Me, unravelling: from the beginning

I am all of these things: a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter, a friend, a boss, a partner, a lawyer, a runner, a reader, a seeker of truth, a lover of sunsets and long drinks and laughing and hiking in hills. Someone who wants to be kind, to do the right thing, to perform all of my roles well, to hold my head high.

I have also been a liar, an adulterer, a cheat, a sneak, a fraud, a terrible mother, a lover of hiding and darkness and the underbelly of everything. Not caring whether I did anything well, or at all. Not. Caring. Selfish to my core.

I was thirty-five years old when I felt my life start to pop open at the seams, gently to nudge against the stitches that had always comfortingly held it together, to leak out in gaps around its outward respectability and to spill and spoil.  I became someone I didn’t recognise.

Five years later, in the impossible, nigh-housebound, panicky Covid-19 apocalyptic year of 2020, I turned forty.  And I was far enough away from what I had begun to see as “an unravelling” to want to write about it.

Because I now think the unravelling is something that as a woman I will always have to live with, to be conscious of alongside all the other things I have to be conscious of, to be aware of as a hitherto unrecognised lurking undercurrent below any true joy. I know that I can let myself down and that feelings are not always to be trusted.

Words are how I make sense of anything, they’ve always played that role for me, and I’m confident that if I can line them up as accurately as possible, they’ll do it again.

So these are my words: as honest a rendition as I can provide of how everything has been for me, of how I see things. I know that it is only my side of so many sides, but it is true.

To read from what I see as the very beginning of being the sort of person who’d later unravel, click here: https://theunravelling.net/2020/04/01/teen-mum-always/

For the actual unravelling onwards, click here: https://theunravelling.net/2020/04/08/dreading-empty-nest-early/