Carrying More Than I Admit

I was twenty-one when I came out.

I was already married. I had a baby boy.

The marriage lasted a year and a half. It should never have happened. The relationship was wrong from the beginning, and it unravelled quickly.

My son was never the mistake. I loved him. That part was simple.

What followed wasn’t simple.

Life moved fast. Theatre became my world. Rehearsals, contracts, travel. Years that felt unstable and transitional. I missed parts of his childhood.

We haven’t spoken for over ten years.

There’s no neat explanation attached to that. Just distance that became permanent.

That sits with me.

Margaret was different.

Forty years of friendship. Amateur dramatics. Musicals. Shared ambition before either of us had proof of anything. She pushed me toward professional theatre when it still felt unrealistic.

I nursed her until she died in 2024. Eighty-eight. I watched her decline in real time.

Since then, my anxiety hasn’t flared — it has settled deeper. A quiet, steady undercurrent.

She was the person who knew the earliest versions of me. There’s no one left who holds that continuity.

That absence is constant.

Financial pressure runs alongside everything. Planning, adjusting, recalculating. It’s not dramatic. It’s ongoing.

It rarely gets spoken about directly, but it shapes decisions.

I’ve been single since around 2010.

Not casually. Completely.

After enough failed attempts at something steady, I stopped trying. Partly exhaustion. Partly fear. Partly a quiet belief that I may not be someone people choose long term.

Sometimes I imagine what it would feel like to have one constant person. Not intensity. Not chaos. Just presence.

Then I pull back from the thought before it gathers momentum.

Carrying more than I admit isn’t one headline event.

It’s accumulation.

A marriage that ended quickly. A son I haven’t spoken to in ten years. A best friend gone. Money that requires constant management. Fifteen years of sleeping alone.

Individually, none of it looks catastrophic.

Together, it has weight.

Most days, I move as if it doesn’t.