Goodbye, 2019

2019 has been a terrible year for me, which is bittersweet as it was the first full year of this new life I've fallen into. 2019 was my first full year of marriage, of officially living away from home and my family (literally in another country), and the year of my first human loss. I got my heart broken this year in so many ways that the stitches I used to put it back together are now overlapping and a jumble of coloured string. Which I guess is okay, as at least it's stitched.

I can't begin to explain how hard losing my Nain has been, it just seems to get worse over time and I can see myself pulling away from people, but it's like I'm watching through a foggy screen and am refusing to handle it. Healthy? No. But it's what I think is necessary right now. It feels like each day something new is dawning on me.. She won't meet my husband, my children, I won't hold her hand again, we won't laugh about our mutual memories. We won't go for food together again, she won't playfully slap me when I say a dirty joke. I won't be stuck watching one her British murder mysteries or Star Trek again, bored out of my mind. We won't rewatch an episode of Barefoot Contessa or Ace Of Cakes. We won't sit in the bathroom together, chatting about absolute nonsense. I won't cut her hair again, or paint her nails. I won't hold her hand again, which I know I've already mentioned, but it's really the thing that's bothering me. She had bony hands that tended to shake when she was upset, she'd roughly rub the back of my hand when it was time to let go. She didn't do that this time, I guess I wasn't even holding her hand, but it just felt like I was when I missed her. Now it's just space. It's hard. I'm scared to return home next year as it will undoubtedly make it real. When I flew home for the funeral, it was a blur of clearing out closets, trying to juggle arrangements, guests, being there for my Granddad, and just.. change. But now we'll be doing the usual things we used to without her, and that will make it feel final. It terrifies me.

In regards to my relationship, this year has been an odd one. It was the first full year of marriage and the first full year of living together. With it came the usual marriage challenges--settling on a routine, being okay to depend entirely on each other. In 2018 my husband had shoulder surgery and was off work for most of the year, so 2019 felt like an entirely different pace. I had to come to terms with being alone for most of the day and not having someone to build my routine around, which was odd. And rather scary. In a sense this was a year of self discovery. I had to fill my days with things I enjoyed doing, and that was a pretty big task as I quickly realised that at home in UK most, if not all, of my hobbies were with my mother. I blogged at night when she would go to bed, or early in the morning when she'd be cooped up in her bedroom for hours. I never actually felt like I was doing something because I wanted to, instead it always felt like I was killing time until she was ready. I knew a marriage wouldn't work that way, so I had to reassess my.. well, everything.

As someone with chronic pain I had to also come to terms with not hating myself for not being able to do housework everyday, and I had to relearn to not push myself because of the guilt I'd feel at having seemingly sat on my butt as my husband worked. It made me more fearful of having children, and that's also something that I'm now dealing with in my own way. I struggled with control, I had too much of it when home alone, and that was most definitely a learning process. I learnt that sometimes for your sanity you have to depend on people, and sometimes those people are the ones you least expected.

Blogging wise, I semi fell back in love with the world. I started up an entirely new Instagram page dedicated to books, and that was 100% the right decision for me. I'm never not going to have a negative outlook toward social media after my trust got broken so many times, but a community filled with book lovers certainly helps. @BranchingPages reached over 1000 followers within a few months, and I couldn't of been prouder.

I'm not looking forward to 2020 as right now it just seems like another year of potential guilt, pain, and loss. But I think that's a part of adulthood, and it's okay to be scared. Everyone is scared, they just show it in different lights. Hopefully I will be proven wrong and in a years time, I will be in a much better place without so much shadow over my heart.

How was your 2019?