In 2021, I had a breakdown. That strongly coincides with when I stopped writing on this blog consistently. I honestly just couldn’t put into words what I was feeling. I had so much that I needed to scream from the rooftops and an inability to get it out.
Trauma does that by the way. It causes you to freeze, to forget and to survive and boy have I been just digging through that. I can’t exactly pinpoint what caused the breakdown because if we are being real, it’s basically just been…my life.
Before I get anyone upset about that last statement, I want to preface this entire (likely long) post by saying that I am INCREDIBLY lucky and fortunate to have the life and experiences that I have. I have a very loving family, the best friends anyone could ever dream of, a great career and a business that has brought more blessings than anyone could even fathom. My life is truly an unreal story and someday I plan to really write about that little girl born to teen parents, who raised her in a biker gang, operated and literally lived in a roller skating rink, while being a champion cheerleader that was awarded a random full ride scholarship to college, married her high school sweetheart while playing roller derby only to become a teacher, content creator and a mom to two really awesome humans. I know. I REALLY know how fucking fortunate I am.
I also know the amount of work it took to accomplish everything and to make all of that look really great and often flawless. Social media isn’t the whole story and while I did share a TON of the ups and downs of our life on here for over a decade, there was a lot happening offline that toppled me. What people read here was about movies, crafts, our children growing up, the extreme amount of death we had, the health concerns of our littlest (and my own health issues), mental health and work stress alongside all of the really awesome stuff we were doing.
What happened offline…well, memories, trauma and therapy, lots of therapy
I started to have dreams and these REALLY heavy emotions that I could not manage. I was finally sober from prescription opioids and little did I realize, they had not only been numbing my physical pain, but also my emotional pain. Sober me had to start dealing with a lot of these emotions and memories that I was NOT prepared for.
I am just going to come out and say it, I was sexually abused from the age of about 11-16. What is wild about this statement is that until a few years ago, what happened to me was not something that I ever considered sexual abuse…I was just a wild kid, doing wild kid shit. I had literally blocked out the most heinous of the abuse and it wasn’t until my own daughter started to get closer and closer to the age that I was when the grooming began, that I truly realized exactly what happened to me and how absolutely wrong it was. Then the dreams started and it was like I was reliving these faint memories I had. These snippets of what I just thought was me being a wild teen…except I wasn’t even a teen and I was partying with fucking ADULTS being drugged and given so much alcohol I only have pieces of memories that I have always tried to put together while knowing in my bones what happened to me, no questions, no confirmation needed, I KNOW.
Now go ahead and put all that to the side and also add in trauma of being a biologist and a teacher in a pandemic. My entire being and passion was under attack by what felt like the entire world including people closest to me. I had never felt so disrespected, belittled and unworthy in my entire life. I am still not in a place to forgive people for what they said and did during that time frame even though I know in my heart they were not trying to be horrible to me. Currently, I am just placing a boundary and working on one thing at a time.
One thing...which is nearly impossible. How do you work through the MASSIVE amount of death we have had, the loss of 2 babies, childhood trauma and sexual abuse, the pandemic, being a teacher in this world and political climate while also working on your marriage (because of course, even that had to be a challenge) and parenting.
I started EMDR therapy 3 years ago. It worked on a lot of my main triggers that were basically stopping me in my tracks. It has turned into a weekly therapy session where there is some EMDR and a lot of talk therapy around trauma. I keep wondering when my therapist will tell me that I no longer need to attend, but the more time we are in therapy, the more I realize, this is going to be a long haul through and I just need to keep going, keep talking, keep rewiring my brain and keep healing.
I am a daily work in progress. I am more reflective, more reserved, more isolated but I am doing ok. The only way that I can truly get through this is to face it head on, but in doing so, something had to give and that something was this blog.
I am not giving this space up. NOT EVEN FOR A SECOND, so please don’t give up on me. It is a really difficult thing to put all of your bullshit out into the world while also trying to create engaging content that people actually want to read and learn from. Finding a balance of being able to tell more and more of my story and create content based off what I find joy in was something I couldn’t (and I am still not sure I can) do effectively…yet.
I have had hundreds of people reach out to me over the last few years wondering why I stopped writing, why I am only posting on social media and not on here and it is because I just couldn’t write what I REALLY needed to say. On social media channels I can promote a brand or create fun content and engage and with my amazing followers, but here, on the space I created it felt so hard. This blog has always been a space for me to just write, to brain dump, to process and sprinkle in my passions. My social media channels became a brand…still me, but me as a brand. Everything felt so disjunct and unmanageable…couple that with how fast social media changed, brands wanting only social content and my own inability to function at a rate that is required to keep up, when you work 2 full time jobs and are a wife and a mom. It was all just so overwhelming. I am still overwhelmed and it’s probably one of the things I talk about regularly in therapy. I just want to go back to the time when I could flawlessly manage it all.
I love writing. I love this blog. It is something that I am SO proud of. I built this, we (my husband and children and yes you) built this, and it is a living scrapbook of a life well lived, even with the ups and downs. So I hope you keep periodically checking in, keeping me (and the other Funks) in your hearts and send us all some good juju for healing.
❤️Laura❤️
