and nothin hurts anymore i feel kinda free

 This Christmas i have reminded myself a couple of times that it is simply a day and i do not have to do everything in power to be seen to be witnessed, that i exist even if it's just me and my mum in the living room that we've spent twenty years in. and it helped. everything is different and coming home for christmas with n like we've always dreamed about - we got out and we choose when we come back - has been beautiful. i have nothing to run from and i know full well that life will continue to grow and develop and be beautiful and one day i won't be here, doing this christmas, with j & g on christmas eve in the same way. i think we will always come back to that christmas eve but i think sometime in the future my mum will be in a bigger, safer, warmer house. with high ceilings and big windows for light. and she'll have someone to love and appreciate her, who makes her howl with laughter and who drives her wherever she wants to go. who keeps her safe. and i'll come back to a bigger christmas, with a bigger family, with my own family. and it will be even more beautiful than this is. 

my hair is blonde and long, my skin is good because it treat it good, i'm a couple stones lighter and fit into some beautiful jeans again, some beautiful jumpsuits and dresses. i'm vaping too much, but i'm christmas warm sober and i'm dancing every day, moving my body and feeling it without judgement for the first time in maybe ever. 

i am so grateful for all of this. for my two homes, for my sobriety, for my mum saying i was the best she's ever seen me on christmas eve, that i laughed the most i ever have, even though normally i'm two sheets to the wind. i'm grateful for N, for M, for my girls. i'm grateful for all that's happened. i'm grateful for my car and my cat son. i'm grateful for all of it. for school and school friends. for all of it. 

Scraps

 party girl was a character, a fun, naughty, dangerous one. it stopped people seeing the real me. which drinking and using did too. the way a cold glass and a fag stopped my hands feeling empty, drugs and alchol stopped me feeling empty. i was a character. but a shadow, a real ghost of a girl, a pencil sketch outline of myself. 

i went to the piano works last night in the west end with myself. scraps of it, but scraps of my real self. i hold the scraps in my hands and offer them to the others. i can give you this little piece: this little piece of me loves paul simon, this little piece doesn't know what to do with her hands, this little piece didn't hear you the first time, this little piece isn't very sure of herself anymore. but they're real this time. there's something real this time. in the few hours i spent with my friends last night they got more of me than i used to give in a whole week. sober, you can see me now. 

Tornado country

 i've been here in my little room in my * home for 14 months now. i've lived and grown inside this little room although i forget it - in this room i've made it through a year at school, a lockdown (and a half), intense trauma work, i've got sober inside this room, i saw my 24 hour chip, my 90 days, my 148th (today!). i've held myself like a baby bird inside my bedroom.  

this term didn't go how i'd planned. i didn't do most of it (although perhaps this is an exaggeration). i was incredibly low, by the middle of the term even getting out of bed to wash my face filled me with this bone deep sense of dread. fear and dread was all over me. i barely made it to this last week we're having now. but the important thing is that i did make it. i'm on a new medication which seems to be doing the trick and i think all the work i missed is catch up-able. getting sober is the most uncomfortable thing i've ever done but it is undeniably the best thing i've ever done for myself. 

i spent a lot of mornings on the 134 bus scribbling away at chekhov work and voice work. trying to breathe, trying to cry, trying to stop crying. i spent a lot of time at AA meetings and in bed, firing off frantically apologetic emails to attendance. but in between that deep discomfort and the distrust i have now of keeping this stable-feeling, i learnt to be loved. i learned how to be supported. i learned how to be hugged by somebody when i'm crying. i learned how to hold a hand to my sternum. i learned how to remind myself that i am human (and i need to be loved... just like everybody else does...). i learned people don't hate what i hate about myself. that people like me. 

i want to write so much more but i won't, because i'll just dilute it. but this christmas i want to rest deeply. i want to have fun. i want to feel joy. i want to feel pretty and fun. i want to feel proud of myself, even if just for a few moments, and i want to make a massive fuck off 'what i've achieved' end of year list and celebrate myself for a monumentally hard but deeply rewarding and important and healing year. i always knew that 2020 was going to change everything, that it was going to be the beginning of a whole new life of luck and good things. and i was right. 

reading/read: 

• a crooked tree- una mannion
• the yellow wallpaper - charlotte perkins gillman

listening to: 

• tornado country - allison ponthier 
• shoot - tommy lefroy 
• just for me - pinkpantheress
• l to the og - kendall roy (unironically sorry)