Nocturnal Anomaly

For the thoughts that refuse to sleep

Recent Posts

  • Sunday, September 6, 2026

    This morning was probably the best morning I’ve had in I can’t tell you how long.

    I think part of what made it so good was how familiar it felt. It reminded me of the mornings Anthony and I used to have, the ones that literally revolved around the dogs and spending 30 minutes in bed just snuggled up, laughing and enjoying the dogs and each other.

    He came downstairs this morning and I don’t even really know how it happened. At one point I thought it was one of the dogs laying next to me, but it actually ended up being Anthony. And I do miss him laying next to me. I do. But we can’t go that way, and I don’t want to go that way.

    Instead, we ended up going through random fucking pictures and memories on my phone for hours. They ranged from things that happened two nights ago all the way back to 2015. We laughed, remembered random shit and just sat there together.

    Then, I made breakfast while he let the dogs out and played with them. It wasn’t as if we were together again, but it also didn’t feel like we were hurting each other. For a few hours, there wasn’t this constant reminder that everything is different now. We were just enjoying each other’s company.

    It was a good fucking morning.

    Then, somewhere between all of that and eating breakfast, he made a comment about how I’m rubbing my new life in his face.

    And just like that, something shifted.

    It hurt because that’s not what I’m trying to do. He’s still my best friend. Yes, we’re not together anymore, but fuck, this stuff doesn’t just stop. Eight and a half years is a long fucking time. I don’t know how to navigate going from that to whatever the hell we are now, especially when we’re both hurting and still living in the same house.

    That one comment put this fucking pit in my stomach. I couldn’t eat anymore. After having such a genuinely good morning, my brain immediately went, well, there goes the morning.

    But I got ready anyway.

    I’m trying to set small goals for myself right now because I cannot keep spending entire days in my bed crying, sleeping, sulking and feeling sorry for myself. It’s not helping me. So today I was making myself get up, leave the house and go meet Marcy and Alex because honestly, that’s exactly what I needed.

    Then, while I was getting ready to leave, he made another comment.

    “Yep. Have fun on your date.”

    I’m literally wearing jeans, my big nasty-ass flip-flops, and a fucking Hanes T-shirt. I’m not going on a date. I’m not ready for a date. I’m not even thinking about that.

    And that’s when I lost it. I raised my voice, but mostly I just ended up crying.

    “It’s not a fucking date. You can’t keep making me feel guilty for trying to do something other than sit downstairs and be miserable. I’m just trying to get through this.”

    I’m forcing myself to leave the house. I’m forcing myself to see people. I’m forcing myself to do something other than lay in my bed and cry. And every time he makes a comment like that, I feel guilty for even trying.

    And then came the part that really fucking hurt.

    “I didn’t choose anyone else. You wanted other people. I didn’t.”

    Because I didn’t.

    I’m not running around living some exciting ‘new life.’ I’m not replacing him. I’m not going on dates, and I’m sure as hell not rubbing anything in his face. I’m trying to figure out what my life even looks like now while still living in the same house with the person who has been my best friend for eight and a half years. I don’t know how the fuck I’m supposed to do this correctly. I don’t think there is a correct way.

    That’s what I’m struggling with. I can’t feel guilty every time I leave the house, because I know what happens when I let that guilt win. I stay home. I go downstairs. I lay in bed. And I’m fucking miserable.

    I can’t keep doing that.

    So I left. I left the house crying and went anyway.

    Then, not even ten minutes later, he sent me a video. Like previous videos, it was along the lines of how great I was and how he knows that, but because he didn’t love himself enough, because he hated himself so much, he couldn’t love me the way he should have.

    And that one got me.

    Because all I could think was: you’re trying to talk to me about self-hatred? I wrote the fucking book.

    I know what it feels like to hate yourself. I know what it’s like to live inside your own head and genuinely not like the person living in there.

    But that was the difference.

    I loved him more than I hated myself.

  • We Existed. We Didn’t Live.

