There is a remarkable amount of pain in acknowledging that some of the greatest strengths in my children are a result of the hell they’ve been through. Something told me to go back and read Heather’s last post that she published before ending her life.
From what she writes in her last published post, where she eloquently describes her reckoning with the pain and grief associated with everything she had been through on her 6-month sobriety date, October 8, 2021. At the end of the post, she mentions 18 months of sobriety, which would have been October 2022. The post wasn’t published until April, two days before her second sobriety anniversary and 27 days before she died by suicide.
I outlined the similarities between Heather and myself after her death and right around my one-year sobriety date. Going back to read her words at three years sober feels completely different. The words and awe she has for her oldest daughter are beautiful, but I can’t help but make up the level of self-loathing that exists just below the surface. The “You’re remarkable, but part of your greatness is because I hurt you so bad, and I’m trying to figure out how to live with that.”
I am immesurably thankful for her life and its direct and indirect effect on mine and where I have ended up and for this history she has left behind for the rest of us doing our best to face the world like a clam without a shell. To look at her archives, 872 posts in 2007, eight hundred and seventy two. 499 in 2014, 20 in 2016, 1 in 2023. Little stops and starts throughout the years but nothing like what it was in the early aughts.
Sobriety, actual healing (proactively going into the shit and figuring it out even when it’s awful), are fucking exhausting, lonely, and underappreciated.
And also worth it.
I think so, anyway.
I’m thankful to every shining example who is able to live their life out loud creating roadmaps and spaces for the rest of us who struggle to fit in to a world that feels so immesurably cruel and uncomfortable right now.
making unbreakable - formerly moosh in indy. 