The Summer That Changed Everything

There’s been a lot that’s happened over the course of my life that’s changed me and shaped who I am today. The past five years were more significant than most. Losing my best friend at 18 was a turning point, for certain. But this summer more than anything is the point where I can definitively say that everything changed. All of it.

I may have moved here 8 years ago, and bought this home 4 years ago, but this summer is the first time I feel at home, in a place I truly belong. The property is flourishing because I am flourishing and I’ve built a foundation based on love and peace here that didn’t exist before. As I drifted around the pool in silence reading a book, I realized that it was something that I’ve never known before. And then it dawned on me.

The only time I’ve ever felt truly safe, is when I am alone.

In nature, or here on my property, in the woods or on the couch with my animals. As long as there are no other humans, I am safe. I’ve learned that while I am – or rather had been – always willing to share my story and my past, my experiences, my fears and my pains, and even my self-doubts and insecurities with others in the hope that it would help them see the light in themselves, that often it was met with awe and understanding, silent nods or quiet moments of shock, amazement, and more often than not, unspoken judgement. What it is not met with, however, is consistent reciprocal vulnerability and love. I don’t know what that is, or what that feels like to experience.

Let me clarify. I have absolutely amazing friends, and an inner most trusted circle of some of the best humans on the planet. They share with me, and we are at times absolutely vulnerable with each other. There’s a trust there that does provide safety and comfort, but in a way that makes me want to have shared experiences with them, and positive ones at that. Not that anyone wants to have negative or challenging experiences, but my default when things get hard or I am struggling is to shut down and only talk about the positive. I suppose it’s a big part of how I wound up with physical PTSD while completely functional from an outward perspective. The emotional hurt and pain and wounds had no where to go, so they went inward and started doing damage to my physical body instead. My mind was able to overcome (or so I thought) everything that these past five years and the people in my life had put me through, but my body broke down anyway. I didn’t realize it, but I hadn’t cried or hurt or FELT in so long that I had completely shut down, and so my body shut down for me. The only thing that wasn’t positive that I was able to feel was anger, as a way to hide the shame I felt along with it.

Why was that? That’s a trick question – which part? Why did I feel shame? I was ashamed that I made a promise to someone that I would see their children through high school, and get them on a better path and that was a promise I didn’t keep (though I did). I felt shame because the goodness I thought I saw in others time and time again was shown to me to be something that people chose not to embrace but instead turn away from for whatever reason – their own fear, pain, guilt, shame, insecurity all from their own traumas and demons I suppose. But I took that all on as my responsibility as much as I took on the responsibility of raising two minors who’s mother was riddled with substance issues and later deceased, and who’s father was alive and well (if you consider how he lives, “good” or “well”) but chose to actively abandon the responsibility of parenting. Courts were quick to give me legal guardianship and full custody as there were multiple instances in writing of the father willingly offering to abandon the children, including that any ask for child support or financial involvement would be met with him disowning them forever. I do not say this lightly, and I do have in writing these statements from this individual. Whether meant in anger or frustration at the moment, or as a real threat, he got his wish and I naively took on two children not my own, of no relation of mine, with no support, not even from their extended family (their uncle is around and never reached out to me, their aunt on their mother’s side stayed in touch, but life’s challenges from school to clothes to food to mental health breakdowns, and even inpatient therapy for one child was met as a challenge for me and me alone to face).

Life was hard. But it got harder still. Seven months almost to the day from telling two children their mother had been found deceased, I had the grave displeasure of telling my siblings the same of our father. It was 2020. The heart of the pandemic, with my siblings living overseas and unable to travel to support. My best friend helped me clean my childhood home – a massive undertaking as we were estranged from our father due to his own severe mental illness and alcoholism – a pattern I was so willing to break in my own family that I took on the burden of another family’s same illnesses in the hope that I could fix us all. But I couldn’t, and it nearly killed me, quite literally.

Earlier this year, I was stopped for a suspected DWI. I hadn’t had much to drink and light beer at that, shared with a girlfriend over 5+ hours right after dinner. The officers said my breath smelled sweet – I must have been having sweet drinks, cocktails, or similar. Anyone who knows me knows I hate sweet, especially alcohol, and that I’m not a big drinker at all either. I carry my own water bottle with electrolytes when I go out. I have a smart, calculated routine where I drink a beer, a water, would smoke a cig before I ever ordered another drink. I’ve only ever been a social smoker at most but because I also smoke very slowly, it makes this about a 1.5h routine to get through one beer. I’ve been known to bring my own beer cozy to the local bar because I would drink so slowly it would get warm long before I was even halfway through. The math didn’t add up. The officers were as confused as I was, and fortunately they released me to the ER where I learned my blood sugar nearly three hours after being stopped, was a very dangerous 67. The staff estimated that it had been lower when they stopped me. (Google “breathalyzer hypoglycemia” and this will make more sense.) Long story short, the DWI was eventually dismissed, but I was suddenly faced with very serious and unexplained health issues.

