WHAT THE FUCK ABOUT ME?

Lately I’ve been writing again.

Not every day. Not on some schedule. Not because I suddenly found discipline or figured my shit out.

I write when something gets under my skin badly enough that I can’t leave it there.

I write when I’m angry. When I’m grieving. When something somebody said six years ago suddenly makes sense in a way I wish it fucking didn’t. I write when I’m sitting in the middle of a life I built and wondering how the hell I became a stranger inside of it.

And apparently, from the outside, that can look a whole lot like doing nothing.

Sitting on my computer.

Smoking.

Thinking.

Going back over old conversations and old memories and shit I probably should have left buried.

But I’m never really doing nothing.

I’m trying to understand what happened to me.

Sometimes what I allowed to happen to me.

Sometimes what I did to myself.

And lately, a whole fucking lot of what happened between me and the man I spent most of my adult life loving.

Then I take all of that ugly shit and try to make something beautiful out of it.

Not pretty.

Beautiful.

There’s a difference.

Pretty hides the blood.

I let it stain.

Because somewhere there is another woman who keeps wondering why being loved still feels so goddamn lonely. Another woman surrounded by people who swear they need her while she is quietly disappearing right in front of them. Another woman who has gotten so good at carrying everybody that nobody notices she can barely fucking stand anymore.

For a while, I thought that was what I wanted to write about.

Being needed.

Or more specifically, how fucking tired I am of it.

I thought maybe I didn’t want anyone to need me anymore.

But I couldn’t make the piece work.

Every time I tried, it felt wrong.

Not badly written.

Wrong.

Like I was telling the truth but somehow still lying.

And tonight, standing in my filthy living room with music blasting while I cleaned up shit that I did not make by myself, it finally hit me why.

Even that was still about everybody else.

What they need from me.

How much they need from me.

How tired I am of what they need from me.

Their needs were still the fucking center of the story.

Again.

So fuck that.

What the fuck about what I need?

I don’t mean what I need somebody else to do for me.

That’s where my brain went first too.

Help me clean.

Listen when I speak.

Do what you said you were going to do.

Notice something needs to be handled without waiting for me to assign it to you like I’m the manager of a particularly incompetent fucking workforce.

Those things matter.

But that still isn’t the question.

Because I have spent years explaining to everybody else what I need from them.

I need you to communicate with me.

I need you to help me.

I need you to stop disappearing.

I need you to choose me.

I need you to care enough that I don’t have to scream before something matters.

And maybe that’s part of why I’m so fucking tired.

I have spent all this time trying to teach other people how to meet my needs without ever stopping long enough to ask myself something much scarier.

What do I need from my own life?

And I don’t know.

That’s the part I don’t want to admit.

I know what everybody else needs.

Jesus Christ, I can tell you that shit before they can.

I know who needs encouragement, who needs help, who needs somebody to listen, who needs to be pushed, and who needs to be left the fuck alone.

I notice.

I have always fucking noticed.

But ask me what Julie needs when nobody else gets to be part of the answer?

My mind goes quiet.

And maybe that’s the real problem.

Not that everybody needs too much from me.

That I got so busy becoming what everybody else needed that I never learned how to become anything just because I wanted to.

And I don’t even know when that happened.

I can point to a hundred different places where I lost pieces of myself, but I can’t tell you when I stopped noticing they were gone.

Maybe because I was always becoming something for somebody.

A daughter trying to understand shit she was too young to understand.

A mother before I ever really got the chance to figure out who I was outside of being one.

A wife who made an entire life out of loving somebody through things that eventually started destroying her too.

A newly sober woman who had no fucking idea what to do with herself once alcohol wasn’t there anymore, so she poured everything she had into taking care of the people around her instead.

That worked for a while.

Hell, maybe it worked too well.

Because when everybody else became my reason to get up, I never had to figure out what my own reason was.

There was always somebody.

Somebody needed to be fed.

Somebody needed a ride somewhere.

Somebody needed help.

Somebody was upset.

Somebody forgot something.

Somebody fucked something up.

Somebody needed me to make it okay.

There was always noise.

Always movement.

Always something demanding enough that I didn’t have to sit still and ask myself whether any of it was making me happy.

And now everything is changing.

My kids are grown.

