Not Yesterday, Not Tomorrow, Today: A Book on NOT GIVING UP in Loss, Depression, Miscarriage, and Abuse

By Ruth H. B.

This book jumps from present to past in my moments of PTSD when I relive the events that make these entries. The entire time from when I was six years old to when I am thirty years old in 2020 forms the complete book you now hold in your hand. Through the journey you take with me, my past is slowly disclosed in sections via chapters. I have a chapter for each phase of my life I was struggling with, such as depression, PTSD, abuse, and the major one for me--my miscarriage and death of my son, which is what birthed this book.

This book was designed to be in the form of a journal instead of a communication between two people so that you could take this journey with me in these different areas of my life and because these journal entries were my therapy and way to survive. Through my journal entries in this autobiography, you can feel the raw emotion with me in the moment. You will feel the thoughts as they dripped with reality. I was very much a part of each chapter, disclosing the very real struggle in which I was thrown. Slowly the entire picture is painted before you. With every step you take into my journey, you become one step closer to understanding what life was like for me. This isn't your typical autobiography where someone sits and tells you about their life. In this autobiography, you get the chance to live it with me and all the people that it includes and all the experiences it conveys. You travel in my footsteps through my memories of the life I have lived and currently live. You read the experiences that have shaped the person who stands here today. This wasn't an easy road for me, and it has taken much courage to display these very authentic and real pages from my actual journal during this time.

My aim is to have this help someone see the positive in life and be an encouragement in rough times in the wisdom I disclose from these experiences in my life. However, it is mostly for myself to say--I am still here to give a voice to the little girl who has been trapped inside for thirty years and to show the many ways that I am still fighting this fight. It is to give a voice to my son and the reality of miscarriage many do not see and those who do live with it on a daily basis. This is to give a voice to the all the struggles this covers and to the one struggling and to break the silence. Are you ready to come? Are you to come on this journey with me?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662450730

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Not Yesterday, Not Tomorrow, Today

A Book on NOT GIVING UP in Loss, Depression, Miscarriage, and Abuse

Ruth H. B.

Copyright © 2022 Ruth H. B.

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-5072-3 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-5073-0 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

PRELUDE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

About the Author

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

It took a long time to find the words to put these feelings into emotion in written form. For many years if you had asked me to explain what I felt, I would not have been able to tell you. I also never realized I had a voice or that it was even that important. It took me my entire life up until last year when I met a man who would change it all and challenge me to think of myself differently—my grandfather. He showed me the value of valuing myself and, in turn, how important my story was to tell.

I cannot explain, describe, or show in any example of just how difficult this journey has been in writing this book. I cannot count the number of tears that have fallen on the keyboard in which I am typing this or how many cries for mercy the walls of my secret world in my home have heard me utter in the making of this book. The courage it takes to write this is even more than anyone could imagine. I do not have my name known by anyone, and that does not help me in my struggle in writing this. In the time I am writing this, being utterly alone in every possible way and metaphor has made this journey even harder than others who have written their stories with happy endings and help from those around them. Names we have come to respect, love, and know well in our culture and our American society. Names this book will be up alongside on the bookshelves against mine. However, just like their books evoke ups and downs, triumphs, and traumas of their lives, this one is of mine.

Often our stories, when told through others, are filtered through their eyes to satisfy whatever preconceived notion they have about us or premade judgment. This was something that has been my inner story and inner struggle for most of my life. Someone else always speaking for me. Someone else always placing in an answer on my behalf or commenting how I felt or what I thought as if I couldn't speak for myself or was too dumb to answer. When you are born and live in a reality that is dripping with abuse, as I did for most of my life, you lose your voice. That is why I have taken my journey and collected them all together in the memories I have through my journal entries of this past year of 2019 through to the end of 2020. This book is composed by me alone and contains only MY memories, struggles, survival, grief, and pain and, ultimately, my journey to who I am today. The person writing this isn't the same person who started this book, and I am ever quickly changing into the person I was always meant to be. This is my journey. This is my destiny. This is me diving deep into memories that have long been since due in tasting the air of truth. It's been a long time since they have seen the curtain of honesty drawn back to relive the tale that shaped my world into the dark places I was thrown into. I was a scared little girl stripped of her voice and left an orphan by my family in abandonment, completely isolated within their grasp. I was left without a way to call for help and without any light to guide me. It's time she had a voice. Are you ready? Are you ready to take this journey with me and hear mine?

