Author: Kaeloni

When I was in my addiction I took so many things for granted.

And I don’t even know if it was me taking them for granted from an arrogance standpoint–like “oh yeah the world owes me everything” it was more from a place that I just didn’t fucking see anything. I didn’t see my surroundings and the life that was all around me.

All I saw was the bullshit I was wrapped up in every day. The bars, the alcohol, the drama of what comes living in that lifestyle. I never truly took the time to look the fuck around and find gratitude in anything that wasn’t what most people find gratitude in. Like of course I was grateful for money when it came in, and food when it came in–you know, basic human necessities.

I can hardly think of a time when the little things brought be true happiness when I was in my addiction. Little things outside of my shakes being suppressed finally or my vomiting finally stopping.

I’m talking little things like my favorite song coming on. The window down while driving. A hot cup of coffee in the dead silence with a good book.

Sidenote, I completely stopped reading in my addiction. For 12+ years I can count on one hand the amount of books I finished. And that alone says ALOT if you know me. I have ALWAYS been an avid reader, a good and fast reader with great comprehension (so many teachers in the past have told me). So for me to completely stop doing something that sets my soul on fire is proof enough how much alcohol took precedence in my life.

Anyways.

Fresh sheets and fucking nature man. You ever been outside and truly just looked the fuck around? Truly LOOKED at nature and everything that is LIVING?! I MEAN WHAT THE FUCK. There is so much beauty literally everywhere and I never ever noticed it.

I remember one time, I was like 6 months sober and I had gone to the beach. I balled my baby blue eyes out at the beauty I was seeing all around me. I had this overwhelming sense of gratitude for my life and what I was finally able to see. It was like this veil was lifted off me and all of a sudden I could see.

I feel like so often we just go through the motions every day. We see the same shit and the same people and we grow complacent in seeing those places and people. It’s almost TOO easy to stop truly seeing people and things anymore because we have looked at them so much.

Stop what you’re doing right now and find someone next to you, or find a picture of someone, or find your pet and just look at them. Notice their features, their mannerisms, their clothing. Just look at them as it is the first time you are seeing them.

Did that cause any emotion from you?

Do the same exercise outside next time. Truly just look at shit and see life pulsing through it. For crying out loud we are ALIVE and we are connected on this planet and there is SO much love and visualization we can see and feel everyday.

It starts in the small things. The little things. Find them throughout the day. Search for them. Welcome them. That is how you start finding happiness in things outside of monetary value or outside of your normal set of goals.

Goals are literally the best thing to achieve. You work so hard and sacrifice so much to obtain them, but goals are fleeting–and for most people who are extremely goal driven–not enough.

Goals come, they happen during one moment on one day, then what?

You probably set another goal?

But what about the in-between? How can you find happiness in the in between moments of your life?

It’s in the little things throughout the day.

The hug you’ve had a million times from you spouse when you get home. Yes that hug, quit taking that shit for granted and fucking hug the shit out of them. Savor that hug.

The fresh take out meal you just got. Savor each bite. Truly taste the food. Enjoy the heat or coldness.

Crawling into bed after a long day and feel your bed. Feel your sheets and your pillow and absorb yourself into it.

Little things are free, and you can find them anywhere at anytime 🙂

I don’t really feel like picking up where I left off last time so I’m going to continue from where I feel like starting from.

What I do know, is that somewhere a long the way I knew that despite all the fucked up shit I have endured and been through, it was up to me to change. No one was going to come save me, even though I secretly thought that. Hoped for that even.

When I made the choice to get sober at 27 years old, that’s when it was truly time to face everything. I had to go through detox first, and deal with the consequences of my second DUI within 7 years, but ultimately I knew that changes needed to be made.

I will never forget, after the jail released me back home after getting that second DUI, I went to my boyfriend’s house (now my husband) and went straight to the freezer, where my beloved handle of tequila waited for me.

Yes I said handle, I drank near a gallon a day of tequila.

I went straight to that freezer and dumped that son of a bitch right now the drain. My boyfriend was like “what are you doing?” and I said “I’m fucking done”.

Three words that changed the course of my life.

