A brief update.

Not to be all ~hey guys, I'm telling you I'm taking a social media break~ instead of just taking one, BUT...

I firmly believe that telling this story is important. 

Jared’s actions were horrific and unbelievable, but not unpredictable. That’s why Ellie’s mother fought so hard to protect her from him. Still, he was given the benefit of the doubt by his family and the courts for each and every red flag leading up to his crime.

Monsters like Jared are among us, men who see their offspring as a pawns to control their partners with and who would rather kill than coparent. Imposing our own sense of morality upon what they are or are not capable of is a dangerous gambit. 

At the same time, I’m really not doing okay. And I feel guilty to admit it because this wasn’t my baby, I’m not the party that’s been most impacted, and I would never want to make this about me.

I don’t sleep anymore. I close my eyes and am awakened by violent images of rape, torture, and death. I watch children dying as I fail to save them from drowning or house fires or bombings or whatever other horrors my mind conjectures. Sometimes I’m kidnapped or sex trafficked. Sometimes I find Ellie’s body in the dumpster. I find myself kicking and punching the air or the walls or my partner. I’ve been lucky enough not to picture Jared’s face In my dreams, because I don’t know if my fragmented psyche is even up for it. 

I’m scared of sleep and I’m scared to sleep. Sometimes I have intense in-bed panic attacks that if I give in to slumber, I won’t wake up at all, which is ironic given the number of times I end up waking during the night. But the intense feeling that sleep equals death is hard to rationalize away in those moments and I’m not ready to die yet. I’m not. 

I’m on multiple medications to help combat the night terrors, and they’re better than nothing but also have their impact on my energy levels during the day. Moving through the world, I’m mostly numb but there are moments where I completely lose my composure even though nothing going on around me beckons back to what happened. I’ve looked it up and each human eyeball weighs an ounce, but each of mine feel so much heavier. I feel the weight of every little movement they make and they bore into my skull whether opened or closed. I’ve lived in this body for twenty eight years and suddenly it feels foreign.

I’ve tried taking time off from work and pouring myself into work, and both have their own pros and cons. I work in the juvenile legal system as a youth advocate. It is a job that I value deeply and that I’m very good at. I love my job, but can’t help it from reminding me of the court’s decisions regarding Ellie and the ultimate outcome.

Through this, I’ve been really pushing myself to write this story. I’ve been doing interviews, combing through online archives, re-reading documents, and trying to do Chrystal’s story justice. I’ve just also been really hard on myself because I was not expecting this many people to tune in so quickly. So I’m writing this update to release myself from the internal pressure to be productive on any specific timetable. It will all come out in time.