PREFACE

Real Journal Entry

Every time I sit down to write my feelings on this virtual sheet of paper, I get this overwhelming sense someone out there needs to hear what I have to say or have said, like some best friend telling me some unknown realization or truth. All those voices come rushing back to my mind like a raging river down a canyon. I hate it, dear heart. I hate that feeling. I wish I could throw a knife at it, and yet it sits there nudging me on to something I would never do in my own thought, will, or desire. I have people left and right throughout the life encounters I've had, telling me, "You need to write a book on this." Whether it be my miscarriage and death of my boy, or the abuse I endured into my adult life from my childhood, or even just my PTSD and depression.

Whenever I have spoken in the past to people, be it a random person or someone I knew for a short time or just met well, they all said the same thing, dear heart. They all encouraged me I NEED to against my hesitation of replying, "I'll try as if to say, I'll think about it. In a way that you know I wouldn't even romance the thought for a minute. They emphasized it again before the conversation ended: No, you NEED to!" Why? Why the emphasis? Why do I need to? I don't see why what I have to say in this time of mending and therapy is so important that I must write a book about it. These little therapy sessions I write in my spare time on your delicate and yummy vanilla pages—well, dear heart, how is that so important? What's the emphasis on MY words? Can someone mail me the memo? I think my mail carrier pigeon ate the last one! My own question is still the same as before when I wrote about my feeling in publishing this book: "What do I have to say that could be so important than other books haven't already said on these topics?" I don't understand how MY WORDS could be what someone needs to hear. The thought really is beyond me. The thought that MY words mean something or could is really beyond me. I have been so beat down by humanity in the relationships I have had since a child that thinking anything I do or say could mean ANYTHING is, well, too much of a thought. I can't fathom it, dear heart, but I want to.

I don't understand why I am getting this nagging feeling, but I want it to go away. I guess that means I need to publish this ever so reluctantly. This nagging feeling is driving me nuts! I guess, if anything, someone just needs to hear these words: You are beautiful and You can do this! That's the message I want to be conveyed throughout all my journal entries and experiences. All the bad, just knowing that even though someone went through all of this—THEY MADE IT, and SO CAN YOU! We don't know our strength until we're left facing the monster that created the fear. Just don't be your own enemy to that victory in giving up. NEVER GIVE UP, because, in the end, you GOT THIS!

Before I end this entry, can I say one more thing? If anything, maybe this can let someone know they are not alone in this unforgiving and ignorant world. We shun as humans what we don't understand so quickly in one another. What a foolish mistake this is. What pain it creates! We need to be understanding. I will be the best I can be in being what I never got and being better, but I am human. I fall short, too, even if I mean well. I have my own struggles, as we are aware. I'm nice. I'm thoughtful. I'm honest. I'm trustworthy, and I'm broken. I'm quiet. I'm negative in my depression and always looking for something to hope in. I'm distrustful. Just like anyone else, I have my imperfections affecting all my thoughts and characteristics. I'm not always right, and I'm not always wrong. I'm not always understanding, and I'm not always understood. We give, we take, we learn, and we grow. In that process, have we ever stopped and questioned, "How is this impacting those around me?" because we should ask that more often. We don't ask it enough. We don't try to understand how what we say and what we do will affect someone else, and we should. Because what they do affects us just the same. It's a two-way street in life, and this is no different in our actions and our words.

Ya know, I have an example of this. My grandfather said something nice to me yesterday that meant more to me than hearing I was pretty recently by a client (I'm still having a hard time believing I could be). My grandfather said, "You'll make a wonderful mother someday. He asked about my past in my miscarriage, and I, in a stream of tears, went over it with him briefly in the timeline of events. I told him, dear heart, about the doctor's disbelief. I told him about them calling me crazy. I told him I held my dead son in my hand and what he looked like, and I told him I was only there because my mother wanted me out of the house, and when I asked to come back home, she wouldn't let me. She tried persuading me to stay in that relationship to the point of pushing it off on me and refusing to let me move back. I told him how angry I was. I told him how I didn't want to be here anymore without my son. And he said that to me, along with Well, now you have your own goddamn house. Thanks to God and him. Yes, I do. Even as lonely as it is. I have one. Those words impacted me positively. Isn't that a change? Something positive. It was nice to finally have something positive to further push back all the negatives. If I was in that dark room developing my photos as I was in high school, well, I'd have a back room full of negatives. In the words of Thomas Edison with all his tries for a lightbulb, let me say as I quote: I haven't failed—I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

