relapse

Quiet Aftermath

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

People want breakup stories. Clean cause and effect. Something they can file away as “this is what went wrong.” At least I did. But the truth is usually messier than that. It’s layered. It’s timing. It’s emotional history colliding with a new connection that feels bigger than your nervous symptom can realistically hold. 

Before this relationship, I had already lived through the collapse of an engagement. Two, actually. 

That kind of ending doesn’t just disappear because time passes. It rearranges you. It changes what you expect from love, from stability, from yourself. After that, I got sober. I rebuilt slowly. Quietly. Away from social media and everything I knew. I tried to become someone who didn’t rely on chaos or intensity to feel alive. Someone who could sit with themselves without needing to escape. 

And I did manage to build something stable for a while. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a real effort. It was learning how to exist without numbing everything I felt. 

Then, I fell in love again. 

After 3 years of celibacy, connection hit differently. It wasn’t just attraction or companionship – it felt like a flood into a part of me that had been sealed off for a long time. I didn’t realize how starved I had been for emotional intimacy until I had it again. And once you feel that kind of connection after deprivation, it can become incredibly hard to separate love from survival. 

I started reorganizing my life around that feeling. Not in one dramatic decision, but gradually- emotionally first, then practically. The relationship became a center of gravity without me fully noticing it happening. 

That’s something I understand more clearly in hindsight: it wasn’t one choice that changed everything. It was a slow accumulation of small ones made under emotional intensity. 

And intensity is where things get complicated, especially with Bipolar II Disorder. Because emotional states can come with a kind of certainty that feels absolute in the moment. Not because the compulsions are correct, but because they feel undeniable. Love can feel like fate. Hope can feel like instruction. Fear of loss can feel like urgency. 

Looking back, I can see how much of it was happening inside me: the attachment, the longing, the meaning I was assigning to everything, the way my nervous system latched onto connection after years of holding myself apart. 

When it eventually started to unravel, what hurt wasn’t just the loss of the relationship itself. It was realizing how much of my stability, identity, and emotional regulation had quietly become intertwined with it. 

And then I had to face everything underneath that – the grief from before, the sobriety I had worked for, the parts of myself I had been trying to protect – all still there, still unresolved, now fully exposed again. 

Not because someone took them from me. 

But because I had been carrying them alone all along. 

And I want to be clear about something I’m still learning how to hold without collapsing into shame or resentment. 

I’m not resentful. 

I don’t look back at this with anger toward a person, because that isn’t what this was. What I see now is 2 people trying to love each other without the tools or understanding to recognize what was actually happening underneath the surface. My symptoms would flare – my emotions would spike, my attachment would intensify, my fear would get louder than my logic – and what I needed in those moments was stability, grounding, and understanding. 

But neither of us really knew that at the time. 

So instead of support there was distance. Instead of clarity, there was confusion. Instead of naming what was happening, we both reacted to it. I can see now how easily that can look like pushing away and being pushed away, when in reality it was just 2 nervous systems trying to protect themselves without language for what was going on. 

I don’t believe that means what we had wasn’t real. 

I think it was real – just unsustainable in the way it formed, because it was shaped by intensity, timing and unrecognized mental health dynamics I didn’t yet understand myself. 

And I’m learning to hold that truth without turning it into a story of blame or failure. 

Just honesty. 

Just grief. 

And they understand that sometimes love isn’t enough when neither person knows how to speak the language of what’s happening inside them. 

And I’ve been thinking about how this doesn’t only live inside romantic relationships. 

It shows up in families too. In friendships. In anyone trying to love someone who is struggling with mental illness without having the language for what’s happening. 

Sometimes people don’t leave because they don’t care. 

Sometimes they leave because they don’t understand what they’re seeing. Or they don’t know how to stay close to something that feels unpredictable or overwhelming. And sometimes they disappear not out of cruelty, but out of their own fear, confusion, or emotional limits. 

And on the other side of that, it can be devastating. 

When you’re the one struggling, their distance can feel like abandonment. It can feel like proof that you are too much, too unstable, too hard to love. It can reinforce the deepest fears you already carry about yourself. 

