Field Note: The Struggle to Heal is Real, The Bell Buoy Calls

Recovery is not an upward trajectory.

Some mornings I wake up reasonably happy with the life I have made. I put away clothes. I straighten the bathroom. I move tired plants into the shade. I pick tomatoes. I pull weeds. I make plans for the beach.

And sometimes, somewhere in the middle of all that ordinary living, the old hurt comes roaring back.

I remember people who hurt me. People who bullied me. People who decided I was an acceptable target because I did not belong to their tribe, share their politics, or behave the way they thought I should. I remember trying to keep to myself and discovering that keeping to yourself does not protect you from people determined to misunderstand or punish you.

And I become furious.

There are moments when forgiveness can go fuck itself.

I want cosmic justice. I want everyone who deliberately hurt me to experience, with exquisite clarity, what they handed to someone else. I want the universe to return their package to sender.

Then the wave passes.

Not because I have forgiven them.

Because I am still here.

That may be the strangest thing about recovering from abuse and bullying. Happiness does not replace what happened. A good life doesn't travel backward through time and rescue you. You can be genuinely happy and suddenly furious. You can love your life and grieve another one. You can have built something beautiful and still occasionally stand among its rooms thinking about who tried to destroy you.

My body has become another complicated territory.

I am 51. I am heavier than I want to be. My struggle with my weight has gone on long enough that it wears on me. I know where I stopped taking care of myself the way I wanted to. I know how often I said fuck discipline because I was exhausted, angry, grieving, celebrating, surviving, or simply wanted the wine and the food and the evening off.

There are consequences to that.

There is also a difference between taking responsibility and sentencing myself.

I can change what I do next without despising the woman who got me here.

And menopause—or simply this great change of life—has begun to sound like a bell.

A marker.

A bell buoy.

Time.

Not panic.

It's time.

Menopause is my bell buoy.

I am no longer standing at the beginning imagining an unlimited supply of years. I've always been very aware of limited time. My parents died before I was 25. I've spent more of my life without parents than with them. I am truly an orphan.

If I get another thirty good years, that is thirty summers. Thirty Augusts. Thirty tomato seasons. Thirty times the cicadas rise. Thirty chances to stand in the Atlantic and feel myself lifted when a wave passes underneath me.

I'm trying to appreciate that.

Maybe fewer.

Maybe more.

But not infinity.

It is depressing.

The girl I was is gone, never to return. With every hot flash, that feels definitive. With every day I check the scale and watch the number slide back upward, I feel failure.

But today is valuable.

Those I once loved and wanted in my life, those I accommodated and clung to, are gone from my life. Those stories ended. Other people left. Some people hurt me terribly. Some things cannot be repaired because they no longer exist.

And still, somehow, I made a family life from what remained.

It turned out really well.

That matters.

So today I am 51.

Today I am 168 pounds.

Today I am angry.

Today I am sad.

Today I am alive.

Today I am tired.

And in an hour I am putting this older, heavier, complicated, tired, surviving body into a moss-green swimsuit. I am putting on my ridiculous beautiful hat. I am taking my son to Coquina Beach.

I will walk into the Atlantic.

The people who hurt me do not get that hour.

Why couldn't they have just left me alone?

Assholes.

Just assholes.

The people I lost cannot come with me. Couldn't people just have been community, or friends, or support for someone who was struggling?

Whatever.

The people who let me go, who stopped loving me, I let go of too—with sadness, until the pain passes like a wave.

The younger woman I was cannot come either.

She has gone.

And there is grief with every sag, every crepe, every bloated middle.

But I can come. As I am.

That is not forgiveness.

That is not forgetting.

That is not pretending everything happens for a reason.

It is simply the stubborn practice of loving a life while I still have one.

The bell buoy is ringing.

I think I will go to the beach.