Greetings my lovely feral, dark, and bright ones,

I am attempting to write to you from a place of in between. If you have never been to the in between, let me tell you—it is a desolate, mind-fucking place to be. Well, for me, it sure as hell is.

What is the in between, you ask? It’s a psychological purgatory where you are suspended in mid-air, completely disconnected from the ground, unsure if you are here or there, surviving or dying. After Mom’s passing, which was 19 days ago, I have been trapped inside a brutal blender of my own making. My emotions don’t take turns; they collide at a hundred miles an hour.

I am sad. I am grieving the biological tie, the history, and the finality. But right alongside that sadness, raging just as loud, is a massive, towering wave of relief. And that is where the mind-fuck truly begins.

I am trying—desperately trying—to allow myself to just be, to find a single pocket of happiness without being instantly pulled under by a suffocating wave of guilt. I am standing on the edge of a completely blank map, entirely unsure of what the fuck is next, drowning in a cocktail of emotions that standard English words are too small and too neat to even describe. It’s a sensory overload of the soul.

Every single day is a battlefield of micro-moments. I start to smile at a thought, or I begin to laugh at something funny, and instantly, this vicious internal alarm goes off. It screams that I’m wrong, that I’m bad, making me feel dirty and toxic for experiencing joy while a body is in the ground. So I slam the brakes on it. I shut it down fast, locking the laughter away like a crime.

Then comes the relief. The heavy, undeniable realization that the monster under the bed is gone, that the judgment has stopped, that the phone will never ring with another weaponized insult. My chest expands, I take a real breath—and then the guilt slams into me for that too. It’s a relentless, exhausting loop: grieve, feel relieved, feel guilty for the relief, try to be happy, feel guilty for the happiness, repeat.

How does one navigate this kind of loss and actually live their life? How do you walk forward when your own brain punishes you for taking a single step toward the light? There has got to be better than this agonizing paralysis, right? Because right now, the silence of her absence is just as loud as the chaos of her life.

The Mind at a Mile a Minute

My brain goes a mile a minute—or faster—these days. It’s an engine running on pure, toxic adrenaline with no off-switch. I barely sleep, even with the melatonin I am popping like candy just desperate for a few hours of darkness. But when I do finally drop off, it’s not rest. It’s a theater of vivid, chaotic, violently active dreams. My subconscious is forcing me right back onto the battlefield, replaying the decades of warfare, forcing me to wake myself up in a full-blown panic attack, sweating, chest tight, gasping for air. Even in sleep, I am fighting for my life.

I have been on a razor’s edge during the day, too. It’s a vibrating, electric kind of tense where my nerve endings are raw and exposed. I just snap for no single, rational reason at the people who love me. My patience is a thread, and my tolerance for noise is zero. Is this what mourning is? Is this what it looks like when 55 years of walking on eggshells finally shatters? If it is, please let me fucking breathe. Let me drop the heavy armor and get back to living MY life!

Sorry, Mom. I need to live my life, and I am feeling completely stuck in your cement. Again, it’s only been 19 days since you left. I loathe this feeling. I loathe that even from the grave, your shadow is still suffocating my days.

The ultimate kicker? This month is Ronnie’s birth month. It’s Gail’s birth month. May used to be one of my absolute favorites since I was a little kid back in New Jersey. Back then, it meant spring was finally breaking, the cold was fading, and we were getting ready for summer. I loved the simple, clean freedom of the sunshine, the swimming, the outdoor air before everything got complicated.

I used to love Mother’s Day when I was younger, too. Before the rot set in, I would get so damn excited to buy Mom presents, or make her a card, or save up my meager cash just to see her smile. I wanted so badly to please her. That was until she had a total mental snap herself, and Mother’s Day stopped being happy for us kids.

It wasn’t a holiday anymore. It became a yearly hostage situation. Every May, we were forced into a psychological arena, bracing ourselves, trying to predict her mood, performing like circus animals just to avoid the inevitable explosion. The month of sunshine was hijacked and painted pitch black. And here I am, 19 days out, still trying to untangle my favorite month from her grip.

The Memory That Broke Me

I recall one specific Mother’s Day that forever altered my DNA. I bought her a red satin top with fringes—a cowgirl top she had explicitly said she wanted. I saved up every penny I had to buy it. She had also dropped hints about wanting a stuffed parrot because my father wouldn’t let her have a live one. I bought her both, plus a pretty bracelet. I walked into that room full of love and hope.

And she threw them directly at my face.

She screamed at me—I don’t even remember the exact, frantic words, but the venom is burned into my brain: “I can’t take gifts like this from a dirty whore like you!”

