This is my greatest secret.

At least, it’s my greatest secret under my pen name.

(TW: suicidality, mental illness.)

I’ve tested the waters a couple times this year, but I’ve never come right out and said it.

Ask me in person and I’ll tell you about it. For years, though, I’d explain all of it at once in a very nervous run-on sentence and then await the other person’s judgment. Now I typically answer one question at a time, as the other person cares to ask me.

I’ve been afraid to talk about it publicly, though. I’ve still felt so much shame.

I think now is the time to confront that.

In a few days I’m going to drive myself a total of 1800 miles to visit my kids for a couple days.

I have two children, and right now they live almost a thousand miles away from me, with their dad and his wife.

When I talk about this with people they often say something along the lines of, “Being so far away from your kids must be so hard.” And I always at least start to tear up. Of course being so far away is hard. Some people get more of the story of just how hard it is. Most don’t get the story in full. I’m not ready to share it in its entirety.

When prompted, I’ll explain that I was already severely depressed and struggling with suicidal ideation when I met my ex-husband. I was nineteen at the time. We got married before I turned twenty, and our first child was born the next year. I then dealt with severe postpartum mental illness on top of the usual stuff. Later we had our second, and I was hospitalized for suicidal ideation for the first time a few weeks after that child was born. Six months later I was hospitalized again. And six months after that, once more. That third hospitalization happened within a month of separating. We’d spent the last year and a half of our marriage living where my ex and the kids live now, and I had no support of my own out there. Not the kind I needed. I knew I was too mentally ill to support myself and the kids as a single mom—I could barely even take care of myself—and I felt certain that if I stayed there I would inevitably end my own life. I felt the only possibility of me staying alive long-term required me to move back to where most of my family and friends were to try to get more help, and that I wouldn’t be able to bring my children with me. I still wasn’t convinced I’d be able to find the healing I needed, but that was my only shot. So, that’s what I did, and my ex took full custody of the kids.

I don’t often share more than that.

Seldomly, I’ll talk about how the guilt of feeling like I abandoned my children made my suicidality worse. Worse than the guilt has been the fear of how my children might presently or eventually feel because I left them behind and moved away.

Less often, I’ll explain that I was so certain I’d end up self-deleting anyway that I told myself whatever I needed to in order to distance myself from the overwhelming pain.

I’m not sure I’ve ever told anyone outright that for years, I was convinced that I had no future where I played the role of mother to my children in any capacity, because I was so certain I would never heal enough to allow myself to live long enough to recover the distance between us.

Seven times. I was hospitalized for suicidal ideation and attempts seven times over the span of about three years, starting in the last year of my marriage.

It’s been almost three years since my last hospitalization.

In that time I’ve been working hard to become fully stable, and not just mentally. Recovery involves far more than absolving symptoms, it turns out. I’ve had to discover who I am and how to live for what feels like the very first time. And all the while, the shame of my past continues to haunt me and shapes some of my thinking in ways I’m still learning to recognize.

I’ve remained as involved in my children’s lives as I’ve known how to for the last few years. Video calls, phone calls, birthday and Christmas gifts, the occasional letter, and trips to see them, etc. It was only about a year and a half ago that I orchestrated a trip to see them, by myself, without an emotional support companion, for the first time. That was hard. There are other reasons all of it has been painful and downright terrifying for me at times, too.

They had also moved to a different place for a while. My upcoming trip is going to be the first time since the divorce was finalized that I’ll be visiting them on my own in the city where we lived at the end of the marriage.

By on my own, I mostly mean that my mom isn’t going with me and my ex-MIL didn’t orchestrate it, as with my previous trips there after the separation.

My boyfriend is going with me.

I’ve been feeling increasingly anxious and afraid as the trip grows closer, even though I’m also excited and overjoyed at the opportunity to spend time with my kids in person. Every day my boyfriend asks me why, and every day I have the same vague answer.

This morning as I journaled I happened upon a more specific source of the fear: this is the first time I’ll be returning to that area as who I am, instead of as the person I was convinced I would die as for so long.

