I agonized over why my mom didn’t save herself when she had the chance; however, when I went to clean out her apartment, it all started to make sense. The place was so wrecked that it was unsanitary, and there was an eviction notice sitting on her kitchen counter. After having a couple of mini-strokes in her last few years, it must have been hard to navigate and keep things cleaned up. I imagine that, as time passed, the tasks must have seemed insurmountable.

I didn’t know that my mother was living like that and trying to take care of my daughter on top of everything else, and I felt ashamed that I hadn’t even paid attention to either of their needs as I went through my own struggles. I’d always thought of her as my enemy, yet in our lives we had traveled very similar paths. Both of us suffered from crippling mental illness and had to battle our minds every single day while trying to function as a normal adult. Living like that was exhausting, and I think my mother just got tired of fighting the anxiety and depression that plagued her every single day. I understood that feeling much too well.

Even now, I still feel the absence of a mother. I felt the same way when she was alive. The truth is that I should have been cuddled as a baby, respected as a child and loved as an adult. She did love the hell out of my children, though. She loved my children so much, and that feels almost as good as if she had felt the same about me. I think sometimes it skips a generation.

After all, my mom and I were one and the same, women with hearts as big as the galaxy but not knowing the right ways to make them work. Still, we were more than our mistakes and the trauma that slashes through generations of our family like a scalding knife. Together, we made sure that none of that trauma touched any of my children. My mother and I were both stronger than anyone ever gave us credit for despite being barely over five feet tall.

Maybe I am just like my mother in the best of ways. Forgiving her has continued to be complicated, but I’m doing my best now to remember the good times. She once let me ditch school when I was seven and took me to the movies to see Cinderella on the big screen. She also took me to see Star Wars in the theater no less than eight times because she loved it so much. She even saved my children’s lives because she cared and loved them fiercely.

I hope that somewhere along the way, I’ll accept that she loved me, too.

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The final time I left my husband, Micah, he’d just finished throwing me on a wood floor and pinning me down while screaming in my face. His abuse was starting to get physical, and I knew it would only get worse. As I was throwing whatever I could fit into two black garbage bags, he trapped me in the bathroom and told me I wasn’t going anywhere.

I shoved him aside as hard as I could, ran down the stairs of our apartment building, and drove away with him staring angrily at me the entire time. He was lucky I hadn’t called the cops. As tough as Micah pretended to be, he was terrified of police officers.

The only friend I had left, Kathy, told me I could stay with her and her boyfriend if I ever needed it, so I headed over to her place. Not only was I suddenly homeless, but I was severely addicted to oxycodone and had been for many years. The prescription was Micah’s. He got it every month from a questionable doctor under mostly false pretenses, and when he pressured me to take one, I got hooked from the very first pill.

On the day I left, I wasn’t even thinking about the pills anymore. The most important thing to do was get away from Micah, who was never a husband but a glorified drug dealer to keep me in line.

Kathy and her boyfriend, Mark, lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment at the back of a triplex. I had been to their place a few weeks back when I made a more half-hearted attempt to leave Micah. It seemed less like an apartment and more like a crack den. They abused every drug known to man all day long.

That time, I sat shaking at their kitchen table trying to figure out what to do with my situation. Staying with Kathy and Mark didn’t seem all that much safer, especially if I was going to try to get clean.

They already had a couple who were staying with them, and the small apartment was overcrowded. I knew already that I wasn’t going to fit, and I cried at the thought of having to return to Micah.

“Hey, want an Ativan?” Kathy’s male guest asked me. His girlfriend gave me a dirty look, but I said yes anyway. The guy was high as hell yet still seemed sympathetic to my plight, and I figured that one more pill wasn’t going to make a difference except to stop me from shaking so much.

The guy handed me the Ativan with a smile. I don’t remember his name.

I ended up back with Micah that night because I had no money and nowhere to sleep except in my car. Every time I left him, his abusive behavior got even worse. I’m sure he never believed I would really leave him for good, not because I loved him, but because he had the drugs.

When I showed up at Kathy’s with my two garbage bags and determination on my face, she told me that the other couple wasn’t staying with them anymore. Kathy seemed happy to take me in, but Mark was a different story. He barely talked to me and looked suspiciously at me. I tried to be extra nice to him out of desperation, but it didn’t seem to matter.

