Like Eating Glass: The Thing Beneath "I'm Fine"

Lately, therapy has been heavy.

Shadow work. Journaling. Reflection. The kind of work that does not only ask, What happened to you? but also, What did you do while you were still trying to survive what happened to you?

That second question is harder.

It is one thing to look at the harm that shaped me. It is another to look at the harm I caused while living inside it.

For a long time, I did not understand how I lost certain friendships. I understood the pain of losing them, but not always the mechanics. Not the moment where something I thought was small, honest, or already discussed became something that hurt someone else.

Recently, I was talking to my brother about a friendship I lost years ago. A friendship that still hurts because I loved this person very much.

I still do.

She had a laugh that made your laugh burst out with it. We held silliness in tandem, without embarrassment. There was a freedom in being ridiculous with her, the kind of friendship where joy did not need to be translated or explained.

I loved her world too. I could talk to her parents. I could be silly and dumb with her twin brother. There was ease there. A whole family rhythm I was allowed to step into for a while. It was fun. It was safe. It was the kind of belonging I did not know how to hold carefully enough at the time.

I told my brother I never fully understood what I had done wrong. In my mind, I had been honest. There were people she had liked, or had history with, and I thought we had talked about it. I thought she had moved on. I thought I had checked in.

In one situation, I didn’t even really like the person at first. I liked someone else. I was even trying to talk her up to him. But he pursued me, not her. Eventually, I ended up liking him, and somehow, in the mess of all of it, I lost her.

For years, my brain stayed stuck there.

But I asked her.

But she said she was fine.

But I was honest.

But I didn’t mean to hurt her.

That was always the part I returned to: intention.

I didn’t intend to harm her, so I struggled to understand the impact.

Then I told my brother something I had always believed about myself. I said that when I was younger, if a guy liked one of my friends instead of me, I would tell my friend to go for it. I didn’t care. If he didn’t like me, why would I fight for him? Why would I be bothered?

My brother stopped me.

“Did you hear yourself?”

I did.

I heard it as soon as he said it.

It didn’t matter to me because I didn’t matter to me.

That was the thing I had never understood.

The “girl code,” the friendship rule, whatever name we give it, did not register the same way for me because I had never applied that kind of protection to myself. I didn’t know how to make myself important in a situation. I didn’t know how to say, This hurts me. This embarrasses me. This makes me feel replaced. This makes me feel small.

So when other people had those feelings, I did not always recognize them clearly.

Not because I didn’t care.

I cared deeply.

But I had been trained to override myself so completely that I did not always know when someone else was asking me, silently, not to override them too.

My friend valued herself enough to know when something hurt her.

I didn’t.

Because I didn’t, I mistook her silence for permission. I took her words at face value even when I could feel something underneath them. I knew something was off. I could feel that she wasn’t fully okay.

But I did not trust what I felt.

I had spent most of my life being taught not to trust what I felt.

So I accepted the answer that was easiest to understand.

“I’m fine.”

But she wasn’t fine.

And I should have asked more.

I should have said, “Are you actually okay with this, or are you saying that because it feels easier?”

I should have listened to the discomfort in the room, to the part of me that knew there was something unsaid between us. I should have cared enough about both of us to slow down.

That is where the grief lives now.

Not in the guy.

Never in the guy.

It was never worth losing her.

Even after I lost her as a friend, I still talked about her with love. I still told him what an amazing person she was. I still carried the friendship in my chest as something precious, even after I had damaged it. My brain could not register that I had lost someone who mattered more to me than anything I gained.

But I did.

I lost her.

And I hurt her.

There is a specific kind of pain in realizing that your lack of self-worth did not only hurt you. It made you careless in places where you thought you were being generous. It made you passive where you should have been protective. It made you accept crumbs and call it normal, then fail to understand why someone else would not accept the same.

I have spent so much of my life not thinking I was enough. Not thinking I mattered. Not understanding my own mind, my own needs, my own intuition. I have pushed people away with that. I have run from people with that. I have hurt people with that.

And I am sorry.

I am sorry for not listening to what she could not fully say.

I am sorry for not listening to myself when I felt the truth sitting beneath the conversation.