Somewhere along the way of my early recovery I started to understand the depths of my trauma. See, when you stop using substances to cope with your feelings, you start to feel your feelings, and they aren’t fucking special sometimes.

Man, I had such gnarly nightmares and flashbacks of people taking advantage of my body. I had flashbacks of being abused and used. It made it hard to even have sex with my boyfriend. It made it hard to be around people sometimes because of my crippling anxiety.

It made sense why I drank. It made sense why I was an alcoholic.

I straight up coped with my trauma with alcohol. And somewhere along the way I became chemically dependent on the stuff.

But feeling my feelings was new territory for me and something I had to learn to do. I’m still learning to navigate my feelings. I still want to lash out in rage and anger. I still want to isolate and be impulsive. I still want to fight everyone who hurts me.

Do I act on these impulses anymore? No, but that doesn’t erase the fact that they are still very much a part of my life. Maybe they will never leave me. Maybe they will stay part of my shadow forever, but be stagnant.

But still learning nonetheless.

I can never pinpoint exact life changing moments in my life aside from like two: getting sober and the birth of my children, but what I do know is that you do wake up one day and things are different.

Small changes every day lead up to that day when you wake up and look around and think “wow, things are different in a good way”. And it will be like a random ass Tuesday haha.

But it’s true! Small efforts lay the foundation for something greater and often unseen.

Those small efforts become the “somethings along the way” that are forever etched into your story.

Ahhh the infamous “they” is in the title of this blog today…

No but really, here’s something they don’t tell you, or rather, no one seems to really be talking about. And it has to do with being a mom that is trying to heal.

I’ve done some hard ass shit in my life. I joined the ARMY at 19 years old, I got sober at 27 years old, I gave birth all a fucking lone for my second birth due to covid PrOtoColS. I’ve survived being homeless a few times and I have survived all the nasty ass men who have taken advantage of me.

But trying to be a mom when you’re fucking hurting inside is the hardest shit.

What makes this so hard??

It’s on days like today when your head is screaming and you have a million intrusive thoughts that are just trying to rip you away from everything and everyone and all the while you have two, beautiful, angelic children who are just being children and you can hardly focus.

Ever heard of mom guilt?? Yeah let’s sprinkle a million tons of that onto days like this when it feels mentally impossible to stay present with your kids because all you can seem to do is TRY to focus on not ripping your own brain out.

Let’s add in them screaming and fighting with one another and now you have to go and mediate and referee. Oh now you have a crisis to go attend to. 8,000,000 times in one hour.

Let’s not forget having to cook, and engage, and “try” to put on your best face. Trying to process a million things all at once and you’re just in a shit ass mood. But it doesn’t matter because you have to suck it up and put your own shit aside to give the kiddos what they deserve NO MATTER WHAT.

See I put “try” in parenthesis because some people, like my own mother, didn’t give two flying fucks and just lashed out at all of us when she was having a bad mental health day.

Every day.

She didn’t give two fucks about yelling and screaming and hitting and doing whatever else the fuck she wanted to do to us to make it our fault she was suffering.

I don’t want to be like that. I wont. I fucking refuse.

So I do my best to present positive and okay to my girls and then do coping skills on the side to try and help. Sometimes that’s crying in the bathroom. Sometimes that is telling my kids “mommy is overwhelmed” (not like they can process that, but maybe one day). Sometimes that’s taking so many deep breaths I feel like I’m using all of Earth’s oxygen.

Some days it’s me going numb and barely being able to function. I’ve had to ask my husband to come before on days like that. When my mental health was so fucked that I knew I couldn’t even FAKE being what my children deserved.

This is why my constant healing is of utmost importance to me. This is why my sobriety is of utmost importance to me. I cannot and will not lose control of my mental health and project my trauma onto my beautiful children.

I will not repeat the cycle.

They deserve so much fucking goodness and love and I’ll be damned if I’m ever a reason for their suffering or trauma.

Hell no, not fucking me.

Or their daddy for that matter.

So I continue to heal and process out loud. I continue to practice gratitude and acceptance and all the other things I have learned along the way of healing.

