On how my family fucked me up.

It has recently become apparent to me that I neglected using this blog at a time when I may have needed it most.

A friend wrote recently that often creative people stop being creative when they feel sad, and that's what happened here. This has been my safe space since I set the blog up back when I didn't have this name, I was still in an abusive household.

When I started this blog, I was a kid. I use that term fairly loosely these days, but it is a word that here means naive, optimistic and scared. I had a safety net that lived on the other side of the ocean, and I had no idea that those closest to me were worse than I thought they could ever be when I came to respecting my representation.

Every now and again, I scroll back through this blog, and I find that post I wrote the day Moony went back to Sweden, and I got called for an intervention in the wake of finally telling my parents that I'd changed my name legally months earlier. It's probably self-destructive, to read back through that, to see the words they actually said, the words I typed out in a room lit only by my screen, blurred through tears that didn't stop until well into the night, replaced by a constant ache in my chest.

Life is about moving forwards, about letting go of the things that hold you back, but I'm not moving on, really.

I'm going to dedicate some proper time to how my life is now, but even with all this. Even with the life I'm carving for myself as I learn how to be independent and fall in love with this town, my partner, and myself, I won't be able to get rid of the grief I feel each time I recall something related to my home, to my family.

I was saying to my sister just now, I'd love to keep up a steady contact with them. I want nothing more than to send a witty e-mail to my dad, and get some stupid joke in return without it feeling about as natural as a science-fiction horror piece worthy of H R Giger. But it isn't easy, and it isn't possible at this moment in time.

And that's still with me, every day. Brighton is often a place people flee to in order to escape something, and it works, but you can't escape your past.

This was a bit bleak, and not very helpful in the grand scheme of my recovery, but I'll do better next time.