Lady Cat Lady

I don’t know how many here remember me from the “old days” of the blogs. I wrote a lot about forgiveness and creating happiness. Then, I reached where my “creating happiness” wasn’t good for me. I wasn’t processing life’s “bad” experiences; I was trying to ignore them. That all came crashing down on me in 2016.

As many of you already know, I have been managing mental illness for decades. I spent a big part of my mid to late twenties going in and out of psychiatric wards. I don’t want to depress anyone; I want to give context to my journey through mental health struggles.

I’ll just lay it all out there for ya: I have been depressed for as long as I can remember, even long before my mother killed herself. As those of you in the States may remember, mental health hasn’t always been looked too kindly upon in our culture. This was the eighties. It wasn’t like today.

Then, my mother chose to leave this world on her own terms, and I..um…fell apart? Yeah, I was a mess at thirteen, and my dad chose to ignore how incredibly strange I was acting and excused self-destructive behaviors on my part.

We moved a lot when I was a kid, creating a sense of impermanence. Then, after leaving college, I married an army man, seriously disappointing my father. And we moved around a lot.

Then, it became my whole fucking personality after I divorced.

It wasn’t until I met Nick that I found absolute stability. This is the longest I have lived in one house/dwelling.

I want to point out the significance of the fact that before I moved here in 2014, the longest I had ever lived in one “home” was three years, including my childhood.

I’m 55.

I settled down and started deconstructing some of the bullshit I had tied up in my brain. I go to therapy, but the depression hasn’t gone away, and I still hit “critical mass” with the CPTSD from time to time. That said, I feel I’m a much better person due to all of it. I am, for all intents and purposes, the most stable I’ve been since my mother died. And, even before.

This brings me to why I’m writing this post.

I spent most of Sunday attempting to write a post about AFF for my website. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the words or the heart to write about it. And, so much of my writing comes from my feelings, my heart. I spent some time examining that and finally realized AFF stopped being my business when they banned me, and I’m done making it my business.

I respect other people’s perspectives on this point.

My one-sided fight with Jon is over. I will only return to the site if/ when Andrew takes over and places a new CEO or himself in charge. I realize he’s more an artist than an executive.

I plan to continue writing, but my focus now is more on the things that make me happy and bring me peace and less on those that bring me such strife. Don’t worry, I’m not diving back into “toxic happiness”; you’ll still read about this fucking back.

He and the site are just not worth my mental health and time anymore.

PS, My first peppers are growing, the blackberry is starting to bloom, and many gorgeous things are happening in the garden. Friday Farm Day will return to its “regularly scheduled programming” 😂 this Friday. 🙂