This is the Last Year of My Life.

"I want to die."

Don't worry, I'm not suicidal. Not really. Those are just the words that keep surfacing in my mind. I don't actually want to die. I think I just want to stop. Everything hurts all the time.

The last year and a half have been brutal for me. This time has had its joys, of course, but none of them has been enough to dissipate the fog that has settled over me since the beginning of 2018. I left bits of myself in moments along the way, and have lacked the mechanism to retrieve them. I miss me. For this entire interval, I have been drifting. I have let the heartbreaks of last year stain this year before it began, and if I don't do something, they will bleed into next year too. I can't and don't want to erase them, but I need to stop submitting to them. I recently took a big step forward and for a hot minute I felt like I was flying. It turned out I was falling, and I have not landed gracefully. I've spent so much time in my head, indulging all the best and worst hypotheticals that I can conjure (and oh, can I conjure), and I have reached a point where I just avoid being by myself as long as possible, and then I cry the rest of them time.

No, I don't want to die. I just can't live like this anymore.

So I have decided that this is it. This is the last year of my life as I know it. I've been a passenger in my life for too long, and now I'm reclaiming the driver's seat. I have (finally) found a therapist, which was the first step. I'm going to start small with the goal of doing something each day to invest in myself in some form, and part of my restoration will definitely be to write about all of it. Writing is one of the things I have lost in the mire, which adds to my grief because I used to be so prolific. Now I can't remember the last time I was fueled to write late into the night. I'm done evaporating.

This process is about more than restoring who I was, because I have never really been who I was supposed to be. Kelly was not supposed to be my name, and I never felt like it was. Maybe that's part of why my life has often felt so ill-fitting. It's definitely not the only reason, but it hasn't helped. So I have decided that this is the last year of my life as Kelly. My mother meant to name me Autumn. I have been trying to let her emerge and my attempts have been thwarted, but part of the problem is that I gave the power to bring her out to other people, and they can't do it for me.

Hi, I'm Autumn. It's good to be here.