Bloodwork was inconclusive and confusing. Doctors were minimal help. My blood sugar would frequently crash – the one time I tried any alcohol since being stopped, it plummeted to 55, just shy of losing consciousness which usually occurs by 50 if not sooner. I tried eating simple carbs, and the same thing happened. Sweets – same. Fortunately for me, I prefer salty to sweet and I could still have cheese, so with the help of some friends in the medical field, a lot of research on the internet, and daily monitoring of blood sugars, blood pressure, heart rate, and more, I set about to figure out what was going on.

A mental health and substance abuse evaluation found that I met 0 of the 11 diagnostic criteria to determine alcohol or substance abuse, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), published by the American Psychiatric Association. I had no problem stopping all simple carbs, including alcohol and sweets (yes that meant bread, corn, ice cream, cookies, rolls, and any and all forms of alcohol). I joked that I could have cheese at least, because otherwise I’d have definitely wound up back in the ER for total lack of self control. I redesigned my diet for the umpteenth time in my adult life (I lost over 60 pounds in early 2021 and kept it off). But that same evaluation was the first step in offering the physical PTSD diagnosis – I had no idea that was even a thing – and I went home and cried, feeling defeated and confused.

I started yoga and meditation regularly and I cried some more. I withdrew from friends and family. I dug into research, and data collection, compiling research on myself with as many data points as possible through the use of glucose monitors, blood pressure checks, Apple Health, and anything else I could. I knew that if I fed my brain enough data, it could sort out and identify patterns and determine what to do with them and help me map a path forward much the same way that it did when I worked on projections and budgets and potential revenue and trends for clients. It didn’t fail me.

I’d eat a salad and my blood sugar would drop to the 60s and 70s. I’d eat rye crackers or beans (complex carbs) and it would stabilize. I added ancient grains and legumes to my diet and it stabilized more. From everything I’d read and learned, given enough time the body can overcome just about anything, and so I set about to keep doing what I was doing, adjusting as I needed, until I healed. I consumed massive amounts of water, electrolytes, and salts which together acted as a filtration system to flush out whatever it was that was built up in my body that was causing this reactive hypoglycemia as it is called (hypoglycemia without diabetes, without any blood sugar increase, primarily a sharp drop in response to sugars). I developed an autoimmune allergy to my 5 year old tattoo. I had a deer jump into my car on my own road. I fought a mental breakdown in my truck questioning everything, but most of all, questioning myself. And I cried some more.

I don’t keep secrets and I don’t lie. It’s just not a part of who I am and anyone who knows me will tell you as much. It hurt even more when someone I thought was a friend called me inauthentic and a liar, using fake health excuses to cover an alcohol problem and pretending my life was great when really I was a mess. The only part that former friend was right about was that I was a mess, but physically, from not allowing myself to feel ANYTHING mentally.

And despite knowing that that former friend has told others about the incident that triggered all of this, while leaving out the legitimacy of the health issues, I started to open up. I started to admit to myself and others that living with those two adolescents was abusive and destructive. That I was afraid to take on a roommate regardless of financial challenges, because I was afraid to live with anyone. I was even afraid to have friends stay over or visit and spend the night. I was jumpy. I had (for years) always had a knife on my right hip anywhere I went. Don’t ask – I don’t have a gun, yet for some reason a knife gave me some sense of security that clearly I was lacking in, well everything.

And then I looked back at my entire life this afternoon while floating around the pool and I put the book down. I never felt truly safe anywhere unless I was alone.

In childhood, my father oscillated like Jekyll and Hyde, and could be horrifically abusive emotionally and physically. As a female professional in a male-dominated field (marketing) commuting on the subway, I was sexually harassed pretty much daily. When I lost weight, worked picked up but I found out clients that would work with me because of how I looked, not ever executing my strategies or recommendations just using working with me as an excuse to always “meet over dinner” rather than in the office and while fortunately none were ever directly inappropriate, it became apparent that it was my looks and not my brain they were interested in.

Dating was a nightmare as if I had an opinion, I was too much. Talking about my past was a surefire way to get someone to run away and so, throwing my skeletons in the street to mortify people was my go-to response to intimacy. Oh, yeah? You think you can handle me? Want to hear about my fucked up trauma? My imposter syndrome? How my father worked for NASA but was also bipolar turned paranoid schizophrenic and how I, too inherited the bipolar part? (I got help in my 20s, that requires an acute level of self awareness and regulation to understand my boundaries and triggers, something that decades later is a non-issue as I am very much my authentic self and embrace who I am and know how to no longer operate in the mania in which my father lived, and eventually died.) All of that, and a side of two kids I was not related to that I willingly took on – and was abused by – was enough to scare even good-intentioned friends away, forget about a significant other. Who would sign up for that? I wasn’t even sure why I had myself, and I was the one living it.

