Time for courage

Its a cute title is it not? Time for courage? Yet I have none. I have no motivation, drive, self-confidence. I have come to the awful, aching realisation that I can no longer allow my desire for marriage be a conduit for me to be blackmailed and belittled by those who claim to love me, but instead, love the power they have over me as they are married and I am not. This must now entail openly giving up my greatest desire so that people can neither use it as a personal flaw or a stick to beat me with. I love children and I require marriage because I don’t believe in knowingly giving children anything less than the best, but yet I will not allow that to be what rules my life. I’m only safe for as long as I don’t annoy a married woman, in which she uses her status to destroy me. To cruelly use my greatest wish, the reason I cry myself to sleep…as a punishment, as a trump card as to why she is better than me. A man has picked her.

So now. I have to be courageous. No player can outshine the team, and my desire to be married cannot outshine the need to have a safe, loving, wife. Being single is not a character triait. Being single is not a personality flaw. Having a personality flaw is a personality flaw. But singleness isn’t one of them. Neither is “settling” for misery in marriage a virtue. Just so you can say someone picked you. I know, because I did it. So I will not do that again.

Next is my business. I write this to you from a deep hole in my soul. I spent 3 hours before this effectively in a vegative state, not speaking to anyone, not able to function as a person. I’m sick again and I know it. My mum destroyed my business idea and actually, after what my friend did to me as a person, I can no longer cope. The friend wasted my time and then torpedoed my self esteem back in April. I am only just realising that I never recovered. I have good days, and bad days but I never recovered. I am incapable of functioning meanwhile this person goes about their day as if normal. As if they didn’t rip a hole in my world which I have cried many tears to get over. Forgiveness isn’t the place I’m in right now. I just need to sort my life out and then decide what I want. The truth is I don’t know. My business is not dependent on my mental health, there are many other problems that make my idea… hard. The lack of support being chief amongst them, now I have no one I trust with it.

For now, only a few things are certain.

I don’t like Jacob, he’s a colleague, he’s done nothing wrong, but I don’t have the capacity to love.

I don’t want a relationship until I’m better. No flirting with the line, single and whole or nothing.

I must avoid people with “everything” because they are so keen to rob the joy of people like me who have nothing. Years from now I hope to God I forget what it is like to have a hole in your chest where your heart should be.

The internet is not my friend.

Not only will I not speak to certain people until I “win” there are certain people, (my mother is on this list) that I have cut out of my inner circle. You can say hi, but you will never be able to use a single word against me. Stop trying to rob the old me. There’s no more smiles left. I really think they broke me properly this time.

I need to take the summer to “work on myself” because I don’t trust my current circle further than I can throw them.

Working on myself looks like beating depression, nothing else.

I pray, with all my heart, that no one ever learns what it is like to be me.

Grace and Courage.

Annetta Mother-Smith