    What I don’t talk about is what it was like to watch the love of my life want to die.

    I am already haunted by watching my mother, the first love of my life, die. Then I had to watch the second love of my life put a gun to his head, want to die, and just fight for another day every single day.

    That’s not someone you just leave.

    And that’s not the only reason I stayed. But was it part of why I stayed? Absolutely. There were no ifs, ands, or buts about where I was going to be. There was nowhere else I wanted to be but right next to you.

    I understand self-hatred. I understand living inside your own head because I do it too. I just escaped differently. I used food. I escaped into books. I stayed in bed. I did nothing.

    And eventually we did nothing.

    We existed. We didn’t live.

    I wasn’t always this way. I don’t even know when I got this bad. But that’s not a lie. I fucking hated myself. I couldn’t stand being with myself. I didn’t want a life anymore.

    And watching you drink 12 drinks a day, every day, for at least a year was so fucking lonely. It was terrifying and gut-wrenching watching someone I loved rather do that than try to fight it with me.

    We both gave up.

    And I’m sorry to say it, but I feel like I gave up because you gave up on me.

    I’m not saying that to take credit for anything you’ve done or become. You did that. But I did everything I knew how to do to fill you up because I fucking loved you. Healing you was never actually something I could do, but God, I wanted to.

    All I ever wanted was to show you that you could have everything you didn’t get before. I wanted you to have the life you didn’t get growing up.

    I wanted us to have it together.

    And realizing you didn’t want that is crushing. It is soul crushing because I waited so fucking long for that life. There was nothing I wanted more.

    I meant it when I told your dad I was going to carry on that name.

    Even when some of my old dreams started disappearing, I created a new dream with you.

    And then, I didn’t get that one either.

  • You Were The Love Of My Life. You Were All I Had.

    I was so lonely. So fucking lonely.

    And I need you to understand the difference. I gave up on myself. I did not give up on you. I did not give up on us. But somewhere along the way, I felt like you gave up on me.

    What I looked like was literally how I felt. I stopped taking care of myself because I stopped caring about myself. I felt like I was walking around in this darkness alone, except I wasn’t actually alone. I had you. And now that I don’t, I’m realizing just how much of myself I gave up.

    Because when I take you away, what do I have? Staying in bed all day? Doing nothing? That’s not healthy. I gave up on everything except you. You were all I had.

    Last night I didn’t want to sit at home, so I tried to make plans. I couldn’t find plans, so I sat in a parking lot by myself. I read a book on my kindle. I listened to music.

    I’ve been finding really good music lately. I’m finding my words again. I’m finding pieces of myself again. And maybe that’s what I have to do now, even if I have to do it by myself.

    What hurts the worst are the things you say to me as if I’m someone who would betray you. As if I would do these things to you when I never did. I never gave you a reason not to trust me. Haven’t I at least deserved that?

    Six months into our relationship, I told someone, If I stay, I don’t think any of my dreams will come true.

    And that’s not just about you. It’s about me.

    I fucking gave everything.

    We found each other in our darkness, and you know what? We kept each other alive. But I also think we dimmed each other’s flame.

    I think I gave up part of my flame trying to restore yours. But I never kept growing. You grew. I just sunk.

    That’s the difference.

    I shouldn’t hate myself. I shouldn’t be unable to stand being alone with myself. But I was done. I had given up on me, and you were all I had left.

    So when you look at me now and wonder how I could give this up, that’s what I wish you understood.

    You were the love of my life. You were all I had.

    Imagine how hurt I had to be to finally choose being alone over that.

  • Someday Never Came

    What hurts the most isn’t even the things you said to me. It’s the things you took away from me. Or maybe the things I allowed you to take away from me, because I’m trying really hard to stop pretending I had no part in staying.

    Within the first six months of being with you, I remember telling someone, “I’m afraid that if I stay with him, none of my dreams will come true.”

    That’s what I said. Eight years ago. And fuck, if that isn’t the hardest thing to sit with now.

