I have been toying with the idea of deleting this blog. I don’t know if I want to write it any more. I still don’t. I thought I would just type a bunch of words and see what comes out. A stream of consciousness if you will. I normally talk these things out with people but it just feels more apt to write this one. Ramble until I know.

I love writing. No one really reads this aside from Mum and Albert. I’m not sure my sister ever has bothered to look. She isn’t big on words and has her plate full enough with her kids. I wake up some days and I have words bursting out of my head. Then others, I don’t have any at all. I think that is a depression thing. My words stop when I am in a dark place. There has been a lot of dark places over the last year.

I am now coming back into the light and the words have started up again. I quite often have things spilling out of my head. I mostly send them to Albert to read. Nothing formal. Just a bit of a word dump over WhatsApp. My dreams are starting to be funny and crazy again, rather than constant nightmares. I have a new dream catcher which has helped.

The reason I don’t know if I want to continue this is my ex. He still stalks my social media. I don’t mind if I don’t know about it but then he will email, or make sure to watch my insta stories to be seen. I don’t know why he can’t just move on. He was forever telling me off about looking at my past. He should take his own advice and just stop. He may read this and it may cause another bout of watching. I hope not.

Half of me is beyond caring. After being controlled and manipulated for so long, both during and after the relationship, I am sick and tired of it. I want to live my life. I want to have fun and write about it. I want to be a normal person not someone who is working though the trauma of being mentally abused for years. Some days that abuse has had such an impact on me that I can’t do this. Just seeing his name makes me sick. It scares me. Not because I am afraid of him, but because I am scared of how I allowed myself to be treated. Of who I became.

It wasn’t all bad. I mean it was all basically a lie but there were some good times too. They are just tainted. I can’t look back on them any more and count the blessings. Especially since other women have come forward to say they were dating him at the same time. I had no idea but it makes sense now. Nothing was real. That helped my healing process a lot. If there was nothing real then there was nothing I could have done. I should have gotten out sooner, but that’s another story.

So that is why I stopped writing. I didn’t want to be watched. I didn’t want anyone to know what I was doing. I wanted to hide and live anonymously. Then I started to realize recently that’s probably exactly what he wants. He wants me to be under his spell still. He wants me to not live my life to the fullest. That way he still has control.

I’m not going to be free of him for a good three years yet. He saw to that by leaving me to pay off all the debt by myself. Each time I lose nearly half my wages to a loan installment payment, it makes me sick. One day I will learn to forgive the majority of things. You can’t exist the way he does without it being a mental illness. I won’t forgive the debt though. He knew how trapped it made me. He left me with it all. I could be paying a mortgage easily with this. But instead I am paying for my naivety.

While I won’t have financial freedom for a long time still, I will have my actual freedom. I have done so many wonderful things since the beginning of the year, despite COVID-19 raising my anxiety levels and job loss taking a chunk of my confidence away again. But it’s coming back now. I am starting to live again. I am starting to take my health seriously again. I am once again becoming me. Coming out of the black hole of depression.

I want to start adventuring more again. I want to start meeting new people. I want to experience this incredible country and all the opportunity it affords people who stay here.

I want to write about that new life. I think I will. I think this may have worked. I have things I can write about that I did over the last few months to start with. I can tell my story. I just have to be brave enough to hit “publish”. To weather the inevitable storm it will no doubt unleash.

It’s just a matter of when.