PRELUDE

This book jumps from present to past in my moments of PTSD when I relive the events that make these entries. The entire time from when I was six to when I was thirty years old in 2020 forms the complete book you now hold in your hand. Through the journey you take with me, my past is slowly disclosed in sections via chapters. I have a chapter for each phase of my life I was struggling with, such as depression, PTSD, abuse, and the major one for me—my miscarriage and the death of my son, which is what birthed this book. This book was designed to be in the form of a journal instead of a communication between two people so that you could take this journey with me in these different areas of my life and because these journal entries were my therapy and way to survive. You could feel the raw emotion with me and feel the thoughts as they dripped with the reality. I was very much a part of in each chapter. Slowly the entire picture is painted before you. With every step you take into my journey, you become one step closer to understanding what life was like for me. This isn't your typical autobiography where someone sits and tells you about their life. In this autobiography, you get the chance to live it with me and all the people that it includes and all the experiences it conveys you travel in my footsteps through my memories of the life I lived. This wasn't an easy road for me, and it has taken much courage to display these very authentic and real pages from my actual journal. My aim is to have this help someone see the positive in life and be an encouragement in rough times. However, it is mostly for me—to say that I am still here to give a voice to the little girl who has been trapped inside for thirty years and to show in many ways that I am still fighting. This is to give a voice to the struggle and to the one struggling and break the silence.

Chapter 1

Depression

Despair and Saving Grace

January 6, 2020

(Simple Beginnings)

My eyes open. It's dark. I am up before the sun even has a chance to greet me with a warm hello on my cheek. I stumble out of bed to the lamp across the room. Silently I wonder if there are any toys I should worry about as I swiftly left through the bedroom door. I close the door behind me, so my four-legged girls won't go into the bedroom. Knowing Mom is about to close the door, they chase the moment, hoping to win as if in some silent race of "WE GOT to get there, what if she's eating!" The door closes just as they reach it, and I quietly smile at the adorable effort as I hear the closing bedroom door click shut.

I stumble into the kitchen, still half-asleep and drowsy as my senses still wake to all that is around me. A small one-bedroom rectangle of a kitchen, where the sink is in front of the refrigerator at just a turn as I come around the wall that separates the kitchen from the living room in my small one-bedroom apartment. I can feel the cold hardwood floor embracing my feet. As if a dive into a mild cold pool of water, the surface greets me as I walk upon it. It feels like rushing water with each step I take, and it is refreshing to the touch. I forgot to do the dishes the night before as they sit there in the dirty water as I grab a mug from the cupboard diagonally above the kitchen sink. I run the sink faucet until ten minutes later, the water finally gets hot, and I place my coffee cup into the microwave. I place clean water into the sink as the coffee water heats up in the microwave. Now it's a dance of time to get them done before the timer beeps in two minutes and thirty seconds. I just make it as the last dish goes on the counter to dry. Still struggling financially, I don't even have a dish drainer.

I remember my simple life and how the things everyone else takes for granted I don't have. What a joke SOME might call my life. Yet I know every moment is so precious, and I am thankful for what I DO have because I worked for it. As anyone knows who has done it before me. Building yourself up from the ground up sometimes means having just noodles and mushroom soup as your main dish each week. That a towel is just as good as a drainer or how YouTube can be the best TV when cable is too much. How a Christmas tree still lit after Christmas with a good hot cup of chocolate can be the best mood picker-upper when you're depressed and isolated and have no one to call. When you build yourself up from the ground up, these simple moments become your most treasured moments. They remind you not to take anything for granted for at any moment, it can be gone.

As this thought concludes itself, I take my coffee cup from the microwave as I dry my hands. I take two spoon scoops from my plastic spoon, aka my fine china, and mix in my instant coffee. I think of someday owning the Keurig. I momentarily remember the smell of columbium coffee and Irish cream and pumpkin spice on the holidays when I was left home alone to fend for myself. The simple moments that got me through with my faithful companion next to me. Whom I remember as vividly as if the cancer never took him. I pour my creamer into my cup. My thoughts wander to where my life is going and what purpose it has as I put the creamer away and stir my coffee. I feel as aimless as a dart randomly thrown in some crazy direction. It's been great getting to know me, but it's been lonely.