It was that Mother’s Day that broke me. It violently shattered my love for that day.

I felt this crushing weight: Why honor this woman after what she did to me? After what she always does to me? How can I keep doing this? After that, I gave up on myself. After all, if my own mother thought I was a dirty, filthy, unwanted, unloved whore, it must be true, right? What a horrific, disgusting feeling for a child to carry.

I don’t know why this memory crawled out of the dark just now, or why I am dumping it onto this screen for all of you. Maybe it’s just me finally lancing the boil. Months before she passed, I did some deep shadow work on a former blog, writing out all the toxic stuff I held onto in the shadows of my being. When she passed, this tremendous, heavy guilt slammed into me for pouring my heart and shadows out for the world to see. I felt like the asshole, shit-fucked-up daughter who betrayed her mother. As Gail so perfectly puts it: “WHAT THE FUCK?”

The 38-Year Radioactive Waste

Let’s talk about the actual timeline, because I am completely done protecting legacies that were built on cruelty.

Yes, I had her in my life for the last 19 months, from October 2024 until May 4th. But before that? We hadn’t spoken for four agonizing years. And before that? It was a toxic, cyclical loop that started all the way back in 1994.

From 1988 to 1994, there was absolute radio silence. No contact from my father, my mother, the void, or my brother Mickey. They fucking vanished. They left me. When I finally tracked them down living in Pennsylvania in ’94, I thought maybe we could rebuild. Instead, for the next thirty years, I trapped myself in a loop. I tried to make amends over and over and over again. I bared my soul, I extended olive branches, and every single time, it ended horribly.

It wasn’t just about chasing the mirage of a kind, nurturing mother. That’s just one piece of the wreckage.

In a perfect world, a mother is your first safe harbor. She is the one who teaches you that you are worthy of love just by breathing. She doesn’t view your joy as a threat, and she sure as hell doesn’t scream vile insults at a child trying to give her a red satin top. In a normal world, you don’t have to censor your words or do shadow work just to survive your own mother’s mind.

And it wasn’t just her. It was the father I should have had. In a perfect world, a father is the shield. He is the protector who stands between his kids and the storm, building a foundation of safety so solid that you never have to doubt your place in the world. Instead, mine was an absent ghost, leaving me entirely unprotected in a radioactive war zone.

Then there is the sacred sisterhood I should have shared with the void—aka IT. In a perfect world, a sister is your lifelong ally. The one who lived through the same madness, who holds your hand, who validates your reality, and shares a deep, unbreakable bond of blood and choice. It should have been a lifeline. Instead, it was twisted into something unrecognizable, toxic, and hollow—a void where a sister should have been.

And then there are my brothers. The profound, shattering weight of 2005, when Mickey passed away right there in my arms. And it wasn’t just Mickey we lost—we lost Jonathan, the youngest, when he was only three months old. Two brothers. Gone.

In a sane family, you don’t carry that kind of monumental, generational grief entirely alone. In a healthy world, a family holds each other up when a piece of them dies. They mourn a three-month-old baby with tenderness, and they surround each other with love when an adult brother passes. But I had to be the lone anchor. I had to bear witness to Mickey’s transition while the rest of the structure crumbled around us, just as I had to carry the silent weight of Jonathan’s missing presence my whole life. I carried those final breaths and those empty spaces in my soul—a heavy, sacred truth that none of them could ever comprehend or respect.

I spent a lifetime trying so goddamn hard, bleeding myself dry, to have a normal “nuclear family.” I thought if I performed well enough, loved hard enough, or fixed enough broken pieces, the universe would finally grant me that basic human right. I wanted the warmth, the laughing around a dinner table, the unconditional safety that I saw other people take for granted.

But I can admit the raw, ugly truth now: my family was indeed nuclear.

Explosive.

Toxic.

Highly radioactive.

They didn’t create a home; they created a fallout zone. Every interaction was laced with emotional poison. Every olive branch I extended was contaminated before it even left my hand. For 38 years, I kept walking back into the reactor core, hoping it wouldn’t burn me this time, only to walk away with deeper, more permanent scars.

With her passing this month, the reactor has finally gone cold. I am forced to face the finality of the devastation. The door is slammed shut. The cycle is done. And with that comes a pure, primal heartbreak—the kind you cannot explain to anyone who hasn’t lived in the ash. It is the devastating realization that the perfect world I wanted, what I begged for, and what I deserved could never exist within that bloodline. And it hurts so deeply right now.

