Notes Along The Journey: August

I keep wanting to be someone that I'm not yet. I want to be through this stage of healing where everything is about how hard it is to get through the day. Where all of my energy goes towards the things that help me to maintain my sanity. I want to have the emotional energy to invest in my world, to educate myself, to step beyond this story of trauma and recovery. To get to that place where who I am is healthy.

It infuriates me that I'm not there yet. It sickens me how self-absorbed my world is much of the time. And this isn't me going on a rant against myself. This isn't some passive aggressive victim plea for you to build me up. This is the truth. The truth of where I am right now. I'm in the middle. The in-between. And I've written about it before and I'm going to have to keep writing about it.

Writing about the struggle to not give in to the old ways that allowed me to survive. Yet also not using energy I don't have to uselessly fight things that take time to change. It's living in this place of accepting the now without losing hope for the not yet that I'm moving towards.

This week has been a week of being reminded of how bad it was last August. I don't want to confess how many seasons of Stargate Atlantis I've watched (three and a half) or how little I've accomplished from my to-do list for the week (none of it). But this is my reality. For today. I can beat myself up for it. Which I have been doing, at least a little bit. Even to type this I had to wrap my wrists up so that the pain from the weather changes doesn't keep me from being able to use my hands. I'd love to know why my joints ache like this. I struggle to not feel betrayed by my body and wonder if this is my body punishing me for all the ways I didn't care for it until this past year. I don't have answers. And if you've been reading here for any length of time, you know how much I hate not having answers.

But. I made it almost two weeks into this month before I ended up in bed unable to function. That's two week I didn't get last year. I'm still able to write, although really I'm not entirely sure what value my words have to anyone else right now. I'm still writing. Still pushing publish. I haven't shut the world out or turned into a zombie. It's not as much progress as I want. This inching forward one exhausting step at a time feels ridiculous. Yet it's going forward. For the first time since I can remember I'm not stalled out just because of the calendar. That's never happened. All the work I'm putting in, being self-absorbed and micro-focused on my own healing, on my own becoming, is paying off.

So I'm going to keep showing up to whisper into the vast void of the internet. I choose to show up in my own life, as best as I can because I know that on my worst days, I need to read, to hear that others choose to show up and stare their dragons in the face. Your dragons probably don't look like mine. I'm going to tell you this anyway - you are not alone. I see you showing up, fighting to hold the scraps of yourself in the face of overwhelming odds. I hear you. You are not alone. (and neither am I)

The Truth About My Depression

The truth is that I'm drowning. Every where I look in the big world there is pain and destruction. Every where I look in my own life, I see pain and destruction. I'm trying to hide from it all, to protect my own sanity. This is one of the two months of the year that I tend to have a major depressive episode. The rest of the time, the depression is a constant hum in the background, sapping my energy, forcing me to choose what three things I will accomplish that day. Anything more than that is no longer realistic. To hear that someone else has lost the war, it makes me wonder if I should just give up now. This hiding from the overwhelm leaves me isolated, back under my tree, peering out at a place where I know I'd be welcomed, but my feet have turned into roots and my voice has fled.

The mocking voices inside start up again - taunting me with my hopes that someone will see me. What's the point of any of this? Their questions are knife cuts, designed to make me give up. It switches to accusations - how dare you ask to be seen by anyone, don't you know that you are broken and needy and they are beautiful and strong? They don't have time for you. How dare you think to divert any of their energies to your pathetic self? You're the one who can't get her shit together. You have the tools, suck it the fuck up and do it yourself. Then you can ask to be seen. Your value has always been based on what you do. No one really cares who you are, unless it shows up in what you do for them.

It all spirals to the point that I don't know where to ask for support. It feels overly dramatic. I'm afraid that people will start rebuking the Devil and casting "depression" out of me. Because that was one of the consistent responses I've gotten before. These mocking voices, they are my voices - mine and those internalized from the abuses of others. I cannot bear to be told that something that happens inside me is evil. It's taken years for me to see, to learn, to trust that I am not fundamentally evil simply because I am a woman. My depression is tied up in my trauma history, but it also provides havoc of it's own.

