Salisbury.Fake Life

Grief Thoughts

Innocuous comment. Made by someone without the straps attached to my shoulders. The baggage I hold there.

All it took to shatter me. Send me into a pit of grief I still swim inside. My fingers are cold. My chest numb.

I miss her, the woman I was last year. She was fearless. She was incredible.

The argument could be made that I am still those things, but it is certainly underneath a pile of rubble. A building collapse, and no one can hear the shouting.

I feel like I’m running out of air. Like there’s wool surrounding my head. Cotton sheets on clotheslines making a maze I started laughing my way through, but now there’s no end in sight.

The sun is shining, and it is the cold sun of winter. Where the warmth doesn’t reach past the surface of your skin and you are left wanting.

I am wanting. I am filled with wanting.

I want it gone.

I don’t want to want.

It has taken an insurmountable effort, you know, to keep my sadness internal. To make sure no one knows the sun hasn’t shone for me most of this year. Spots of gold on the timeline where it cracked the barricade, softened the blow.

My sadness has always felt like weakness. Grief an unforgiveable sin.

I sin tonight without being capable of withstanding temptation.

The sadness will pass, as sadness does. But for tonight–

Just for tonight.

I think I’ll indulge a while longer.

Salisbury.Fake Uncategorized

Dear Robbie

Your birthday is Monday. And so another year has passed without you here. It went quickly this time. Most days appear to be happening faster than I think I like.

Some days are better than others. Where I can see a sunrise and not be disappointed one of my best friends isn’t there to see it. Where opening my mouth to inhale doesn’t hurt because you aren’t able to do the same.

If I had loved you more. If I had loved you better. Would that have made a difference? Probably not. I know what it’s like to be chained to the whirlpool of thoughts dragging a person to the bottom. I know there’s very little, if anything, that looks like hope. That looks like something to hold onto with every bit of strength left.

I love so hard. I put everything I have in me into making sure people know that they matter. I give all of myself and usually get very little in return, but I do it because to lose someone else, to break open with every thought of them–good or bad–I don’t have it in me.

My beautiful boy. You will never be 35.

I tell myself to keep plodding through the different paths my life will take me. I do it for the little girl I never got to be. I do it for her.

Myself.

All this time I thought I was doing it for everyone else. Because I had to stay strong, be strong for them. Be the one people could rely on even when I was broken and battered by the hurricanes of my mental illness.

To say I miss you is to be cheap with words and you deserve more. I hope the sun shines on your face now, and that the pain you felt while here is more a memory almost forgotten.

You will never be forgotten, my sweetest friend.

Salisbury.Fake Life

Mud Puddles

Effulgent is the face of a four-year-old as she steps into the standing water in her side yard. Her father has already told her twice not to do so, but the stick in the center needed saving. As did the leaves. Sodden socks removed and replaced with dry ones, rubber rain boots exchanged for the baby crocs she wore at first.

She is invincible.

With a smile back at those watching her, she sweeps her feet into the water, soaking instantly the dry socks, her tiny jeans, and part of her jacket.

The leaves are safe now, though.

She sits off to the side, near the fence she’s almost as tall as, and she removes her boots one at a time, dumping out the water. Entirely too pleased with her results, she stands back up and begins again. Once more filling her boots so that when she takes a single step out of the muddy water, it squirts from her boot and she looks over at the cackle I’ve made.

It truly is a sight I don’t think I can put in words properly. My niece is my favorite person on this earth and she will never know just how much she’s taught me. The small things that seem so instant, so demanding of my time are absolutely not of any importance when one must dance like the LED ballerinas on her videos. Or become a horse so she can direct me around the living room, but never on the kitchen tile because my knees are no longer as young as I think I am.

Her radiant and pure joy as I get out of my car, her little bounces because she can’t wait to run to me and tell me all about what she has planned for my visit, there are no actual words for the peace it fills me with.

I had not been well. In fact, I’d been too close to the side of me that wants to cut the losses and go. So close I had to take time off of work to find my way back to myself. My true self, not the one broken and hanging on by a mere thread of a root at the precipice of a cliff. The one buried alive under a hill of dirt clods, dry and yet still clumped enough to be in the way. Each attempt to dig out meant effort I couldn’t find. The light I’d found kept becoming reburied and I’d have to rest.

I talked to my brother one night, right at the beginning of understanding I was not, in fact, okay. And at one point, I stood beside him as he sat in his desk chair and he held me the tightest he’s ever held me and let me cry on top of his head because I didn’t have the words to say how scared I was. How uncertain of anything I was.

