Writing my way from darkness back into light
This isn’t my photo. I found it on BlueSky. It just spoke to me. The single branch swamped in dark water with a single red breasted robin on it’s arthritic finger. It is a story of rebirth, renewal and recovery from a dark and solitary life to the freedom of a bird to soar on the winds of time. Too dramatic? Possibly. I just really like this picture, it gives me hope.
Spring has officially sprung when you see more ducklings in the pond than ducks. Happy Spring!
you just have to keep looking.
That’s what I’m doing, slow small steps out of the madness I pushed myself into. I’ve been writing, but just in my journal. I can say anything I want in my journal; no one is listening. It’s the only true place where I can open a vein and allow the words to flow out with the pain. The writing there is a pressure bandage on the gushing self-inflicted wounds I’ve made. Yet to truly stem the flow I need to make plans. Real plans. I’ve found opening my heart here helps me form the lumps of ideas into a solid sculpture; something I can work with and towards.
My last blog “Humpty Dumpty was Pushed!” I talked about needing to go back to basics. Journaling. {check}. Chilling {check}. Blogging { }. That’s where I am today. Where chilling has been mostly watching TV/Movies and Miss Fisher (I don’t know why but the show is the best at relieving me of my need for reality for a short time). As things have quickly changed I’ve changed my to-do list as well….
Murphy’s Law popped up and ripped the rug out from underneath me with the news I had to close down my site and work at the other one in the same town. Not a horrific thing, I’m still employed and it’s only temporary, but it’s a new site, new people (not absolutely new, I’ve worked with the other two at different times). Today was the first day in the new work environment. It’s not horrible. I still get lost, it’s like four times larger than my site and there are two room dedicated to just employee space. Quite posh for a PSC. (Patient Service Center). I still turn into the wrong room for processing and I always go the wrong way to find the employee bathroom. But it is just the first day. Knowing this would be a challenge I spent the weekend trying to put my life (room) in order. I didn’t get it all the way there but enough so I can try and do a little bit every day to keep it neat and orderly. I don’t need orderly, per se, but it is nice to find what you’re looking for or having a nice clean space to write it when the urge hits. So, that’s the other small step out of madness: Making space for healing.
The writing…
The writing still scares me. I hate how pathetic that looks on the screen. Something I love, something I feel defines who I am and what I’m suppose to be doing with my life scares me. Even still, my brain is simmering the storyline in the back of my brain as a way to keep the aroma wafting in the air to call me back to the page with intriguing turns in the plot….but I just can’t do it. It’s too soon. I was hoping to do something this weekend, but instead I cleaned. I work next weekend and I’ve made plans with my niece for The Renaissance Faire for the 14th. Again, a way to chill and allow the pieces to come back together and solidify to bear the weight of my working again. So, in essence, I won’t be ready to present anything to anyone by the following weekend. And, as badly as I wanted it a few weeks ago, I think I’m okay with that. I’m not beating myself up about it, or berating myself…I’m just taking care of myself. Maybe the next time I push myself off the wall I will only crack, and the time after that I should have enough epoxy on my soul to bounce and laugh it off like a whole person.
I lost a member of my flock last week. Dotty was a budgerigar which is more commonly known as a parakeet. I adopted her from a foster mom back at the height of COVID in 2020 as a companion for my bird Blu. Blu had lost his mate, Fluffy, a few years before and as social birds I thought having a companion would be good for him. Blu, sadly passed away a year or so later at the beginning of 2021. Dotty lost her mate as well and came from a home where human/bird interaction wasn’t very high on the young families list. I’m a hands on kinda bird owner but I learned to respect her boundaries. She was never let out of her cage before and I’m a big believer in free flight in the house. She smacked into the sliding glass door a few times and resented me having to hunt her down behind furniture to put her back in her cage. Sammy, the macaw, kinda wanted to see how comfortably she could fit the little ones head in her beak so I never let them play together. She liked to be sung to. I used to sing “Hello Dotty” to Hello Dolly. The most remarkable thing about this little feather-ball was she was always trying to talk and master the sounds around her. She always sang, chattered, and made vocalizations which were solid attempts to talk. I should have spent more time with her to aid her speaking ability but shoulda/woulda/coulda seems to be the refrain which serenaded her life.
