I turned twenty-five last week. I’ve made twenty-five full rotations around the sun, I’ve had happy birthday sang to me twenty-five times, and I’ve opened a present twenty-five years in a row. I’m halfway to fifty, a quarter of the way to one hundred. By all the standards I set for myself, I really thought I’d have it all figured out by now. On the outside, it kind of looks like I do. I’ve published two novels, earned two degrees, built myself an amazing career, planned a wedding, survived an abusive marriage, gotten a divorce, and managed to navigate a move across the world. When you list my achievements that way, what I’ve done in my life so far seems more than most. I should be writing an article about the ten things I do to keep my life on track, how to be disciplined or follow your dreams, or the most popular, twenty things I’ve learned in my twenties. But I’m not going to do that, because I’ve really got no qualifications to. Yes, I have some really good rules for my life I follow, like always keep a good pen in your purse or make your bed as soon as you leave it, but that’s not really what I want to say. What I want to say is, I thought by twenty-five, I’d have it all figured out. I thought I’d be healed and fine and happy, but I’m not. In fact, I think I learned just how much I don’t know. Because, at the end of the best birthday I’ve ever had, I crawled into my bed wearing heels and my cute black dress, and I fell apart in tears.
Sad birthdays have been my thing in recent years, starting when I turned thirteen. Each birthday, I’ve had less than I did the year before, lost someone or something along the way. No matter how hard I try, I always end up crying, crying and my birthday go hand in hand. But this year, I really thought it would be different. Abby and I planned yoga, pedicures, winery lunch, girl chatting time, then a fancy dinner. Everything was perfect and wonderful, better than I could have dreamed. I sat around the dinner table, looking at the faces of those surrounding me, and I was in awe of what I had been given. These people cared about me, they took time out of their day to make me feel special, and all I had to do to earn that was to be myself. But, in such a perfect day, there were also reminders of my past, of birthdays that weren’t as wonderful as this one; of spilled coffee and angry car rides and my unworthiness. Everything was great, until I went to the bathroom before leaving, looked at myself in the mirror, and realized that I didn’t have a person to share this beautiful night with. Abby, Liam, and Kane are wonderful friends, they showed up for me, but there’s a difference between having good friends and having a partner. At the end of this beautiful day, I would go home to my bed and be alone, I wouldn’t debrief the stories of the day as my person held me, and I wouldn’t wake up in their arms. At that realization, the tears came, and I was tired of stopping them.
I think the major misconception about me is that I’m always happy, or joyful, or bubbly and cheery. I may present that way, I may smile a lot, and I may even do my best to believe it myself, but deep down, I’m not. I’m not happy all the time, I don’t always look at things positively. I may dance around my kitchen when no one is watching and sing loudly with the windows down in my car, but for all that, I’m also a person who, when the alarm goes off, has to search for a reason to keep going because she doesn’t want to anymore. I think for this past year and a half, I’ve never allowed myself the time to grieve… anything. I just pulled myself up, moved from distraction to distraction, and told everyone that I was okay. I couldn’t change the past, so why act like it bothered me? Why tell people again and again how much you’re hurting, when they’re probably tired of hearing it anyway? I was doing a really, really good job of it, until I moved here and ran into my past like a brick wall, again, and again, and again. First, it was the five weeks of loneliness that hurt, then, it became getting to know so many people on an intimate level. Do you understand how difficult it is to have to tell a new person each week that you’re divorced? Do you know how hard it is to sit in a room full of people your age who are talking about their engagement, their wedding, and their married life? It is agonizing. There’s no other way to put it other than to say it’s torture, and it’s not their fault that they’re happy or they have love, and you don’t want them to know how badly it hurts, so you just smile. But all of those experiences weigh on you until one day, you can’t take it anymore, and you fall apart.
I think a major part of healing from anything is admitting to yourself that you need help. It’s like having a really bad cough, and it only gets worse for months, but you keep putting a doctors visit off. Then one day, when the cough gets bad enough that’s it’s hard to breathe, you go to the doctor and figure out that it’s cancer. If you would’ve gone at the first sign, it never would have been this bad, but because you waited, everything is so much worse. That’s how my healing from heartbreak has been. The symptoms of my pain have always been there; my inability to sit alone in silence, a constant need to be busy to the point of exhaustion, and my fear of reading books. These are just the smaller symptoms. They were always there, I just ignored them, until I finally couldn’t anymore. I snapped and I broke and I cried for hours. I had that kind of sadness where your tears don’t make a sound and you have to hold your heart, because it’s in so much pain it could fall out of your chest. That’s what losing your other half will do to you, because that’s what happened to me; I lost a part of myself. I never let myself face my pain, or accept how badly it hurt, because I thought ignoring the problem would make the pain go away, but it didn’t. I came head to head with what I’d lost, how much I’d ignored, and how much healing I still had to do.
The bright side is that it’s okay to not know everything, to fall apart and realize you have so far to go. I’ve set such unrealistic standards for my life, that I have to be something at a certain time, or I’m not working hard enough, but that isn’t true. I can start a new career at thirty, have my first child at thirty-five, or never write another novel again, and that’s okay. I can be happily married and still cry because I’m hurt by what happened in my previous marriage, and that doesn’t make me a weak person. In fact, I think that being honest with yourself and others about your pain makes you stronger. How can we heal if we don’t admit we’re hurt? How can anything be mended if we don’t admit that it’s broken, and put in the work to fix it? So, here’s me admitting that I’ve really got no clue what I’m doing, and that’s okay. I’m taking each day as it is, I’m putting in the work to heal and become the best version of me, and that’s okay. Because you know what? I read two books in the last three weeks. That may mean nothing to you, but it means everything to me. Because even though picking up a book scares me, I did it, and I actually enjoyed it. I’m broken, but everyday, I am choosing to put in the work to mend the wounds, heal what was hurt, and let the pain make me stronger.
Yours Truly,
the Brightside Blonde