The Shift in the Air

Here is the thing: my whole world stopped, or so it felt, the moment she passed. But the truth is, I didn’t even need the official phone call.

The night before, and even the morning of the call, I already knew she was gone. I felt it.

Before the phone ever rang, my body registered the shift. The tether snapped. For 55 years, my nervous system had been tuned to her frequency, bracing for impact. When she left, the air suddenly changed. And then the call came, and it felt like the air was forcefully ripped from my lungs, my heart torn right out of my chest, leaving me bare on the cold ground, desperately trying to claw my way back to ME.

Reclaiming the Light from the Ash

I cannot—and I will not—make her out to be the martyr, the heroine, or the amazing person she spent her life demanding I paint her as. To write some beautifully polished, fake eulogy about what a wonderful mother she was would be a total, absolute lie. And the lie ends here. Death does not retroactively turn an abuser into a saint. It just stops the clock.

But out of that radioactive wreckage, I found something real.

I want to thank Ronnie’s family from the absolute bottom of my soul. Thank you for showing me what a family actually is. I can honestly say I didn’t know what unconditional, safe love felt like until I came to know them.

Think about that for a second. Read those words again. I didn’t know what safe love felt like.

For the first fifty years of my life, I thought love was a transaction. I thought it was a high-stakes game where the rules changed daily, where you had to perform, shrink yourself, and bleed out just to earn a scrap of acceptance. I was hardwired to believe that every kindness came with a hidden bill, an expiration date, or a psychological penalty. I thought love was supposed to hurt.

But Ronnie’s family completely rewired my understanding of reality. I didn’t know you could just exist and be loved. I didn’t know you could walk into a room as your raw, unfiltered self—without a script, without armor, without a performance—and just be welcomed. No price tags attached to my worth. No emotional landmines waiting to detonate if I said the wrong thing or wore the wrong color. No one throwing my heart back at my face.

The first time I experienced that, it almost broke me because it was so completely foreign. It was beautiful, but it was also devastating because it highlighted exactly how much had been stolen from me since I was a little girl. They gave me a glimpse of a clean world. A world where love isn’t a weapon used to control you, but a baseline safety net that catches you when you fall. They showed me that I wasn’t the broken, unlovable creature my birth family tried to convince me I was. They showed me what home actually means.

Yet, the trauma response is a relentless bitch. My brain is so conditioned to fixate on keeping everyone else afloat that I spent the weeks leading up to this completely consumed by anxiety. I was tearing myself apart worrying about finding Ronnie the perfect birthday presents, magnifying every detail over how to make his day great while navigating my own mourning. Because she left May 4th, and his birthday was May 16th. Then there’s his dad’s birthday on May 13th (who passed two years ago), Grandma Todd on May 19th, Grandfather Florian on the 20th or 22nd, my father on the 29th, and Gail on the 31st.

This is a month of celebrations, for FUCK’S SAKE! It should be a beautiful tapestry of the people who matter. And instead, one big, huge, fucking enormous thing toppled it all. The ghost of her presence took a sledgehammer to the calendar. Can I just have one happy month to love the people who actually love me back? One month where I am not walking on psychological eggshells, waiting for a bomb to drop?

Selfish? Self-centered? Self-absorbed? So fucking be it! Drag me for it if you want, because I am so utterly, structurally exhausted from spending my entire life putting everyone else ahead of myself just to appease the hollow ghost of guilt.

Think about the sheer madness of that conditioning. I was taught that choosing myself, protecting my peace, or even just existing outside of someone else’s storm was a sin. I was trained to believe that if I wasn’t actively bleeding out to keep everyone else comfortable, I was a bad daughter, a bad sister, a bad person. The ghost of guilt was a weapon custom-built to keep me on my knees, acting as an emotional shield for people who didn’t give a single shit about my survival.

Well, the shield is down. If refusing to swallow my own life anymore makes me “selfish” in their twisted narrative, then buy me the damn t-shirt. I am completely done bartering my sanity for a scrap of false peace. I am done apologizing for wanting to survive. If taking up my own space and breathing my own air makes me self-centered, then I am centering the only person who can actually save me now: Me.

The programming runs so deep that I did my nails the other day—just a simple, basic act of self-care—and caught myself freezing up, feeling pure guilt for doing something pretty for me. Like, what the actual fuck, RAE? What is wrong with me? Why is joy treated like a crime in my own skin?

Yesterday, I graduated my training program. As of this coming Tuesday, I will be fully on the call center floor. I work from home, but still, you get the drift—it’s a massive milestone. A fresh start. A clean slate built out of my own blood, sweat, and tears. I should have been elated, soaring, celebrating my ass off. I earned it.