But that’s what they don’t tell you. That trying to heal when you’re a mom is triggering as fuck. It’s hard and exhausting and overwhelming.

But I’ll tell you what. Not once have I ever felt bad or guilty that I cried in the bathroom instead of yelling at my kids. Not once have I felt bad or guilty for walking outside to take some deep breaths over hitting my kids.

We have actually never hit or spanked our kids. We agreed as parents that that is not what we want to do for discipline. No shame on any parent who does, we just didn’t want that.

I will continue to do what I need to do to heal while also being the best mom I can be because I absolutely will not accept anything less than healthy behaviors for my kids to see.

If you’re out there as a father reading this, this applies to you too. I’m writing it from a mother’s perspective, but I’m not shy to the fact that MANY MANY men out there are dealing with the same shit but from a completely different perspective and I have mad respect for you.

I have mad respect for anyone who chooses to heal over projecting their trauma on their kids.

Our kids deserve it.

When I went through undergrad for my BA in psychology I took a class on death. More specifically how different cultures and populations view death. I read case study after case study on people on their death beds and what they said or did from their loved one’s perspectives.

So many people said “I wish I had more time”. This was something that was stated over and over across different countries, religions, and even ages. Another widely said thing was “I wish I spent more time doing the things I loved”.

What I read when I read those, was that people were at the end of their lives and WISHING for something different. They wished that they lived a different life and now that their time has run out, they got sad about it. That alone is sad.

To continue, different cultures and populations had different viewpoints on death. Some welcome death, some fear death, some are indifferent about it. It makes me think, am I afraid of death? Do I welcome death? Am I indifferent? I feel like I have been through different stages of my life where I didn’t care if I died and I’m at a stage now where I am scared to die.

Not scared from the “I don’t know what is going to happen” viewpoint, but from the “my kids are young and need their mother” standpoint. I don’t want to die right now because I want to be a mother, I want to see my kids grow up and start their own families. And I want to see and do all that in the flesh.

I want to feel it with human senses and perceptions. I want to touch and smell and see and hear and BE with my babies and their babies. I wouldn’t get the same experience if I were to drop dead today.

But I’ll tell you what. I do NOT want to get to the end of my life and WISH that I had more time. I don’t want to WISH that I did more things that I loved. I want to do all of that every day.

I feel like I never really pay much mind to the fact that I am going to die one day or pay mind to how I am going to die…but when I do go down that rabbit hole, I can kind of freak myself out lol!

It makes me really want to be more present and just fucking enjoy life man. Not sit around and just exist. It makes me want to try to new things and heal myself so I can fucking be happy and peaceful throughout my days.

I read somewhere once that “people with PTSD and severe trauma don’t heal to be able to handle the trauma, they heal so they can handle the joy”.

And holy fucking moly did that vibrate my soul.

Think about that…

Joy is hard to handle because it is unfamiliar if you’re used to chronic turmoil and trauma. You don’t know how to experience joy, you just know how to handle shit storm after shit storm. So when a joyous experience does happen, you feel like you don’t deserve them or that the rug is about to get swept out from under you at any time.

I remember one Christmas, after my first daughter was born, it was our first Christmas at home as a family of 3 now. I was so fucking depressed that it was a beautiful morning that I couldn’t even enjoy my firstborn’s first Christmas.

I was triggered the whole fucking morning and even cried alone in the bathroom at one point.

Triggered because Christmas was always a horrible experience for me growing up. So this is where handling a joyous moment can be destroyed by trauma.

That was a tangent unrelated to the death topic, but definitely needed to be processed.

Back to wanting to experience and live each day to the fullest, as cliche as that sounds. But think about that, really fucking think about that.

We all think we have so much fucking time here, but we don’t. Time is man made so we can simplify the un-simplifiable universe. We are all on this one long track jetting us towards the end of our “time” and what we do along the way matters most.

Who we become on the jet. What we learn. What we create. How we impact the world in a positive way. How we contribute to our species.

There’s so much good we can do every single day. There’s so much connection we can make with Earth and everyone and everything we share the Earth with.

Even connections we can make with our creator.

Even ourselves.