But he knew. He knew the way he knows what his daughter needs before she knows she needs it.

I am no longer stuck in the mud like a four-year-old’s boot as she tries to maneuver her way out without falling. I am sweeping my feet through the puddle, the joy on my heart is effervescent and I am ahead of where I was when I started sliding into despair.

Mud puddles are not places to get stuck. They are places to save leaves and prod with sticks and see the way the dirt swirls as it saturates.

There will be other sad times. For now, I am turning my face toward the sun, feeling the warmth on my skin as though for the first time, and I am okay.

Until next time, friends.

Salisbury.Fake Life, Uncategorized

Acceptance

A small backstory for this is I lost a friend of mine a few years ago when he took his own life. For the longest time it crushed me because I was worried I didn’t do enough to help him, to keep him. His birthday is today, and in the past I’d become a useless mess because I didn’t want to face the overwhelming sadness. I miss him most especially today. The piece below is something I wrote last year for him. There’s sadness today, but also joy because I got to know him even if it was for a short time.

Acceptance

It takes a lot of effort sometimes to remember the good moments when you’ve lost someone really close. Sometimes the grief is more than a wave. It’s a vacuum and you can’t feel anything but the pressure of that loss, the pressure of the absence of the person you loved. They can’t make jokes about how innocent you were. They can’t send you twenty-five YouTube videos of their favorite metal songs for you to wake up to. They can’t stay up until all hours of the night just because they love the sound of your voice.

You romanticize these moments. Look back on them with a fondness you never felt while they were here. Because they were here. You didn’t need to remember them fondly yet. You could keep talking even though your throat was sore and the birds were chirping and oh shit, man, I gotta work in four hours. I’ll talk to you later.

You gave so much of your love without knowing you had and now there’s nowhere to put it. So it bubbles over and leaves you with a displaced mess of smiles for boys with an Irish lilt to their voice, for those friends of yours now who ask if you want to talk about history, or go into why you’re slacking on your writing. You no longer hear that beautiful voice, but you remember the way it filled your heart with a hello, hey, I missed you.

It’ll be all right, you tell yourself. And it is. It’s absolutely okay. But sometimes it’s okay to miss them and accept you’re still sad about it.

written july 27, 2020

I watched Bo Burnham’s “Inside” last night and it’s kind of stuck with me in a big way. It rendered me speechless, but it was 2 A.M. and I was lost in remembering Robbie, lost in the sound and art of “Inside,” lost in wanting to just create forever. The world can often feel too large and yet still too close all at once and it’s so easy to get stuck in a loop of existing. Letting the world slide over you while you try to come back to what you’ve worked so hard to become. It ends up feeling like nothing.

But there’s a moment. A last ditch effort, that sniff of “not yet, I can’t give up yet,” and it propels you forward for a moment and lets you feel real. Like you’re invincible and everything is yours.

On my drive home at the end of summer, when the days start getting shorter, and the sun hangs lower in the sky at 7 p.m. The gold covers the earth and for a half hour I am okay. I see the world as I love to, without the filter of what keeps me up at night. It is striking and stunning and it is mine. That is the world I exist in with Robbie. With Henry. With all the ones I love. It’s the rush of air coming in through my windows, in the breath of sweet grass baked in the sun all day. I am the realest I’ll ever be and it is enough.

Salisbury.Fake Life, Weekly Update

It Isn’t the Same

Once more I found myself uncertain of what I wanted to write about this week, and I still don’t think I have a full grasp on it yet, but we’ll try it out and see how far we go. I’ve been thinking a lot about self-worth and self-image and before you tune me out and say “this ain’t a self-help blog,” I know. And I know I’ve talked about this kind of stuff before on this blog, but I gotta just put my thoughts down here.

It’s an interesting thing nowadays, where we have the socialization on the internet. Complete strangers read what I write and sometimes click a button showing they enjoyed what I had to say. “Back in my day,” I say like I’m wise enough to, we didn’t have the luxury of tucking ourselves behind a digital screen to consider ourselves social. It might be a leap to call social media “socializing,” but I’ve witnessed friends end friendships on Facebook over something someone said, and that’s just as real life as anything else. Sure, it may not be fisticuffs in the parking lot after work or anything, but the way people take certain things seriously online these days is wild to me.

I guess that’s where I question why I do this blog. I appreciate that I have a goal to maintain it and keep it going because it’s very much for me more than it is for anything else. I do appreciate those of you who read this and continue to read it, but I don’t know. I’m not quitting, just pondering the efficacy of such a life. Where validation has become external and internalizing that sounds like a foreign concept.

