The beginning of the year, I lost my best friend of over 35 years to an overdose- nine days ago I lost my dog of over 15 years, and now my mother is intubated in a hospital 3,000 miles away because of severe liver damage causing internal bleeding and I can’t go to her because I currently have chronic maxillary sinus infections and and cannot fly.

I’m here.

I don’t feel pride for past hard stuff I’ve made it through, not really. But I am grateful for the things I learned from the hard experiences.

I think the event that was most “useful” to me, and that I learned the most from, was running away from home when I was 16. It led to an immediate bettering of my situation.

I will caveat and say I was lucky in that my crappy family had a relatively upper-middle-class wealthy city gentrify around us, and I got to reap the reward of that well-funded support system because the foster system in my county was well-funded and capable. I hear that this is not necessarily the case in poorer communities, and people in other areas can end up in more of an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” situation. I definitely made a jump out of the frying pan onto the relatively clean and stable counter.

But going from a situation where I was a minor and without money or access to things I needed to survive, to a situation where I had a job and could use MY money on whatever I wanted (including a living situation that was safe) was far superior than relying on abusive people to feed and shelter me.

It’s always funny to me when people hearken back to their teenage years when “everything was provided for them” and they could just do school and have fun without any worries. I never experienced that. A job and bills was a step UP from my previous situation where every bite of food I ate was flavored with fear and every blanket I fell asleep under had the potential to be ripped off of me while I slept if some adult decided they were mad at me for some petty, cruel reason.

Ok so I have a super unserious one compared to everyone here but I am legit really proud of myself for it.

I have pretty bad trypophobia where I will have a pretty extreme visceral reaction to many different holes, patterns of them, etc. This includes nail holes in the wall so I have a hard time putting things up and especially taking things down. When I moved places a few years ago I tried to face this extremely irrational fear and made myself fill every single nail hole in our old apartment. I felt so ill and honestly still feel ill even typing this out. I had to lay down on the floor in the dark apartment for what felt like hours because I was so nauseous. But I did it. Never fucking doing it again, but I did it and nobody can take that from me. This year I even put up two frames all by myself.

I had three years of my life where every thing that could go wrong, went wrong. Among other things, a divorce and losing both parents. I’m invincible now. Nothing rattles me.

Years ago I might’ve said something like school or overcoming my setbacks, but if that were the case, it’s less so now because my mind no longer squares the view that they’re challenges with the view or understanding that I would not wish many of the things I went through on anyone, if it ever did. Can you imagine going through things you were never meant to go through while people watch silently and measure your self-worth based on your success in endurance as if to imply the moments that haunt you forever were all a game and one you wanted to play?