Pretty much my whole life, I’ve struggled to feel like I can’t be anything unless other people acknowledge or validate it. Worse, I’ve felt like if someone says or even seems to believe something about me, that also now defines me.

I’ve gotten so much better about this, but it still sneakily plays into how I think and feel about myself sometimes.

This time I’m pretty much guaranteed to bump into a whole lot more people who knew a version of me that I’m ashamed once existed.

Of course, most didn’t know me that well, and I’m sure this is mostly or all projection on my end, but I think a lot of my fear has had to do with that. Returning to a place and people I once spent a lot more time with feels like returning to a version of me that shouldn’t exist, and in a way that feels like bringing that version back to life.

I imagine this fear will be a lot easier to subdue now that I recognize where it’s coming from.

Months ago I asked my boyfriend if we could read my journal entries from my marriage together, because I expected I would feel safer revisiting those memories with him, and that seeing that version of me through his eyes (and with the wisdom I’ve gained since then) would help me have more compassion toward and less shame from who I used to be.

We got maybe halfway through one journal and haven’t gotten back to it in months. I’d forgotten that I wrote such long entries detailing such severe mental illness, and it was painful for both of us.

But, it did help, for what we did get through.

This morning when I named my more explicit fear around this trip, he asked if it was like a more visceral version of what returning to those journals feels like for me, and he reminded me that he’ll be by my side through this just like he was for those exercises.

That helps.

Not as much as acknowledging the difference between who I was and who I am, though.

I have it in me to put the fear aside, to give no power to the memory of what I once carried, and to show up with confidence in who I am now. I know I do.

I don’t have all the answers. I don’t fully know what I want in general, except that I want  what’s best for my kids, and I fully believe that involves healthy relationships with all their parents. I know I’m more than capable of providing that, myself.

In some ways I’m still undoing that belief I held for years that I would never get to be their mother, and figuring out what undoing that even means.

I still feel so much fear. I have to confront that every single time and to remind myself of all the reasons I no longer need to feel afraid. That I’m successfully able to do so doesn’t take away from how hard it is.

A lot of that shame comes from what I fear other people do think or will think about me, I’m sure. I’m not yet out of the practice of speculating what they might think about me. Given my progress with it, I’m confident I’ll get there.

At first I thought I could say “all of that same comes from [that]”, but I had to go back and change that. For years different people have been giving me the same advice that, “You’re not the same person and no one else gets to define you, so don’t worry about what they think.” That didn’t help even once I started to feel fully confident in my growth. I carry a lot of shame that started as guilt, because I’ve felt certain that a lot of people still carry pain I caused and I’ve never known what I can do about that.

Sometimes you can’t make amends directly. Sometimes even an apology will make things worse for the person who carries the pain. I carry this fear and shame broadly as well as around the circumstances of my divorce and the people who witnessed or were affected by it.

There are a lot of conversations I would love to have, as painful as they might be, but I’m still too scared to initiate them myself.

Somewhere along the way people told me that when you can’t make amends directly, you just have to focus on growing into someone who wouldn’t make the same choices. Maybe your paths will never cross again and maybe they’ll never accept an apology from you, and you just have to live with that.

I’ve never felt okay with that sentiment.

But I never felt like I had another option, aside from self-deletion or making myself small and miserable so the people I hurt wouldn’t feel threatened by any semblance of happiness from me.

For a long time, I did feel like those two options were more feasible.

Despite how the shame around “abandoning my children” made my depression worse, though, it was the desperation to become what I felt any child needs from their mother that pushed me to keep fighting.

Not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about what I want for them and what that requires of me. Not one day. Even when my answers were limited and misguided because of how genuinely impossible I felt the road ahead looked.

Shame doesn’t belong in my journey of motherhood. I have no business assuming or pretending it does. Removing it is a painful practice that will take me a bit more time, but I will get there.

I wish I didn’t have to make the decisions around motherhood that I did. I wish things could have happened differently. I’m not sure they could have, though. I did my best with what I knew and where I was at, and I can’t blame myself for not having had more resources. I can’t blame myself for what I was never given or taught. I survived. We all survived. I’m in a much better place now, and I have reason to hope it will only get better from here. That is more than enough to move forward with.