I’ve tried to spruce the place up a bit on my occasional overnights, but it feels like I’m visiting the cast-off shell of a former life—and I didn’t really even live here for that life. I’m just sitting in a place I used to avoid. It’s still not mine, and I don’t know how to make it my own.

To be in the desolate badlands while envisioning the lush tropics without being totally triggered again isn’t easy, especially when life seems so effortless for everyone else.

I wish there were a wise mind drug.

I knew I needed distance between myself and my feelings so I could observe, but just being with my feelings was like being possessed. I didn’t need mindfulness; I needed an exorcism.

This could be a whole new beginning. Or it could be yet another false start.

If I want to survive, I have to stop turning my energy against myself—stop being the worker bee, the supplicant always feeling helpless and asking for help, the one who desires, unrequited. I have to transform this despair and anger into power.

I don’t understand how I can have so much information in my head and still not be able to change.

Poisoned by what’s inside us, and vulnerable to anything outside us.

It feels like my life hangs in the balance of his affection—as though his heartbeat and skin, his voice and eyes, bring me back to myself. As though I don’t exist without him.