    Because I knew. I fucking knew.

    My gut knew before I had all the reasons. Before I had eight and a half years of examples and explanations and excuses. Something inside of me knew exactly what staying was going to cost me, and I didn’t listen to it.

    Instead, I listened to “I love you.”

    I let those three words become louder than my gut. Louder than my head. Louder than that feeling in my stomach telling me that something wasn’t right. I kept thinking love meant we would eventually figure everything else out.

    And what did I want? I wanted to be a wife. I wanted to be a mom. I wanted a family. That’s it. Those were my dreams. You knew that from the beginning.

    And you let me believe those things were coming.

    You joked about our future kids. You talked about “our kids someday.” You talked about a future with me like it was something we were actually building toward, when you knew it wasn’t going to happen.

    That’s where so much of my anger comes from.

    Because I think you knew that if you had looked at me and actually told me the truth, I would have left.

    You knew how badly I wanted to be a mother. You knew that was probably the one thing I wouldn’t have compromised on. So instead, there was always a someday.

    Someday just never came.

    And then somehow you started telling other people stories about why we didn’t have kids. You told people we were having trouble conceiving. Last Halloween, when we met our neighbor for the first time and he asked if we had kids, I said no. And then you said something about how we were expecting once but lost it.

    I remember just looking at you completely fucking baffled. Because that never happened. I was never pregnant. We never lost a baby.

    But you said things like that enough that even your dad believed there was some fertility issue and offered to help pay for fertility treatments. And somewhere in all of that, I stopped questioning the insanity of it. It became another explanation for why the thing I wanted most still hadn’t happened.

    But we weren’t struggling to have a baby. We weren’t trying. And that’s a really fucking painful difference.

    Now people tell me, “It’s not too late.”

    And I know they mean well. I do. But I’m going to be 38 in days, and I don’t need somebody to tell me what technically might still be possible. That’s not the point.

    The point is that I had time. I had eight and a half years. And I can’t get them back.

    I can’t go back to the woman six months into this relationship and shake her and tell her, “LISTEN TO YOURSELF. You already fucking know.”

    Because she did. She knew exactly what she was afraid of.

    She was afraid that loving you would mean giving up the life she wanted for herself. And she stayed anyway.

    That’s the part I have to live with now. I have to figure out how to forgive myself for that. Because as angry as I am at you for letting me believe in a future you knew wasn’t coming, I’m angry at myself too.

    I stopped trusting myself.

    I thought loving someone meant believing in them when everyone else wouldn’t. I thought if someone was hurt, you loved them harder. You didn’t give up on them. You saw the good underneath all of the shit and reminded them it was there.

    And I did believe in you. I still fucking believe in you.

    But I sacrificed so much of myself believing in you that somewhere along the way I stopped believing in me.

    So maybe that’s what I’m supposed to take from all of this. When your gut is screaming at you, fucking listen.

    It doesn’t need eight and a half years of evidence. It doesn’t need to prove its case. It doesn’t need someone else to agree.

    Because eight years ago, mine told me exactly what I was going to lose.

    I just wish to God I had listened.

  • 10% Can Still Be 100%

    I’ve been thinking about how fucking hard we are on ourselves when we don’t have 100% to give.

    But what if I only have 10% today? If I give that 10%, then I gave 100% of what I had.

    That’s it. That’s the whole fucking perspective shift.

    Because I’m really good at looking at what I didn’t do. What I should’ve done. What I could’ve done if I had more energy, more motivation, more whatever. And somehow I completely ignore the fact that maybe I still gave everything I had in me that day.

    Your 100% isn’t a fixed number.

    Some days it’s getting everything done and feeling like you could take on the fucking world.

    Other days it’s getting out of bed, taking a shower, answering one text, or doing the one thing you’ve been avoiding.

    10% can still be 100%. It just depends on how much you had to give that day.

    I don’t think 10% was ever the problem. Maybe believing it wasn’t enough was.

  • The Devastating Privilege

    We both died that day, Mom.
    You were just the only one who stopped breathing.