I feel the age of time whisper to my conscience I should have been here already and I'm late as if to some life event. I feel like Alice in Wonderland when the rabbit is running for an important appointment he's about to miss. He's running as fast as his feet will carry him as he explains to Alice, "I'm late, I'm late, I'm late for a very important date!" as if a daily rush out the door to work I am all too familiar with. I certainly feel late, but at least I am here.

I feel the passages of time sweep over me, and I am reminded in a few weeks, I am turning thirty years old, and I am ready to settle down and have a family. Something most of my generation has already beat me to, and I realize I am nowhere close to that yet and a few steps behind as if some young twenty-year-old still going to college. Instead of someone quickly reaching the prime of their life and entering the next phase life brings. I am learning and growing and this I know, and for the first time, I have the opportunity I never had before to move forward, with and within my own life. When you live in a household, in a reality dripping with abuse, you don't get to focus on yourself or grow as a person. For the first time, I can grow, and I can move forward. That feeling alone is so liberating, but it's also just as scary.

I once wrote when I was nine, "I want a house. I want a farm and I want my cat with me" (November 1999). I was nine years old, and though I was young, I knew what I wanted. Everyone kept telling me my dream was impossible, and I grew up without any family or support of any kind. I was left to travel the waters of life completely unguided in complete darkness and often used and alone. I wanted a quiet slice of peace, and I still can hear it ring through my ears when I open my door someday. A place where I can let my work bags fall on the floor and hear the thump-thump of the dog running to greet me. My girls meowing a hello and whatever else that future holds I am not aware of. A little farm out in the country away from humanity sounds like a delightful trip I'd never get tired of. Going out my back door to my garden on the weekends and listening to the birds sing a morning melody is all the harmony I need to wake up too. Someday…someday…this fight isn't over yet, and no one is going to stand in my way. NO one. No one but myself if I give up. I'm still here…so…there must be a reason for me being here…even if I don't know what.

January 17, 2020

The weather is rainy, been nasty, cold, and wet all week. My knees and wrists are feeling the impact now from my arthritis, but I'm happier today than I've been in months. Nothing great happened either. Other than that, I've been sick with IBS and wondering if the fact I fainted Monday is something serious or just my low blood sugar from glycemia. I fainted. I got up from lying down to sit in a chair because I felt light-headed after standing up and needed to go to the bathroom. I no more than went to sit down and barely verbalized without finishing my sentence to the thin, quiet air around me, "I feel like I'm going to faint," because I collapsed. I felt myself going down and didn't have the strength to fight it like I normally do. I felt my heart slow down until I could feel every slowed beat of it a few seconds before hitting something.

I woke up slopped over the arm of the chair like a Raggedy Ann doll, no joke…the arm of the chair caught me as I fainted and prevented me from hitting my head on the other objects like the table and fan beside me. I tried to move and couldn't—no strength to stand. I lay there, unable to respond but aware of my surroundings—vaguely. I was in a daze and feeling like my head was foggy, my body held down by some invisible force as if an elephant was on my chest, and my heart hurt. A pain shot through my body as if traveling my nerves through the blood veins that spread throughout my body as highways across some vast landscape. I couldn't move, no strength. Once I did, I had a headache. Ever since I've been unable to barely maintain my fluids, as in I can't get enough. If I am not constantly drinking, my pee turns to a dark orange after 3–4 hours of no fluids. I've been having a headache lately and my mind foggy—I can't remember anything! I've been sleepy, even when I'm not really that tired. Heart's been hurting almost regularly this week. Not sure what to do about it since I can't rush the process to finding a doctor with work every day of the week any quicker, and every time I go to the hospital, everyone tells me I'm fine.

Obviously, I'm not fine. Obviously, SOMETHING is going on, and this has been really scaring me. I guess this is what years of stress does to you. I've been under such an enormous about of stress for YEARS that I guess; it finally caught up with me—and it doesn't care how young you are. Actions from others have everlasting affects; just because we want to ignore that fact doesn't mean it's not true and it doesn't hurt you—emotionally or, over time, physically. Abuse affects people in all kinds of ways, and the stress from the abuse and depression can have everlasting effects on a person's life.