Both things can be true at the same time. 

There can be real pain in being left. 

And there can be confusion and helplessness in the person who leaves. 

I don’t say that to soften what it feels like to be the one who stays behind – because that pain is real and heavy and it lingers in the body long after the moment is over. 

I say it because I’m learning that mental illness doesn’t just affect one person. It moves through relationships. It distorts communication. It creates gaps where language should be. And if you don’t know what you’re looking at, you can mistake symptoms for personality, or intensity for incompatibility, or crisis for rejection. 

I wish I had known that sooner – about myself, and about others. 

I’m still learning how to hold all of it without turning it into blame. Without turning it into shame. Without erasing the love that existed just because the connection couldn’t survive in its original form. 

Some things are real and still don’t last. 

And that truth is painful – but it’s also where understanding finally begins. 

There are 2 relationships that I keep thinking about when I try to make sense of all of this. 

One is my ex-girlfriend, who I loved romantically. One is my brother, who I’ve loved and looked up to my whole life.

And what connects them in my mind isn’t blame – it’s distance that formed during moments neither of us fully knew how to handle. 

I’ve been on the side of intense emotion, spiraling symptoms, and not having the right words to explain what’s happening inside me. And I’ve also been on the other side, watching someone I love disappear into something I didn’t understand, not knowing how to reach them without making it worse. 

Both experiences leave a kind of silence behind them. 

But I don’t see either of them as villains in my story. I don’t even see them as failures. 

I see people doing their best with the tools they had at the time. 

And I can finally say I’m trying to do the same. 

Not to rewrite what happened. Not turn it into something it wasn’t. Not to force it into meaning that erases the pain. 

Just hold it more gently than I did before. 

Because I don’t want the ending of these relationships to be resentment, or confusion, or self-blame. 

I want it to be understanding – even if that understanding arrives late, even if it arrives slowly, even if it takes everything I’ve been through to finally see it clearly. 

And maybe, that’s the only kind of closure that actually lasts. 

Still Becoming…

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

I wake up and I already know. 

Not because I remember everything clearly – but because of the weight. It’s sitting on my chest before I even open my eyes. Heavy, familiar, impossible to ignore. 

My mouth is dry, my head is dull, and there’s this quiet dread creeping in like it’s been waiting for me to wake up so it can fully settle. 

I check my phone. 3:07 p.m. 

What day is it? I’ve completely lost track. I’m sure it’s only Friday… It’s Tuesday. 

Of course it is. 

Half the day is gone and I wasn’t even living it. Just hiding from it. Sleeping doesn’t even feel like rest anymore – it feels like avoidance. Like I knocked myself out just to not be conscious inside my own head. 

I lay there longer than I should. Staring at nothing. Thinking about everything I don’t want to think about. 

What I did. 

How easy it was. 

How fast I folded. 

It replays in flashes, not even full memories – just enough to make my stomach turn. And the worst part? There’s this sick, quiet voice in the back of my head that’s not even surprising. As if to say, yeah…. This is what you do. It was only a matter of time. 

I hate that voice. Because it sounds like me. 

Getting out of bed feels pointless, but staying in it feels worse. So I just sit there, stuck in between, scrolling my phone like I can outrun the feeling. I can’t. It’s in my body now. It’s in the way my chest feels tight, the way my thoughts won’t land anywhere without turning dark. 

I start doing that thing where I bargain with reality. 

Maybe it wasn’t that bad. 

Maybe I can just reset tomorrow. 

Maybe no one has to know. 

Maybe someone DID hack my instagram and phone and messages and phone calls…

But underneath all of it is the truth, loud and steady: 

You knew better. And you did it anyway. Not once at this point, but for days in a row now. 

That’s the part that cuts the deepest. Not the act itself – but the awareness. The fact that I watched myself cross the line a long time ago and said nothing. That the last relapse wasn’t that bad. Like I was split in two – one part screaming, the other part already too far gone to care. 