    But the grief didn’t begin with your last breath.

    It began while you were still here, when loving you meant fighting for your right to die on your own terms.

    I knew what you wanted. I knew what you didn’t want. I knew your wishes, and no matter how badly I wanted to keep you here, I would never have gone against them just to make losing you easier for me. Loving you meant advocating for you when every selfish part of me wanted a different answer.

    And somehow, in the middle of preparing to lose my mother, I sat beside you and planned your funeral with you.

    You planned your own funeral.

    There is something so completely fucked up and strangely beautiful about having those conversations with someone you aren’t ready to live without. Talking about what happens after you’re gone while you’re still sitting right there in front of me. Listening to you make decisions about a day I couldn’t even allow myself to imagine surviving.

    Someone asked you if you were scared. You said no. And I knew you weren’t. Your faith gave you a certainty about where you were going that I don’t think death could touch.

    But you were scared. Just not for yourself. You were scared for us.

    You were scared for your family and what would happen to us after you were gone.

    And I know you were scared for me.

    Because you knew me, Mom.

    You knew exactly who your daughter was. You knew how deeply I loved, how completely I attached myself to the people I loved, and how hard I would fall apart when one of them disappeared.

    You knew exactly how I would react to losing you. And you were right. 

    Because four and a half years later, I’m still doing it. I’m still learning how to exist in a world where you don’t.

    And then came those final days.

    We were all there. Our family did this together. We loved you together, cared for you together, watched over you together and somehow tried to help one another survive something none of us knew how to survive.

    But those last 36 hours, you weren’t awake anymore. You made sounds I still can’t describe without hearing them again.

    For months afterward, closing my eyes meant hearing those final 72 hours all over again. Nights were the worst. Silence wasn’t silent anymore. It sounded like you dying.

    And then there was the medicine. Every hour, on the hour.

    We were responsible for giving it to you. We were told it was keeping you comfortable, and intellectually I understand that. I know what hospice medication does. I know we were easing your suffering. I know we were honoring exactly what you wanted.

    But knowing something and feeling it are two completely different things.

    Because when you’re the daughter standing there with the medicine, watching the clock and watching your mother slowly disappear, your brain doesn’t always tell you that you’re helping.

    Mine told me I was killing my mother.

    Every alarm felt like another step toward losing you. And that is a fucking impossible thing to ask of someone’s family.

    My last alarm was supposed to be at 4:00. I woke up late. For once, I will forever be grateful that I did.

    At 4:06, you took your last breath, and I was there.

    You were there when I entered this world, and somehow life gave me the devastating privilege of being there when you left it.

    You were there for my first breath. I was there for your last.

    There is something beautiful about that, even though it shattered something in me that I still don’t know how to put back together.

    People talk about grief as though time slowly carries you away from it. But it hasn’t gotten easier. It hasn’t gotten better. I’ve just gotten better at carrying something that is still impossibly heavy.

    And maybe that’s the part you already knew when you told us you weren’t afraid to die, but you were afraid for the family you were leaving behind.

    You knew what losing you was going to do to me before I did.

    I was your daughter. I would have done anything for you.

    And I did.

    But loving you enough to stay until your very last breath shouldn’t have meant having to live with the feeling that my own hands helped bring it.

  • They Were Chapters, Not The Story

    For a long time, I could tell you pieces of who I was by telling you about the men who shaped me.

    Not just the men I loved romantically. The men who raised me. The ones who protected me. The ones who disappointed me. The ones who made me laugh, made me question myself, made me feel safe, or made me feel small. The ones I tried to save. The ones who tried to save me. The ones who stayed, the ones who left, and the ones I pushed away.

    Some were good men. Some hurt me. Some did both.

    And sometimes, I was the one who did the hurting.

    There were men who offered me something healthy and genuine, and I didn’t know what to do with it. Men whose kindness I couldn’t trust because chaos felt more familiar. Men I couldn’t love the way they deserved because I hadn’t yet learned what healthy love looked like, or how to receive it.

