Was It All a Dream?

As I am busy re-reading and copying all of my old blogs across to the new website (yes... it really is happening this month!), I am seeing something I didn't expect.

I can see how much I have grown.

As a person.
In my healing.
As a parent.
As a wife.

And yet I can also see how childhood trauma still moves in ebbs and flows. It doesn't disappear. It just no longer gets to lead.

I'm currently copying writings from 2024, including the second blog I wrote after Mum's death.

I remember listening over and over again to one of my favourite Harvest songs, Rooms.

I'd always loved it, but after she passed, the lyrics meant something completely different.

No rooms. No levels. His grace is sufficient for all.

Today, for the first time in almost two years, I listened to it again.

The peace that came over me felt strangely familiar. Not the same peace I felt when she died, but something quieter.

A peace that whispered...

You can breathe again.

I'm not going to pretend everything is okay though.

I still find myself searching for old messages, emails and text messages. We were estranged for the two years before she passed, and I'm not ready to write about that chapter just yet.

What hurts isn't simply that I can't find them.

It's that I can't find any of them.

Good or bad.

It's as though every conversation we ever had has disappeared.

My mother could be incredibly spiteful and deeply hurtful. If I'm honest, there have been moments in my own life where I have seen that same pattern try to rise up in me when I've been triggered.

The difference is awareness.

The difference is acknowledging it.

The difference is apologising.

I am human.

One of the greatest gifts somatic therapy has given me is not simply understanding compassion, but experiencing it. It has taught me how to pause. To discern. To sit with what my body is telling me instead of reacting. To bring it to Him. To surrender it. To let it go.

Yet this missing correspondence has continued to niggle away at me.

For months I wondered if someone had deleted them. Maybe him. Maybe my sister. Both were capable of causing hurt in different ways.

But after talking it through with ChatGPT, the explanation doesn't really fit.

Four email addresses.

Two phones.

Years of messages.

Nothing.

Apart from a single notification from when we flew across.

How?

I don't know.

What I do know is that, for most of my life, I have carried feelings of isolation, rejection and abandonment.

Finding no trace of our conversations somehow intensified that wound.

It was as if I had never existed at all.

That thought terrified me.

Until today.

Today I found myself wondering...

What if this isn't something to solve?

What if this is something to release?

Could this, somehow, be God's kindness?

Because if those messages still existed, what would I actually find?

Pages filled with criticism.

Verbal abuse.

Pain.

Words that reinforced lies I have spent years untangling.

Do I really need to revisit them?

Or have I already lived them enough?

Living with aphantasia makes grief different.

I can't close my eyes and see her face.

I can't replay happy memories.

I don't have that felt sense of comfort that so many others describe.

So maybe what I thought I was searching for wasn't really the messages at all.

Maybe I was searching for closure.

In eight weeks, if everything goes to plan, He will leave !, then the family home will be sold.

It will likely be demolished.

Another physical reminder gone.

Just like the emails.

Just like the text messages.

For a moment I found myself asking...

Was it all a dream?

But deep down, I know it wasn't.

The scars tell me it was real.

The healing tells me it was real.

The woman I am becoming tells me it was real.

Perhaps the absence of those messages isn't erasing my story.

Perhaps it is reminding me that my story no longer has to be found in someone else's words.

It can now be written in my own.