Instead, I sat there staring at the cold glow of the computer screen, suffocating under a wave of grief, trying not to bawl my eyes out. Why? Because my immediate, hardwired, deeply frustrating biological instinct was that I couldn’t pick up the phone to call Mom and tell her.

That is the sickest, most twisted part of trauma. It forces you to miss the very hand that bruised you. In that heartbreaking second, you aren’t mourning the monster she actually was—you are mourning the mother you wished she was. You are crying because the finality of her death means the fantasy is officially dead, too. It means you will never, ever get that proud, loving validation you spent 55 years begging for. The phone will never ring with the words you deserved to hear. It’s the mourning of a lifelong deficit that can now never be filled.

And because my nervous system is stuck in this brutal, exhausting loop, the world outside feels completely surreal. This weekend is Memorial Day weekend. People are gathering for fun BBQs, laughing, drinking, having parties, and acting like life is simple. For me, it’s low-key, heavy, and quiet.

And frankly? I AM SICK OF THIS SHIT!

I don’t want to live in the quiet, low-key ash anymore. I NEED PEOPLE! I NEED FRIENDS NEARBY TO HAVE FUN WITH! Actual, physical, real human connection.

I am so utterly, completely done with the people who text me or look at life and say “We are old!” or “I am too old for that!” FUCK THAT SHIT! That is a slow death, and I refuse to participate in it. I am 55 years young. I just survived a lifelong nuclear meltdown, I buried the radioactive wreckage, and I did not claw my way out of that fallout shelter just to sit quietly in the dark and wait to wither away. I didn’t fight this hard for freedom just to accept a boring, small, censored life because other people are tired.

I want the sunshine. I want the laughter. I need to live my life fully, loudly, fiercely, and without a single goddamn apology to anyone! FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!

The Reclaiming

This is where I am at, folks. This is the definitive line in the sand. As Freddie Mercury belted out: I WANT TO BREAK FREE!

So yes, it is okay if I put on loud, happy music today. It is okay if I dance a little around my kitchen and sing at the top of my lungs, even if it’s only been 19 days since she passed. It is okay to laugh, to breathe, and to live my life now that there is no more looking over my shoulder, no more censoring myself online, and no more waiting for her cruel judgment. The prison door is unlocked, and I am walking the fuck out.

Honestly, I don’t give a single, solitary shit about the others, like the void—aka IT! If you know who I am speaking of, make sure you let IT know that she is now IT. That should really do something to her twisted ego; she always hated that movie after she saw it when we were younger. She will tell you I forced her to watch it, just like she claims I “abused” her! FUCK HER AND HER MENTAL SHIT TOO! I am completely done carrying their delusions. I am stripping them of their power to define me.

Instead, I am turning all of my energy inward. I am taking the inner child inside of me—little Rae—and I am holding her tight. I am wrapping her up in my arms so completely that the coldness of the past can’t touch her. I am looking her square in her green eyes, cutting through 55 years of lies, and telling her it is going to be okay. And for the first time in my entire life, I don’t just hope it—I actually, thoroughly believe it.

I am telling her she is allowed to come out and play now. The world is finally safe for her. She doesn’t have to hide behind armor, she doesn’t have to match her colors to someone else’s mood, and she never has to earn her right to joy again.

I am stepping back through the timeline to gather the rest of my fragmented selves. I am standing before the pre-teen who felt the first jagged cracks of betrayal. I am reaching out to the teenager who was abandoned and ghosted for six agonizing years, left to wonder why her own flesh and blood vanished into the night. I am comforting the shattered young adult who held Mickey while he died in her arms, bearing the weight of a monumental, radioactive grief completely alone. And I am shielding the adult woman who took every single toxic hit, swallowed her voice, and walked on eggshells just to keep a broken system from exploding.

I am looking at all of them, and I am pulling them into the light. I am telling them:

The war is over. The monster is gone. The threat has officially left the building. Look at me—I am the protector you always deserved, and I am telling you that you survived.

The walls are coming down. The exhausting, suffocating facade is smashed into a million fucking pieces on the floor. I am done playing the martyr. I am done being the emotional garbage disposal for a radioactive bloodline. I am done letting dead people rule my living days.

May ends right now. The fallout stops here. I am leaving the cinders, the thrown gifts, the venomous names, and the stolen dreams in the ash of this month. I am not carrying a single, solitary ounce of this radioactive sludge into June.

The cage is broken. The sky is open.

I am breaking free.