The truth is also that I have support. I have a therapist who has stuck with me these past three years as I've fought to find me, to learn compassion for myself, to tell the stories that I need to tell from the past. I have incredible friends who are there for me. Who give of their time and themselves. Who provide a safe place for my anger and frustrations. Who cry the tears I can't always cry for myself. Who understand all too well what it looks like to fight this illness, because they fight it for themselves.

I have more of a voice now, than I have ever had. Even when it's too hard for me to speak up, I still belong. I'm seen and loved for who I am, even when it's all I can do to show up. I have other voices in my life, in my head. Ones that speak kindness. That tell me that I am brave. That remind me that I'm allowed to have a dark day. Voices that remind me that I have all the permission. That speak light and hope into my darkness. For this day, it is enough.

When the Dark Comes Calling

Weary

She stays up

Propping eyes open

Aching

She fights sleep

Oblivion too tempting

Lonely

She wants light

Dark fears exposed

Lately I seem to be able to write only the first half of posts and poems. The dark ideas, the tormenting thoughts, the secrets. I can't seem to write my way into the light. I know that not everything has to have a happy ending, that sometimes this is where I am in the process. It doesn't change that light is there or that hope still whispers to my heart. I hesitate though to push publish on things that are only dark, or mainly dark. Pieces that don't have a balance between dark and light. Posts that like me are still in process.

I can't be somewhere that I'm not though. I can't be someone that I'm not. And who I am right now? She's fighting the dark. Some of that is because of the time of year - which if I ever figure out why my brain implodes when it does would speed up my healing by leaps and bounds. For now though I am looking to be content in this space. To practice acceptance of my whole self - including the darkness that takes over twice a year, every year for as long as I can remember.

I've tried fighting back. That only exhausted what little resources I had left. I tried giving in. That fed the darkness and it held on longer. That leaves me with acceptance. Choosing to see into this space, to reframe it, to see the beauty in it as it is right now. Shadows are cast by light, even when I cannot see the source.

Depression (An Unfinished Poem)

It calls to me
Seductive whispers
Teasing my heart
False promises
Preying on weakness
My weakness

Thin inky cords
Soft against my wounds
Wrapped layer upon layer
Strangling
Cutting deep
Rubbing raw

Fight, flight
Cords tighten faster, harder
My heart weeps
Body limp
Mind listless
Eyes unseeing

Found Poetry - A Processing of Fear

I hate this theme of fear running through my words, my life, my heart, my veins.  The fear feels like it's bonded to my very blood.  I know it's March and for reasons beyond my understanding, the terror that comes with March, that terror in my blood - it shuts my heart down as the depression rears her ugly head for another life and death battle.

I have to laugh or cry right now.  This entire experience with Be so far has been staring my fear in the face, of allowing myself to be stripped down just a little bit more, of putting down things that aren't helping me to be fully me and picking up things that are helping me learn to dance, to be.

As I've read through our Found Poetry exercise for this week, I've tasted that old familiar shame. The one I heard time and again.  The one thrown at me any time I did something creative.  "That's so artsy-fartsy." Lectures on how only math, science, and engineering degrees were "real".  "Play the music as it's written...there's no rubato there and definitely no retard."  It was less painful back then to shut down any part that wasn't logical and rational.  I remember taking a right-brain/left-brain test in 2005 and I was very left.

These days I'm pretty close to centre.  A big piece of my healing over these last years has been about discovering my creativity.  Polyvore has given me some space in which to do that and it's been amazing to explore.  I've got a feeling that as I continue to heal, as I continue to become that I'm going to end up as a right-brain.  I'm discovering my love of crafting candles and blending oils.

Each step on this reclaiming of myself has been scary - and now here's the next baby step.  The exercise this week - oh I want to bawl like a baby.  To approach a passage of Scripture and find the words that taste just right from it....there's nothing about this that is safe.  I have put so much work into making sure that Scripture in my life is always in context.  What would it look like to let go of that for this?  I could use something else, but I don't want to.  I sense there's something here, something beyond the scope of the exercise because I see the colours of the Spirit dancing in my soul every time I read through the instructions.  There is freedom here, another layer, another piece.  I won't let fear snatch it from me.