I am sorry that I treated her answer like a contract instead of treating her discomfort like something worthy of care.

I know now that communication is not only about what someone says. It is also about what trembles underneath it.

It is about asking again, gently.

It is about making room for the truth to be complicated.

It is about knowing that sometimes people say they are okay because they do not want to seem jealous, hurt, needy, or small.

And sometimes people believe them because believing them is easier than risking the harder conversation.

I wish I had risked the harder conversation.

There are moments when I wish I could still be in her life. To laugh with her. To cry with her. To hold her. To see who she became.

Years have passed. Whole lives have happened in the space between who we were and who we are now. There have been joys I did not get to witness and griefs I did not get to help carry. That is part of the ache too — knowing that when life asked for love, I was no longer close enough to offer mine.

But I also know that right now, I am still learning how to show up with care. I am still becoming someone who can love without reaching from the wound first.

So I will love her from here.

I hope she is well. I hope she is loved. I hope she is cared for. I believe she is. She has people who love her. She has family. She has a friend I trust with her heart.

And I hope, somehow, she knows that I understand more now than I did then.

It was not worth it.

None of it was worth the pain.

But I know better now.

I am learning to listen.

To myself.

To the silence.

To the thing beneath the words.

And wherever she is, I hope she knows this:

I am sorry.

I love you.

I hope you are well.

Frozen Oranges In Little Rooms

I was never genuinely good with change.

I mean, from the moment I was removed from my mother’s womb, I reacted by choking myself with my umbilical cord. And when that didn’t work, apparently I was constantly unswaddling myself. I hated — hated — being out of my comfort zone. I have never been one to enjoy when someone moves something in my world.

I have AuDHD, so it’s not always that I will notice and lose it the way my father would. But my body will notice. My body will feel the shift. My body will get emotional and register the loss before I even understand what has gone missing.

Lately, I have been very present in my own life. For a person who tends to anxiously dwell in the past and focus-jump into the void of the future — well, it used to look like a void; now it just looks scrambled, because I never thought I would live this long — the present is actually an amazing place to be.

I realize now that I haven’t always been reflecting so much as drowning in my past lakes. That is why my present was so hard to live in. That is why my future seemed so bleak. It is okay to reflect, but as soon as you feel your old self pulling you in, you have to pull back and walk away. You do not need to dip into, or fall into, any place you no longer need to enter.

And anytime you go back to past lakes that are too dark or too deep, always grab a line and tie it to a strong tree. That way, if you get caught by your reflection, you can pull yourself up and find your way back out.

I have felt more in my body, more in tune, more here, than I have been since I was maybe sixteen or so — before I knew what had happened to me, before I had language for certain violences, before I knew anything about my summers in Colombia as a kid. Even before that age, I was never completely whole. Pieces of me had already been taken, and I had already lived through physical and mental abuse I was well aware of. But I felt there. I lived. I owned myself, and ferociously so.

Today, we were driving through my old neighborhood, and my brother and I realized the old bagel place we went to growing up was closed again. It had been closed for over a month now, and my brother mentioned the old lady who worked there.

I remembered her from elementary school and junior high school. She made the best plain bagel with cream cheese. To me, it felt like heaven: that thick block of Philadelphia cream cheese sliced off and slabbed — PLOP, SLAP — onto the bagel. It did not need to be toasted because it was just that fresh. And it was $1.10.

Yes. $1.10.

I would pass by every once in a while as the years went by, and the years had made her smaller. They had curled her into something that would make anyone’s bones ache. Inflation made the bagel more expensive, of course, but it was still fucking delicious.

I was sad because I hoped the inevitable whispers of Mother had not asked for her return again. Even though I know living in that kind of ache is no life for a woman who spent more than half her life standing and making those delicious bagels — bagels she had made for my older brothers too.

But I also hoped some piece-of-crap mogul had not taken this mother and daughter out of their bagel business.

And then I started to room-inate.

Farther down, we drove to the place where there used to be a swimming pool. It was completely demolished.

There was once a pool there where only white kids went — seriously — because none of us could afford to go. Now it was closed. Gone. Leveled.

