When do our trauma wounds heal? When do the brittle scabs stop bursting open at every light-handed brush? When do the scabs harden to eventually scar?

At the start of the year I penned my word of focus as “enough.” Each month my planner has a line for a mantra and I’ve simply written, “I am enough.” It’s more of a prayer than a reminder.

What do you do when there’s no magic cure and you will remain sick for long periods of time - maybe even all your life?

I didn’t write down the good memories like I thought I had. I didn’t write down my first kiss or the fun things I did that day. I wrote about my parents fighting. I wrote about how often I was bullied in school. I wrote about how bad I felt about my body.

I remember standing in front of my bathroom mirror covering my left eye to make sure it wasn’t a dream. Yep, something was wrong. I couldn't see anything out of my right eye.

I ache, everything hurts, I’m nauseated, but I asked for it, didn’t I? Don’t accept drinks from strangers, my grandma’s voice lectures from memory. Never leave your drink unattended.

I am only ankle deep in the water, but I close my eyes all the same, breathing in the familiar sensations of the beach, our home. I’m not weightless in the water, but I feel lighter, as if I removed the weight of overwhelm and left it on the shore for someone else to carry for a while.

Tethering to an idea or a thought comes both naturally and oh, so difficultly for me. My personality dislikes risk, variables, gray areas, patience. I need facts, logic, plans and authority that I can respect.

Friendship evolves so much as you get older. It’s harder to make friends, to stay in touch with those friends, to keep nurturing and growing those friendships. Life can get in the way, despite our best efforts.

Why is it that when considering our bodies, we focus not on how it feels or what it needs, but instead we tend to spend our time focusing on how it looks?

For me, anxiety isn't a feeling here and there but a constant thing that, when at it’s worst, can color every single thought in my life. It’s not a thought process; it’s a physical, mental, and emotional state.

When the world shut down, so did I. Not leaving my home for nearly three months, it took a drive around town with my hubby and two sons on Mother’s Day 2020 to see the world was still moving, even though it looked and felt drastically different.

I realized with such stunning certainty that I did not live in the myth of the post-Civil Rights America that, for 41 years, I believed I did. It was like the moment that Neo awoke after he was unplugged from the Matrix. I saw the world I lived in for all of its ugliness and cruelty and I was broken.

The parts of Me I miss most are not parts I can see in a rearview mirror or parts some stranger can see in the baby food aisle at the grocery store. Me is not some shiny exterior, lacquered and gleaming.

At first, learning to be secure without latching on to someone else caused all sorts of panic and alarms going off internally. But my mission needed to persevere, I had to know I was enough to find happiness on my own.

I could not handle the mediocrity any longer. I was 38 years old and life with my husband felt stagnant; 10 years together without moving forward, no house, no kids, and debt was high.

Miscarriage is like receiving an invitation to a party you never wanted to be invited to, and your RSVP has already been checked. You have no choice but to attend.

One of the biggest changes to spending more time at home, I realized, was not being observed by others. I remember, in the “before times”, during meetings I might have spent some mental energy on being aware of how others were perceiving me - my body, expressions, and movements.

Growing up in an environment where adults did not feel comfortable expressing their negative emotions in front of me made me think that happiness was the only emotion allowed in public and it was an unwritten societal rule that everybody knew.

Two years after the end of that relationship, and I am finally free from a lifetime of self-hatred. I have worked tirelessly through my issues, challenging old thought patterns and beliefs, doing the work to heal myself.