At this point, as Brad Pitt once described it, this thing had me on my back.  

Basic things feel hard now. 

Showering feels like a chore. Eating feels like something I have to force, if I even can. Texts go unanswered because I don’t even know how to pretend to be normal right now. Everything in my life suddenly feels slightly out of reach, like I’m behind glass watching it instead of actually living it. 

And there’s shame. 

Not the soft kind. Not the “I messed up, I’ll do better” kind. The kind that makes you want to disappear and draw completely into yourself. 

The kind that says if people really saw this version of you – the one who caves, who lies to themselves and everyone around them, who keeps going back to the same thing – they wouldn’t recognize you. Or worse, they would. 

I sit with that for a while. Too long, probably. 

Because the truth is, this isn’t just about one relapse. 

It’s about the pattern. The cycle. The part of me that keeps choosing something that wrecks me and then has to wake up and live in the aftermath like this. 

3 pm. Alone. Heavy. Trying to figure out how to exist in my own skin again. 

And the scariest thought isn’t even “why did I do it?” 

It’s – 

What if I do it again? 

This brings me to today. 

A few days sober, technically. But it doesn’t feel clean or triumphant – it feels like I’m walking through fog and I can’t see where I’m going or what’s on the other side. Like everything is slightly muted, slightly off, like I’m here but not fully in anything.

My brain is slow, my emotions are unpredictable, and there’s this constant low hum underneath it all that I can’t shut off. It’s not loud enough to name, but it’s there. 

This is the part no one celebrates. 

The in-between. The early days where nothing feels fixed, just exposed. 

And I’m writing this because I’m too good at hiding. Too good at smiling just enough, responding just enough for people not to worry, showing up just enough that no one keeps asking me deeper questions. I know how to disappear without actually leaving. I know how to shut people out in a way that’s almost scary. 

And that’s exactly where this thing has always grown – in the quiet, in the isolation, in the spaces where no one can see me clearly. 

I think that’s why I refuse to keep being silent about it. Why I refuse to keep sitting in denial and just waiting for my character to suddenly change. 

Because when people picture someone struggling with this, they often picture something obvious. Something messy and visible and easy to label. (I’ve been there before too). But a lot of the time, it looks like me – functioning just enough, hiding really well, slowly unraveling in private. 

And no one likes to talk about that. 

Or if they do, they soften it. They make it more palatable and easier to swallow. Less uncomfortable. 

I don’t want to do that. Not this time. 

Someone recently asked me if putting such vulnerable things about my life out there is even a good idea. What if it makes people uncomfortable? What if it upsets or embarrasses someone? 

And honestly – yeah. It might. 

But hiding hasn’t done me any favors. Silence hasn’t protected me. If anything, it’s protected the addiction – even when I wasn’t drinking. It’s giving it space to grow without resistance, without exposure, without consequence. 

I’m over that. 

I might be someone who has relapsed more times than I can count. Someone who has fallen on her face, made the same mistakes, sat in the same shame over and over again. 

But there has never been a time I didn’t get back up. 

Not once. 

Bruised, embarrassed, exhausted – yes. But I get up. 

And I’m not sharing this because I’m proud of the mess or because I need anyone to tell me I’m strong. I’m sharing it because I know exactly what happens when I don’t. 

My addiction thrives in secrecy. 

It survives in isolation. 

But it does not survive in vulnerability. 

And I’m done giving it somewhere to hide. 

So I will keep writing. 

Not just when things are messy. Not just when I’ve fallen apart. Not only when everything feels like it’s burning and I need somewhere to put out the smoke. 

But also when it’s quiet. 

When it’s uncertain. 

When nothing dramatic is happening and that’s exactly what makes it hard – the in-between days where I don’t know if I’m healing or just pausing, where I can’t tell if I’m moving forward or just standing still in the thick of the fog, unsure of where I am, and hoping it counts as progress. 

Those are the moments that usually get lost. The ones no one really documents because they don’t feel important enough. They’re either too painful, or not painful enough to be compelling, not joyful enough to celebrate. Just… existing. Floating. Unclear. 

