“This Is How Things Are Now”

I originally started this blog when mom was alive as a means of documenting and warehousing and compartmentalizing the abuse & absurdity I experienced in my relationship with mom.  

In the aftermath of her passing, I now see that it has evolved into documenting my relationship with myself. 

Before COVID, I thought I had a handle on everything: controlling myself, my thoughts, and by extension my feelings to the point where I was off antidepressants for 11 years. 

Back on medication & back in therapy again, to put myself back together again. Familiar territory. 

I have been re-reading the entries in this blog and reflecting back on the version of myself writing those entries, and so many thoughts come to my mind: the exhaustion & exasperation of constantly being vigilant and protective of me, Maharajah and our life, mindful not to share anything that could be gossiped about or twisted into something else entirely. 

I spent too much time being protective, vigilant, angry, resentful. I see the gaps in blog entries where I was documenting how many days I went without contacting mom, or days when she would call me an outlandish amount of times. 

Exasperation. Exhaustion. Control. Stress. Then her love bombing with a mere glimmer of what appeared to be love, which would dissipate back into the spiral of stress, and nothing ever making her happy, leaving me feeling like a failure—why bother? 

Spending that much time being hyper-vigilant, over stressed, feeling like the villain in the stories mom told herself and others didn’t leave much room for love—and to be honest, it is difficult for me to distinguish actual love versus trauma bonding & Stockholm Syndrome regarding mom. 

I learned too late in life what this is (or was): peptide addiction (the interplay of excess cortisol + dopamine depletion in particular). There I go again, doing what I do best, intellectualizing my trauma. 

Things toward the very end moved too quick, no time for tidy attempts at a sentimental goodbye. The last month of her life was, for all of us, high stress. And in a way, I am chasing my “next hit” of dopamine from a wave of love bombing that will never come. Closure has yet to darken the doorstep of my heart & psyche.

In her 2019 Christmas voicemail to me, in response to gifts she can no longer afford to give us she said, “Well, this is how things are now.” 

Indeed. This is how things are now. At some point I hope to progress from stone cold resignation to actual acceptance. In the meantime, I am trying to allow myself the grace to “just be” and sit with my thoughts and feelings until such time my sadness lessens and my resentments melt away.