I’ve always thought I had a deep self hatred–which I do–but it’s not every day that I think I’m garbage. It’s only when something I perceive as significant happens that I tend to spiral into a thought loop of hate and “you’re not worth the effort.” Now, let me clarify by what I mean when I say something I perceive as significant, because there have been times where I’ve felt something pretty powerful about the way I’ve been treated, and the person (or persons) who did the thing to me don’t see it the way I do. A wise friend of mine once told me to make sure I was telling the right story to myself to see if how I was reacting was accurate or if it was what I thought I should be feeling. Because of that, I’ve grown a lot in my perception of how I respond to things.

But what I’m talking about, the significant thing, I mean something like a personal failure. I’ve been trying to get in the habit of regularly walking/jogging with one of my best friends after work (our parking lot allows for such a side quest), and my gut reaction most of the time is “another day,” or “next week will be better.” I posted about the book The Power of Habit on here recently, and one of the things the author brings up as a key force in changing habit is the power of belief in that change. I go into full panic mode when change happens. I don’t do well with it, not even slightly. Even if it’s positive. The reason being is I don’t have the core belief that I am capable of being who I want to be.

Do you know how heartbreaking that is to realize? My niece, who’s 2 1/2 ish years old, adores me and she knows I am so full of love for her. She doesn’t know how little I care about myself. Mainly because that part of me doesn’t exist when I’m around her. She deserves the best the world can give her.

But so do I. I’m not good at this. Where I confront myself and try to see a way around the problem until I can fix it properly. Because it bubbles up and turns into days where my throat hurts because I’ve been holding back tears. Self pity is one thing, but knowing the way you feel about yourself isn’t good is a completely different thing. It gets tricky when you try to change that because if you’re like me, you have almost two decades of practice throwing yourself to the proverbial wolves and hoping you make it out the other side. I know I’ve said this before, but I don’t tell people that mental illness gets better, because it doesn’t really. You find ways to carry it differently, so your neural patterns go a different way when certain things happen. The change bit there is almost subconsciously done because we tend to shy away from discomfort.

I’m not sure if this all makes sense, or even if it flows well. I don’t think I’ve said all I wanted to, but I don’t know how to express that at the moment. This weekend I’m being gentle with myself and telling myself it’s okay to skip mowing the lawn because the bees need the clover. I hope you’re well, and I hope you have a pleasant weekend. You are worthy of good things, and it’s not a problem if you take time for yourself.

Until next time, friends.

Salisbury.Fake Life, Weekly Update

End-of-the-Year Party

Well, I guess this is going to be one of “those” blog posts. You know the ones. Where the writer waxes poetic about the year gone by, and talks about hopes for the next year. It is going to be one of those, yes, but I’ll try not to bog you down with a lot of “2020 was the worst” stuff. Because even though the pandemic is still ongoing (wear your damn masks and stay home unless you absolutely have to be out), and so many people have had tragedy after tragedy this year, I think this is one of the first years I’ve grown the most into the person I’d like to be.

I had a goal this year of finishing three books I’ve been writing for a little over ten years. I separated out the year into four-month quarters, allowing myself time to get done with each one and have it beta read while I worked on the next one. I didn’t accomplish that goal, but I don’t hate that I didn’t. The person I started out as at the beginning of this year is not who I am now. And that shows in the quality of my writing. I stopped using first person perspective, switched to mostly third limited, and the story just fell out of me.

As I consumed media, I paid attention to the stories being told. Most notably, I watched/listened to a playthrough of Death Stranding, a video game produced by Kojima. I was not prepared for how deeply that story would end up impacting me. But then I decided to look at what made the biggest impression on me, and it was the emotional growth the main character goes through by the time we get to the end. It twists and turns itself around its own story, told in memories mostly, told with tragedy and loss. But at the end, hope remains. I’ve made it sound so cliche, but the relief I felt at the end of the game was profound.

I want to tell a story like that. I want to infuse emotion into my writing so that by the time we reach the end of the story, the audience is relieved and filled with feelings they then get to internalize and see themselves through. I know that’s a lot to task myself with, but I feel fairly confident I can do it. Emotive writing is important, especially in this day and age where emotions are often suppressed for being too intense.

Along with my writing growing, I feel like this year I’ve changed so much about my mindset about myself. I know I’ve talked about my mental health issues, and I will continue to do so because it is an ongoing, lifelong process. The small moments of joy, the reminders it’s okay to be here, the tethers we create to make sure we don’t leave behind what we will miss. Holding on with a white knuckle grip because there has to be something worth it at the end of this, I believe in it. I believe in it with a fierceness I’ve never believed with before.