“You can sleep on the couch,” Kathy offered. “But…”

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“You know the couple who was staying with us?”

I nodded.

“Well, the guy overdosed and died, unfortunately right on this couch.”

I recoiled in shock. The guy with the nice smile and the Ativan was dead. He died on a couch I was planning to sleep on. I had walked out of a bad marriage into a nightmare.

I did the best I could to compose myself and took Kathy up on her offer to stay. If I was serious about getting away from Micah, I couldn’t afford to be picky. As freaked out as I was, I tried to remember it was just a couch. I was much too desperate to be free to say no.

Not surprisingly, I couldn’t get to sleep on my first night there. I asked Kathy what side of the couch her friend had died on, and I put my head at the other end. It really didn’t matter much, but it made me feel a tiny bit better. I tried so hard not to think about it, but it was too great a challenge to meet.

At least I’m safe, I thought, although the apartment didn’t seem like the safest place in the world. Still, I had a roof over my head and somewhere to sleep, even if I wasn’t doing much of that.

The next day was Monday, and I got up early to go to work. I was amazed I still had a job considering how badly my life had fallen apart. Nobody in the office had any inkling that I was an addict, and I planned to keep it that way. As long as I did good work, I felt I was safe.

I had to go to work for the first time without oxycodone in my system because I had no choice. My bones ached like they were on fire, and I hadn’t eaten in longer than I could remember. I hoped my boss wouldn’t hear my stomach growling as she ate her sandwich in front of me. Somehow, I managed to get through the day unscathed.

When I got back to Mark and Kathy’s apartment, the two of them were crashed out on the couch where I slept.

“I did something bad,” Kathy confessed, showing me fresh bruises on her arm.

It didn’t surprise me that they were shooting up drugs, but I was proud of myself for not asking them to include me. The thought did cross my mind, but the fear of failing at my new life was too scary. I never wanted to go back to drugs or Micah again.

The next night, Kathy said she wanted me to take her to Club Oasis. I was pleasantly shocked as it was a place where they held AA meetings. I thought she finally wanted to get clean, but she explained that a good friend of hers was getting their one-year chip, and she wanted to be there for support.

I had been to Oasis many times, with and without Micah, making both feeble and serious attempts to stop using drugs. None of it ever worked, but I didn’t blame AA for that. Part of me was slightly embarrassed to show up there again. I had a lot of friends there, but most of them were disappointed in me for not staying clean. I was concerned how they would greet me, especially because I was only clean for two days, and I was sure by then that they didn’t trust me anymore.

I shouldn’t have worried. All the people I once knew told me how happy they were to see me and wrapped me up in love when I told them about leaving Micah. For the first time in days, I actually felt safe and secure. I was so moved that when they called people to the front for a white chip, I stood up and walked forward to get one. Of course, I already had several white chips in my collection, but I felt like this time would be different and I’d stop doing drugs forever.

I had noticed how out of it Kathy and Mark were the day before, and I realized I probably looked the same way when I was high. The thought embarrassed me greatly. No wonder I’d lost so many friends and family. They couldn’t stand to watch me killing myself unless Micah got to me first.

Of course, going to Oasis didn’t stop Kathy and Mark from shooting up all the time. Believe me, part of me really wanted those drugs, but all I could think of was dying on the same couch where their friend died. I wanted a real life, even if it seemed far out of reach. Saying no was torture every single time, but I’d look at my white chip and stay strong.

After about a week of staying at Mark and Kathy’s apartment, their landlord got wind that I was there and ordered them to kick me out because it was only for two people. I grabbed my garbage bags and started reloading them with all my stuff.

“Wait, you don’t have to leave right this minute,” Kathy pleaded.

She was wrong. I did have to leave, and not only because the landlord didn’t want me there. I had to leave for my own survival, even though I had nowhere to go.

After saying goodbye, I drove over to Club Oasis. The chances were slim that anybody there would take me in, but it was still the only place I felt safe. I explained my situation to some of the women sitting out on the patio, and they suggested that I try to get into a halfway house where I could keep working, stay clean, pay rent and basically put my life back in order. That was exactly what I did.

