An Introduction to the things I didn't say

Last year was hard. The years before that weren't a piece of cake either, but so many things converged last year that it finally broke me in a lot of ways. The proverbial straw to the camels back.

Anyone who knows me, knows I talk... a lot, but what a great many people don't know about me is that I'm extremely private. I can talk for hours about all sorts of things, and hardly share something private or personal if I don't want to or don't feel comfortable. 

Talking too much is a habit I wish I could break, but it is also a distraction and entertainment thing- a thing I do as I am constantly trying to fit in, or relate, or make connections. Maybe if I say the right thing or can relate to the right story, you'll like me. 

Talking about everything while saying nothing though... that's a self-preservation thing. I can tell a self-deprecating story and laugh a long, but to tell something that feels like a piece of myself? My soul? That's rare. 

I have secrets from the time I was tiny that I've never told. Secrets I'll most likely go to my grave with. 

What happened last year was far from a secret.

My oldest daughter was diagnosed with cancer.

I was the only one the doctor told over the phone what she suspected at the time. I was the only one with the 'secret'. It lasted for about a minute. It was probably the longest minute of my life- trying to pull myself together to call first my husband and then my sister to come help with my other kids.

That minute was the heaviest and longest and shortest minute. To know her life, and ours as a family, would be changed no matter what happened.

It was a confidence quickly told. Maybe it's wrong to even call it a secret. It didn't need to be, it wasn't, it shouldn't be, but at times it still felt like a major invasion of my privacy to have so many people know something that felt so private and hard so quickly. It was hard for me, even though it was really happening to my kid. 

Over the past year, there have been a lot of things I repeated to the point they felt like a line I memorized for a play. Other things though- I have held so close and so heavy in my chest that they weigh me down to the point I can't move some days. I'm getting help now, and a year later I decided I wanted to start this blog to try and help release the trauma of all the things that happened and to say the things I didn't, or rarely, said to anyone through the journey we've been on and will still be on for some time to come. 

I read a thing once- even before all of this- that went something like this: Lives are changed when healing happens out loud. 

I've already been helped my soo many. Maybe I'll help someone, maybe I'll just help myself, but  the only way to know is to try. So here I go.