We found it interesting that when they finally — finally — made it reasonably priced enough to let everyone in, it only took a few years for them to shut the pool club down and demolish it completely.

It felt like it spoke to something larger about the kind of community we were part of. When I was a kid, I wanted so badly to go into that pool club. I would peek into it all the time and ask my parents why we couldn’t go. As I got older, I started to understand how discriminatory that place was. There was a reason so many people could not get in. The pricing was designed so lower-income people could not access the pool, and since the majority of lower-income people in our neighborhood came from marginalized communities, it made exclusion easy.

As an adult, finding out that this had changed made me happy.

Until they closed it down.

And it made me see that sometimes watching youth thrive where your family had once been denied access is not only a correction. It is a kind of grief too. Because the door finally opened, and then the whole building disappeared.

Roominate.

Then we passed the field.

The field where I used to play with my dogs. Where I spent countless snow days. Where I watched my friends play their team games. Where I ran track. Where I drank until I forgot why I was even there. Where I cut through for shortcuts. Where I played handball. Where I hid away from the problems at home.

It was completely covered up.

“Wonder what they’re doing to it,” my brother said.

I looked at it blankly.

“Probably some commercial development,” I joked.

But then something filled me with dread.

What if it was commercial development? What if it was another building? What if they were taking the field down because it was no longer serving its purpose? What if it was just taking up space, and they needed to build something new?

Roomination.

As we started to make the turn, we saw my favorite place.

The Historical House.

But it looked different too. All the windows were covered. Something was definitely happening there.

The field and the House?

Are they going to take the House?

This house was here when I came back as a little girl. This is the house I pointed out behind Willie in Paris Is Burning and said, “THEY FILMED HERE!”

And he said, “Yes, they did, baby girl.”

Willie, who taught me to be who I am and to never settle for less. The grandest person — and his mom! — you could ever get to grow up around as your neighbor.

I saw that house in all its phases. I met my friend Joel — Pigeon — in that house, and never was a drop of wine wasted there. Words were sold at valuable offers, and boy, were they worth every bit spent.

I miss him daily. I think of him often. And I wondered what would happen if they ever did anything to that Historical House.

After all, that wasn’t its first place of living. The House had its bones somewhere else before its feet were cut, lifted, and placed near my childhood home. It had a rough time getting used to us, but now it has been well over thirty-five years. Now it is comfortable. Now it has found its shape and skin and settled here.

So what is happening to it now?

Room in ate.

Room in ation.

Rooms.

Matt Berninger’s “Frozen Oranges” began to play in the car.

I think the rooms in my mind heard the words before I had a chance to hear them. I began to tear up, and I did not quite understand what was going on. I was having a particularly good morning. We got bagels from the other really good place we love. I felt good. We were laughing and joking around.

So why was I feeling this way?

Then Matt sang about frozen oranges in the trees in Indiana. Crystal apples in the creeks. Swimming in a limestone quarry. Saturday.

And I realized it was, indeed, Saturday.

But more than that, Matt was singing about a memory. About childhood. About nostalgia.

And here I was, in my old neighborhood, in my rooms, watching them tumble down and change all around me.

And I smiled.

I was sad. I was so sad. I was grieving. Because I kept asking, What’s happening? But underneath that, I was really asking: What’s going to happen to my memories? What’s going to happen to all the things I lived? To all the things that happened here? Are they gone if this is gone?

And the answer came almost immediately.

Yes, because it was gone a long time ago.

The moment already happened, babe. You lived it. And as long as you live, the moment lives. And once you’re gone, the moment goes into the memory of all things.

Huh.

As easy as that.

No, it still hurts. Change hurts. But it makes way for some really beautiful things sometimes, so be open to it. Not all change is bad. Don’t settle for less because it is comfortable.

Oh, I’ll never sett—

I’ll never settle.

I said it to myself for the first time in a very long time.

I said it when I was younger, but I do not think I understood the meaning then. Maybe that was it. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe when I was choking myself with the umbilical cord, unswaddling myself, being the ultimate colicky bebé, my spirit was already saying, This body was just not enough, and it did not yet have the language to explain itself.

