Where Have You Been?

Alright, so I'm finally at a place where I can talk about some of the things that’s been happening in the last few months without feeling riddled with guilt for what I’ve missed; we’re here now. So I started this blog with intention of bringing some joy and laughter to the world ‘cause I think I'm funny and the shit my mom-brain was coming up with was, at the very least, chuckle worthy. However, as I started writing and posting it started to become clear more and more that something was bubbling beneath the surface. I stopped feeling funny, I felt more sad and pessimistic as the days progressed and talking about the motherhood things I was experiencing went from being amusing to alarming. From grappling with becoming a new stay-at-home mom to the postpartum anxiety and depression things started to snowball more and more rapidly out of my control. I superficially talked about therapy and it’s importance and how it was going, trying to make sure everything came across positive and uplifting in nature. I felt like there was already so much heaviness and hardship in thus pandemic-era world, I couldn’t be that way on the platform I was creating. A more evolved human could’ve seen that was hella unrealistic, but I couldn’t, and I began to feel guilty. I felt guilty because I wasn’t the beacon of positivity I felt I should be and I that I was somehow letting the word down. Ha! It’s really my audacity for me. However, I really was riddled with guilt and felt like a failure. And then as if that wasn’t enough, therapy was going great and by great I mean I was getting my ass handed to me and working through some deep trauma that left everything in my world at a standstill. It’s so funny how you think you’ve healed a thing until you fully remove the mask you've created and see exactly all the shit you’ve been carrying behind it. And what I learned is my anxiety ran deep, like SO DEEP, far beyond anything that post-partum hormones could've created. It was so much deeper than just postpartum shit. It was my entire life as far back as I could remember. That was a hard pill to swallow. You think you just have a fun, quirky personality only to realize you've been walking around actively experiencing the world through your trauma goggles. It's trash really. And suddenly I realized, I’d lost my voice. I then became obsessed with the why and how, like, why was my brain doing what it was doing? Was it undiagnosed ADHD? Was I just lazy? Was I on the Autism spectrum? How long has this been my reality?Was I depressed? Was it a combination of all of those things? All I knew was that I had more questions than answers and it was growing more and more frustrating. I didn't know what my voice sounded like, and it’s hard to write with clarity in those conditions. So, stopped posting altogether and I went on this quest to discover my voice and really strip back the layers of me and see what I looked and sounded like.

I began the process of psychiatric evaluation, such a weird thing to say, but I wanted to know exactly what was going on and why my brain was doing the fuck-shit it was doing. If you can't address a thing, you can't begin healing a thing and I was ready to heal. La It took a few months of therapy, then the hours-long testing for me to be later be diagnosed with a few new friends some being Major Depressive Disorder, ADHD, & Avoidant Personality Disorder. Not gonna lie, I had to look that last one up ‘cause I just knew my psychiatrist made that’s shit up, but alas, it’s a thing. I finally had concrete proof that my brain really was doing some extracurricular shit. For years i’d been unconsciously masking as neurotypical, when I wasn’t. I wasn’t failing and I wasn’t lost, I was tired. Having my daughter highlighted that could no longer mask like I was and function as I had before. Since I now knew what was happening, I could govern myself accordingly and really do something to positively change my station. I started exploring the island more going out and showing up as my authentic quirky self. I mean everything from stimming in public and not smiling if I didn’t feel like it, to actually telling my friends when I wasn’t okay. And you know what, a funny thing happened… I started to hear my voice again, the way I felt about things became a beautiful poetry flowing freely from my heart to my fingertips and I had that fervent urge to start writing again. So here I am, months later, a clearer understanding of my mental health, and a zest for life, and writing, that I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s more apparent to me now than ever before just how much my heart and my pen are tethered. I’m still learning the odds and ends about my new friends and navigating those spaces. However, It’s 2022 bitches!!! I feel that things are looking up and, despite what the Omarion variant has us feeling, I finally feel like life is about to get good! So that’s where I’ve been, I’m excited to share with you where I’m about to go. Be sure to subscribe to keep journeying with me. 🙃