To Virginia Woolf

I would have met you at the water if I

were then without a daughter; I would have

held your hand–I’ve known you before.

I would have decided on the hour–on

instinctual impulse–when the lower

haze of swaying moods send me down.

I would have called you I bet,

and the moon would’ve been full and

I would’ve ran barefoot in my nightgown

to meet you at the edge.

We would’ve known, I think, not to speak

about blue darkness and moon shafts shifting

across pale dandelions between our toes.

But chemistry comes in capsules now, Virginia,

and I dare say it’s like breathing under water

in a beautiful menagerie of imagination

where thoughts come with a reign and scale–

for weight, not matter.

But sometimes, like those nights we’d dive,

I fear my words are pebbles,

I risk giving them meaning and shape

and find shame from their sudden emptiness,

I fear it’s left me

until I think of you–my shared reflection

in the water, you with so much more grace,

but I can only build you up as a writer

and a fighter

and I drop a little stone to wrinkle you away

and I see my face, blurry and rippled,

brilliant in the moon.

All You Have to Do

In this sleepy little town

down behind the milkweed

to the hidden trail

that winds through the pines

and then,

breaking

 

sun

 

just like that

 

and once the light

has teared your eyes

you see the sea below

like a memory

like a dream

like a dead sea

 

like when you were a little girl

it carries the same sounds–

lapping, splashing, trickling off

your fingertips;

 

it carries the time you thought

you discovered it

 

it carries a night long ago when

you opened your eyes beneath it,

alone in that dark

 

it carries a constant answer

to a question you have no words for

 

take me, you say,

take me to that dream.

 

You could go there, you could feel it

all you have to do is weep.

 

 

Humming Birds (memoir)

“Amy, you’re gonna get it,” Nikki tells me.  I’m hiding between the lilac bushes, Barbie’s head in my hand.  It’s our weekend at our father’s house.
“What’d you use?”
“Daddy John’s knife.”  I’m not afraid.  My father is harmless, even almost afraid of us.  It’s my stepfather I’m scared of.
“I’m telling!” And off she runs toward the farmhouse.  I fish for the knife in the pocket of my dirty overalls and slice at Barbie’s pretty blue eyes so they open.  I sit and poke little holes where her pupils are and then I saw at her ratty hair.  I lick my bottom lip, almost got it.  A pleasure fills me.

Fragile Things

     At some point everything becomes clear. That doesn’t necessarily mean a good clear, but fact is preferred over fiction when you’re locked up in a mental ward. Again. And it’s snowing out–and worse–it’s New Year’s Eve and you’re thirtieth birthday is coming and you’re little girl must be looking for you. It’s all you can do to decipher the shell-shocked woman looking back at you in the tin mirror bolted to the wall above your sink. Here you get your own sink because this time, this trip into the bin, they knew it was much more serious than they had originally thought, and your “security” is upgraded. You have a thought you would usually have–that the upgrade only makes you feel more nuts–but at this point, you don’t feel nuts. You are nuts. I say to myself ‘I’m clinically insane’ and for a moment I believe it’s something to smile about. When the leading psychiatrist told me on New Year’s Day morning that I was clinically psychotic and suffering from complex PTSD, I thought about my mind–clearly–for a second, and I imagined a blue and

“How Great I Am” Chuck Liddell, Ali, Stalone

Very motivational, the quotes said are why I love it, I could give two shits about Chuck Liddell.  “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond all measure” and “It’s not about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you get hit and keep moving forward…” from Rocky Balboa

Quick Update, Please Read

To all of you wonderful bloggers and to those of you leaving comments: for some reason I am not getting email notifications when you comment and also not when you publish a new post to your own blog–I get nothing in my email so I don’t know when you’ve published! Anyone know why and how to fix this?????

The Overthinking Person’s Drinking Game

Reblogged from Thought Catalog:

When you experience a vague sense of inequity or deprivation but don’t have a template for whether your expectations are fair, drink.