I was always uncomfortable in myself. People took from me and absorbed me, which made me want to hide more. People would say I was capable of more, or that I was scary, or imposing, because I could speak my mind. Because I could say how I felt. Because I could see through them, or listen, or understand, or whatever gift they wanted from me while resenting me for having it.

I used to cower. I used to get upset. I used to try to be lower. Shut down. Act differently. Mask.

And in the past couple of years, I have decided: truly, fuck it.

I am going to be myself. I am going to love myself and ignore what anyone else thinks or wants me to be. I am going to accept that I am this pure, loving, caring, intuitive, empathetic, bold, assertive person who wants the best for herself and for the people she loves.

And if people cannot get behind that, great. If they can, great too. But if they want to be a dick about it, they can fuck right off. I am not here for their bullshit.

I realized I am capable of change. In fact, I welcome it.

Change is good and needed at times so beautiful things can be born and flourish. We can be the creators of beautiful things in our own lives. We can be the change we choose to see.

And not everything is necessarily changed forever. All we have to do is travel to the rooms in our minds. We can ruminate, yes, but we can also remember beautifully.

I have these little rooms in my head, decorated and lovely, full of thoughts and things and places that remind me of my past. Wonderful things. Angry things. Sad things. All the things that make up me.

And for the first time in my life, I see myself as a monster I can bear to look at — and even love to admire — instead of something I can only other, or speak of in shadows.

I appreciate these rooms because they give me a greater appreciation of my present. They give me love for what I have now, for whom I have around me, and a greater awareness of how I want to spend my time.

They also make me think about my future. But not too far ahead. I am realistic now, and hopeful. I understand that we live in a world changing so constantly that it would be ridiculous for me to think too far ahead. I think as far as I am realistically allowed to think at this point, with how everything is going.

And honestly? It has been a lot better than I thought it would be.

It took me almost forty years for my spirit to finally adjust to my body, and I have to say: choking myself with my umbilical cord might seem a tad dramatic, but looking back and seeing what a dumpster fire this timeline has been, I can understand why the fuck I did such an insane thing.

I would never settle for such a terrible timeline.

So, BRB. I’m going to make something beautiful in this timeline.

Because fuck hoping. We have to make it.

You Need Someone

I have been trying to write an essay for a friend.

That sentence should not carry this much weight, and yet it does.

It is a simple essay. The kind of thing sixteen-year-old me could have written in an afternoon, maybe while half-distracted, maybe while listening to music, maybe while doing three other things at once. Back then, words came when I called them. They lined up. They obeyed. They arrived with a kind of loyalty I never had to question.

Now I am nearly finished with this favor, and still it has felt like dragging something holy through mud.

For the past few weeks, I have been telling my brother that I have been struggling with it. Not because the essay itself is impossible, but because I have been overwhelming myself, tangling the task until it feels bigger than it is. Then he sent me one of those harmless little links people send without thinking much of it, something about the birth months that supposedly produce the best writers. June. November. February. Another month I cannot remember. Not May.

I was born in May.

It is almost embarrassing to admit how deeply that stupid detail cut me. It was such a small thing. Such a silly thing. A joke, really. But something in me gave way. It became the cherry on top of a magnificently horrible Sunday. Because it was never really about the list. It was about what the list touched.

It touched the bruise.

It touched the fact that I used to be the person people came to when they needed help writing. The person who edited essays, wrote essays, sometimes got paid to write essays. The person who could write stories at the drop of a dime. The person who could look at someone and make a poem out of them. The person who had language on speed dial.

And now here I was, unable to finish one simple thing.

That is when the joke turned on me.

I texted my brother something playful, something like good for you and Mom, the best writers in the house, because he is November and my mother is February. I was trying to keep it light. But beneath the text, beneath the laugh, something uglier was already waking up. The voice that waits for moments like that. The one that loves a crack in the door.

Guess who is not the best writer. Guess who cannot finish a damn essay. Guess who cannot finish writing their book. Guess who cannot finish a poem. Guess who cannot seem to do any of the things that once came so naturally. Guess who cannot make the art, cannot crochet, cannot sing, cannot pull the thing from the soul and bring it into the world.

It kept going.

Cruelty always knows how to build momentum.

And beneath all of that, the real question began to rise, the one that frightens me most:

Where are you?

