Daunting. Cruel. Horrible. Anxiety inducing. Thought provoking. Indecisiveness. Ambivalence. Lonely. Unloved. Unwanted. Magical. Useless. Uninspired. Jubilant. Selfish. Selfless. These are just some words and feelings I experienced the closer I go to the d-day of Thirty.
What a hard to swallow bunch of words gathered in one place; let alone attempting to understand the feelings tied to each of them with their own unique bow. Decorative of course. I remember how I spun the year of twenty-nine into this whole big era in itself capsulated within a year. Boy was in nothing I hoped for. & honestly I am to blame. I lost my fire, got it back, lost it, fanned the embers until I was just too tired to care. Depleted. Exhausted. So may months- not consecutively- I spent running on fumes. It makes me a bit sad to reflect on.
However- MRB kicked some ass this year. I made arguably the most progress in therapy in a short span of time this trip around the sun than, well, maybe, ever? Boundaries. I’m your girl. Standing my ground, 100%. Walking away from toxic relationships, people, experiences. Goodbye. I said goodbye a lot this year. And Truthfully. It. Felt. Good. Progress. Making progress felt good. And I allowed it to. I made a commitment that I was going to be intentional. So intentional that intention would become my best friend. It’s served me well. I am intentional with my time and who I allow into it. Who I share it with. There is intention down to the letter of every word in each sentence I speak or write. Intention behind the tiniest action and you can bet I am able to explain it if you asked. I’ve lost so much time, I was not about to waste more. I also decided to rid myself of judgement. Of where I ought to be in life, the stages and milestone, my looks, my job, my hobbies, what I enjoy. The weight lifted. Not always, but it’s helped. I also rid myself of that expectation. Expectations for myself and others. Doing these 3 things though seem small- they altered my life probably forever.
Now, We can be excited, woo hoo! But walking into 30 I realized it was a brand-new decade that I was leaving people behind. People who no longer walk this earth; like my grandma and dear friend Kerry- who we talked about this year for almost ten years now. It felt like I was losing the last bits of the goodness that was left. Until I stopped and realized- this is a whole new decade. Untouched, unscathed. Without people who dictated my every move for years silently. Filled with secrets and trauma & so much ugliness and sickness. I was walking into the unknown truly for the first time ever.
This decade- this is mine. To destroy, to immerse myself in. To dance around through joyfully. To fall, to stumble through, to open my heart to & love more deeply than ever before. To inevitably feel more heartbreak. To grow, to celebrate victories, to overthink the shortcomings. To do whatever the hell I want. This is my decade. I get to own Thirty. I have never been able to say this & entirely mean it. So, to my thirties. Hello, it’s me, Morgan Rae Brown. Let’s mess this up together & make it more beautiful than any other mosaic we’ve created out of any decade thus far. It’s nice to meet the real you, Morgan. The raw, authentic, ripped wide open Morgan that is finally able to show her face.
Though most days it’s still hard to breathe, I find comfort in knowing I am allowed to freely. I am learning, it’s a process,
MRB

These three words. Sum up all that I am lately. Which most would not think. I've been kicking ass, project after project, adventure after adventure. I do not stop. 

This is a trauma response. It's not that I just enjoy cleaning my carpets (actually I did a little bit), it's that my brain is so fogged and bogged and troubled that it says do do do do. So that I do not have the downtime to think, to process, to digest. My days are scheduled out so much so that my dog gets weird when we are off schedule. I take my vitamins, I make my tea, I go with the routine. I have a heathy sleep pattern- even with the nightmares. I have re-configured my life to make it so healthy that it would be unrecognizable. Oops, maybe that's the point. 

My life has been so much the product of a trauma event or timeframe of survival. Just this last year I have finally reclaimed my life to be my own, & man was it liberating, empowering, unrecognizable. The feelings I've had these last few months have been foreign to me. Though it looks like I am a poster person for long time therapy and selfceare, I am almost brand new when it comes to healthy therapeutic relationships. But I do not get treated as such. And that is where the conflicting thoughts, process, and the rest that follows comes in. 

My life is newly mine. The investigations are over. The interviews are done, The police are gone, the state investigators absent. Ink on the papers of injustice have dried, & I have been left behind. In the rubble, the damage, the wake of the immensity of all that these traumas entailed. Everyone else moved on & left me standing there, still as a statue. 

So I did just that. Nothing. For awhile. I forgot what would happen when it was all over. I had not connected to any of these devastating traumas. Even childhood events I am just now learning to connect to. But it's time and it's been time. Because too much of my life was taken from me outside of my own control; and that sat heavier on me than any weight of facing it all could. I was determined to not lose out on anything more. 

After typing that, I look up and re-read the description of the inability to sit and do nothing lately and it makes sense. See, writing again is already helping. 

I realized this morning that a wave of sadness has swept through taking me with it. That a cloud of loneliness has found its way over my head. The duality of them both left me in tears for the first time in a long time. 

I was reminded today that this time last year I struggled. And possibly the year before, and undoubtedly the year of my suicide attempt. Which I'm allowed to dive into now. All of it, uncensored. Because nobody can use it against me anymore. But this realization made the sadness hypocritical. Why? This is my favorite time of year, so why does it also make me so sad? Is it that I am wrestling with the years it fed my soul in a good way, which is now long gone? This we will look at closer. 

I am rambling, this I know. But I hold no expectations, and also owe no explanation or ownership over the way I convey this new journey, you simply make the choice to read along or not. So I say it now, do not expect or look forward to the well thought out, magical and metaphorical MRB you once knew. She has died a disastrous death a million times over due to silence. 

I am however, going to greet you with authenticity. I will walk along in honesty, integrity and character. The only expectations here are to show up as I am & nothing else. I will not waver from the values I hold, & will not expect myself to be poised or graceful, so please do me the favor of greeting me with kindness as we venture this together. After all, kindness matters. 

​mrb. 

My thoughts race yet slow at the exact same time. I am healing and falling apart at the exact same time. I am strong, yet fragile at the exact same time. I am so many things. at. the. exact. same. time.

I love it and I hate it. Go figure. I disappeared and I am learning how to lovingly embrace the things I am coming back to. I am trying to give myself grace and approach it tenderly, with kindness and self love I maybe never had. It's hard. Having to halt the things we love; until it's not. Then it's even harder to pace back and forth stumbling back toward them. Writing was never hard for me. Words flow, they seep through me like nothing else ever could. It's for as long as I can remember been easier for me to write, more natural than it was to breathe. Until I was told not to. 

So here I am. Vulnerable. Naked. Broken in so many ways. But also more sold, confident, independ