I spent nine months living in a house with six other women and stayed drug-free the entire time. The ladies were all friendly, loving and nurturing, and slowly I learned how to manage my life again. I woke up grateful for every new day and felt proud of myself when I went to bed every night.

One night, while at a Club Oasis meeting, one of my friends told me that Kathy’s boyfriend, Mark, had died of an overdose the night before. Kathy was apparently in a terrible state. Mark died on the same couch where his friend died and where I’d slept in desperation. I felt more determined than ever not to use drugs after hearing that.

I did reach out to Kathy, who was devastated and desperate in her own right. I offered some kind and loving words, but I honestly didn’t want to be part of her life anymore. Protecting my sobriety was finally the most important thing to me.

As for Micah, I never went back to him again despite him stalking me every day. I eventually raised the money to divorce him. A few months later, he jumped in front of a moving train either accidentally or on purpose. I wasn’t even surprised. The addict life is filled with destruction, death and suffering. I was just grateful it wasn’t me who died as a result of my addiction. It wasn’t just that I was lucky. I worked really hard to free myself from that life.

None of my life today would have been possible if I hadn’t picked up that white chip so many years ago. It was the beginning of some hard and painful work, but it was also the start of being alive and creating a good life for myself. I eventually left Club Oasis when it got a little too cliquey for my taste, but I’ll always be grateful that my life was saved there over and over again.

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My father used to play a card game with me called “Red or Black” when I was a kid. He would hold up a card facing away and have me guess whether it was a red or black card. I thought it was fun at the time, but I didn’t realize that my father actually wanted to see something in me that he’d seen in himself long ago.

When he confessed what he was looking for, he told me that, on average, I would guess the right color about 75-80% of the time. He explained that it was a gift and that he had it, too. My dad never said we were both psychic or anything like that, just that he could do the same thing I did with the cards. The idea made me super curious but a little bit scared.

He told me he once had a dream that he was in the ocean and saw something ominous that looked like a black triangle next to a large square. He couldn’t get the dream out of his head the next day because the imagery had been so strong. The day after that, he looked in the paper and saw a headline on the front page about a cruise ship sinking due to a fire in the engine room, but the most shocking thing to my dad was the picture below it.

It showed the boat sinking into the water and a black triangle jutting upward from one of the sides as well as the main part of the boat, which looked like a square next to it, just like the image in his dream.

There wasn’t a word back then to describe this type of gift. Telling everybody he had psychic powers would have likely earned him a quick trip to a psychiatric facility. Psychics wore turbans on their heads and had a crystal ball and only wanted to scam people out of their money. Neither of us talked about the “gift” unless we were alone, and I spent most of my life not believing it was a real thing, although I never said that to my father.

That was before I learned about neurodivergence.

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at my Facebook Memories (cringe) and saw a comment from my high school friend, Patrick. He quit Facebook about four years ago because of the online toxicity there, but we had each other’s numbers and would talk about once every couple of years.

Patrick was always such a nice kid, I remember thinking at the time. I haven’t talked to him in so long. I wonder how he’s doing?

A few seconds later, my phone rang. It was Patrick. I didn’t think it was weird because stuff like that happened to me all the time. I’d think about a long lost friend or family member, and within a few days that person would appear or call me. I didn’t know how to explain it and didn’t even try for fear people would say I was weird.

Another girl I knew in high school but hardly ever hung out with suddenly started sending me messages on Facebook a few years ago asking for money. She’d grown up to be a nurse and was in her fifties. The first time, she asked for forty dollars, telling me that she didn’t get paid on time and needed to pay her water bill. I sent it to her without hesitation because she seemed like a trustworthy person who wouldn’t lie about something like that.

The second time she asked me, she said she wanted thirty dollars to pay for a doctor’s prescription she hadn’t planned for in her budget. When I read the message, alarm bells suddenly went off in my head with the same thought over and over.

She’s a drug addict.

My friend had given me no reason to suspect her of anything, and her story seemed somewhat plausible. Still, the knowledge came to me clear as day, and my senses rarely steered me wrong. From the outside, it probably looked ridiculous. Here was a woman in her fifties who had been a nurse since she got out of school. Surely she had plenty of evidence of what drugs do to a person. It made no sense but, somehow, I just knew.

