Searching Within Myself

My best friend needed an escape from his toxic family environment at home and needed some time to grow on his own so this past week he came down to LA. It was a group of four of us high school friends all gathered together in one place day and night. Essentially like an incubator to help my friend talk through things and help him find his direction in life. And that we did. We talked for hours and hours deep into the nights and helped him discover core issues buried within himself.

But at the same time, the rest of us also got so much clarity on our own journeys and realized some things that we pushed to the side for way too long. For me, the biggest thing was my relationship with my mother. I talked about her candidly in ways that I never let myself before. Speaking about a woman who I used to fight with physically and verbally throughout nearly my entire childhood. Someone who I never agreed with on anything and oftentimes wished for her death. A single mother who I never truly appreciated.

There was a span of a few years where I pretty much cried every day arguing with her. I talked to my friends about how it got to a point where I just decided to not care. Where I became emotionally distant and unavailable. But that wasn’t something that became my mindset to just my relationship with her, but somehow it permeated throughout my entire life. And even today. I almost never feel sadness or anger anymore, two emotions that are potentially harmful but also can be channeled into great good. It’s a sort of numbness that really scares me. A numbness that I am now realizing has affected so many other factors of my life, like my ability to care for people (including myself).

When I think about trying to alter my relationship with my mother, it’s difficult to even comprehend because changing something that has been the same way for two decades seems nearly impossible. I have always been scared of change. And it seems so weird saying that in this case given that the change would definitely be for the better. But at some point, it is a change that has to be made. And I’m going to have to accept that it will be an uncomfortable process.

If I don’t make an effort to have a real relationship with my only parent (who’s in the picture) before it’s too late, how much would I regret it? I think it would debilitate me.