Come back… be here

Thank you to everyone who’s given me so much support this week, and all the other times, it is so appreciated and helps so much to know there are people who understand how hard this whole situation is.

Day 3 isn’t even over. Oh my god this is honestly the most stupid decision I’ve ever made. What was I thinking? It feels utterly impossible to survive this break. And it was my decision. Except it doesn’t feel like my choice – I would never have made this decision if 2020 wasn’t shaping up to be the worst year in human history.

I am okay but also really not okay. It is taking all my strength to be okay but I can’t sustain this till the spring. Not possible. I miss K so much and there have been about 30 things already that I’ve gone to write down to tell her next week and then caught myself. Yuck. It hurts so much. I keep getting hit by waves of grief and when I think of her I’m aware of an internal sense of free-falling through an abyss. All around is empty space. There’s just too much of it and not enough of me and she gets further and further away as the hours go by. I keep coming back to me, my body, home, life, plans, but it is hard work and I can feel myself getting lost. I just want to email K and say I made a big mistake and can I come back. But then back to what… Remote work. That was so painful and pointless.

Yesterday started off kind of okay, I felt crap but accepting. And then it was dark and grey and wet here, and I felt groggy and tired and foggy and so flat and empty. Just a taste of the months to come over winter. Work is going to be absolutely crazy full on for the next 7 months and I can’t believe I’m heading into this time without K ,and planning to try and endure nearly all of this time without her support and co-regulation. Already there are workplace dilemmas and boundary issues I’m struggling with and would value her input to help me unpick. It struck me how this whole ‘taking a break’ was much easier to contemplate in summer, when life is more spacious for me and I’m able to spend huge amounts of time alone and connecting with myself and doing things I need and love, but all this is going to be much harder in the coming months. Now work is getting busier again, and I have more meetings and huge amounts of social interaction each day, there is less time for me and I can feel myself dissolving, as if my sense of self gets absorbed into others and I’m too thinly spread. Scattered energetically. It’s making the lack of mirroring from K very daunting as I’ve had a difficult reminder of what happens for me and why the past few exceptional months have been easier for me in many ways, with the isolation and solitude and lack of decision-making and so on.

Heartbreaking also yesterday was finding the special bracelet K gave us last summer to celebrate 4 years of working together out in the garden in the mud and all tarnished from the rain. Nina had taken it from my room without asking and lost it out there earlier this week. It was devastating. And I know I did thoughtless crap like that when I was 13 (and older) but honestly, of all the things for her to ruin this week, it just led to a massive wave of pain because we can’t even tell K what has happened to it. And my dad was being horrible yesterday and I can’t tell her that either. And a reminder of why stupid online therapy doesn’t work, because there is trauma work to do around him still, lots has come up during lockdown, but I can’t go there on a screen so it’s all on hold whatever. And I can’t get the gentle warmth and holding through a screen. So none of the work I need to do is possible right now, but then it means I can’t have K either.

It was sunny today and things have felt better and I worked productively, but the days are not going to be like this for very much longer. Maybe remote therapy would have been easier once my life became fuller again because I’d have had more things I needed to share and get input on so there would have been a point to therapy even without doing more trauma work or getting more of whatever magical things she poured into us all. Maybe I should have waited. But it was so hard and often re-traumatising to work like that… What an impossible situation. Last night it just really hit me what this decision involves – not speaking to K for 6 months… It feels like it all happened so suddenly and here I am on the other side of this decision, even though I know I’d thought it through. And then the alternative – keeping going with stupid remote therapy. Which is worse? I don’t even know. Maybe there is just a lot of shock going on in my system and it will settle, but right now it just feels impossible to survive 6 months without K whilst we’re in a pandemic and adapting to that at work and there is still so much change and uncertainty ahead.

We miss her so much. We’ve missed her for 5 months now but this feels worse, more of an empty space. It’s so hard imagining her living her life with me not being a part of her week anymore. Will she even notice on Monday that we are not there? And if she does, for how long till she gets used to not knowing what we are all doing? I want her to at least know how hard this is for us all this week, in case she thinks we are fine and having a nice time, but likely she isn’t thinking about me and how I am at all so why does it even matter that she knows how I actually am.

I really hope the next 5 months goes at warp speed like the last 5 have, ,or that the government get their shit together with tests we can do at home and get results within half an hour and then we can go back to therapy and normal life!

This was a pretty pointless post but it helps to get it down and I sometimes get tangled when I journal – writing here helps me make the internal mess a little more coherent.