Day Loop Trail

Sitting on That Rock

I made it out to the water today, found a place on this huge flat rock and sat down.

And I absolutely fell apart.

I cried and cried. Not a couple of tears. I sat there and ugly cried because all I wanted was to go home.

I miss my parents. I miss knowing Mom and Dad are both right down the road and that I can be at either one’s house in fifteen minutes.

And now I keep thinking about all the times I could have stopped by when I lived there and didn’t. I took it for granted that they were just there.

I’d give almost anything right now to be able to make that fifteen-minute drive.

I miss my kids. I miss cooking for them, I miss having them just down the hall. I miss hearing them bicker then laughing. I miss the daily "Love you, see you later" or everynight's "Goodnight Love you".  I miss washing their clothes- and as much as I hate laundry I'd take it all back if it meant having them both down the hall again. 

I miss our cats.

I miss my family. I want to go to my nieces’ softball games—even the weekday ones. I miss just being part of everybody’s normal everyday life.

I feel like life is happening back home without me.

And I think part of why that hurts so much is because I already spent the last six months away. Everybody kept living while I was gone. Birthdays happened. Ball games happened. Regular Tuesdays happened. 

People adjusted to me not being there because they had to.

I kept telling myself that once I got out, I’d be back in everybody’s lives again.

But now I’m here....and I still feel so far away.

That part hurts more than I expected.

I’m here, and they’re there, and sometimes it feels like I missed six months of life only to come back and still be watching it from a distance.

And sitting on that rock, I was angry too.

I’m angry about everything that brought me here. I’m angry about the incident. I’m angry about the relapse. And I’m angry at myself because part of me keeps thinking that if I had just been stronger, if I hadn’t started drinking again, maybe I wouldn’t be sitting on a rock in Tennessee crying because I miss a home I never really wanted to leave in the first place.

There’s a part of me that still feels so much guilt about how everything happened.

But then I have to remind myself who I was just a few months ago.

By the time I went into treatment, I was broken in ways I don’t think I even understood yet. And after all that freaking therapy—every single day—I ended up dealing with things I didn’t even know were “things” for me.

Things I had buried. Things I had blamed myself for. Things I had just learned to live around.

Therapy made me look at things I had never really connected before. Some of it went back a long way — not because somebody failed me, but because I was so young when some of my biggest relationship patterns were being formed.

I was still figuring out who I was while also learning how to be what somebody else wanted me to be. Over time, that can blur the line between loving someone and losing parts of yourself trying to keep the relationship working.

It helped me understand that some of the choices I made later didn’t come from one single person or one single event. They came from years of patterns, habits, and things I had learned to accept without ever really stopping to question them.

I still own my choices. But I’m learning that understanding yourself isn’t the same thing as blaming somebody else.

Sometimes it just means finally seeing the pattern clearly enough to stop repeating it.

I wish I had this much self-awareness years ago.

I wish I had known then what I know about myself now.

I wish being stronger now meant I didn’t still hurt.

But it doesn’t.

I can know I’ve grown and still sit here missing home so badly that it physically hurts.

I can be grateful for everything I learned in treatment and still hate that my life had to fall apart badly enough for me to need it.

I can know I’m stronger than I was and still have a day where I sit on a rock and cry because I don’t want to be here.

Today is one of those days.