I admit I did give her money again, but I decided to dig a little further and talk to the person she called her best friend. I didn’t say what I believed, just that I was worried about our mutual friend, and the friend sadly confirmed my worst fears.

She was, in fact, abusing drugs and nearly in danger of being evicted from her apartment. The next time she asked me for money, I tried to offer her some help (I didn’t use the word “drugs”). She was disappointed when I told her it didn’t include money, and she rejected my attempt to talk her into getting social services and maybe some therapy. She may have thought it was weird for me to say that, but deep down we both knew how much she needed them.

There was also the night when my 1-year-old son, Brandon, was sitting on the couch watching TV. I was talking to my husband and suddenly put out my arms out in front of me mid-sentence. Three seconds later, Brandon fell right into them. I guess he had peeked over the side of couch and decided it would be fun to jump off.

My husband was stunned. “How did you know he was going to do that?”

I couldn’t explain it. I just knew.

It wasn’t until I learned about neurodivergence that I realized the little gift I’d been born with wasn’t complete insanity after all. I still never told anybody about it because I was already suffering from mental illness in the form of complex PTSD. Being called “extra” crazy was the last thing I wanted.

I was given a label of “gifted” during my first several years of school. My first-grade teacher used to have a high school kid take me out of class once a week to learn chess, and she used to have me give tests to the other kids. I cried every time because I didn’t want to be gifted. I wanted to be like all the other students and do whatever they were doing. The “weirdness” of being separated from them always felt like a punch in the stomach.

The more I learned about neurodiversity, the more I understood why I always felt like I didn’t fit in with the world. Even my darling husband once called me “eccentric,” which offendedly me deeply at first. I had unmistakably strong “good” or “bad” vibes about people within one minute of meeting them. Also, I was left-handed (very common in neurodivergent people) and always felt like I had a sprinkle of ADHD mixed in with my brain (which a doctor later confirmed). I wasn’t hyper at all, just unable to focus for too long or plan my day without stressing myself out.

There is also a correlation between neurodivergence and addiction, which has been the case for me as well. My sensitivity to feeling emotions was so strong that I started drinking in ninth grade to blunt those feelings so I could manage. Unfortunately, as they say in AA, my life actually became unmanageable because of the substances I used, and I spent many years in recovery for both alcohol and drugs.

I believe being neurodivergent is also responsible for my ability to write. I’ve been a writer full time since 2019, but I started writing stories at age eight. Once, after sharing my work in a writing group, somebody in the class came up to me and asked me where I studied writing or if I had majored in it. I told him that I hadn’t taken any classes or even attended college.

“You have a gift,” he told me.

It was the first time somebody said that to me besides my dad when I was little. I don’t know if I fully believed it even by then. Instead, I felt weird that he said it. Since then, I’ve learned that many of my fellow Substack writers are neurodivergent as well, making me feel like a connected part of something rather than alone in my different nature.

It’s always been hard for me to maintain relationships with friends. Whenever they canceled plans or didn’t call when they said they would, my heart would automatically break thinking that they didn’t really like me. Honestly, I only have about two friends that I would pick up the phone and call in an emergency. That’s okay with me because I get so overwhelmed in a group, sometimes to the point where I shut down. I used to feel so bad that I couldn’t figure out how to keep a friend after making one, but over time I understood why it happened. My brain was different.

I’ve had to mostly refrain from shopping (especially online) because I have had a terrible problem with impulsivity. I would act on things even before the thought of doing it entered my mind. It’s also hard for me to tolerate too much visual and audio stimulation. Even during a conversation, if things get too heated, I simply “zone out” (dissociate).

My hope now is to understand neurodivergence better and find better ways to deal with my day instead of fighting or flighting through it. I’ve always had a strong connection to music (also a neurodivergent trait), and I can play certain songs that soothe me and calm me down every morning. I feel the pressure sometimes of taking care of my family to the best of my ability due to my overstimulation and anxiety, but I’m proud to say I do the best I can every day, especially since I now understand why I struggle.