But I think that’s where most of life actually happens… Especially for me right now. 

So I want to write it all. 

I want to write about the mornings where I still feel heavy but I get up anyway. The days where I don’t feel fixed, but  I don’t fall apart either. The quiet decisions no one sees – choosing not to isolate, choosing not to spiral, choosing to stay present even when everything in me wants to disappear and hide. 

Because healing isn’t just the big turning points. It’s not just the relapse or the breakthrough or the dramatic before and after. 

It’s the slow stitching in-between. 

And I don’t want to only remember my life as a series of extremes – broken, then better, then broken again. I want the full thread. The continuity. The small, almost invisible moments where something in me shifted and I didn’t even have language for it yet. 

Maybe that’s what this becomes. 

Not just a record of what I survived – but a testimony built in real time. Not polished. Not edited for comfort. Just honest enough to hold the truth of who I was in each version of it. 

So that one day, when I’m further on the other side of this,  I can look back and see it clearly. 

Not just the falling apart. 

Not just the getting back up. 

But everything in between that quietly made me someone who stayed. 

Here Again

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

I didn’t plan to be here again. 

That’s the part I keep circling back to – the quiet confidence I had this time felt different, that I had it under control – or at least was well on my way to. And then something shifted, or maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was always there, just waiting. 

I replasped.

Hard enough to make my heart sink as I write this. And even typing that feels heavier than I expected, like the words themselves carry shame I haven’t figured out how to put down yet. 

Anyone who knows me and knows my journey of the past 7 or so years of trying to get sober, of trying to figure out how to live sober, knows that relapse is not unfamiliar to me. In fact, it’s been more consistent than my actual sobriety. That’s a hard truth to have to swallow and come to terms with. Yet, it hasn’t stopped me most times from going back. 

In fact, a lot of times, I think it’s what drives me back. The shame of it all. 

It feels like it escalated so quickly – like one moment I was steady and the next I was right back in it, full force. Addiction raging and suddenly I couldn’t see the way out. But if I’m being honest, I don’t know if that’s true. I think I want it to be sudden because sudden feels easier to forgive. 

If it “just happened”, then I don’t have to look too closely at everything that came before it. But there were signs, weren’t there? Subtle shifts in my thinking, in the quiet justifications, the moments I chose not to pause and check in with myself or anyone else. 

I keep asking how I got here again, like it’s a mystery, but part of me knows it wasn’t one step – it was a series of small ones I didn’t fully notice, or maybe didn’t want to acknowledge. 

I think the hardest part to admit is that it doesn’t feel like I just slipped- it feels like I’ve been slowly giving up on myself for awhile now. Little ways, quiet ways, choosing what’s easy over what’s right, telling myself I’d try harder tomorrow.

And now it feels like that’s caught up to me, like the people around me can see it too, and maybe they’re starting to give up in their own ways. And I can’t say that I blame them. 

That’s what hurts the most I think – that this doesn’t just live inside me. It spills out onto everyone who cares about me, and somehow I feel like I’m the one causing the damage while also being the one stuck in it. 

I feel alone in a way that’s hard to explain, like even when people are there – reaching out, trying to support me – I’m separate from them, watching myself disappoint them in real time. And I want it to get better so badly, I want to feel different, to be different – but the work it takes to actually change feels so overwhelming that I don’t even know where to start. (Or start over again, I should say.) 

And that’s the trap isn’t it? Because picking up a drink cuts through all of that for a few minutes. It softens the edges, quiets the noise, makes everything feel manageable – until it doesn’t. Until those few minutes get shorter and shorter, and I’m left chasing something that barely even works anymore. Something that not only doesn’t work, but is intent on destroying my life. 

Even though it doesn’t feel like there’s hope right now, I know – somewhere deeper than my emotions – that there is. Because God has never been dependent on how I feel. He isn’t a God of fleeting comfort or temporary relief; He’s a God of promise. 

