January 2023 Update
Welp, hello everyone. Here’s an early update for the month because, well, this month has sucked. And I figure that, the faster the month ends, the faster things will start getting better.
So, things started out pretty fine, I guess. I’ve been doing a lot of work to improve my mental health, and it’s been working. I’ve been getting better dealing with my various traumas. I’ve been working on my relationship with my art. And then, uh, well.
Then my mom died.
Things with my mom were always…I dunno, tense? She lived a really hard life before she had me, and I always respected the hell out of her for accomplishing all the things she did. I mean, she did a lot of bad things, but she did a lot of good things, too.
She had some mental health issues, but she came from the kind of family that didn’t ‘believe’ in mental illness. And I inherited basically all of her same issues, so when I was a struggling young teen, looking for help, I thought she would help me. And she didn’t. And I always held that against her.
I mean, I’ve spent the whole month trying to logic my way out of every single ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda’ because I know that won’t help. And it…it won’t. It fucking won’t. It won’t help.
But fucking hell is there a lot I would have done differently if I knew that she would be gone the first week of the new year.
Like, okay, get this. She died the day before her holiday party. I was looking forward to that party. I had things I needed her advice on, about managing my prescriptions and communicating better with my pharmacy (because they fucked up my brain medicine that I need for, ya know, my fucking brain). My little sister had been making jokes for the whole month leading up to the party about the gifts mom got for me, and I wanted to see what I got. My sister’s boyfriend was going to be there, and I was excited to see him and Devin (my spouse) interacting.
But mostly, I was excited to see my mom.
I left home when I was my sister’s age (a few months into 17), and I went basically no-contact with my entire family for almost eight years. So it’s really only been the last two or three years that I’ve seen anybody, including my sister.
And I’ve told her that it isn’t her fault, and I’ve tried to explain that it wasn’t even just mom that made me leave — that I’ve had an exceptionally difficult life, and that I needed to be alone for a long time in order to learn how to be a person again. That I lived a double life, every time I was forced to go to my biological father’s house. That, in the vaguest of terms, I had horrific, criminal things done to me there.
Still, though…
Things were getting better.
And I guess everyone thought they had more time.
My grandma is a fucking wreck. My uncle, the middle child, killed himself before I was born. And around the same time I disappeared, my aunt, the youngest, also vanished.
Nobody has been able to find her. I don’t even think she’s…
And now my mom is gone, and my grandma has no children.
And now everything is a giant mess. There’s just…so much I don’t want to talk about. Devin kept trying to get out of the party, and now he’s full of, I dunno, guilt? I’m next-of-kin, so I have to talk to everyone about what they’re ‘allowed’ to do with mom’s body or mom’s house or mom’s stuff. To be fair, we already had the funeral, and it sucked. Nothing went how she would have wanted it, but neither me nor my sister really give that much of a shit to have said otherwise.
The reason I’m writing this is because everything is falling apart this month, and I need January to be over now. Devin lost his job due to ‘restructuring’, and my sister got in an accident, totaling her car today. I’m not asking anything from you, reader, just maybe a little patience as I try to figure out, once again, now in the eyes of everyone I’ve ever know, how to be a person again.
I will leave you with this parting gift; two demos I wrote the weeks of and following my mom’s death. They’re rough, and somewhat distasteful, but I hope you enjoy them nonetheless.
