fyi if you choose to continue reading you will encounter grief and trauma that shaped me.
I lost a parent when I was 23. it’s been a complex grief, because he is still alive and because he’s a core part of the complex trauma I lived in for most of my life. on Saturday I bumped into a cousin from that side of the family that I haven’t seen since I went no contact and looking into his eyes felt like looking into a part of myself I hadn’t seen in almost a decade. I was surprised at how much it devastated me; I was a mess for the rest of the day. because of this huge demarcation of before and after my father was in my life, the first 23 years of my existence often feel like a memory of someone else’s life. it made me realize, with all this distance and time between then and now, that the thing about that is there are parts of myself I also left behind in the rubble of that crumbling house.
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