Today has been one of those days where everything feels heavier than my own bones.

I went to see Stefan earlier, trying to explain where my head has been, but the words wouldn’t land properly. My mind has been a mess — foggy, aching, spiralling — and today of all days hasn’t helped.

 

Because today would’ve been my daughter’s 21st birthday.

 

I miss her every single day, but today the grief sits differently. Sharper. I can remember her birth like it happened last night: going into the hospital, getting through it alone, and Paul only turning up after she was already here. He held her, put her back in the cot, and then told me he couldn’t handle any of it. He walked out.

It’s strange how those moments stay stitched into you, even decades later.

 

So yeah… my mental health hasn’t been great. I tried to tell Stefan that. Tried to explain that I’m not myself — the pain, the treatment, the grief, the exhaustion — it’s all twisting my brain into knots. But conversations like that never go the way you imagine they will in your head. I wanted to tell him about Ryan but I couldn't 

 

And then there’s Ryan.

 

Last night, in the middle of the pain and the pills and the emotional chaos, I sent him a message I probably shouldn’t have. I told him if I didn’t hear back, I wouldn’t bother him again.

And I haven’t heard anything.

 

So I did what hurt people do — deleted his number and blocked him, convinced myself that’s what he wanted. Now I keep fighting the urge to message him again, to explain everything, to pour out how broken and messy I feel. To tell him what’s really going on in my head.

 

But instead my mind is screaming the same thing it always does when I hit a low point:

that I’m a bad person.

 

It’s like every mistake I’ve ever made crawls out of the past and lines up in front of me, each one whispering, “See? This is who you are.” And when you’re grieving and exhausted and hurting… those whispers feel like truth.

 

But maybe writing this here is safer than saying it out loud to him — or to anyone.

 

Today was hard.

My heart feels bruised.

My head feels cruel.

And I’m trying to remember that none of this makes me a bad person.

Just a human one, carrying too many memories and too much pain in a body that’s already fighting enough.

 

So ill message them both and them them to leave me alone that im bad and they deserve better I hope the cancer gets me