I’m on another meme flood and they all seem to say a lot of the same thing.

I don’t even know what part of my life I’m in anymore. I’m not broken, but I’m not healed. I’m not sad… But I’m not happy either. I wake up, I do things, I talk to people I laugh at texts- just enough to look fine.

But deep down? It’s like I’m stuck in a version of my life that isn’t mine.

I keep thinking I’ll snap out of it. That one day, it’ll all make sense again. But it doesn’t… it just keeps going. And I keep existing in it. Quietly, numbly, like I’m watching my own life from outside of it. Is this what moving on is? Because if it is no one warned me it would be this lonely.

This one appeared in my feed yesterday, and it honestly still feels like I’m being smacked in the head by it. This—this—is exactly how I feel.

We constantly hear people talking about how screwed up this timeline is, and I’ve felt that way almost continuously since 2020. I’ve said before that I don’t think this is being done deliberately—and if it is, well, good on those people for pulling off such a convincing mess.

I think this feeling shows up when life takes such a sharp, radical turn that you don’t just lose your footing—you lose your sense of what’s real. Everything changes so fast that your brain can’t keep up, and suddenly you’re out of sync with your own life.

Anyone who reads this knows my life made two or three radical changes in less than a year. Just as I would start to grasp one event, the next one arrived before I could even catch my breath. It was exhausting. And I’m going to be brutally honest: it was too much. Way too much for me to handle with the tools I had at the time.

Yes, I was a professional. I still am. But as I’ve said before, it’s one thing to be a professional and an entirely different thing to try to treat yourself. It doesn’t work. You don’t have the objectivity or insight to assess yourself properly. So you discount the advice—because no, that doesn’t quite apply to me.

One night, an ER doctor I know and deeply respect caught me trying to self-diagnose. She pointed at herself and said, “Me doctor.” Then she pointed at me and said, “You patient. Let me do my job.”
And that’s when it finally sank in that I needed to listen.

I did get help—real help—and I’m grateful for that. But I’m also a child of instant gratification. A college professor told me back in the ’80s, “You’re part of the MTV generation. If it can’t be solved in four minutes and thirty seconds, you don’t want to deal with it.”
He wasn’t wrong.

So I took shortcuts. And we all know those work about as well as tariffs do for the economy.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve seen several memes about “holding on,” and they hit uncomfortably close. Over the last two-ish years, I’ve realized that I tried to hold onto people who only had space for me when I was convenient. That’s the only way I can put it. I was fine—until shit hit the fan. Then I became inconvenient. I became a hot mess.

I’ll own that. We all know the outcome. And I’m sure some of you have enjoyed watching the train wreck of my life over the past few years. Honestly, I hope it’s been high-value entertainment—because it hasn’t been for me.

This isn’t about the people who comment immediately from afar. This is about the ones who quietly watch, scroll past, and think, I don’t want to be anywhere near that mess. And that’s okay. Truly. You don’t have to be here.

If you were here and walked away—that’s fine.
If you were never here and just slow down occasionally to see how bad the wreck has gotten—that’s fine too.

I get it.

Some people knew me as an asshole—and yeah, I can be a pretty good one. Especially when you’re subjected year after year to narcissistic behavior and intentional triggering that makes you look unstable and unruly. I’m sorry to anyone who had to witness that. It was never my intent.

The truth is, I’m a kind and caring person. And yes, I deserve some of the reactions I got—I wasn’t always a good person. Half the time even I felt like an asshole, and I didn’t know how to stop that feeling.

In 2023, I felt free for the first time in a long time. Free to be me.
Did I do a good job with that freedom? I don’t know. I don’t think I did the worst possible thing. I don’t think I did my very best either. But I tried. I worked with what I had in front of me and took steps forward.

And yes—I fucked it up.

I won’t sugarcoat that.

I don’t think I did incredibly wrong once I realized my mistake, but I’ll be honest: I’m more sorry that I got caught than for what I did. Not because I didn’t care—but because I had already realized it was wrong and was trying, sincerely, to make it right. I hoped the steps I took would matter.

Life, of course, had other plans.

In the end, my health was the final nail in the coffin.

I’m not angry at anyone for how they’ve reacted. Anyone who’s known me for more than a couple of years knows I have good qualities that rarely get a chance to shine publicly. That’s okay. The people who truly know me know I’m a good person. And I believe that too.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to help others when they needed it.

And somehow, through all of this, it’s hard to believe that Mom has been gone for two years now.

My mom didn’t always understand me, and I definitely gave her more than a few gray hairs. But she always supported me. That’s why I talk about moms—and dogs—so much in this blog. Your parents and your animals want to believe the best about you. And honestly, there’s no reason they shouldn’t.

Your mom will always love you.
Your dog will always love you.

I miss you, Mom. I wish I could have even one more minute with you. Instead, I’m left with the minutes we did have—sometimes messy, sometimes hard, but always real.

Thank you for always being on my team, no matter how screwed up things got.

Take a moment to tell your mom you love her.
You never really know how much time you have left.