Day One
I didn’t expect to feel this much grief.
For months, maybe even years, I could see this day coming. I had been preparing for this day. I had cried over friendships I had to leave behind. I cried for years over my mother. I grieved no longer contacting my siblings. But today feels different.
Today, I closed the door on my father, and with him went the last remaining tie.
Today is Day One.
An Island to Myself
Right now, I feel like an island.
Deserted.
Calm.
But ravaged.
For the first time in my life, I have completely severed ties with my entire family. There are no more connections left. No more parents. No more siblings. No more relatives.
And the truth is, I have no homebase anymore. I have no place to go back to. I have no home away from home.
I never realized how much that mattered until it was gone.
By choosing no contact, I changed the course of my life. The future I always assumed would somehow include my family no longer does.
They are not dead. They are alive and living their lives. The difference is that I won’t know their world beyond Day One.
I won’t know what happens next, and that’s a heartbreaking reality.
I picture my heart snapping in two from the grief, but I don’t feel the snap. It feels broken somewhere else, and I find it hard to explain. It’s a pain so distant, that it feels like it’s welling up from within my gut – a type of pain that feels somewhere so deep, it’s too intangible to grasp.
I have cried so much that my head aches from it. The grief feels heavy, almost impossible to carry. But it’s an odd type of grief. There is no darkness. Everything feels bright. There are no rains. No clouds. There is no depression.
The hardest part to reconcile is that I chose this. I chose this grief to carry and to hold. This is day one.
The Cost of Freedom
I chose this because it was the only way to be free.
It was the boundary I needed to finally live my own life, stop the hurting, and begin healing.
I still have my own healing to do. I’m not pretending have everything figured out. But I know I cannot heal inside the same system that wounded me.
For a long time I prayed for strength to do what I knew needed to be done. Deep down, I knew the situation was unlikely to change. It was a sobering fact, and it was beyond my control.
The gift I have received is freedom.
It just doesn’t feel like a gift yet. In my grief, it doesn’t feel like a gift at all. But this is just Day One.
Right now, it all feels like such a loss.
My Voice Unchained 