Greetings my lovely feral, dark and bright ones,

Life certainly has a way of taking us down or lifting us up, doesn’t it? Sometimes it does both at the exact same time, leaving you gasping for air in the middle.

To be completely honest, this month has been brutal, and I’m just glad it’s about to end. Ronnie and I had some really beautiful things happen recently—moments that should have been celebrated with pure, uncomplicated happiness. But Mom’s passing on May 4th changed the air in the room. It didn’t just dampen the festivities; it sucked the joy right out of them, replacing it with a heavy, confusing fog. I’ve been trying so hard to keep my head up, to keep moving forward, and to not go down like—as Ronnie so bluntly puts it—”a wet bag of shit.”

But the truth is, the moment the momentum stops, the questions rush in. I am second-guessing every single thing I do now. I am second-guessing my own skin.

How do you navigate this? Do I keep mourning and grieving, or do I get back to living my life now?

And I don’t just mean going through the motions. I mean living it to the fullest—seriously, like never before. Because the honest, hard truth is that whenever I claimed I was living to the fullest in the past, I wasn’t. Not really. I couldn’t. I was always looking over my shoulder, hyper-aware, constantly worried about what others saw, what they said, or what they would post. I was always holding my breath, waiting for the impact.

Now, the gravity is gone, and I am paralyzed at the crossroads. Is it okay to smile? Is it okay to laugh, dance, sing, or invite any kind of light back into my life? Or am I breaking some unwritten rule? Am I supposed to stay frozen in the dark, or am I finally allowed to step into the sun?

The funeral home called yesterday while I was working. I took the call, and the director, Britny, was on the line. She is a kind, young southern woman, and her voice carried that soft, genuine warmth. She told me Mom was at the crematorium and it was time.

She is cremated. Either it happened yesterday or it happened this morning, but either way, she is physically gone now. It is such a strange, jarring thought. Fifty-five years of a loud, turbulent, larger-than-life presence—all the arguments, the phone calls, the laughter, and the storm—all of it suddenly reduced to quiet ash. The physical space she occupied in this world for my entire life is just gone.

I am still not entirely sure how to feel about it. While Britny and I were speaking, the word finality just kept echoing in my head. I heard myself say it out loud to her: “It’s the finality now. She is really gone.” There is no going back. The door is shut.

I went back to the office and sat at my desk, staring at the screen. The world was still spinning, the emails were still coming in, but everything looked different. I messaged a manager to let them know what was occurring, and people can surprise you with their kindness—they were so great, telling me, “If you need to log out, you can. It’s okay.” They gave me the exit ramp. They gave me permission to walk away.

But I stayed. I sat right there in my chair and kept working. Maybe I needed the distraction, or maybe I was just too stunned to move.

I struggled so much through the rest of that day, though. When you are carrying something that heavy, the rest of the world feels violently loud. The customers were like nails down a chalkboard—every complaint, every demand, every minor tech issue felt completely grating against the raw edges of my mind. By the end of the shift, I could not run out of my home office fast enough. I wasn’t just escaping the job; I was trying to run away from the sheer exhaustion of holding myself together.

Behind the sadness of this whole thing, I am navigating a chaotic array of emotions that don’t seem to belong together. Guilt. Sorrow. Anger.

And peace. Yes, peace, oddly enough. Relief and release. There are other feelings tangled up in there that I cannot even name yet, and I guess that has to be okay.

It is a relief that she is no longer sick. She is no longer battling her demons or the mental illness that defined so much of our lives. The anger I feel comes from the grueling reality of what she lived in, and what she dragged me through—the bipolar disorder, the schizophrenia, the delusions of grandeur, the fits of rage, the alcoholism, the pills, the delusional tendencies. It comes from the strokes, the cancer she fought long ago, the heart attacks, the heavy smoking, and the hoarding. It comes from the way she skipped her scheduled doctors’ appointments and hid them from me, because she knew if I found out, I would have forced her to go somehow.

I am not writing this to make her look bad. I am writing it because it is the honest truth, and truth is the only baseline I have left. For 55 years, that chaos was my normal.

We had a tumultuous, deeply painful relationship for most of my life. After all the years of abuse I endured as a child, a teenager, a young adult, and an adult, I thought the script was written. I thought I knew exactly who we were to each other.

But then, in October 2024, the script flipped. Something shifted.

We grew close. She became my best friend, and I think, for that short pocket of time, I was hers too. We talked daily for hours. Sometimes those calls left me utterly exhausted from her ranting and raving; sometimes they ended with me happy. It was a dizzying roller coaster after decades of off-and-on, love-you-hate-you.

And then, just like that, it’s over. Done.

But when a storm you’ve navigated for fifty-five years suddenly stops, the silence is deafening. How do I go on living my life now?

There are no more unreasonable, unrealistic expectations to live up to—expectations she never once held herself to. There are no more eggshells. No more walking on broken glass. I no longer have to worry that posting something online will spark a massive, exhausting fight. I don’t have to worry about what I am eating, what I am wearing, what I am doing, or what I am saying. I don’t have to spend a single ounce of my remaining energy wondering if I am finally making her proud or happy.

Now, I can live my life my way.

But what does that actually look like or feel like when you’ve never been allowed to try?

I am beginning to realize that freedom doesn’t arrive in a giant, cinematic moment. It shows up in the smallest, quietest acts of reclamation. It’s about taking my power back, piece by piece, from the voice she left behind in my head.

Is it in me walking into a tattoo shop, discovering that my old nose piercing is still open on one end, and finally putting in the exact earring I wanted?

Is it in the blonde highlights I’ve been wanting to get?

Is it in the way I choose to style my hair with bangs, just because I want to look in the mirror and see me, untouched by her critique?

Is it in watching the movies I actually love, reading the books I want, and turning off the noise of everyone else’s demands?

Is it in refusing to feel guilty, dirty, or “perverted”—as she used to call it—for enjoying a beautiful, healthy, loving sexual relationship with my husband?

When you lose the person who abused you, but who also became your best friend at the very end, the grief doesn’t fit into a neat little box. You are forced to mourn the friend you finally got, while simultaneously recovering from the person who hurt you for decades.

So I am leaving the questions open. I am letting the relief exist right alongside the heartbreak.

Because now, for the first time in fifty-five years, I am forced to look into the quiet space left behind and ask myself the hardest, most beautiful questions of all:

What makes me truly, unequivocally happy?

What does Rae actually want in life?

I think living life on my own terms looks like finally giving myself permission to find out.