When you aren’t sure whether the lingering sensation that you aren’t liked enough is a rational response to unfair circumstances or is in fact symptomatic of your tendency to blame your environment for your own failure to self-actualize, drink.

Read more… 598 more words

I love this!

A Little Joni Mitchell Today

Poets Nick Flynn and Matthew Dickman

It’s been awhile since I shared some of my favorite poems, so here goes.  These are poems by the incredibly talented Nick Flynn from his book Some Ether (also the author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City which was turned into the movie “Being Flynn”) and Matthew Dickman from his All-American Poem book of poetry.  Amazing shit, read on.

Nick Flynn (Some Ether)

 

 

 

 

FATHER OUTSIDE

 

A black river flows down the center

of each page

 

& on either side the banks

are wrapped in snow.  My father is ink falling

 

in tiny blossoms, a bottle

wrapped in a paperbag.  I want to believe

that if I get the story right

 

we will rise, newly formed,

 

that I will stand over him again

as he sleeps outside under the church halogen

only this time I will know

You a City

I’m standing on the roof of a four-story building downtown in a city.  I’ve just taken Ecstasy.  I don’t feel ecstasy.  I feel what I learned later to be verging on psychotic, panic.  I’m going to jump off if someone doesn’t stop me, if someone doesn’t touch me.  These arms aren’t mine. The sky is clear.  Alisha spins and spins, her arms out “Amy, oh Amy I love you,” her red hair flashing.  I tell her she looks like Satan.   I feel like the roof is going to tilt and my body will let itself slide to its death.   I’m too embarrassed to speak, the stars pulsating in time with the veins in my temples.
It intensifies.  I feel the depth pressure when I look over the edge and then run back to the center and fold, wrapping my arms tight around my legs.  Alisha is sliding all over in smooth colors.  She’s scaring me.  I am a bottomless void.  Nothing can fill me.  I take and take and take until I reach near death, until my body cripples under the pressure, and once that passes, I take again.  I’m a train.  I need the ultimate climax in everything I do until I’m repelled by fear.  And it’s hard to scare me.  Alisha takes my hand and pulls me through the thick air and into the stairwell and kisses my cheek “Let’s go,” and I hold her hand and crash into another night.
I find myself rocking in the dark wet grass behind my apartment.  I don’t know how much time has passed since the rooftop.
…this is too much, this is too much
The night is warm but the grass cool beneath me.  I comb my fingers through it like hair and it waves and gleams.  I had demanded that “Jason” come outside with me.  I hardly know him.   Again I’m a train rushing toward a peak I’m too weak for.  “Jason, Jason, Jason,” I can’t speak lovely enough in that beautiful fucked-up way back then.  “Jason, I need you to take me inside I need you to touch me hurryupJasonI’mnotgoingtomakeitJasonIcan’tfeelwhenpeopletouchme-did-you-know? I-want-you-to-help me talkmethroughit-something-is-wrong.”  He takes me to my room and plays Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” and spends the next four hours talking me into a peak neither of us had ever known.  My body a city beneath his, an empty city with all the lights on.   And I find myself lost in the tone of his voice, “now I’m going to…” I’m a train again, hushed briefly on a long, lonely track beneath the cold stars.