March 10, 2020, Tuesday

I hid so much from everyone and never spoke about all I went through and was going through during my miscarriage. I didn't even really understand that he was gone. I was still going on the mother's instinct. I was focused on one thing, and the only thing that mattered once I realized I WAS pregnant—survival for my son. My mind pushed everything else onto the hold pile. I got out of North Carolina by labor in a plastic plant that was hard on my body from my disability and long hours of standing shorting hot plastic with my bare hands. I moved to Virginia to a small town and found a job at the local Kroger.

When I was in North Carolina, I had searched for apartments I could rent to get out of the situation with my mother and get away from my abusive ex. My mother tagged along with me since she was facing an eviction from her home on my plan to move me out of the state. I already had made arrangements for myself concerning the two-bedroom apartment I found for me and possibly my son—he was always on my mind in living form. It hadn't hit me yet that he was dead.

Shortly after moving to Virginia, my mother went behind my back and stole the apartment—I had placed a down payment on for myself upon arriving. She waited until I was at work when she signed her name as the only one leasing the apartment with her I just met him boyfriend, Timothy, the second week we arrived. She told the office I was staying with her for only a week and I would be moving out. She told me the news of what she had done and in so set-in motion late at night when I got off work and had just made a strenuous walk home from the other side of town. I had been on my feet for over six hours with a serious disability and unable to see at night. I was more than exhausted when I came through that door that night to hear the news my mother told me in a cold, unfeeling tone as if she had a right to be so cruel and unfeeling. She never drove me, even knowing my disability and the seriousness of it or with knowing that the only reason she had a roof over her head was because of my plan MONTHS in advance to move myself out of a very dark and abusive situation.

This wasn't a small town, generally speaking, and even more so when you struggled to walk across a single room. Every day I did the same thing in the hopes of just surviving, and every day I fought all the odds against me in all the silent struggles and fears I faced in my life and my disabilities. I was in so much physical pain trying to just survive on my own. She told me I had to leave in a week, and the lease had already been signed. She never told them, of course, that I was the one who had talked to the woman in the office and reserved the apartment FOR ME and had paid for it. My mother was just supposed to stay there for a short while to find her own place, an obvious lie she had told me.

After my mother informed me of what she did behind my back, she tried kicking me out of the apartment in the dead of winter. She brought in a guy she just met that week and tried combining their incomes, telling him I was just temporarily staying with her as if the apartment was her idea all along. He wasn't working yet, and she couldn't do it alone when I inquired about the finances. I used that leverage to stay since she wouldn't have any way to afford the place and would be evicted without my half of the rent—I told her she assumed all the bills then since she stole the apartment, and I would pay for my bills and half the rent. Ironically enough, her not being able to afford the rent was the reason she had tagged along with me to begin with!

I slept on the couch and used the small guest bathroom as if a guest in the apartment I had reserved for myself. I tried finding another place to go, but already with the leasing year already in full swing with students needing places to live and people moving into the town and so on, there was nowhere else for me to go that time of the year. In fact, this was the last place in the town available, which was why I took it to begin with, in hopes of getting on my feet and getting a better life. I was going to work and hoping to go to college there for a better future in either medical coding or pursue my dream of becoming a vet.

For the rest of the year, I continued sleeping on the couch in the apartment I found and paid for as a guest and continued fighting for my right to be there during the dead of winter. My mother was always being very abusive in hopes it would drive me out the door. She emotionally murdered me all the time and at ANY opportunity she got to further lay claim on the apartment as her own. Karma bit her pretty hard though as the apartment complex sued them for damages when everyone moved out. Since they couldn't afford the place, ahem, I found for myself and they stole, cough, they tagged along with me to Texas and, therefore, broke their lease in which they were sued for on TOP of the damages they created while living on the top floor.

I planned on moving to Texas because of an invite I received from someone. I decided to take the invite, knowing I needed help getting on my feet, and I wasn't going to get on my feet and have a better life with them tagging along, taking everything from me. He promised a job, and I really needed that. He promised a better future and spoke to the lost hope within that needed that to be true. I figured I'd sleep in the back of the business somewhere if things went south with my mother as they usually did. My mother and I never did get along, and that's only when she was around. We had moved that late fall/early winter as the first snow fell that cold night in November on the twentieth and arrived on the twenty-second of the month and year of 2018 in Texas.

