"Raw" She Said

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Farewell

All –

Over the next few days / weeks, I will be shutting this blog down.

In 2013, when I started “Raw,” She Said, I was so far removed from myself that I had no way to speak to the people in my life. I was a workaholic, a functional alcoholic, constantly sleep-deprived; I used working out, money, and travel to numb myself, and I kept failing again and again at relationships. I would end my years, during this particular holiday time, always alone and angry, and I would start the next year by once again meeting someone new and repeating all the same, bad patterns over.

Needless to say, it didn’t work.

I tried therapy the first time: there was some help, but I didn’t stick with it and I didn’t go deep enough.

I felt like a broken soul and in many ways, I was one.

Having this blog gave me a space to talk. A space to attempt to share my feelings, to give shape and context to my pain, to record those patterns and to finally be in a position to see them. This saved my life. I do not say that with any hesitation or exaggeration: this saved my life.

And now, after all these years, I am finally ready to move on with that life. In the last four months, a few things happened:

1. I broke up with the woman I love — or she broke up with me — regardless, we had a breakup.
2. I didn’t run from it. We tried to reconcile and came close, but it ended badly this time. She wasn’t ready and I am coming to accept that. The big difference? I’ve learned something from this.
3. I started therapy again, but now I’m taking it seriously and making progress.
4. I started to uncover not just the roots of many of my relational issues, but to figure out how to mitigate them and seeing that impact my life.
5. I came out to my family.
6. I started a new job, a better one, which is not about distracting me, but truly about things I enjoy and working with people that I like.
7. I’m finally getting my own place, away from my family, because I’m done living the half-life of pleasing them and not pleasing myself.
8. I am starting to understand what my own needs are and develop the appropriate boundaries to get those needs met.
9. My last stint through therapy showed me that I needed my friends; now, I am deepening those relationships further.
10. I am learning to trust people.
11. I am learning to walk away from toxic people.
12. I am discovering new hobbies and re-discovering old ones.
13. I have hobbies and I am now getting the sense of how important it is for my own happiness, well-being, and self-care.
14. I am no longer using dating as my hobby, coupled with over-work and over-drinking.
15. I don’t actively use any of those numbing behaviors anymore: constantly filtering through new “skills”, shopping, excessive travel, expensive restaurants, etc.
16. I am learning self-care.
17. I am learning how to say no.

And so much more.

The reason I need to shut this site down is that it is time for me to stop using this as a box and a closet to hide in. I needed the anonymity at one point to feel safe, but no longer. If I keep this going, it will now become an impediment, a temptation to be a place that I can once again bury my emotions in and not share them with the people I need to share them with, myself included. This was a coping mechanism for which I have been incredibly grateful, but now it is time to let it go and for me to step out into the world and share my writing in public. When I was a child, I wanted to be a writer. I let that dream go deferred.

No longer. I have nothing more to hide. I’m ready.

Thank you for the last three years. Thank you for the comments and the emails, the support and the commiseration. Thank you for supporting me. Thank you, all of you, for being the listening ears that I needed when I had nowhere to turn. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

If you want to keep up with me as I create my public face, email me at quinn [dot] carver //at// outlook [dot] com. I would love to invite you to that side of my world when it opens up. Some of the writings that were shared here will have be given new life over there. And if you’re fine to not be part of that shift, I understand. Regardless, I will always cherish you for the time you spent walking along with me on this journey.

I wish everyone love, happiness, joy, delight, acceptance, and hope; we all deserve it, we all deserve it, and may nothing stop us from getting it.

Forever grateful,
Quinn