I had to take a class as part of my legal hearing. I thought it would be about kids but it ended up being more about me. I hadn’t anticipated walking away from it with new thoughts on where I was in my life but I did. I found it helpful and not a waste of my time.

.

We spend a lot of time walking through life with blinders on. We are just doing the next thing in front of us. We are working our way through our life. We can become blind to how we function and why we function the way we do because it is normal for us, our family, our relationships. Sometimes it takes an outside source to point out the dysfunction.

.

Detached.

.

I had detached a long time ago. I didn’t know to name it that back in January. I sat across a table from you and tried my best to explain it but I didn’t have the right language. You told me to stop focusing on the bad and only focus on the good. You didn’t understand that I need to acknowledge the pain and have my pain acknowledged in order to move on, to see the happy again.

.

Detached.

.

It wasn’t really about hurt feelings or holding on or a grudge. It was me grappling with how I could feel the way I did. You knew so much and at the same time so very little. You thought you saw a lot but I knew the inner world and the world you never entered into. It created a vastness you never saw.

.

Detached.

.

It was easier to detach from you than to continue down a path of hurt. I had done it out of self-preservation. I didn’t know a better way. I didn’t have the language, the energy, the stamina, at the time it felt easier to take it and put it away in a box. I didn’t know while I ignored it it grew and once I opened the box it had become large, enormous, massive, consuming.

.

Some days I wish they hadn’t been able to show me. Some days I wish they hadn’t taken my face, turned it towards the darkness that lingered out of the corner of my eye, and told me I had to face this problem. I wouldn’t have found happiness by ignoring it, but I wouldn’t have caused pain to everyone, I would have just stayed in my private pain. Then I remember the only way to make it out of hell is to just keep going.

.

I’m still going.

.

I decided I mattered and I couldn’t choose to sit in the flames alone anymore. I couldn’t sacrifice myself for the sake of you. That wasn’t what it was supposed to be like and me calling it out wasn’t wrong. I don’t have to take the name tag, “Bad person”. I’ll leave that one on the table.