I refuse to get to the end of my life and wish. Even if that day were tomorrow. I will know that today I did something kind for someone else, I held and loved on my children, I connected with nature and my creator, and I tried to move with love in every thing I did.

Imagine if I could do that every day? Would that leave me satisfied at the end?

I can remember a time when I was very little, five or six maybe, that I had really really high hopes for myself. I can remember feeling like there wasn’t anything on this earth I couldn’t do. I remember really wanting to do so much with my life and honestly felt like I could really do it. I was naturally very good at everything I tried to do–still am actually. I can pick up things very fast and I am a very fast learner. It made me excel at almost everything I tried. From sports, to school, to even keyboarding (I got the golden keyboard award multiple times in elementary school).

I wanted to play sports and be a teacher when I got older. I knew from a young age that I wanted to work with people and help people.

I also knew from from a young age that my family wasn’t normal.

I knew that being abused wasn’t normal. I knew that having basic human necessities, like water and food, being taken away as punishment wasn’t normal. I always felt like the weirdo in school when the teachers would say things like “your parents will help you with this homework” or “just ask your parents for money for the field trip” because I knew both of those things weren’t happening for me. But I would see other kids interact with their parents in such a different way than how me and my siblings did.

See, one of my parents had zero capacity to show love towards my older sister and I, but said parent was able to do it for our little sister. This was the most confusing to such a young me, and still is honestly. I feel like it would be different if this parent was the same towards all of us, but that wasn’t the case. This parent babied and mothered our little sister, while completely acting the opposite towards me and my older sister. You know how confusing it is to see your little sister being hugged and told “I love you” meanwhile you are being treated the exact opposite?

This taught me the competition game from a young child.

I now felt the need to compete with my little sister to get the love and affection that this parent would show for her instead of me and my older sister.

But that affection and love never really came, at least in the ways I needed it.

This pattern repeated when one of my parents remarried and had two more kids with a separate partner. The step parent treated me and my sister the same way as our other biological parent. This step parent loved her own babies more than her non-babies and the cycle continued.

We got to see this step parent love and baby her children while not showing us the same affection, and again, confusion.

Competition.

How can I change who I am to be more loveable? How can I make them love me? It must be me because they love my little brothers and sister! -Thoughts from little me…

To this day I don’t like head to head competition because growing up, it was ingrained in me that I was always going to lose, no matter what I did. I prefer team competition or individual competition. But it is interesting to see why I get so clammed up and lose all confidence when I’m going up against someone head to head. I understand why.

I was never going to win.

Somewhere along the way, that little me who felt that she could do anything, morphed into a young teenage girl who was afraid of the world and had low self esteem. Then I found alcohol at 12 years old and that’s where a whole new storybook opened for me.

A storybook I will explain another time.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when I got the “fuck its” but it was very early on in my teenage years and I was full of rage and turmoil.

Teenage me was not happy. Teenage me used to run away from home and sleep under the slides at the park.

Teenage me used to lie about my age and run off with older guys to go drink and party, completely at risk and vulnerable.

Teenage me didn’t give a fuck about being alive, and teenage me didn’t feel like anyone would even care if I was alive or not. Teenage me didn’t have hopes or aspirations, other than just making it through high school and playing soccer.

In a sense, soccer kinda saved me and kept me sane in high school. It gave me some purpose and kept me feeling like “a normal teen”. I remember showing up to school sometimes after sleeping in the most random outside location and lying to people about having a great home life.

I was embarrassed of my life, but I was a good liar.

I graduated high school even though not one person from my family showed up to support me, and that was also embarrassing as fuck.

Everyone standing around taking pictures with crying moms and dads, while I stuck out like a sore thumb and tried to be happy that I had graduated high school while also hating my existence.

I got so fucking drunk that night.

To be continued….

I’m not exactly sure what drew me to ultimately choosing to make a blog, but I think it has to do with my love of expressing myself through words and online posts. I use social media to publish a lot of my thoughts and feelings, but I always second guess myself there and feel like sometimes my truths make it uncomfortable for people.

Maybe that will happen here too, but maybe I don’t really mind.

