I Found Myself on the Inter-web

I got the notification about a week ago for a memory from my first blog post, it’s kind of funny how stuff like that happens. I guess by stuff I mean time, you don’t really realize how fast time passes until you’re reminded. Sometimes it’s in some incessant notification from Facebook that you get every day or, by the possessions you’ve acquired, maybe it’s even a change in the company you keep. Time is always progressing it’s always changing and you have to adapt to these things because if you can’t you get stuck.

I feel like when I finally started this blog I stopped being stuck, it takes a lot of retrospective thinking to make actual progress. This is the platform I chose for dislodging myself from the rut I had created. It’s a really powerful thing to get yourself out of a rut. I chose to be alone with my grief because letting others in felt like I was relying too much on someone other than myself. I know what it feels like to not be able to control your friends emotions, to listen to them vent for hours and do nothing to change their predicament. I took it upon myself to change partially because I felt it wasn’t necessary to burden others with my problems but also because in order to rely on myself and be independent in the future I needed to be able to change my own life, not to have someone else tell me how to do it.

In retrospect I had so many people I could have asked for help, it’s not that I didn’t want to, believe me I did. There were plenty of moments where I just wanted to run into someone’s arms and just let it all out, I felt like I needed that but to be honest I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s hard for me to just completely break down in front of someone, to let all the walls I’ve put up dissipate. I put myself out there in a lot of ways but emotionally is not one of them. That’s probably one of my biggest faults, besides you know everything else.

To distract myself from that urge I tried to be there for everyone else, I tried to mask my feelings in productivity. I can’t say it worked all that well but you have to have something to take up your time. Eventually I just realized that I had a lot to say, nothing that I needed a huge audience for, my blog wasn’t something I created for others, I think it was mostly for myself.

After I got that notification I went back to my archives, I read every single piece I wrote last year. Some were interesting and not worth the read but in the others I saw my growth. I saw that I wasn’t that person anymore and not in a bad way just in a different way. I stopped caring what others thought about what I was writing; my blog became a platform for me and only me. That’s what it was supposed to be to begin with, a journal without all the hand cramps.

Recently someone told me that I let Emaleigh’s death define me. Almost a year ago a comment like that would have put me into a tailspin. There would have been crying and a whole lot of “woe is me-ing,” for a good solid week before I got over it. When it happened this time I just scoffed, because I just couldn’t believe how much that person didn’t know me. I was in disbelief because I just couldn’t imagine someone saying something that was anymore wrong than that. It was just 100 percent opposite of what my life is about now.

There may have been a point where I felt like it defined me but, that wasn’t because it actually did. It was because I had never dealt with something that tragic in my entire life. They don’t give you a guide for handling something like that, I never received a previously agreed upon list of protocol that I was supposed to go through to grieve the death of one of my best friends. I dealt with it in a way that probably wasn’t the best but the point is that I got through it. I got through it on my own, that’s something I find great strength in.

Hopefully I will never have to go through something like that ever again, but if I do I know I can get through it. Somehow, some way I will find myself, I am capable of anything I set my mind to.

Change is not always bad, in fact it’s necessary, it’s a necessary reaction to the passing of the time. The only way it presents itself as negative is if you let it.