This was the summer that changed everything.

The second half of the summer, I started inviting people over.  My cooking flourished as did my health (just check out my IG @CJMillar82!). My property blossomed and I did along with it. I reconnected with friends who called me family, and meant it, without wanting anything from me but time and love, something they were willing to also offer consistently in return and we made monthly visits a thing. I was able to have ice cream once in a while. I had a cupcake and didn’t pass out, get dizzy, or end up dangerously hypoglycemic. My soul started to heal. And so did my heart.

But I still only felt safe alone. Truly safe. Not just physically, but emotionally, too. Abuse is a strange thing. It doesn’t have to be just physical. The constant demanding, demeaning, being told you’re not doing enough, that you expect too much, that you’re too demanding, or even being told lies and spun stories that make you question your own reality and mind is another form of torture that triggered more emotional trauma from my childhood. I haven’t sat down and told anyone all of this from beginning to end, though the handful of true friends I have know these stories strung together over time, campfires, and the occasional smoked old fashioned or porch swing conversation. Few have seen me cry, crumble, or hurt. Even fewer have seen me ask for or accept help unless I am truly desperate and out of my element (such as with my tractor or hot water heater) and even then a prevailing sense of guilt and “not good enough” had me scrambling to repay them with dinner if they wouldn’t accept money even when money was tight for me and I still insisted. I felt overall undeserving of help or love it seemed. Though as I thought earlier, and thinking back again as I type this all out, I can see why.

I also realized I genuinely like alone time, but that perhaps I don’t want to be alone all the time anymore. I’ve been reading Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett, Ph.D. and struggling still to get through it, stopping frequently as I reevaluate myself and uncover more of the “why” behind who I am, and learning how to start to feel, even when it’s uncomfortable. It is often uncomfortable. I’ve always wanted to share the good experiences in life, the beauty of nature, the magic of theme parks, the thrill of a roller coaster, my favorite things that make me smile and laugh, my brightness and joy with others to help them see the light in themselves. What I didn’t realize was that I was doing so over and over and over again whether or not people wanted to grow or evolve or change, without ever allowing myself to replenish and feel for myself. Positive only, all the time. Struggles are hard, but I’ll get through them on my own, no need to bring others down. I can carry this weight, and their weight too.

This summer I put that weight down. All of it.

I put down the weight of being the sole person focused 100% on the agency that provided the bulk of my income and 0% ownership, and instead focused on what I wanted to do and what I excelled at with the intention and goal of finding additional employment before the close of 2025 and I am happy to say I have several opportunities in front of me.

I put down the weight of educating others on areas in which I knew I was more informed or experienced or educated whether that be business, community, relationships, psychology, interpersonal skills, communications, or anything else for that matter.

I put down the weight of trying to fit in everywhere – at business events, fighting to stand out to get the attention I knew I deserved but instead just clamoring among the noise. Fighting to be recognized for my skills when people would tell me I’m brilliant and amazing and if they had the money they’d hire me while wondering why the companies with the money had not (hard to when you’re self-limiting).

I put down the weight of explaining myself, my past, my trauma, and my small town’s rumors. Writing here is more than I’ve said on anything that’s happened in the past year that’s even remotely public, and it terrifies me. But I also know everything I have said here is the truth, and I have the proof to back it up, and I also now know that no one needs that proof but me. It’s my experiences alone, and no one else has to have an explanation even when they make up their own stories about me and tell others in an attempt to ruin my life.

I put down the weight of being stalked and the fear that followed that. While it’s still disconcerting, I realized that changing locks, alarming everything, and living in fear wasn’t doing anything for my health, and that if someone really wanted to hurt me, they could and would. And that words spray painted in the woods as a threat were just words. They couldn’t hurt me anymore. And as such I deleted those awful parts of abuse and hate and evil from my past. Literally. Gone. Saving only what I felt I needed, and knowing that the lessons would stay with me for times to come, knowing I learned what I needed and grew where the Universe had pushed me to grow.

And I put down the weight of being too much, the fear or guilt of being the smartest person in the room, the most perceptive, the one who notices everything to the extent that it almost seems like I can hear thoughts and read minds (maybe I can). And I embraced myself, and welcomed anyone in who wanted to share in that same level of authenticity, help me learn in all the areas I am lacking – we all have so much room to learn and grow. And open to sharing in the areas where I am strong and resilient, intelligent and outgoing. I dare hope for that challenge, compatibility, and above all else, authenticity and honesty in action and communication that brings with it the consistency that forms the soil from which safety starts to grow.

I repotted plants as much as I repotted myself, with firm roots in my home. And then today I realized.

I only truly feel truly safe when I am alone.

I’d like to change that. So I am.