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Such simple sentiments. With so much gravity.

Thank you. I love you.

I’ve learned so much this past year. Things I never thought my soul would ever age to, would ever grow to become. I still talk about (and to) my best friend. He died when I was 19 and he was 18 in a quad accident. Every day, every time we spoke, we always said thank you, and I love you. And we never said goodbye. Goodbye was too close to forever. We always said later, or for now.

Today a friend asked me when I would stop saying thank you, because she (and her family) all know it takes a village. I still thank that village. So thank you. I love you.

I never want to have regrets. I am learning to live in a state of self-focus rather than object-focus and I feel the shift through to the core of my soul. It’s not like I suddenly no longer have to move mountains, or somehow those mountains have become plains. Quite the contrary. Those mountains have grown into seemingly insurmountable obstacles, yet somehow it’s okay. I can move them. I can move mountains. Because I have friends like I do, and please don’t ever for a moment don’t think I don’t notice you. I notice every single one of you and I am so ever grateful.

Lately I keep telling myself we’re almost there. Just a few more months. Things will get better. Everything will all work out. But it’s still hard. I feel like I’m carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders, and I know I am not. But I am carrying the weight of our lives. I couldn’t do it without everyone around me. It’s amazing what we can accomplish together.

But also lately I haven’t been publishing these blogs. The one from end of May I just published tonight, and this one was already half written also. I’ve written a lot in my head when I get a few minutes of downtime, such as in the shower or in the car between running errands and moving stuff out of the Wayne house. But those tend to get said only in my head and somewhere never quite make it to here.

I suppose part of that is because I feel like all of this is me coming here to complain or vent or whine, and then tell you how optimistic I really am, and bring it around full circle. Always look up and all that jazz. Not that I don’t believe it, I do, but seriously this shit is starting to get old. I need a break.

A real one. In talking with a good friend today we said how recently even our vacations or breaks or mini-getaways feel more like a cheap band-aid, not even the good kind but the crappy kind that sticks a little to hard to the hair on your skin and then falls half off but still hurts when you pull it off and it’s almost like it did nothing but make things worse. Yeah that kind. That’s what all this feels like. Like we’re just putting cheap band-aids on our mental health work life balance and keep saying – all the hard work will pay off once we get through this and it’s 2021. Or is it 2022? I feel like we’ve been saying that for years. Oh yeah, we have, pretty much.

So in my “free” time, I am moving and cleaning and packing and trying to balance and be in 12 places at once and remember to breathe and go hiking and spend time with the horses and occasionally sleep. When my brain lets me. I can’t do another night of 24 min of deep sleep and a whopping 5h max of crappy tossing and turning and still function. Today was hard enough as it was. And yesterday was even harder.

Selling my childhood home and much of its contents to fund our future is worth it. In some ways it’s poetic justice for the disaster my life used to be. Sure, we were all wrapped up in a super pretty upper-middle class family that from the outside looking in sure seemed swell. But it wasn’t, and I am still healing from it, and still piecing together memories and experiences and learning to see things from my siblings’ points of view, and understand that their brains work a little bit differently than mine, and helping them understand that my brain is like our father’s and essentially translating what we’re piecing together about the realities of the last year(s) of his life, together. And our whole lives, really. Strange, just starting to understand your childhood as an adult after all this time.

This decade has made for strange times, indeed. And fuck me, it sucks, and I’m terrified. Staind’s song plays on repeat in my head, haunting me of the failure I used to be. Taunting me with the paranoia that I’m not perfect. I’ll never be perfect. And therefore, I’ll obviously fail.

Old habits die hard. We’re almost there. Just a few more months.