Found Myself Today Singing

Well it’s been awhile since I’ve written just a post on what’s up with me lately.  Maybe because what’s up is confusing and yet somehow dull to me.  A couple of great things are happening–I’m seeing a new psychologist who leaves around the bend across the lake and I think she’s…brilliant.  Fucking brilliant.  The first time in fifteen years I felt like, in therapy, “this is the one.  She can help me help myself.”  It’s good dammit.  Good.  I quit smoking.  It’s day four.  My singing voice is already almost fully back!! I’m drinking tea instead of coffee to cut the cravings for a cigarette and I can’ t believe how much better I already feel.  Right now I’ve got the house to myself, blaring the blues, some Aretha, some Richie Havens “Freedom”, some OneRepublic, quite a mix.  I feel so damn good today.  So calm.  Even with the cravings.  Maybe I’ve been so much more at peace because I’m on a right path–my path–and I’m ready for whatever happens in therapy.  I’m stronger now.  I’m willing to get rough.  After the first session I went home and cried so hard I was actually doing that embarrassing hiccup thing, because I felt so exposed and vulnerable to myself, not to anyone but myself.  I have this steal shield I use in the mirror to keep me from believing shit is hard, to keep me from believing I can’ t do it, that I’m weak.  I ask for help from no one, and I just can’t change that.  My sister was crying and asking me why I don’t open up, because it’s too much and too hard alone, and I love her dearly for it, but I just can’t.  It’s not my…style.  You get so used to handling the hard shit alone, pushing down your shoulders and making you sink a little, so you take bigger steps, you gain more muscle in my opinion.  I want to rely on myself, and learn how to do it better.  I was also crying so hard because she got so much out of me and i don’t know how, but I looked at myself, really looked at myself, and i was disgusted by what I saw.  So disappointed, yet I’m so used to disappointment that it wasn’t too much of a crusher.  What she’s doing with me is instead of me blathering on the same tired old story about what all happened to me, is we’re dealing with (first) how I’m dealing with it all in the present.  She’s taken me back to such basic steps I was blindsided and felt like I wanted to hold her hand because I’d forgotten the importance of ‘the now.’  Back to building blocks, which feels good because I haven’t known up from down in a long time.

Why does it still seem I am still trying to prove myself to myself? Anyone else do this?  I think of therapy/dealing with complex ptsd/bipolar/dissociation/adhd as a challenge, and I must win.  I must defeat what has beaten me down, I must not let one person own me.  I must be the master of myself.  I can almost taste it, yet I’m so far.  As long as I keep going, I’ll make it.  The longer and harder it is, the better it’ll turn out, I know that.  It’s about patience.  I’m by no means rushing into therapy like I used to, expecting results I could hold in my hands, read and educate myself out of a hole.  Oh no.  It’s more holistic than that.  It’s a 180 from that.  Now I go in and I’m like a child eagerly waiting for guidance into what I already know but can’t tap.

Another thing I realized is when you’re in deep water long enough, you get accustomed to it, and for awhile you take the rest of the punches and hits with your chin up, you allow yourself to fully feel the swells of pain that can strike, but what is pain anyways but a tool for success?  Anyway, yeah, you get accustomed to it, but then somehow, after so long, you quit treading, and you float comfortably, until someone comes along and steals your fuckin floaty.  And you see yourself, comfortably numb to all around you, your life–stuck in this swirling eddy of memories and fears and even, at its worse and most embarrassing–self-pity and complacency.  I will not settle for this.  I will not be okay with the woman who fucking sits there anymore.  She was begging for me to wake up.  And then I wonder–is this another bipolar mood trick?  Am I really feeling this or am I on the upside of the disorder, seeing things that I will only see and feel for a short while ?  Well, if that’s the case I’ll just keep coming back to write about it.  Music.  Music is everything.  It reminds me that I am alive.  That I have a say in things, that my emotions are real, valid things that I can feel without doubt and shame and embarrassment.  I have a say in things.  I have a say in how this shit’s gonna go.  It already went down, I swam through the murk at the bottom, I barely rose, but I’m slowly rising to the surface, its a long way.  And I can look back at the shore but I’ve come to far to go back from where I came, it’s time to swim to a new shore, a new island of Amyness.  I can’t go back to what I was, that wasn’t living, from the age of sixteen to thirty I wasn’t living, and I’m still not, but I’m trying, and I’m aware and that’s the key.  That’s living.  It may not be pretty, I may look at myself and just think “aww shit” but I have choices and options.  I remember when it all changed–a specific point.  I was sixteen (already haunted by memories of sexual abuse and living in injustices via my mother and stepfather and the lack of my real father) and I was in my room in the basement listening to “Free Bird” over and over and I was looking in the mirror and I just couldn’t see myself.  I wasn’t there.  Just like that.  I disappeared.  This is also when the bipolar began, I just know it.  I can’t explain it, it would take  to long, but it was.  I forced myself to cry and I just stared at my tears as if they were fake, and i was a fake, a fraud, who felt nothing.  I was empty.  And I would spend the next fifteen years or so trying to fill that.  Until the psychosis and PTSD hit and i went to the bin–when I completely shattered.  To a million fucking pieces.  But piecing it back together—I get to create what I want to be.  Not just what i want to SEE, but I what I want to BE, because my feelings are back in full force.  I am not empty anymore.  I think all my life I waited for the break, so I could start over.

