What This Blog is About.
All of us walk around with a hole inside us. I think we are all born with it. It starts out small, not very noticeable and is covered up by all the new experiences as a child and exploring life. First, we start to notice it in Jr High and High School when we long for companionship, popularity, and love. But we are on such a mission to finish high school, get our degree, find a career, and be married that it isn't recognized. We stifle the feeling till the hole grows big enough that nothing fits in it to sustain long. We are constantly searching.
For some people the hole doesn’t effect them too much and they continue on with their lives chasing goals and dreams, always on to the next thing. For some people, the hole keeps them in bed day after day unable to turn on the light. However that hole affects you, this is where we talk about it. All stories in life are meant to be shared. So much of our lives are meant to be communal. These are my stories. This is me trying to understand life, understand the hole that's inside me. By sharing my stories, it might give someone else the freedom to share theirs. Too many people are trying to avoid, trying to distract themselves from what they feel inside hoping that it will go away. Hoping that if they ignore it long enough, they won’t feel it anymore. This is the lie we all tell ourselves. For so long, I ignored my pain because I didn’t want to feel it. This is my safe place to feel it. This can be your safe place to explore it.
I have always loved stories, telling them and hearing them. Here is where I will tell mine.
Little Bit About Me.
I am a very simple person. I always have been and always will be.
My name is Linda and this is my story. It isn’t eventful. It might not be interesting to some people. However, I know there are others out there that share a similar experience to mine. You are not alone.
I’m not sure when it started. It must have been some time after college. I started to think that who I was wasn’t enough. I thought I had a strong personality. Anyone who really knows me, knows that I’m not a push over. I’m still not. However, at some point, I began to change things that other didn’t like about me so that I didn’t cause problems. I wanted to me liked. In my head, that meant love.
So little by little, I put away that things that others didn’t like about me. My sarcasm, my opinions, my fight, and my love for donuts were all hidden away deep down inside. No one was interested in that part of Linda. They only wanted to get to know the happy and agreeable, do anything for you, Linda who never fought back. Every Facebook posts, Instagram scroll and story, and every article told me that I needed to be a knowledgeable, socially aware, and politically correct, self care guru who only cared about recycling.
Pretty soon, the noise became so loud I couldn’t hear my own thoughts. Pretty soon, I noticed I wasn’t feeling anything. I wasn’t feeling bad, but I wasn’t feeling good. In fact, I wasn’t feeling anything. However, since I wasn’t feeling bad, I didn’t think too much about it.
One day, when the noise became too much - when the stress overtook me, I broke down in my husband’s arms crying out the last few years of emotions that I didn’t know were there. I told him that I wanted to run away. I told him that I just wanted to leave and never come back. So we did in our own way.
Scott, my husband, turned off our phones and that next weekend we ran away. We woke up early and went to the beach. I brought my journal, which I hadn’t touched in months, and poured out all the emotions across the pages. As the sound of the waves crashed on the shore, my hand vigorously scribbled across the page in anger and shame as I had lost myself. I had lost who I was in trying to be more acceptable to the people around me. We went to breakfast. We laughed and filled our bellies with all the food that we wanted, not concerned with the calories or health benefits. We went archery shooting, a past time that I love and have cherished since Scott introduced me to it. We returned to being children, building a fort with our living room with our furniture and bedding sheets. We used no technology, no phones, no music, not even the lights in our house. We played games and read books by lantern light that we used for camping. We basked in the glow of our innocence.
I will not go back. I can’t go back to that hole that I was in. And so this is who I am. My name is Linda Rochelle Greytak. Despite the fact that I’m only 28, I’ve already changed my name three times - legally. I hate my middle name. Culturally, I am white. But somewhere deep inside, there is a little girl who always pretended to be Pocahontas. I love connecting with nature and seeing the world in it’s raw state. I love to read. I love to journal and go on the journey of self discovery. I hate liars. I hate being lied to. I love everything old. I love wearing black and my combat boots understand my every mood. I love to fight - not verbally, but physically. I love kickboxing and working out to build my body to be strong. I love researching to build my mind and better my health and skills.
I love music. I have a playlist for happy. I have a playlist for sad. I love sad movies because that’s truth to me. That’s not a lie. That’s real life for someone who wanted to share the brutality of reality that I love. I have some ill humor that others might not get. I hate talking to girls because I don’t want to hurt their feelings. I like talking to guys because having opposing opinions doesn’t mean that you aren’t friends anymore. I love the 1600s and the pirates that occupied that time with their rebellion. I love collecting things that make me happy. I love coffee shops and wandering around small streets with small shops. Love talking to the wind because I know he hears me. I love silence as my pen scratches across the page. I love tea. I love coffee, but it makes my heart race, so I drink it in solitude on the weekends and hang on every sip. I prefer cuban coffee. I love taking in the glistening of the morning sun and the magic as it stops time.
As I said. This might have not been exciting, but I’ve found myself again and I’m never going back. I know who I am. I have found comfort in everything that I love. I’m going to do all the things that I want to because I can. I will. This blog is one of those things.
“You’re not a bad person. You’re a very good person, who bad things have happened to. Besides, the world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.”
-Sirius Black, Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix (movie)