Where is the woman who could make things happen? Where is the one with force in their spirit? The one who could create, heal, move, speak, write, become? Where is that version of me that felt not invincible, but deeply, undeniably alive?

Because I know they are still in there.

That is what makes it hurt the way it does. If they were gone, maybe this would be grief with a clean edge. But they are not gone. They feel buried. Locked somewhere inside me, behind fear, behind exhaustion, behind the strange paralysis that trauma leaves in the body long after the danger has passed. Or maybe after some dangers have not quite passed at all.

The truth is that this does not begin and end with writing.

It only looked like writing because that was where the wound surfaced.

For the last few years, and especially these past months, I have felt deeply stuck. Not in the romantic way people talk about being blocked. Not in the neat, temporary way creative droughts are often described. I mean stuck in a way that feels physical, painful, almost surreal. As if the words exist, but snag somewhere between thought and form. As if I can feel them pressing against me from the inside, asking to be let out, and still I cannot free them.

And that kind of stuckness begins to infect everything.

I have been dealing with the weight of CPTSD, for the past few months, with fear that has learned how to make a home in the body. I have been trying to progress while feeling unsafe. Trying to move while feeling watched. Trying to build while still carrying the psychic architecture of being manipulated, frightened, and worn down. There are things that happened to me that made me disconnect from myself for survival, and now survival is no longer enough. Now I want my life back, and I am realizing how difficult it is to return to yourself after you have spent so long being taught to abandon yourself.

That is the terror of it, I think.

Not blood. Not ghosts. Not monsters.

To stand at the threshold of your own life and not fully know how to enter it.

To remember yourself in flashes but not in permanence.

To know the voice is yours and still struggle to speak in it.

The cruelest part is that the things I love most begin to feel like proof of failure when I cannot access them. Writing. Art. Healing. Learning. Teaching. All the things that once made me feel most like myself become tender to the touch, almost threatened, as if losing access to them means losing access to me.

And I do not want that.

I do not want a life where I am severed from my own passions. I do not want to be so afraid, so exhausted, so destabilized that I cannot reach the parts of myself that make living feel meaningful. I want to be awake. Entirely present. I want to do my work well. I want to create without terror sitting beside me. I want to flourish, not merely recover. I want to know who I am outside of fear, outside of projection, outside of survival. I want to know what is truly mine.

Recently, in the middle of an argument with someone I care about, he said something that lodged itself in me: You need someone.

And I remember the immediate offense that rose in my body, because the answer came just as quickly, sharp and certain as a struck match:

No.

I do not need someone.

I need me.

That was the truth sitting beneath all of this grief.

I need me. I didn’t say it out loud, and parts of me felt I should have, but not for him, for me. I need my voice. I need my safety. I need my center of gravity returned to me. I need the self I have been grieving while still carrying them. I need to feel that I belong to myself again. Not to fear. Not to confusion. Not to the aftermath of what other people did to my mind. Me.

Because I do love myself. Fiercely, even now. Enough to know when I have gone missing. Enough to feel the rage of that absence. Enough to keep searching through the dark for the shape of my own hand.

And I think that when I find myself again, I will not only be able to hold myself better, I will be able to stand inside the kind of love that can meet me there. Love that is reciprocal. Safe. Mutual. Love that does not ask me to abandon myself in order to keep it. Love that does not leave me starving and call it devotion. Because I think finding myself also means knowing I am finally well enough to receive what answers me back. Not a love that says I need someone, but a love that recognizes I am the someone, and meets me there whole.

That is what this is, maybe.

Not failure.

Not the death of talent.

Not proof that I have lost whatever gift once lived in me.

Maybe it is the sound of me reaching for myself again, clumsily, angrily, honestly. Maybe it is ugly because return is ugly. Maybe it shakes because I am still shaking. Maybe it comes out in fragments because fragments are what I have had to work with.

But buried is not gone.

Silenced is not emptied.

Blocked is not barren.

They are still here.

A little frightened. A little fractured. A little harder to find than they once were. But here.

And if I need anyone now, it is not another savior, not another witness, not another pair of hands telling me who I am.

It is me.

It has always been me.