A Bukowski Quote

I found this on facebook so I don’t know who made it….

“Extreme Ways” Moby

Now I’ve never been a fan of Moby this song is brilliant.  Genius.  And it also happens to be the theme song to the Bourne movies I’m obsessed with.  Enjoy

lyrics:

Extreme ways are back again

extreme places I didn’t know

I broke everything new again

everything that I’d owned

I threw it out the window, came along

extreme ways I know move apart

The colors of my sea, perfect color me

extreme ways that help me out late at night

extreme places I had gone

but never seen any light

dirty basements, dirty noise

dirty places coming through

extreme worlds alone

did you ever like it then?

I would stand in line for this

there’s always room in life for this

oh baby

then it fell apart, it fell apart

oh baby, oh baby then it fell apart, it fell apart

like it always does, always does

extreme songs that told me

they helped me down every night

I didn’t have much to say

I didn’t get above the light

I closed my eyes and closed myself

and closed my world and never opened

up to anything

that could get me at all

I had to close down everything

I had to close down my mind

too many things to cover me

too much can make me blind

I’ve seen so much in so many places

so many heartaches, so many faces

so many dirty things

you couldn’t even believe

I would stand in line for this

It’s always good in life for this

oh baby, oh baby

Then it fell apart, it fell apart

oh baby oh baby

then it fell apart, it fell apart

like it always does, always does

 

Virginia Woolf's 'moments of being'

Reblogged from Draft No. 4:

• 
• 

The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but it is then that I am living most fully in the present.—“A Sketch of the Past”

Read more… 1,033 more words

"Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being" an excellent essay at an excellent blog!

Catharsis and Literature

I wanted to share this chapter from one of my favorite writing books, Views From the Loft: A Portable Writer’s Workshop (edited by Daniel Slager) from The Loft Literary Center.  There’s a chapter called “Negotiating the Boundaries Between Catharsis and Literature” by Cheri Register.  It got me to thinking about my writing, working on the memoir, over and over, doubting what I’m doing and my reasons for it and why I’m writing it and what’s the point and all that jazz.  Writing about abuse and mental illness, yet making it literary–how damn tricky.  I’ve realized this is going to be a much bigger project than I’d already fathomed.  Yeah, way bigger.  I really need to think it through more.  What I’m thinking is how NOT to write it ABOUT mental illness and incest and abuse but focus on something bigger and more universal, and making the other issues just issues, adding to the theme or acting as motifs.  ?? Any thoughts, fellow writers?  Here are some citations from the chapter:

“..think hard on what makes an account of personal suffering worth reading?  Why write about suffering in the first place?…A writer who expects to transform catharsis into literature has to involve the reader in a negotiation of boundaries.  If work merely invites the reader to witness the catharsis, it may come across as a tedious display of the writer’s endurance.  …”There is no virtue in enduring hardship.”

Eh, Fuck It

another poem for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub, come join in the fun!

Eh, Fuck It

I wanna sit you down and talk

I wanna pull back the veil

get you outside your head

get you into the air

through a curtain I see you

sleeping through

another day, another you

yesterday you looked in the mirror

you jumped right in

Uneasy

Reblogged from Writing and Living with Mental Illness:

UNEASY

 

Even as a child, I knew something about myself was uneasy. There is no other word for that feeling. It was not just the bad stuff happening around me and to me. It was not just my father creeping into my bed at night. It was not just the abuse drowning me from my mother. Or even that I was such a quiet child, without emotion, that I was something like a large stone.