The power behind that hope, the force of that desire to make it mean something, I wish I could give it to those who struggle. I still have my shitty days. I have them more than I talk about because that’s not what I want to focus on. They’re becoming less frequent, which is fantastic, but I want to hold on to the memory of them so I know how to fight them.

This year was hell for a lot of people. It was horrible and garbage and there’s no amount of gargling that will get the taste of it from the back of our throats, but you are still here. You are still here and you are incredible. You are stunning. I believe in you with the same fierceness I believe there will be good somewhere along the way, and we can pick it up to sling it on our backs to carry us through whatever the world tosses our way. Because we are strong enough to do so. We are capable of battling and making it through, even if that’s all we do is make it through.

I hope this year taught you more about yourself. I hope this year gave you the confidence to accept who you are, and if not, I hope it gave you the boost you needed to make the changes you’ve been wanting to make for yourself.

Next year, there will be book reviews, writing about writing, life talks, recipes. It’s going to be a better year because we will know how to approach it properly with cautious optimism. It’s not over yet, but it will be and we will march forward with a brightness of hope, a determination to conquer anything and everything.

Thank you for going on this ride with me. Thank you for your readership, and for you. I’ll see you next year.

Salisbury.Fake will be updated again after December 31st, 2020.

Happy holidays!.

All my love, Carla

Salisbury.Fake Life

You Don’t Have To Be Alone To Be Lonely

This one’s going to be a ramble, probably. I know, so surprising.

We’re going to talk about loneliness. Sort of. We’re going to talk about how it’s okay to take time to get to know ourselves and forget about being with other people because we deserve to like who we are.

I seriously hate how self-help-y that sounds. But hear me out. I spent the last two decades learning how to hate myself. Acted on it in various ways I won’t talk about in this post (I’ve discussed it before elsewhere), but it all boiled down to the thought that I’m just average/mediocre/run of the mill not worth anyone’s time. Kept me going for a long time. Or so I thought. What it really did was give me a chronic back ache because I hold my tension in my shoulders and my lower back. Makes aerobics fun.

But what’s the point of this? Let’s focus, Carla. I’ve seen some posts recently from some of my favorite content creators who talked about how they were using this quarantine time to get to know themselves a little better, and I suppose I have, too, and I need to tell you it is

u n c o m f y

Seeing how I’ve spoken to myself for the last half of my life really kind of broke my heart. Surprised me. Kind of like looking in the mirror and noticing you had peanut butter on your face all day. “I really let myself do that?”

But it hasn’t been peanut butter. It’s been self-dragging, self-loathing on a level that is kind of destructive, and just ignoring all the people telling me I’m not trash. “Thank you, but I am. It’s fine. I’ve always been this way.”

I haven’t.

We can try and pinpoint where it all started to go in a direction we didn’t think it should, but that is like trying to pick a watermelon seed out of a pile of watermelon seeds. I’d say a needle in a needlestack, but that’s not accurate enough. You can eventually find the needle you want if you search hard enough for the specific characteristics (size of the eye, length, sharp or not, blah blah blah), but watermelon seeds all look like watermelon seeds. They slip away every time you try to take one off the plate, and then you’re left with chasing it around.

The point of all of this rambling is it’s time we started being okay with being alone. I’m not talking about introverted alone, where one recharges after having social time with people. That’s a different kind of being alone. I’m talking about getting to know ourselves and seeing we’re not actually gum on the bottom of a shoe in summer. We are the kid who has the pool so all the parties are at our house. We have what everyone wants. We are admirable. We are strong, capable, and worthy of taking the time to learn how to believe that.

I say all of this knowing I’m going to ignore it like I always have, but the difference is I’ll know I’m ignoring it. Before, I would be all self-help-y and it would be for others. This one is for me. This time I know I’m ignoring good advice from myself, so it’s easier to hold myself accountable. And that is the key. Holding ourselves accountable for the goals we want to achieve and learning the difference between discouragement and destruction. Change is excruciating. It really is. I fucking hate change. I don’t really like swearing on these things, but this requires one. It’s that awful for me. So telling myself to stop calling myself garbage is like when your teacher tells the class, “no notes on this quiz, folks,” and turns around to do work on the computer so everyone uses notes anyway.