Previous to this moment, while I was still living with them back in Virginia in the apartments, my mother received an invitation she got from her real father and someone I grew up never knowing. My mother had isolated me from the entire family growing up to retain her control of me, and I grew up never knowing anyone but her—even in her constant absence. She only reached out to him recently before the invite to pay her half of the rent in our agreement between us. She couldn't even afford HALF the rent and was asking ANYONE she THOUGHT MIGHT help her. Her father helped her a few times pay her half of the rent, and she decided out of obligation she would go to the celebration held in Ohio for the holiday by her father; he had invited her to.

We traveled to Ohio and stayed in the inn he paid for us. I remember it like yesterday. He was wearing a blue and white shirt with suspenders and jeans and a smile a mile wide when I met him for the first time. He asked me what I was doing and if I had a car. I suppose he was just being a grandfather being so nosy. I was SO embarrassed to answer the questions as honestly as I had. I told him I was going to school and working and that I didn't have a car. He looked at me funny and said, "You don't have a car?" I replied I didn't, and he asked me how old I was. I replied I was twenty-eight and going to be twenty-nine in the following month. My mind flashed back to the ONLY other time I saw him for a whooping FIVE MINUTES when my seven-year-old self had met his eyes for the first time in my ENTIRE life! We took one picture together, and he slipped away from my life until this pivotal moment.

The celebration in Ohio was my first ever family celebration where I got to visit other family members. I had only previously been to two potlucks where I met some of the family but was isolated as being my mother's child. No one would approach me. I understand their reasons NOW, but at the time, this really bothered me. This hurt deeper than I'd admit, and it confused me more than anything else in my life. I was left feeling detached with no way to connect to the place where I was SUPPOSED to belong and find acceptance and support. I only found emptiness, judgment, and hate.

Upon meeting my grandfather for the first time where I could talk to him and get to know him, he had asked me how I was, if I had a car, and so on. As embarrassed as I was, I was so thankful to finally be able to talk to him. He took us to a secluded bar within the hotel, and my mother excused herself, leaving just him and me. We talked for a good while before he talked to me about moving to Texas. He explained he needed someone to take over his business so he could retire. He begged me to come to Texas even if my mother didn't. I remember he had the same talk with me a SECOND time as we all walked out of a Denny's restaurant he had brought us to before we all departed and went back to our normal lives after the celebration. I remember him stalling behind where I was and waiting until they left before talking with me privately about making sure I came even if they didn't. He wanted me to assure him by making a promise, and he was dead set on making sure I made the journey. I couldn't figure out why, and I pondered this so deeply in my heart. Why was I suddenly such a hot ticket? I was never noticed before. I could never expect the blessing he would turn out to be for me in my life when I took the jump and moved to Texas. My mother and her boyfriend came along reluctantly because they couldn't afford the place without me. I told them I was going to go with or without them; I made the jump even though I was overdosing on fear. I got my feet wet for whatever would happen, even as paralyzing as the fear was. I'm so glad I did.

I remember my first steps in Texas when my foot hit the ground for the first time. It was in a big city just outside a place called Fort Hood. I was twenty-eight years old in 2018 that November and just getting off the U-Haul when my grandfather was standing there anxiously waiting. I saw him pacing back and forth as we pulled into the U-Haul parking lot. It was November 22, 2018, when I arrived about nine in the morning. We drove all through the night, and it was the longest two days of my life in that U-Haul. Ironically, that January, the following month, in 2019, I would pass my anatomic sac and complete the incomplete miscarriage I had been suffering from since the late summer of 2018. This was a PIVOTAL moment in my life. My cramps would go away, and I wouldn't feel so sick anymore as I held my anatomic sac that morning before work and a week before my twenty-ninth birthday.

I had arrived just before Thanksgiving that year. We all gathered for Thanksgiving and celebrated it together. It was my first Thanksgiving with my real grandfather and my last with my mother that Thanksgiving in 2018. In 2019, my mother would move to another state, leaving me behind that summer, and I would be left alone without a parent of any kind physically. My grandfather's health would decline, and I would hardly see him except in the mornings at work. I would be left alone in the year 2020 when this was written with no one to call family except my grandfather and his failing health. I only saw him during work and usually only in the mornings. My private life was as lonely as a deserted parking lot during the time I wrote these entries in hopes of finding healing.