Read more… 1,479 more words

My dear friend and amazing, award-winning writer has started a blog and I'm telling you, you should all read it. It's AMAZING stuff. Here I have reblogged one of her posts. Follow her, trust me.

A Yellow Tulip

Join in the fun over at dVerse Poet’s Pub, this was a very interesting, and as Brian Miller put it, “ethereal” experience.  Here’s mine, rough draft:

A YELLOW TULIP

The lights streams through me

that white light of winter

on this warm ledge I am like a small sun

my yellow head heavy, lolling

as they each pass

at first a lover, then a brother

a mother and sister, no father I notice,

one friend

a nurse, a doctor, chrome on wheels

Dreams by Taken by Trees

The Very Thought of You

Poetry Prompt from dVerse Poets Pub “Poetics: InterActions.”  I chose to do Gretchen Leary’s music prompt.  Here goes.  (“The Very Thought of You by Billie Holiday, the first singer I fell in love with)

THE VERY THOUGHT OF YOU

The rain is pattering on the overhang

black coffee in the air

the smell of paint from

my little kitchen I just painted

Emma is asleep in her crib upstairs

as Lady Day dips and drones

and flattens the back of my throat

as we sing

…the very thought of you…

it is July in my prime

FORGETTING

FORGETTING

In This Instance Photography at Etsy

I watch my tennis shoes

I had painted white

as they step down the sidewalk,

a Catholic school girl on her way to school

in the late Spring

heat, when I pass a tavern,

the door held open by an ashcan

and cigarettes and bleach

A Dream in My Mind

I have this recurrent fantasy where I’m lost in a forest so deep it’s purple.  The grass is black, the moss creeping up the trees is black, the birds chatter like the noise in my head.  Hungry wolves are near, always near.  Then, there, there’s an opening of light not far off, finally.  I walk to it, unable to cry anymore, unable to care anymore with hope.  But I go anyways.  There’s a field of strawberries spread before me, and mountains in the back like Switzerland.  At the end of the field there is a cottage with smoke coming out of a

Around the Island Photography at Etsy

stone chimney.  I walk through the white blossoms.  A crab apple tree slouches in the back of the cottage where the pink and white petals fall like snow.  I smell honeysuckle.  The noise is gone, the birds have turned into song, but I don’t notice this yet.  The sky has never been so blue, the grass so fragrant.

I knock on the wooden door but no one answers.  It’s unlocked so I open it and enter.  An old stove holds pots bubbling and boiling, fresh strawberries on the table by a window that has no glass.  Checked curtains sway in a gentle breeze.  “Hello?” I call but no one answers.  A hound sleeps lazily on its bed by the door, and a cat leaps to the counter by a bowl of eggs.  I walk through the rooms, doors framed in oak, a bed swathed in a handmade quilt, a basin of water.  I’m suddenly tired.  So tired.  I’ve never been so tired in my life.  And at last, at last, it must be safe to sleep.  Safe to sleep.  What a relief.  I lay down on the quilt, the springs squeaking beneath me.  Hours pass, and then days, and then weeks, and then months.  I wake to an old woman in an apron, holding a cool washcloth to my forehead.

“Where am I?” I ask, unalarmed–a new feeling.

“You’ve made it, my dear, you’ve made it home. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

Buds in the Gutter

James M. Cole Photography at Etsy

(this poem comes from a Yeat’s quote given to me by Mosk, thanks again my friend! This is what I came up with.  also, join us poets over at Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub!

there’s an undercurrent

to this city

something about all the red lights

and in a crowded line

for welfare I want to be waiting

for something other than me

I walk my way

toward some kind of home

in this little city

where I get lost

along the avenues, I follow

their rhythm

everyone seems to know where they’re going

yet no one does

Bed of Winter

It’s quiet out here

in the snow

the morning sky still a heavy blue.

It’s peaceful here

right now

for a few moments.

I think of the screaming

I heard in my head last night,

it doesn’t scare me anymore.