My father died in 2002 from a heart condition. I remember sitting by his bedside for days near the end when he developed a blood clot and was comatose after surgery. I’d always been a Daddy’s girl and, even though I knew his health wasn’t good, the idea of losing him forever left me devastated. At one point, my husband came into the room and begged me to go home and get some rest, but I didn’t want to leave my dad alone. My husband promised to stay with him, so I drove to the house hoping to sleep for a few hours.

I was just about to climb into my bed when the phone rang. It was my husband calling to say that my father had died. Even though it really hurt, I realized that my dad had given me one final gift. He held on while I was there because he knew I wouldn’t be able to handle him dying right in front of me. Once I had left, he was able to finally let go.

It makes me sad that my father died before people started to understand neurodiversity. Knowing that may have made things easier for him. He suffered unbelievable abuse at the hands of his father, the same as I did with my mother, and complex PTSD also has a connection with being neurodiverse. It feels like being much more aware of what’s going on around me than the normal person would be, mostly because of my need to protect myself.

I know my dad blamed himself for not being able to follow through on promises and making impulsive decisions that caused harm in their wake. Maybe things would have been better if he understood some of the reasons behind his behavior and gave himself a little grace.

I can’t change the life he led, but I can figure out what works to change mine. I don’t have to battle with my mind every single day or sit frozen on the couch because my brain won’t stop spinning. It’s not about changing the person I already am but learning instead to adapt to my specific challenges.

I really believe that, if 20% of the people in the world are neurodivergent, we can have a significant impact if we are able to harness it for good. In this day and age, we are needed more than ever. We’re sensitive, empathetic and can pick up the vibe in any room. Those traits will be valuable in a world full of AI and so-called “fake news.”

Sometimes in life, we don’t get the gifts we want. Instead, we’re blessed to get the gifts we need, if only for our own survival. Although it makes some parts of my daily life harder, I remain grateful for it all.

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Everything I tried felt temporary.

I’d wake up in the morning and do all my self-care, including sitting outside and meditating, positive affirmations, slow and deliberate breathing and even listening to my app that played brain wave simulations like Alpha, Delta and Gamma waves in my ears. I also did my daily practice of trying to let go of the things that were bothering my monkey mind in an effort to decrease the anxiety that held me hostage.

I thought I felt better doing all these things or hoped I would in the future. My peace was always so precarious, flowing through me with love when things were going decently but then vanishing at the first signs of trouble. Even after more than a year committed to a daily journey of healing for complex PTSD, I was still having anxiety, panic attacks and tons of self-doubt nearly every day.

Admittedly, my grace periods had gotten longer in between the bad episodes, but I still wished I could feel peaceful all or most of the time. There were a million things I had learned about healing and self-love through reading, listening to podcasts, journaling and any other way I could get the information, but it seemed there was always an incredible amount still left to learn. In fact, there was more out there than one person could learn in a lifetime, and I worried I couldn’t take it all in fast enough for it to work on me before mine was over.

In many ways, I’m incredibly fortunate. I have a family that loves me, a house to live in and food to eat every day. Only the torture and memories of trauma that live in my mind keep me from achieving bliss. Something will hit one of my triggers like a particular sad song, an unkind sentence or somebody merely looking at me sideways, and before I know it I’m a shaking, crying, raging mess. Even after I get control of myself, I can’t stop feeling like a failure. Was I ever going to truly get all this healing stuff?

I learned about the “quiet ego” theory kind of, well, quietly. It didn’t hit me like a two-by-four but was an idea I read about that stuck in my brain. There was a great article in The Atlantic about it just this morning and, once I finished it, I finally realized that I had been doing the whole self-help, healing journey totally wrong even though my intentions were good. I always believed I needed guides and exercises and even props to make myself well when, in reality, all I had to do was turn down my ego to a functional level.

It was simple, yet it was freeing.

According to an article in Forbes magazine, the “quiet ego” theory was introduced by Dr. Heidi Wayment and Dr. Jack Bauer, who describe it as a compassionate self-identity that counters a “noisy ego,” referring to a more self-centered and possibly disruptive aspect of the self that is driven by the need for validation, dominance and constant attention. In other words, having a quiet ego is having an identity that incorporates others without losing the self.