My marriage is ending whether my heart has caught up with that fact or not.

The role I knew how to play better than any other doesn’t fit the way it used to.

And I’m standing here with all this fucking room I spent years wishing I had, and some days I don’t know what the hell to do with it.

That’s the part nobody tells you about.

Everybody talks about freedom like the second you get it, you’re supposed to run outside barefoot and spin around under the fucking sun like your life just turned into a tampon commercial.

Nobody talks about how terrifying freedom can be when you’ve spent your entire life building your identity around responsibility.

If nobody is telling me what they need, then I have to decide what I want.

If nobody is waiting on me, then I have to decide where I’m going.

If nobody else’s emergency is controlling my day, then suddenly the day belongs to me.

And I should be excited about that.

Part of me is.

Another part of me wants to crawl out of my own fucking skin.

Because I don’t know how to live a life that isn’t built around reaction.

I know how to survive things.

I know how to respond to things.

I know how to take a disaster and start sorting it into smaller disasters until eventually it looks manageable.

Give me a problem and I am fucking fantastic.

Give me peace and apparently I have no idea what to do with my hands.

Maybe that’s why I keep ending up surrounded by people who need so much from me.

Maybe being needed gave me something I understood.

A place.

A purpose.

Proof that I mattered.

Because even when I was exhausted, even when I was pissed off, even when I wanted everybody to leave me the fuck alone, there was comfort in knowing exactly who I was supposed to be.

And that might be why being needed and being loved got so tangled together in my head.

If somebody couldn’t do without me, then surely, I mattered to them.

If I mattered enough, surely, they would keep me.

If I gave enough, loved enough, fixed enough, forgave enough, understood enough, eventually they would look at me and see everything I had been giving them.

Eventually they would wonder what I needed too.

Eventually somebody would choose me without me having to beg for it.

God, what I wouldn’t have done for Thomas to choose me over himself just fucking once.

Not just stay.

Staying and choosing someone are not the same thing.

I know that now.

You can stay in the same house with somebody for years and still choose yourself every single fucking day.

You can sleep beside them.

Share bills.

Raise children.

Say “I love you.”

Build an entire life together.

And still, when their comfort and your hurt are sitting on opposite sides of a decision, they can choose themselves.

Again.

And again.

And again.

That is the kind of thing that changes you slowly.

You don’t wake up one morning and realize you disappeared.

You just start asking for less.

Then explaining more.

Then getting louder.

Then getting angry that you have to get loud.

Then apologizing for how you said something because somehow the way you finally screamed it becomes more important than all the times you said it quietly before.

And eventually you become somebody standing in the middle of her own house absolutely fucking furious because a grown man cannot seem to understand why he should help clean without being given instructions.

And it sounds so stupid when I say it like that.

Cleaning.

That was tonight’s big fucking revelation.

Cleaning.

Not cheating.

Not addiction.

Not some giant betrayal.

Just a filthy house and a man walking through it.

But I think sometimes the smallest shit tells the truth better than the catastrophic shit does.

Because catastrophe gives everybody something obvious to react to.

Ordinary life tells you who somebody is when nobody thinks the moment matters.

He had been gone all day.

I had finally gotten myself into a good mood.

Music on.

Cleaning.

Not because anybody made me.

I fucking knew it needed it.

I live here.

I have eyes too.

I was doing it because I wanted my space back.

I wanted to feel better when I looked around.

I wanted to stop sitting inside something that was making me miserable just because part of me was pissed off that I shouldn’t have to be the one fixing it.

Then he came home.

And there it was.

One of those tiny moments where change could have happened without anybody announcing it.

He could have looked around.

Looked at me.

Seen what I was doing.

And joined me.

Not because I asked.

Not because I gave him a list.

Not because I was already pissed.

Just because he noticed.

Instead, he ate.

Went back to his room.

And once I said something, suddenly there were reasons why helping wasn’t simple.

The dishes.

The cabinets.

The AC.

Tomorrow.

Always something.

Always some explanation for why the obvious thing I’m looking at apparently isn’t as obvious as I think it is.

And that’s when I realized what I’m actually so fucking angry about.

I don’t want to keep telling people how to care about me.

I don’t want to keep writing instruction manuals for love.

