Looking Back at the Words That Helped Me Heal

f you read my previous post, you know that my mother was recently diagnosed with cancer. I traveled to be with her, and while helping her sort through her home and prepare for what comes next, I found myself returning to this old blog.

Maybe there is something about sorting through a lifetime of belongings that makes you want to sort through other things, too.

My mother and I haven’t always had an easy relationship. Like most mothers and daughters, ours has been complicated at times. Looking back now, I can see ways that the relationships I grew up around shaped what I later accepted as normal. But I can also see something much bigger than any of that: I love my mother tremendously, and right now I am incredibly grateful to be here with her.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I started fixing broken images on this blog. Then I started reading.

I Didn’t Expect Anyone to Still Be Here

I haven’t written here regularly in a very long time.

Recently, I came back to the blog for a fairly simple reason. Some of the old images were broken or missing, and I decided I should finally fix them.

I expected this to be a housekeeping project. I didn’t expect it to be emotional. I also didn’t expect to discover that people are still here.

Thousands of visitors have found this blog over the past year. People are still reading posts I wrote years ago about gaslighting, verbal abuse, manipulation, abusive emails, a child caught between parents, and healing after an abusive relationship.

That surprised me.

Then I started reading some of those posts myself.

Reading My Own Words Years Later

It’s a strange experience to read something you wrote while you were still living through it. Today, I know how many of those stories turned out. The woman writing them didn’t.

I can see her trying to reason with unreasonable behavior. I can see her wondering whether she should respond to another email. I can see her recognizing patterns and then getting pulled back into them anyway.

Sometimes I want to reach through the screen and tell her, Stop explaining. You don’t have to convince anyone.

But I also find myself impressed by her. She was figuring it out. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But she was getting healthier. One of the things I’ve realized while rereading these posts is that sometimes I understood more than I knew I understood.

Some Things Look Different Now

There are posts here about my daughter that are particularly difficult for me to read. She was a child growing up between two parents, and I desperately wanted to protect her without asking her to reject or stop loving her father. Years later, I can see things I couldn’t see then. I can also see connections to my own childhood.

When one parent repeatedly says terrible things about the other parent, children don’t necessarily hear those statements as being only about Mom or Dad.

Children know they are made from both.

If Mom is terrible, and I’m just like Mom, what does that say about me?

I understand that now in a way I didn’t when I originally wrote some of these posts.

Healthy Rather Than Normal

I recently reread an old post in which I wrote about choosing what was healthy rather than what felt normal. All these years later, I think that may be one of the most important distinctions I ever learned. Normal is simply what we’re accustomed to. Healthy is something else entirely. And sometimes becoming healthy means questioning things that have felt normal for most of our lives.

So, What Happens to This Blog?

For now, I’m fixing it.

I’m replacing missing and outdated images, cleaning up things that have broken over the years, and making sure these old posts remain readable for the people who continue to find them.

I’m not planning to rewrite my history.

There are things I would word differently today. There are conclusions I might add nuance to. There are moments when I can see that I still had a lot to learn. But that’s part of the value of leaving these words here.

This blog documented a process.

And if you’re reading one of these posts today while wondering whether something happening in your own relationship is abusive, please remember that you don’t have to understand everything today.

I certainly didn’t.

Sometimes recognizing one thing leads to recognizing another.

And then another.

Until one day you look backward and realize just how far you’ve come. Thank you to those of you who somehow kept finding this little corner of the internet while I was away. I’m glad these words are still helping someone.

Photo Credits:

Image by Artur Pawlak from Pixabay