What a crock, huh? It feels like that, here at the bottom of this. But it isn’t a crock. It’s a truth I’ve been trying to learn, that I am worth my own time, and I want the people I care about to know it for themselves, too. I don’t know that many will read this, but I hope it helps someone. Maybe someone looking for a sign to start working on themselves.

Be safe as you can be in these weird, awful times. And remember: you are worth your own time. I promise.

Salisbury.Fake Life, Weekly Update

Car Calories Don’t Count

That’s the biggest lie I tell myself. Not the cliche “I’m fine” or whatever. I tell myself that all food consumed within the confines of the car doesn’t count toward a daily calorie limit. It’s a lie. Those calories do count. But I still stuff a cheese roll up in my mouth on the way home from Taco Bell all the same believing it won’t exist in my body the moment I leave the car.

Hi, my name is Carla, and welcome to my TED Talk.

Just kidding. This blog entry is gonna be somewhat unclear in terms of how we get to the point, but we’ll get there.

When I was a kid, I never understood the concept of aging, I think. I knew I got older, had that quintessential fight with my parents about how I was 16 and not a child anymore (yes, Ariel, you are, sit down and comb your hair with a fork), turned 21 and saw Riverdance with my mom, got blackout drunk when I was 25, loved, lost, all that happy nonsense we expect along the way as we grow up.

But tonight as I was changing out of my work clothes and into my “I’m a writer” chunky sweater and baggy sweatpants, I had the thought of how it’s so nice to find a pair of socks there when I reach for it in my drawer. This might not be revolutionary to you, but for me it was a small epiphany bomb going off in my head. Because if there’s anything I know about myself it’s how I am when I’m depressed. I’ve mentioned that my depression manifests itself with dirty dishes and unfolded laundry. Well, I’ve got the dishes taken care of, now I’m working on the laundry part, and I think–honestly and truly–I’ve cracked it. I like knowing there’s a pair of socks waiting in the drawer for me to put on after work. It sounds so damn stupid when I say it out loud, but the part of me that’s been trying to be proud of myself is throwing her hands into the air saying, “THIS IS WHAT WE’VE BEEN WORKING FOR FOR SO LONG, CALL YOUR THERAPIST AND TELL HER YOU GET IT!”

The happiness we seek is elusive because we want sustained happiness. Why not try for sustained contentment instead? Far more easily achieved.

And just so we’re clear, car calories do actually matter, and I really need to work on my relationship with food. But that’s for another day.

Salisbury.Fake Life, Uncategorized

Let’s Talk

I had every intention of making this post about why I haven’t been blogging, but I mean come on.  There’s a pandemic and it’s thrown everyone into a tailspin and we’re all just doing our best.  I don’t know if I can say I’m doing my best, but I’m certainly trying to.

So, what are we going to talk about?  I don’t really know.  I wanted to be all poetic and beautifully worded, but I’m tired.  I’m very tired.  Maybe more tired than I’ve been before, and I know it’s deeper than because the world has felt like it’s been ending.  My depression manifests itself with unwashed dishes and unfolded laundry.  I finally got my kitchen cleaned and organized this weekend and it felt impossible the entire time.

It’s not a lack of motivation.  It’s more an attempt to pull an elephant out of a watermelon and you only have dental floss.  We hear so many times of people losing their battles with depression and anxiety and all kind of other mental illness, but what about the people fighting?  Daily striving to feel something other than a crushing weight of indescribable heft just hanging from our teeth.  Our chests are tight from holding in ourselves.  We can’t be too emotional, we can’t show we feel, so we hold it in, and we hold it tight because no one wants to know we’re struggling.

A lot of people are saying it’s okay not to be okay, and that’s true, but the caveat is you do something about it once you realize you’re not.  Self care isn’t always soft and gentle like those romanticized posts making the rounds on Instagram and Tumblr make it out to be.  Yeah, it can be those small moments, but real self care, the deeper self care is ugly.  It’s having moments where you tell yourself that enough is enough and you wash your dishes. You take a shower.  You brush your teeth.  The smallest things have the biggest significance.  You fight back for yourself.  You fight hard to beat back the voice that tells you you’re a failure.  Because you’re not.  You’re doing your best and that’s enough.  You are enough.

We are stronger than what our demons call us.  We can make it through this and more. I shouldn’t be here, but I am because there is some part of me that is determined to prove myself wrong.  I don’t ever tell people it gets better, because it hasn’t so far for me, but it gets easier to hoist on my shoulders and carry it.

You are worth it.  You are valued and you are loved most fiercely.  Hold on to those words until they fit into the bits of you that are broken because you are beautiful and the world needs you.