And I’ve lived that before. I’ve walked through darker, heavier seasons than this and somehow, every single time, He’s been steady when I wasn’t. Faithful when I drifted. Present even when I couldn’t feel Him at all. So I know He’ll do it again – I just don’t know how to hold on in the meantime, and that’s the part that feels almost unbearable. 

Maybe that’s where surrender comes in. Not the kind that feels peaceful or resolved, but the kind that costs everything. 

Letting go of the person I thought I loved. Letting go of the life I was trying so hard to build and control. Letting go of the version of myself I keep trying to force into existence. And trusting – really trusting – that maybe everything needs to be undone before it can be rebuilt the right way.

That maybe, I need to step back and let Him rearrange what I’ve tangled, rebuild what I’ve broken, and carry what I was never meant to hold on my own…. Even if it means starting all over again.

I don’t write any of this to impress anyone or to turn it into something meaningful for other people. If anything, it’s the opposite. I write because I need somewhere to be brutally honest with myself, somewhere I can come back to years later and see the bigger picture I can’t always see in the moment. 

Because when I look back over the years, over entries written in completely different headspaces, I can’t ignore the pattern – God has been faithful even when I’ve been completely lost and out of my right mind. 

It hasn’t been random.

It hasn’t been pointless.

Even when everything felt chaotic, He was still doing something underneath it all. And if I’m really honest, the times my life has gone the most off track are the times I stepped out of where He had me and decided I knew better. I chased my own way, my own timing, my own desires and my own control- and it’s never once ended well for me. And still, I keep going back to that, like I forget every lesson as soon as things start to feel okay again. 

So I write because this is the only place, outside of numbing out, where things get quiet enough for me to actually think. 

Where I can sit with the confusion instead of running from it. Drinking makes everything go silent for a moment, but this – this is different. This is where I try to make sense of things that don’t make sense to my very human, very limited mind. 

Where I can be messy and unsure and still somehow feel like I’m not completely lost in it. Where I can remember, even faintly, that there’s something bigger happening than what I can see right now. 

Right now I don’t feel strong. I don’t feel redeemed or even remotely put back together. I feel like something in me has been scraped raw – like I can still feel the damage in my chest, in my hands, in the way I keep replaying everything I wish I could undo. Everything I wish I could unsay. 

There’s a heaviness that sits in my body like I can’t outrun it, no matter how much I want to disappear from it for a while. And I hate that I did this again. I hate the version of me that reaches for something that destroys me just to stop feeling things for a few minutes. I hate how quickly it becomes a cycle I recognize and hate, but still step into. 

But if I stay here long enough – past the shame, past the spiral, past the urge to shut it all down – I know the only way forward is through honesty and small, deliberate steps back toward life. Not fixing everything at once. Not becoming someone new overnight. Just stopping the bleeding where it is, one choice at a time. 

Reaching out instead of isolating. Telling the truth instead of hiding it. Letting the discomfort exist without feeding it. And trusting that even now, especially now, I am not beyond repair. I don’t have to feel ready. I just have to not disappear from myself again. 

If this is the version of me the world sees right now – struggling, messy, trying and failing and trying again – I don’t want that to be the whole story to my life. I don’t want to be remembered for the nights I gave up on myself or the ways I numbed out when things got hard. I want to be remembered as someone who kept coming back. 

Someone who fought for her life even when it felt impossible. Someone who loved deeply, who cared, who didn’t stop believing that God could still make something beautiful out of the broken pieces. 

I want to be remembered for choosing to get back up, over and over again, even when no one saw it, even when it felt pointless. Not because I did it perfectly – but because I didn’t stay down. 

So this is where I am. 

No clean ending, no neat redemption arc – just me, sitting in the wreckage of my own choices, telling the truth about it. I don’t have a breakthrough to wrap this up with. I don’t feel fixed. I feel exposed, tired, and painfully aware of how easily I can lose myself. 

But I’m still here. 

And maybe that’s the only honest place to start again – not with confidence or clarity, but with nothing left to hide. If there’s any way forward, it has to begin here, in the mess, with me choosing – however weakly, however imperfectly – not to run from it this time.

To be continued….