The following Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2019 were both lonely and rough. Christmas was especially rough. It was only a few years after the death of two very important influences in my life and only a year after the death of my son. Annie and Mittens both died in the same month of Christmas and right before the holiday in 2016. My son died in the middle of 2018 just a week before the third trimester. He, my beloved boy, is why I sought comfort in your pages and searched for healing in every letter that was typed across your empty and lonely page. He is the reason I am here to tell this story, and he is the reason I am here writing these words.

I remember thinking my first Christmas in Texas in 2018 as I sat across the table from a man I should have known and a man I knew nothing about, "I don't know this man in front of me any more than a stranger on the sidewalk" with feelings of how I should. I helped place the food and put it back and remained really quiet the entire time. Like a grave with only enough whispers to know there was a silent wind to show some shallow bit of life. I mostly just listened. I listened to stories and places the family had gathered and visited and I wasn't a part of. In twenty-nine-years of life, I never knew my grandfather or any other members of my family or that I even had family outside of the little circle I grew up knowing about but rarely met. Those I had met wanted nothing to do with me as a child and I couldn't figure out why I was rejected since birth.

During this first Christmas, I was grieving the loss of my companion of fourteen and half years along with my friend from a sudden suicide, which left so much destruction in its path, and my miscarriage and death of my son. I was also dealing with the heartache of the abuse I had gone through in the previous twenty-plus years of my life since I was ten years old and even darker secrets of abuse when I was five. I felt a lot of things, but I didn't feel festive or happy that year. I barely pulled through in the silence of my apartment and inner life.

I remember for the following New Year of 2020, shortly before I started writing this book, through the entries that were birthed in my quiet secret world after work. I got the fake bubbly and pretended I was happy for bringing in the new year. Only long enough to enjoy the ball drop, as I had done as a habit with my life companion of fourteen years all the years before his sudden death from cancer that Christmas. Before I silently whispered to myself as I toasted and sipped the bubbly, "here's to another year alone," before falling and crying on the kitchen floor. I had twenty-five years in complete solitude and isolation. Another year in the same wasn't something I welcomed and made me feel like I didn't exist.

Here I am in 2020, writing this book, which is just a copy and paste of my journal entries to try to help myself cope with all this trauma and find some healing. A form of self-therapy. It gets hard being your own hero. Sometimes it's impossible. As I write this book and go back over these journal entries I am without a mother, without the sense of family, no friends, and living in a new place so foreign to me, I feel like a fish out of water in a hard, dry, unforgiving desert.

I was grieving pretty heavily in the beginning of this year when I noticed on my way to work a paper. I had written things down in my mental fog on the New Year holiday of 2020. It must have been in my mental fog and breakdown after the ball fell. I really don't remember when I wrote it. It became a routine for the first three months of the year, every day after work. During some random time when I would just cry getting supper ready, or getting dressed for work, or taking the trash out, or remembering my boy, I would randomly write things down I NEEDED to hear. Things I NEEDED to believe in and always wishing I could on random pieces of paper that cluttered my random drawer of knickknacks and random items on my counter shoved in some random corner against the wall of the kitchen. I would get up, get dressed, go to work, and after six or seven LONG hours, go home.

I entered a mental fog where all my grief was wrapped around my mind and my heart like a cold, wet, drenched blanket as soon as my car pulled into the apartment parking lot. I could feel it come creeping up like some cold hand gracing the back of my body, piercing my skin with its sensation. I knew the emotional storm was coming, and I couldn't stop it as I rushed to my apartment to try to hide the storm about to hit. It was cold and heavy as soon as the key left the lock on the door, and the click of the closing door could no longer be heard echoing through my empty one-bedroom apartment. I immediately entered another world filled with grief, pain, and heartache, and mentally it was as if I was drunk—absent from everything around me. I was ENGULFED in the pain and misery. I just had that much pain I was carrying that I didn't have to drink to get the same affect. I was past my limit and on life support—emotionally.

