I’m changing

Something is happening to me.
I know I’ve been saying this for a while, but I think I’m finally starting to figure it out.
I’ve grown a tremendous amount in a short period of time, and… how do I explain this… I’m starting to feel my brain again.
I’ve been in a group chat with 5 of my friends for about 6 years. I love these people. I’ve known them for 15 years. However, lately I’ve been finding the chat to be quite tedious. I used to find it fun and funny and amazing, but the last year it’s honestly just become a depository for my friend Stephanie to just dump all the teeny little bumps in the road of her life and we all give condolences. It happens every week. It’s like a little Stephanie support group. The weird thing is it seems like no one really minds. It’s all very safe and superficial. This week it was that her husband’s step dad has pneumonia. I mean… I’m a compassionate person, but I just don’t have time to give a flying fuck about someone’s step dad’s illness. The week before that it was rats in her kitchen. Then it was a handy man that did a bad job. Then it was trouble with her internet. You know what I mean? I’m almost 40 years old. I really don’t need an update on your internet connection every day. But everyone just goes along with it.
Anyways, if I’m honest, I’ve always done most the heavy lifting in me and Stephanie’s relationship. If I didn’t text her, I’m not entirely sure she would even bother to text me. But this is not a post about Stephanie.
A lifetime of dissociation and substance abuse to numb my existence coupled with low self esteem is how I’ve ended up in this situation with Stephanie. Because at the end of the day, I just wanted to be included. I didn’t care in what. And in order to manage that, I had to dull my brain.
Because here’s the truth: I don’t want to talk about Southern niceties. I want to have meaningful conversations or none at all. I want to talk about cognition, behavioral studies, women’s issues, science, economics, anthropology, history, architecture, love. The list goes on and on.

I want to talk about the human condition.
I don’t want to be polite anymore.
I’m changing.
I’ve woken up.
I don’t need fair-weather affection for validation.
I’m no longer need other people’s small town bullshit to distract me from the empty hole inside. I don’t need to dumb myself down lest I be left behind. Because that’s not right. I’m not the one being left behind in that situation. It’s them.
Being a woman with a modicum of intelligence is tricky in this world. It’s dangerous. It’s threatening. I’ve learned to hide it. But hiding it is painful and takes a lot of energy, which explains why I had to drink so much, amongst other obvious reasons of course. I needed to lower my vibration to feel accepted, which at the time was the only thing that was important to me—a direct result of my “mother wound,” of that emotional and physical neglect I experienced day in and day out.

I’ve always felt this deep sense of longing for something more, I just wasn’t sure what. What I didn’t expect was to find that what I was looking for was myself, and I’ve been here all along.