I don’t want somebody asking me what I need just because they can tell I’m about to lose my shit.

I don’t want “what can I do?” when what they really mean is “please give me one task so I can say I tried.”

I want to be noticed.

That’s it.

I want somebody to see me carrying something and take part of it without waiting for me to drop it.

I want somebody to remember something that matters to me because it matters to me, not because there will be consequences if they forget.

I want somebody to look at me with the same kind of attention I give everybody else.

Because I notice everything.

Sometimes I wish I fucking didn’t.

I notice changes in people’s voices.

I notice when somebody isn’t okay even when they swear they are.

I notice who hasn’t eaten.

Who hasn’t slept.

Which animal is acting different.

Which bill is coming.

What somebody forgot.

What needs to be bought.

What needs to be cleaned.

What needs to be fixed.

What somebody is pretending not to care about.

I notice.

And most of the time, I do something about it.

So being told, “You should have asked,” makes me want to fucking scream.

I shouldn’t always have to ask.

Sometimes I want to be the one who doesn’t have to see everything first.

Sometimes I want to be the person who gets taken care of before she has to explain why she needs taking care of.

And maybe that’s selfish.

I don’t fucking care anymore.

Because I have spent enough years putting everybody else first to know that nobody hands you a medal for disappearing.

They just get used to the space you stopped taking up.

And that’s what I’m done with.

Not being needed.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop being somebody who shows up.

I don’t think I want to.

That part of me is one of the few things I genuinely love about myself.

I love hard.

I care hard.

I give a shit when I probably shouldn’t.

I will still answer the phone.

I will still figure shit out.

I will still love people who occasionally make me want to throw them directly into traffic.

That isn’t what has to change.

What has to change is the part where everybody else automatically gets considered before I do.

Because I have spent my whole fucking life asking what everybody needs from me.

And now I need to start asking something different.

What do I need from this day?

What do I need from this house?

What do I need from this relationship?

What do I need from this person?

What do I need to stop doing?

What do I want to do even if nobody understands why?

What actually makes me happy?

Not useful.

Not productive.

Not necessary.

Happy.

That one almost feels embarrassing to admit.

Because I genuinely don’t know.

I know things that make other people happy.

I know things that used to make me happy.

I know things I’m supposed to enjoy.

But actual happiness?

The kind that belongs completely to me and isn’t dependent on somebody else having a good day?

I’m still trying to figure that shit out.

Maybe writing is part of it.

Maybe that’s why it matters so much to me right now.

Because when I write, I’m not solving somebody else.

I’m finally sitting with myself.

I’m taking memories that still hurt and asking what they did to me.

I’m looking at the ugliest parts of my life without trying to excuse anybody or make them easier for somebody else to swallow.

I’m putting words to things I spent years surviving without understanding.

And then I’m putting them out into the world because maybe somebody else has been standing in her own kitchen wondering why the fuck she has to scream before anybody sees her too.

Maybe she thinks she is selfish.

Maybe she thinks she asks for too much.

Maybe she is fucking exhausted from being everybody’s everything while feeling like nobody really knows her at all.

And maybe reading somebody else say it out loud gives her permission to finally ask the question too.

What the fuck about me?

I don’t have the answer yet.

That’s probably the first thing I’ve written in a long time that I’m completely okay not knowing.

Because I don’t want another ending where I pretend I’ve healed something I’m still standing knee-deep in.

I haven’t figured out how to live my life for me.

I don’t know what freedom is supposed to feel like.

I don’t know who I am without half the roles I spent decades hiding inside.

I don’t know what happens when the people I love don’t need me the way they used to.

And I definitely don’t know what Julie looks like when she stops waiting for somebody else to choose her.

But I think I’m finally curious.

Not about who needs me next.

Not about who is going to stay.

Not about who is going to love me the way I’ve spent years begging to be loved.

About me.

What do I like?

What do I want?

What kind of life actually feels good when I’m the one living it?

Who am I when nobody else gets to answer for me?

I don’t fucking know.

But maybe for once I don’t need to know before I start.

Maybe I just need enough room to breathe.

Enough quiet to hear myself think.

Enough courage to stop filling every empty space with somebody else’s needs.

And enough time to finally become somebody because I fucking wanted to.