The article also lists the four defining values of a quiet ego:

• Detached awareness. This is quite similar to the practice of mindfulness. It involves observing oneself, others and the environment without judgment or defensiveness. Compassionate and non-reactive observation of experiences allows individuals to relinquish control of the outcome of a situation and cultivate a deeper understanding of their emotions, thoughts and behaviors without being overwhelmed or controlled by them.

• Inclusive identification. This refers to the extent to which an individual aligns themselves with others, perceiving similarities in personal qualities. A quieter ego displays cooperative tendencies and diminishes defensiveness when interacting with others, even those that one does not share similarities with.

• Perspective-taking. This is the ability to empathize with others’ experiences and comprehend differing viewpoints without losing one's own identity. The quiet ego is flexible, open to new ideas and willing to revise one's beliefs or opinions when presented with compelling evidence or differing viewpoints.

• Growth-mindedness. Growth-mindedness includes a transformative shift from focusing on the need for personal gain and immediate gratification towards a broader perspective of long-term personal development and more intrinsically rewarding experiences. This includes acts of care and concern for the generations to come.

Cognitive scientist, Scott Barry Kaufman, reminds us that the self can be our greatest resource, but it can also be our darkest enemy. As he tells it, “A noisy ego spends so much time defending the self as if it were a real thing, and then doing whatever it takes to assert itself, that it often inhibits the very goals it is most striving for.”

That was me in a nutshell. I spent so much time worrying about my “self” and whether it was okay and protecting it from anything going wrong that any progress I would make only worked for a little while until the next bad thing happened that I had to protect it from. I took on other people’s expectations about whether I was “doing well” instead of honestly talking to them about my ideas and feelings when I wasn’t. I constantly felt like I had to prove I was okay, especially to myself.

Dr. Kristin Neff has a website where you can take the self-compassion test online. It ranges from 1-5 with 1 being the least self-compassion and 5 being the highest. My score was 2.78 and looked like this:

As you can see, my scores for self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness were somewhere in the middle, but my self-judgement and over-identification were surprisingly high. It revealed to me that, while the work I had done so far had been beneficial, I was still much too hard on myself and spent way too much time lost in my own mind and wondering who I “really was.” Honestly, these were things I thought I’d already worked through and had come out healthy on the other side, but the scores told otherwise and ended up being right.

Even after all the work I’d been doing, I clearly didn’t believe that the foundation I was building would hold. I realized that the compliments I heard about how “well” I was doing may have been true, but that it was all relative, and I probably should stop believing my own hype. A real healthy human being is humble and knows they don’t have all the answers.

A month or so ago, I was feeling so peaceful that I convinced myself I’d gotten to the finish line of healing and didn’t have to use any more tools to help myself. Of course, life intervened the way it usually does, and I crumbled like always. Now I know that if I turn my ego down and listen more than ruminate, it’s much easier to let go of the things that kept me tied in a knot. It’s important not to “squash down” the ego to the point where it’s non-existent and I’ve lost my identity. Instead, I can fine tune it to where it isn’t too much or too little.

If our egos are properly nurtured and not allowed to run the show, it amplifies our sense of compassion for oneself and others and gets rid of a lot of the “noise” that goes on inside our heads. We embrace the quiet ego as a journey of self-reflection, a commitment to personal growth, openness and empathy as well as a pathway to a kinder world.

I know I could stand to navigate my life with a little more grace, and maybe others feel the same way. There are times where something that seems simple breaks through like a bolt of lightening, though, and suddenly we’re drawn to pay attention. That’s what the quiet-ego theory has already done for me.

Warning… mild book spoilers included.

Confession time: I’ve always been a major fan of Wally Lamb’s books, all the way from She’s Come Undone to his newest book, “The River is Waiting.” It’s not a coincidence that he’s been picked for Oprah’s Book Club three times. His writing is captivating and goes straight to the heart, and there is always something relatable on every page.

I couldn’t wait for “The River is Waiting” to be released in June 2025. Even though I only vaguely had an idea of the plot about a family, a horrible accident and whether a person is worthy of redemption, it was enough for me to obsess about for weeks waiting for it to come out.

