Every city has a haunted house. Mine is all of downtown Bellingham. The bars, the alleys, the breakfast tables, the blocked contacts, the empty chairs. I changed my name, got sober, lost almost everyone I knew, and I still have to walk through all of it. Here’s what it looks like when your whole former…
I spent months grieving what I lost. Then one Tuesday the grief shifted into something I didn’t have a word for yet. Not sadness. Not anger. Bewilderment. A deep, disorienting, almost embarrassing what the actual fuck was I tolerating? I had been pouring everything into people who were treating me like a resource. Emotional support…
For months the past kept showing up uninvited. Mind games. Hypervigilance. Plans I changed out of dread. I almost let it work. But recently something crystallized, I finally saw clearly what I was dealing with, and something in my nervous system just released. This is what seeing the light actually looks like. Not a dramatic…