    This isn’t about blaming men.


    It’s about looking honestly at the relationships that shaped me and recognizing my own reflection in every one of them.

    Somewhere along the way, love became responsibility. Loyalty became endurance. Being needed became being worthy. I learned to fix, carry, forgive, protect, and sometimes lose myself completely in other people. But I also made mistakes. I hurt people. I stayed when I should have left and left things unsaid when I should have spoken. I accepted love I shouldn’t have accepted and rejected love I didn’t yet know how to receive.

    Every one of these men became a chapter in the person I eventually became.

    Some chapters are beautiful. Some are painful. Some I’m proud of. Some are difficult to admit.

    But none of them are the whole story.

    Neither are my mistakes.

    They were chapters.

    I was always the story.

  • I Don’t Know How To Choose Me, Yet.

    So now I’m supposed to “find myself,” and I’m realizing I don’t entirely know what that means.

    Because apparently my first instinct isn’t self-discovery. It’s distraction.

    Anything that keeps me from sitting still too long to feel this. I’ve made plans I know I’m not emotionally ready for. I’ve opened doors I probably have no business opening right now. Not because I’m looking for someone to replace what I lost, but because distraction feels easier than sitting alone with everything I’m trying to process. And somehow, even in that, my people-pleasing tendencies have found a way to show themselves. I’ve been completely honest that I don’t want to be the one making decisions right now. I don’t want to think about what someone else wants from me or whether I’m doing the right thing. There is a strange relief in just saying, you decide. Tell me what to do. Tell me I’m doing a good job. Let me shut my brain off for a minute and just exist without carrying the responsibility of figuring everything out.

    And if that doesn’t expose the people pleaser in me, I don’t know what does.

    There is something almost painfully revealing about realizing that even in my rebellion, even in this supposed era of finally choosing myself, part of me is still looking for someone else to tell me who to be.

    Maybe that’s what this healing actually has to be about.

    Not becoming some completely different woman. Not proving that I’m over him. Not filling every empty space with another person, another plan, another distraction, or another version of myself.

    Maybe it’s learning how to sit in the uncomfortable silence long enough to hear my own voice again.

    To make a decision without wondering whether somebody else approves of it. To want something without needing permission to want it. To say no without guilt. To say yes because I actually mean yes. To praise myself instead of constantly needing someone else to tell me I’m worthy.

  • Friday, August 28, 2026

    I lost my path to faith when I lost Mom. Her faith meant everything to her, and instead of letting that bring me closer to God, I got angry. I couldn’t understand how someone so good, who believed so deeply, could suffer the way she did. So I ran from it. I knew I should go back to church, but I fought it because I was hurt and angry and scared of what walking through those doors might bring back up.

    There were some incredibly dark days after losing her. Days when I didn’t necessarily want to die, but I didn’t want to be here either. Suicide was never an option for me. I believe in Heaven, and I was never going to take even the smallest chance of doing something that could keep me from seeing my mom again. But that didn’t mean I wanted to participate in life. I isolated. Some weekends I barely left my bed except to take care of the dogs. I’d sleep because sleeping was easier than feeling. Then Monday would come, I’d get up, go to work, and somehow function. Mornings were always the worst.

    And somewhere underneath all of that, I’ve always known I need to find my way back to God. Not just because faith mattered to Mom, but because I think I need to discover what faith means to me now. Maybe finding the right church and rebuilding that connection will make me feel closer to her. Maybe it will help me heal parts of myself I’ve been trying to survive without touching.

    I know I need to go.

    I’m just scared.

  • Rest Peacefully, Norm

    Life is so incredibly short and fleeting. We never really know how much time we have, with the people we love, in the places we call home, or simply on this earth.

    So live. Love people deeply. Stay young at heart. Find joy in the ordinary. Be kind. Be genuine. And don’t take a single day for granted.

    Rest peacefully, Norm. You were truly one of the good ones. ❤️