Daddy’s Game

published in FRiGG Magazine, Issue 35 2012

DADDY’S GAME

I imagine you must’ve shut

yourself off somehow–the way

you’d eventually teach me to d0–

before you entered my room

like a king’s shadow.

I hear the scrape of your jeans

your hands hot and big like swings;

I’m About to Get Personal Whoa Shit

Getting Intimate with You Guys.  Thanks for listening/reading:

Tonight I’m wondering about what love really is.  Did I have it?  Are there different kinds of love?  I’ve always avoided writing about love, because I have this outer shell that believes it’s ridiculous.  Hmmm.  I had someone.  A keeper.  I grew into loving him.  Is that really love?  It is a genuine kind.  But then there’s the love that strikes you dead in your tracks and makes you uncertain of yourself and your heart pounds.  I was thinking, with my fiance of nine years–we didn’t have really any intimacy.  I’m a virgin to it.  I don’t know how I’d react if I ever encountered such a thing.  I never let him in.  Why?  I’m listening to “Slow it Down” by the Lumineers over and over 

I feel naked what I’m aiming to write.  It’s so easy for me to write about mental illness and shit like

An Amazing Poem by Heather Sawaya

So I had the very fortunate luck of coming across a poem“Pull Me Down” by blogger and poet Heather Sawaya over at Heather Sawaya Poetry.  It made me cry. A lot.  And it’s so insightful as to what it’s like for a caregiver/lover/best friend/helper of someone with so much suffering.   She’s an advocate for survivors.  Here’s what she says about “Pull Me Down”:

“The poem, Pull Me Down, means a great deal to me.  It speaks of both my purpose for writing, and also the inspiration for my next book.  I am most moved by people who have gone through the worst life has to offer, yet, find the strength to keep moving toward something better.”

I’ve just started speaking with her on her facebook page and never have I met a more compassionate person.  Visit her page, you’ll see what I mean.  She has given me permission to share Pull Me Down with all of you.  Enjoy.

(all rights to this poem solely belong to Heather Sawaya)

(I apologize if her formatting doesn’t publish correctly)

PULL ME DOWN

Pull me down

to that place

you don’t allow words.

I have never been

Difficult Degrees

published in Rose & Thorn Journal

How strong the wood is

how heavy the water

how fire burns you and saves you

how we can suffocate in space.

A leaf knows no direction and it cycles.  

How I slip across a plank of moods

how I gaze so far in my small mind

how I am not this sick body, but a cycle–a circle,

a painted sphere in orbit given to touch–to feel–magnitudes.

I know no direction. The dark, the light–two poles of a whole.

Balance: I pull you too far down and then too high,

but at such lengths

I wander beyond myself

examining the weight

the burning

the constancy

the continent

of such a life.

copyright@AmyJoSprague

Erica

Come join in and share poetry at dVerse Poetry Pub, it’s Open Link Night–and sorry dVerse readers, this is the poem I meant to link to.

(rough draft)

