The Blender.

Here, drink your failure.

Have you ever wanted so badly to forget who you are, that you’ll do almost anything to disappear into a dream just so you don’t have to feel pain?

Lately, that’s been my resting state. Adrift in distraction, vices, characters, and fantasies. Not for fun. Not for pleasure. But because I’ve spent my whole life trying to detour around pain. Trying so hard to avoid and escape it that I barrel straight into anything that might distract me from feeling. Anything.

And then, last year, I lost something I didn’t even know how to hold onto. My second miscarriage hit like a ghost storm – quiet, invisible, but absolutely fucking devastating. I thought I was handling it. I thought I was strong. But grief is tricky like that. It dresses up like resilience, then sucker-punches you while you’re smiling in the mirror.

I spiralled. Not all at once, but slowly, the way moss grows over stone, until you forget what the surface beneath looked like. I chased dopamine like it was oxygen. I disappeared into ideas of people like they were lifeboats. Mistook acknowledgment for care. Sexual currency for being seen. As if I didn’t know my own worth.

Grief is a strange, relentless teacher. It grows like branches, twisting you into shapes you swore you’d never become. It pushes you into places that feel like betrayal. To yourself, to your values, to the life you thought you’d have. It makes you disappear into anything: a text thread, a stranger’s idea of you, a moment you think might save you, but only breaks you further. It turns self-love into suspicion, clarity into chaos. It whispers cruel lies. It tells you: ‘You are the reason this happened.’ It says, ‘You should’ve done something differently.’ It forces every choice, every conversation, every instinct into a blender, hits purée, and hands it back with a smile. ‘Here,’ it says, ‘Drink your failure.’

And I did. I drank it. Again and again, until I could barely taste the difference between shame and survival. Between desire and desertion. Between longing and loathing.

But the thing about it all is that it bends your mind into thinking you’re living a reality you aren’t. You believe you’re in control, when in fact you’re just dancing on a leash. And when it snaps, you realise no one is coming to save you. Not your family. Not the friends who swore they’d never leave. Not even the ones who claimed they understood. This isn’t a fairytale. There’s no rescue arc. Just you, trying to scrape your way out of a hole with nothing but broken fingernails and a spine made of grief.

I’ve come to realise that not everyone who wounds you sets out to do harm. But some do. And somewhere along the way, I started trying to make sense of it all. Tracing patterns, mapping motivations, writing my way through the ache. It’s what I do. I unpick the knots in other people’s stories, so I don’t have to sit so long in the tangle of my own. I turn pain into language, as if understanding it might soften its edges. As if I can just find the shape of someone else’s hurt, I won’t have to feel the full weight of my own.

But that part of me is dying. Or maybe it’s just shedding. The soft kind of revenge, where I don’t burn bridges, I just quietly walk away from them. No announcements, no apologies. Just a quiet recalibration of access. I don’t chase clarity or closure anymore. I don’t offer my softness to people who treat it like it’s disposable. This isn’t about bitterness. It’s about choosing myself, over and over, in the quiet moments when no one else is looking. It’s about learning to hold my own time, my own energy, with the same care I kept hoping others would.

There’s no moral here. No perfect ribbon to tie this mess into something digestible. I’m still somewhere between timelines. Not clinging to the past but still shaped by it.

And yet, I’m here. I’m writing. And that counts for something.

Joey Hespe, 2025.