You know, it’s been pretty damn hard for me to rationalize the great betrayal that happened a few years ago now. To get legitimately thrown away and ignored was not a thing that was easy for me to stomach and I have had wavering feelings of forgiveness and hate which have kept me steady in my vision to really get the hell out of here and leave that chapter for good. I suppose I should thank my birth mother for the snappy sendoff. Granted there might have been less painful ways to do it, I dunno, a fucking conversation might have been less caustic to my general well-being and development, and easier to forgive. But, you can’t do much aside from control your own reactions to shit. And I have been honest-to-god better trusting who has not broken that trust. That being Don, and really my birth father. He’s actually a really excellent person who has been there for us when we were really fucked, and ultimately has been our saving grace when literally everyone else was basically telling us to burn in hell.

Granted, he’s told me he’s often terrible with emotional support, but that’s Don’s realm. and Don’s really fucking stepped up the past few years. I think he’s been shit on largely by almost everyone in my families, and given he’s been very shit on by his own, he’s really been the perfect person to keep me up and steady. When I felt like nobody gave a shit about me being dead or alive, Don fucking stood by my side and at this point has done a really fucking fantastic job of taking care of me, and ensuring we have a future now. Once his assignment is done out of state, we are headed out to somewhere better, I hope. Seattle has been calling him for a few years now, and depending on how some conversations go, it might be there or some other places worth more consideration. I helped where I could, with the resume and the taxes and the old child support a friend helped us finally pay off for his daughter who is now 24. But when nobody had my back, Don was there, ready and steady to keep my back upright when I felt I was getting kicked in the stomach. I don’t wish anyone anything terrible, that’s definitely been a common theme–I do hope everyone in that family is doing as well as they can. But for us, the strength we developed leaning on each other has definitely trumped any nostalgia I thought I had for relationships that were ultimately much easier for them to see torched and fucking decimated.

However, even with my realization with all of these forces, I can’t help but be grateful for the hard push of my face into the mud. He and I were living no life over there, surrounded by hoards of shit that weren’t ours, spending all of my time trying to convince her about the value of her property in one of the hottest real estate markets in the country, getting high and drunk every night, because our lives were not pretty and were pretty fucking sad, actually. Ever since we left, things have gotten better for us, and I guess having a fake-ass family proved to me that once again, friends are the family that’s worth it, largely. Blood can be something, but without history or context, they can chuck you to the wind like you were nothing but trash.

Now we’re in a better place, and those things did happen for better reasons. I haven’t had alcohol in some time–I’ve quit weed entirely for now, and the clarity I’ve found for my purpose and direction, shit, even the dreams I’ve had are kind of therapeutic, yet strange. You kind of forget how that is to dream when you sit in a weed haze, trying to numb yourself to your own life. And the alcohol is definitely not something my face misses, nor does my body and soul. I’ll readily admit I am much quicker with my own comments on the world around me, but in my clarity I can be definitely a bit meaner in my observations. Or maybe I am blunt, and un-apologetically so. Either way, the haze of my non-sobriety left me more depressed than I am now. Definitely less protective than I’ve become lately about my life–absolutely so.

Now I am just pissed sometimes, nothing drowned out as I am sober. And there are a lot of things that have earned my ire. Can ya tell?