When avoidance no longer serves you

Oh, avoidance. The hot button word of my life lately. I’m pretty sure it’s in my top 5 of skills mastered, right alongside sarcasm and “not giving a shit”.

Avoidance is…basically the only way I know how to deal with hard things. I don’t think I’ve ever learned anything other than that, and it’s honestly served me pretty well. If you don’t have the tools or support to deal with all of the hardships around you growing up…you sort of just learn not to.

Because you can’t. There’s no time to stop or slow down…there’s no time to deal with one thing before the next crisis comes. You just have to keep going.

And so that’s what I’ve been doing, nonstop, my entire life. Jumping from one crisis to the next. Don’t deal with it, don’t stop, don’t look back. Slap a sarcastic smile of, throw your middle fingers up at the world and just keep fucking going.

But you can’t outrun it. It will always be faster, it will always catch up. These things will come back to haunt you if you don’t address it.

Trauma doesn’t just…disappear. As much as I’m sure we all wish it would…it just doesn’t.

I used to be a competitive runner. Up until surgeries took my body from me physically, I ran. I completed.

To be honest, I never stopped. I’m still running. I’m runnning from my pain, from my past…shit. I’m even running from my present. I just don’t want any part of it…any part of feeling it.

But the thing is…I’m so tired now. And I can’t keep it up. I can’t keep running. There’s nothing left in me. It’s like all there is left to do is to just finally…stop.

Stop running, and turn around, and face the fucking bears in the room and pray that I can make myself look big and scary enough to run them off for good. But I can’t do any of that if my back is turned and I’m running. And if I keep running, they’re going to catch up, and fucking eat me alive before I can even see if coming.

The only problem is…I don’t know how to stop running. I don’t know what happens when I finally stop and turn around. I’m afraid of what I’ll see…I’m afraid of what will happen. It doesn’t seem like a fight for just one person. A lifetime of demons standing across the room, ready for battle.

It doesn’t seem smart. And it really doesn’t seem like the right thing to do. But I know that continuing to avoid all of this and running from it all isn’t working either.

Each day that grows closer to that first week in Aril…each day that passes that brings me closer to my sons birthday…it’s another day that a little bit more of my soul gets ripped from my body.

I want to run. I don’t want to deal with this.This avoidance isn’t serving me. But I’m not sure that actually feeling this is smart…or safe…either.
It just hurts. It really does. More than I know how to put into words.

It has been almost 8 years since I have given my son a hug. 8 years that I have been the most incomplete that a person can be. I’m lost without him. Losing a child is unlike anything. And I just don’t know how to fucking deal with it. Sober.

For the next 20 days…and then the week following…you can pretty much just assume that I’ll be a disaster. A shell of myself, somehow functioning in a world that doesn’t make any fucking sense.

Avoidance doesn’t work, and it certainly isn’t helping me anymore.
But I’m just not sure that…feeling…all of this….is the right thing to do either.

I don’t want to run. But I really don’t know what else there is to do.

Send hugs.
And ice cream.
And coffee.

(((I miss you always. But right now I miss you extra.)))