In this state, I had written something that was the moment I started becoming aware of how serious my own state of pain and grief was and prompted me in the direction to write these entries for therapy purposes. I had written on the front counteracting everything my abusers ever told me as some failed attempt to save myself of things I NEEDED to hear: "You are enough. Never doubt yourself. You are amazing, believe in yourself. I wrote in blue ink on a scrap piece of paper that held my grocery list of the following week. However short, and on the back, I wrote something that stuck with me for a while after reading it: Never let someone tell you, you aren't enough. You are enough, love yourself, and never doubt yourself. They aren't worth your time, your pain, or your tears." I wrote as a way to mentor myself from the pain I felt at the hand of my abusers, with my mother at the forefront of that thought. As a way to mother myself, I wrote these words when I was in pain. I remember I cried for hours in that kitchen, just crying my heart out as I asked God some big questions and feeling lost as to where to find the answers. I cried and asked why my boy couldn't make it. Why was I forced into that pain and abuse from my ex, and why was I even alive to endure more of this misery! I screamed at God in my pain and silently hoped he understood me as misunderstood and judged as I felt by a cold world.

I stumbled to my bedroom around the corner of the kitchen at the end of the living room and fell into bed. The only piece of furniture I had I remember my last thought was of my girls—my two cats and the only thing bearing life in my apartment. I drank the last bottle of fake bubbly I had left in my hand and went to bed wishing to God I was dead in the morning so I wouldn't hurt anymore. As crazy as it sounds, I also prayed I could get up to at least feed my girls in a low mumble as I knew they would be hungry and need someone to feed them. How odd our wishes are when we are in the pit of grief and depth of depression. As simple as that thought was in caring for my girls. It kept me going to another day when continuing to go wasn't something I was motivated to do.

I wanted out. I didn't want to feel the pain as deeply as I did anymore. I was thinking of all the abuse I went through. I was thinking about how I was tired of the pain I carried and hid. I wanted the pain to end. After I saw what I wrote that morning and had read that rediscovering it a week later, that's when I decided I needed to do something to get through this pain. To really honestly get through it this time and move past it. I'm not out of the dark yet, but slowly with my two girls, Kasi and Sphinx, I am getting there. Through my writing, I am learning to cope with my grief as I still write in my journal in the making of this book. Maybe someday, I can say I made it. Until then. I'm still fighting in the silent darkness. But aren't we all fighting something?

March 14, 2020

The year I fell into that terrible relationship with my ex was the year I gave up ever having a child and I gave up my will to live. Always stuck with some loser who abused me or the abuse from my mother or others in my life. Left me in a place emotionally where the abuse of everyone I was undergoing made the abuse from my father ring loud in my memory than ever before. Every man at this point in my life meant pain, and I was done with them all. I got so suicidal in that dump of a place where my ex lived and where I was left abandoned by my mother. The week I was raped was the week, I was going to kill myself, but then a nightmare gave birth to hope.

I remember feeling so helpless at that moment and wishing I could give out some silent call for help. Why, I knew no one was coming to save me from what was about to happen in the next few seconds. Just like last time, I would have to be my own savior. After he left, and it was all over, I felt different. It felt like something bit me inside, sounds cliché, but it's true, and I never felt that before in my other experiences of being raped by others in my life or even him in previous moments. Something was different about this encounter. I can't explain the feeling I felt, but I didn't think of it again until I noticed my body acting strange. After all, that was done, though, and I had the miscarriage, I was left to just me. I felt like a failure again because I couldn't save my son. I felt like not only had I failed at protecting my son but also at life, and I felt unworthy of someone loving me. I felt ugly, and I felt like nothing good would ever happen to me. People like me, we don't catch breaks in life. I knew living would be harder than giving up.

I didn't feel like I had anyone that would care and often would go through my phone list to see how many people I could call in the numerous lonely hours I found myself in. When I came up empty, knowing if I called the few on my list, I would get voicemails or "I'm too busy—I'll call you back later," knowing they never would. I gave up caring. I gave up, slowly giving up on everything. My hopes and dreams of being a mom, of myself in accomplishing anything, or ever finding happiness and even of wanting to survive. I gave up caring about everything because I lost my son. I lost the only thing I ever loved in that way and ever wanted. I loved him more than I have loved anything, including myself. I was constantly hit with life telling me I wasn't worth the gum off the sidewalk. All the things I endured, all the unspeakable encounters and all the dark corners, all the abusers I knew controlling my life. All the things they beat over my head and would tell me daily as if I needed reminding of their abusive and cruel words on my person. How worthless I was and how lucky I was to have them. How I was fat, or lazy, or ugly, or dumb, or how I wasn't like HER, or how moody I was. I was constantly compared to someone else. Constantly told how I wasn't