PhotosbyDeniece @ Etsy

I still picture you

as sun-kissed in rayon

skirting up the tree behind me

one of us must have led

but who knew

how I followed you

your independence a purple

gloss I mimicked

muddling my own insecurity

my need to belong

chasing and being chased

like the trains we’d jumped

that took us around

the outskirts of town

or the mornings before school

running through the milkweed

and thistles

to get to the shore

where we’d leave our

shoes in the sand and swim

in the green lake

underwater I’d open my eyes

and look at how the sun

beams streaked my legs

in the space of water

and you, not so far away,

suspended beneath the surface

I come up for air and

you have left, your emails

say places like Naples and Europe

and I sit in my chair

in the dead of winter

wondering how you did it

how you got to what we were after

without exploding

how you fell in love

with a writer on another beach

I’m

here

etching scars across the ice

The Road

My mother never promised life would be easy.  There’s a picture of her on a boat with a red bandana on her head, the wind blowing back her hair and she’s laughing.  My early, early childhood was a beautiful thing.  Yellow light through my mother’s kitchen windows, listening to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Cat Stevens, Eddie Rabbit.  I remember dancing.  I remember my mother, how she bloomed.  I wanted to be like her.  Days at the farmhouse out on the dusty country road, the pink petals of the apple trees falling on the bright green grass, a plum tree, tractors, the pig out back, uncles and aunts and cousins everywhere, dirty, some drinking, music playing.  Mama kept us in church.  Daddy was shy and sweet.  Grandpa Leo watched the humming birds from his window in the kitchen.  Grandma Helen with her apron on.  Playing and singing on the old organ with her.  Jelly jars full of lilacs.  Lightning bugs in jars.  Riding big wheels.  My heart was young then.  We were never promised anything, and I think that kept us strong for the years that would follow.  Riding in the old dirty car with my dad, he was probably drinking, sitting up front with Nikki and I was by the door when it flew open.  I remember a whir of green and dirt.  Nikki held me in.  Not a scary moment.  Nothing was scary back then.  Everything is warm.  My daddy’s hands holding me.  My mother cleaning my cheeks, keeping a tight, clean house.  We were so poor and never knew it.  Life was beautiful.  Things don’t always turn out the way we planned–life is hard.  It’s damn hard.  Some people enter in and destroy bits of you.  But there are others, like my mother and sisters, and my memories, that keep my chin up.  We still have moments where it feels like we’re dancing, no promises, no future, just the now, and that it’s okay, as long as we’re together.

Fears, Prayers, Robes

Fear has been consuming me the last few days.  Weeks.  Months.  It was camouflaged as daily worries, bills, being a good provider for my daughter–all of which I feel I am failing at.   I’m drowning in debt/fines.  Well I am not drowning, I’m just overwhelmed, waiting for this damn disability is killing me.  But anyway, last night, after another night of being wide awake, thoughts flying and racing and accumulating, I began to look at what was going on beneath my pounding heart and cramping chest (good ole anxiety)-but before I could see the problem, I thought of Jesus, and I began to cry.  When I am at my breaking points, he comes out of nowhere.  I felt his hand on my forehead like a parent checking for a fever and I felt love.  My lost girl, my lost child, I could feel him say.  Which only made me cry harder.  Whether this was my subconscious speaking, madness, or Him, who knows, but they were words given to me, not created by my waking psyche.  My pillow honestly felt like his robes and I cried and cried and I told him that I’m afraid.  Afraid of what?  Death? Yes.  No.  I’m afraid of myself.  Again.  I’m afraid of fear–terrified of fear.  I could feel peace seeping in a little, and then I reached for him thinking the moment was fleeting, but he was still there, in my heart, and I was saying in my mind–you’re still here, you never leave—and the response was that he never ever leaves, that he is here and was here the whole time, I just had to realize it because I was the one that would leave, not him.  Having someone to love you so unconditionally and never leave you and still want to hold you and dry your tears no matter what kind of monster you feel like–that alone makes me cry.  I tested my ‘sick thoughts’ on him and they didn’t hold either–you’re just sick, he’d seem to say–it’s not you.  My chest pain began to go away.  I thought of my favorite (psalm?)–when you see only one set of footprints, that is when I carried you.  He has carried me quite often.  And you know there is no asking for relief from this life, there is only being thankful for what you have.  I stared at my little Emma and thanked him over and over for her and then I went into a sort of deeper meditation, asking myself if maybe I’m too tired for this life.  Or something else was asking me if I was too tired to do this anymore.  The room changed.  Everything I looked at looked tiresome and redundant and depressing and empty and so so lonely.  I’m so lonely. I thought about death, about how that slip must be so simple when the time comes, a relief.   But some kind of light always remains in me–I KNOW there is something greater I am meant to do.  I have so much more to give.  I have so much to teach Emma.  So much is in me.  And in my heart He said–then do it.  Love yourself, it’s the only way you can love her better and show her what you want to show her.  Take care of your body, or it WILL fail you.  Get up.  Again.  And love yourself.

So that’s the plan.  Thanks for listening.