On the day it arrived, I happily settled in to start the first chapter about a mom and dad of toddler-age twins. Everything seemed fine, although the dad seemed to have a habit of overusing alcohol and his legally prescribed benzos here and there to take the edge off. Even though he was the primary caregiver to the twins, there were times when he appeared to be more concerned about himself.

By the time I got to the end of that first chapter, I literally threw the book clear across the room with a loud gasp and then burst into sobs. For the next few days, I tortured myself with shame and guilt and hate for myself because I realized that only luck separated me from the main character was that my kids were fortunate to grow up relatively unscathed despite what they had as a mother.

I wasn’t entirely sure if I wanted to keep reading, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the book. Could a man who deserved every bad thing coming to him also deserve redemption as he tried to put his life back together after a life-shattering accident? If that could be true for him, could it also be true for me? I picked the book up with my hands shaking and kept reading, even at the hardest parts or maybe especially at the hardest parts, until the book was finished.

When it was over, I thought about putting a review on Amazon, but the only sentence I could think of writing was this:

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I worried a lot about whether I was going to be a good mother. Even though I was thrilled about having a baby, I wasn’t sure if he would have the best care in my incapable hands.

It wasn’t like I’d grown up in the average family. My parents split up when I was nine, and my father inconsistently popped in and out of my life. My mother had treated me to a childhood full of abuse, neglect and jealousy. As I got older, she saw me more as a rival than her daughter. When she kicked me out of the house at seventeen, I felt more relief than anything else.

I remember talking about all this with my then sister-in-law, who was raising two young boys at the time. When I admitted that I was scared I wouldn’t handle motherhood as well as she did, she said something that I never forgot.

“The fact that you care so much about being a good mother means that you are already a good mother.”

I held tight to that sentence for the rest of my pregnancy and also after my son was born and I suffered from crippling postpartum depression. Because of injuries sustained during childbirth, I was confined to bed when we brought the baby home from the hospital. I watched other people in the family take care of my infant with tears blinding my eyes.

My dream of being a good mother faded away because of my depression. I couldn’t even carry him across the room, much less change his diaper or walk him in his brand new stroller. Every time I saw my son in one of the new outfits I’d picked out for him but hadn’t dressed him in, I’d dissolve into a puddle all over again.

Thankfully, after a month or two, my mind and body healed enough that I was able to take over care full time, and most of my fears about being a good mom proved to be unfounded. I poured all my love and attention into my beautiful son, honored to be his mother and get to show him all the wonderful treasures of the world for the first time.

When I finally took him for rides in his stroller, I would point things out to him like a bumblebee, vividly colored flowers or the way the puffy clouds looked in the sky. When he started eating solid food, I let him try just about anything to get him used to different flavors and textures. I read “The First Three Years of Life” and “The Baby Whisperer” and incorporated their ideas into my child’s daily routine. There was nothing I loved more in the world than being his mom.

Four years later, my beloved son became a brother when I had my second child. My new doctor was aware of the things that had gone wrong last time, and she made sure labor and delivery was a much easier experience. There was also a contingency plan for any lurking postpartum depression to head off at the pass.

The new baby seemed happy and full of energy, already devoted to everything his brother ever said or did (which has never changed). I remember playing with him every morning on the carpet with his toys and cuddling him and singing songs. One day, my then husband walked into the living room with a smirk on his face and said, “Does doing all this really make you happy?”

Honestly, it was the happiest I’d ever been in my life. My heart was bursting with love for my children, and being with them was like a cool drink after wandering a hot desert for all the years I’d been alive. I didn’t try to explain that to my husband because I didn’t think he would get it. I mean, why would any mother want to do anything else?

One evening when the boys were with Grandma, my husband sat me down and told me out of the blue that he wanted to split up after fifteen years of marriage. He said he wasn’t happy with me and was seeing somebody else. The next day, he moved in with his parents. The last person I ever thought would betray me demolished my life in the span of ten minutes. Suddenly, I was a single mother of two boys, and all my old insecurities about caring for them came flooding back like an overwhelming tidal wave.

I became extremely depressed and anxious all the time and would withdraw to bed whenever the boys went to their dad’s or had a sitter. This happened to the point that a teacher who had been coming to the house to tutor my oldest threatened to tell the school about it. However, she hadn’t figured out the biggest issue, the one that was most dangerous to me and my children.

