Over the course of what I have named my WTF year the chaos intensified. It was completely out of control and seemed to collapse with speed I didn’t imagine possible. I was unhappy, feeling unsafe and unsure of where this mess, a friendship, was going to go. In a matter of only a few months, I got hit by a nuke and spiraled into a place I still can’t believe. I had lost everything, absolutely everything. The day I found Rowan brutalized very quickly became the beginning of the end for me. The life I imagined, the life that was supposed to be good ended up in a pile of rubble.
Homeless, broke and desperate to protect Rowan was my new reality. I needed to find the strength to fight, harder than I ever had before. I was in shock over the speed that everything had imploded. One of the hardest to accept reality was that I somehow lost me. All the conditioning I survived, all the disappointments, my now vanished dream of a perfect life. There was nothing left except a shell of a person that sat there in my car. The person reflected in the mirror, empty, scared and my eyes were blank, not even a hint of the soul I once possessed. She had taken it all and now all I felt was hate. Even though I had been abused since birth, hate never really formed. Dislike, strong dislike but never before the raw hatred I felt towards Alex and what she did to me and my son.
That hatred was my driving force. I had to surrender Rowan to the state because of her actions. I no longer had a home or even a life. She threatened to destroy me and she did. All of me had been taken. My way of thinking, doing and even survival took on a new meaning. I had to constantly remind myself that the things she took away were things that didn’t suit me anyway. The person I had to become to survive Alex’s special kind of hell no longer suited me. That person attracted bad things, chaotic things, things that weren’t safe or healthy.
I still daydream, but this time the things I imagine are actually possible. They’re out there, waiting, and I’m finally becoming someone who can reach for them without flinching. All I need to do is shed the old personality — the one built for chaos — and build a new one, a better one, one that attracts good instead of evil.
I’ve swept up the rubble of that old life and thrown it where it belongs. Alex and her theatrics don’t get to live in me anymore. What grows here now is mine.
Still standing, but rebuilding on solid ground this time,
K.