I’m not going to trauma dump on the first post–even though it was thought about. I feel like you will eventually get to know me pretty well after some time. One thing I do want to do here is just be honest, even if it’s ugly. Even if it makes me and others uncomfortable. So I vow to state the ugly truths and to always “keep it real” as the kiddos say.

Maybe I will jump on later and make my first official post with some heavy shit that has been on my mind lately. Maybe.

It’s 5:49 pm and I sit here on my bed next to my catahoula (that’s a dog breed) Rosalie to write my first ever blog post. My two kiddos are playing peacefully in the living room and I decided to now take the opportunity to write this out.

I’ve been thinking about where to even start this thing and I feel it is best to just start where I am at and sprinkle in the old stuff as I go. So here we gooooo….

Please…no drumroll.

I feel like right now I am standing on the cusp of some big change that I can’t quite pin point. I started a healing journey, yeah very cliche I know, about 8 months ago. I started this healing journey because I was starting to recognize myself behaving and acting un-healthily (is that a word?) and I didn’t like it. I was starting to react towards my husband and people around me in ways that were not fun, all due to me not coping well with things that were out of my control. I realized that I didn’t want to be that person, so I chose to face my demons, my shadow, my fears, whatever you want to call it or them?

Since then, things have been changing for me. I’ve been making decisions that ultimately make ME feel good instead of trying to make decisions to please others. Up and coming retired people pleaser here! Can I get an amen?!

No, but seriously. I’ve been a people pleaser my whole life because I was “loved” conditionally as a child. I put loved in quotations because I don’t feel like I was loved, but according to some toxic members of my family “it could have been worse–I could have been put up for adoption!”. I digress. Love came if and only if I did or acted in a way that the adults in my life EXPECTED me to. If I wasn’t their perfect little angel, then I wasn’t loveable and I was punished, which we won’t get into now.

So ultimately, saying no to things or people can be really hard for me, almost panic inducing. Because for so long, I equated doing what others wanted of me to being loveable.

It’s one of the hardest thinking patterns to break.

I struggle telling people no and I struggle asking people for help because, even though these tasks are sorta on the opposite end of things, they require another person to make ME feel a certain way.

See, people pleasing isn’t about making someone else feel good, it’s about making YOURSELF feel comfortable. It’s easier to do or say what someone asks or tells you than it is to say no and face rejection, judgement, or name calling, or retaliation (even if sometimes this is perceived). I don’t do shit because someone asked me, I do it because I’m more afraid to say no than I am of hurting myself by saying yes. Is that too confusing? Here let me try again.

Let’s say my toxic parent calls me drunk, which is quite often. Old me: would answer the phone, despise the entire conversation, get ridiculed and name called, then eventually hang up to go cry alone in the bathroom. All because I couldn’t just say NO to answering the call. Because if I didn’t answer I would get a nasty text telling me what a horrible daughter I am for “nOt BeInG ThEre”.

New me: sees parent calling, doesn’t answer. Gets a little panicky, because well, anxiety of people pleasing my whole life, but doesn’t go to the bathroom crying after the phone stops ringing! I mean it’s almost like MAGIC.

When you people please you hurt yourself by saying yes when you really want to say no. Sure, sometimes you may really want to please someone and do something for them out of kindness and love. But if your whole entire being is screaming NO and your brain is screaming NO and your soul is screaming NO, it’s a clear fucking sign it should be NOOOOOO.

How did we get on the topic of people pleasing? That was completely off track from where I wanted to go tonight, but here we are.

Might as well roll with it now. Fingers be flyin over this keyboard.

Ahh that’s right, I was talking about how I’m making decisions for ME now. Doing and UN-DOING things that I feel no longer serve me or feel right for me. Even if I have been doing them my whole life. Even if I really fucking enjoyed them at one point and considered it a whole part of my identity. If I don’t feel like I want it in my life, I am removing it.

And feeling free as fuck about it.

Which leads me to these big decisions I need to make in the very near future.

And you can bet your sweet (or salty) ass that I will be sharing them here. On this far corner of the world, with anyone who cares to read.

And if that “anyone” is ever only me just writing to myself, well I feel confident that I can look back one day and find growth in my story.