I was wholly and completely dissociated from the world, including the boys I loved more than life itself.

The pain of losing my husband and his family was so intense that I essentially disappeared, the way I used to when my mother abused me and I got too scared. My mind and body developed their own escape hatch because it was the only way to protect myself. I just went numb.

Of course, back then nobody had ever heard of “dissociation,” so my behavior was identified as rudeness, inattentiveness, being too nervous and being too shy. These defects were treated as my fault and never the fault of the people around me who abused me.

Now I know that the first time it ever happened, I was five years old and watching my babysitter beating up one of the other little girls she watched. I ran away and hid in the backyard shed, where I lost all track of time and location until an older kid found me standing there blankly. Then, I just walked back into the house as if nothing had happened. My mind was vacant, storing the trauma away only for it to rise and scare me over and over.

In the midst of my dissociation over my divorce, I got involved with a monster who got me pregnant with my third child, a daughter, and then damaged me in every way a person can be hurt. The only good thing that came from the ensuing relationship was my little girl, who was premature but beautiful and the toughest cookie I knew. The worst thing was the alcohol and drugs he got me hooked on. I tried to end things with the monster many times, but he kept showing up like the proverbial bad penny, and it took me years to finally shake him.

I was a mother with three wonderful children, but my worst fears had come true. Because of the dissociation, I was rarely present and engaged. The monster left me so traumatized that I couldn’t even get through a whole book with the kids because I couldn’t fully pay attention. I couldn’t focus on their little songs or stories because, in my head, I wasn’t even there in the room. In the meantime, I had an addiction to deal with on top of everything else.

The people in my life began to notice and, one by one, my children were taken away from me by family members who gave them everything I couldn’t. My sons went to live with their father, and my daughter moved in with my mother. I was left by myself as a shell where a human being had once been, heartbroken and not understanding why I couldn’t fix myself and be the kind of mother I used to be a long time ago, finding joy with my baby in a patch of colorful flowers or puffy clouds.

I don’t want to spoil “The River is Waiting” too much for any potential readers, but the story of Corby, an initially selfish man with a growing substance abuse habit whose behavior flips his family upside down, does not completely include a redemption arc. Until he comes to terms with his part in everything that happened within his family, there’s zero room for him to evolve. Once he accepts the truth, his growth happens in stages, always one step forward and two steps back. That’s what has happened in my healing, too.

A few years ago, I was made aware of dissociation by a therapist, specifically that I was doing it and probably had been for most of my life. Being in my first husband’s family was healing and taught me how to give and receive love after a seriously messed up childhood, but when that was taken away, the dissociation started all over again. Because I had no solid ground to stand on, I often acted impulsively and made mistakes I can never taken back, including with my kids.

I realized I hadn’t been “here” for a very long time, all the way through my first divorce and my relationship with the monster and my daughter being born and trying to live without my children. The shame I felt over losing them enveloped me every day and, rather than deal with it, I vanished and went numb. I felt the same time of numbness that Wally Lamb describes in Corby. We were both not alert and not paying attention, but for him it led to devastating consequences. I knew that if I had any hope of living fully ever again, I had to face my past, accept it and make positive changes going forward.

Being present is what I work on every single day, close to the same path that Corby traveled in the book. My children are all grown up and, because I have been blessed to heal quite a bit, we are closer than ever. I listen and talk to them with all that I am now. What I am, most of all, is here. I’m their mom, and I never want to be separated physically, mentally or emotionally from them again.

Most of the time, I feel I’ve made peace with the past and have reached a certain level of forgiveness for myself. Wally Lamb’s incredible book, “The River is Waiting,” caused me to question at first whether I deserved any of it. I think I do. I think we all deserve to live in the present and not be held hostage by the past as long as we learn from it. That includes me, and that includes Corby, too.

I was heartbroken when this book ended, as I wanted it to go on forever, but at the same time I felt able to breathe again. Corby’s story and mine crossed paths several times as far as redemption is concerned even though they had different endings. Neither of us may never have achieved full and complete forgiveness with every single person in our lives, but we both cared enough to try for them and for ourselves. In that respect, both of us were finally free.

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