When I lifted the cage cover to check on her after she had been making odd noises I found her with her wing caught in one of the slats on the bottom of her cage. I extricated her and moved her over to my bed to observe her. She was breathless from the struggle with the bars, both wings drooped in exhaustion but she wasn’t fighting my hold on her, and when I uncurled my fingers from around her she didn’t try to fly away. In fact, she held fiercely onto one finger. She started having some sort of fit where she would try and bend her head all the way back to her tail and fly. The first time this happened she landed on the floor. I got her back on the bed and made a nest in the blankets for her but the fitting kept coming over her and she would get dislodged. I had never seen this kind of behavior before and I was terrified she was dying. Frantic, I found a site that connects people with questions with experts with answers and paid the $1 sign-up fee and was passed off to a vet who wanted to look over the techs notes before she continued. I never heard back from the vet. By this time I had Dotty blocked on the bed with my leg, she was still fighting the seizures but she was getting tired. I took a video of an episode and sent it to the vet. She was against my leg a little on her side when I saw her wing quiver; then she was still. I informed the vet she was gone and put my phone down and picked her up and gently held her to my chest and sobbed. I cried harder over that small bird than I did for my mother or my two brothers deaths. It’s taken me almost a full week to clean out her cage and move her out of my life. I miss her singing.
I wish I could say my mind allowed me to make this all about her. Recriminations rained down on me like a flight of arrows calling to mind every mistake I made, when I didn’t keep her cage clean, when I didn’t let her exercise, when I kept her in front of the window on a hot day, how I never took her to the vet, how I shouldn’t have let her suffer and I should have just rung her neck and put her out of her misery. Then a shield came up and deflected the arrows with comforting words (which has never happened before, at least not this consciously); You didn’t know her age, birds hide their illnesses, budgies don’t have a long life in a cage. You loved her, you took care of her and you were with her up until the very end. I don’t know which voice is true. I know which one I want to believe and for the first time in my life, it isn’t the negative telling me it’s all my fault. The self talk I’ve been practicing in my daily life, when it doesn’t seem important, has built up the muscles of support when I was to weak to block the old ingrained mantra of self loathing and disappointment.
The emotions of mourning have unsettled me, tho. I spoke to my sister about it briefly because I’ve not been able to talk to anyone about it without tearing up, and she speculated it might be an accumulation of all the changes, deaths if you will, I have experienced in the last five or six months. She might be right, I’ll have to talk to Ellen about it at our next session, but having these emotions so close to the surface is troubling for me, well, emotionally. Crying is so foreign to me, I feel like I’m forcing the emotions so I try to stop it and it comes back up to the surface in the most inopportune moments. I’m trying, on one side of my brain, to allow myself to cry when I’m alone and where I’m supposedly safe and the other side decided it wants to watch TV, write a journal entry or a blog, play with Sammy, crochet or do anything other than the needful. I guess I will cry when I cry. Maybe once the tears are all dry I will find the peace which comes with silence.
Mom died.
It’s been about seven weeks since her passing. Time seems to go buy at different speeds at the same time. I’ve hit new levels of stooopid I never knew I could. I’m still not eating right, sleeping well or taking care of myself as I should. The only thing I’ve been capable of doing is making crochets shawls. I can count to 8, I can sit and watch it grow and not have to do anything else. Since December 1, her last time to the hospital, I’ve made seven shawls. One is my “house hold” shawl because I would rather wrap up than turn up the heat. I seem to keep going back to the hook for comfort. They feel like hugs. I’m trying to make one for all the women/girls in the family for the boat ride out to skater Mom’s ashes. Hopefully I will be more back in the world by April.
I haven’t really cried yet. Maybe writing this out might break open the flood gates and release the torrent of tears that are just waiting for the opportunity to flow. I don’t know why it seems so hard to express myself that way. It could be the general fear of crying; if I start I won’t be able to stop. Or it could be the medication is still providing the buffer that keeps me from completely dissolving into a puddle. I’ve gotten the basics down in my journal but not really the emotions. I wonder if I’m actually going to have any. I mean, it’s not like this is out of the blue. I’ve spent the last 12 years taking care of her as she, well not exactly slowly, declined. The last three to five years have been the hardest, and living with her and taking care of her really tore the wellspring of hope out of me several times. It did happen really fast, in the hospital on the 1st, back home by the 5th, then dead by the 10th. There wasn’t a rally coherent good by on her end due to the hypoxia from the lack of oxygen.
My team of professionals and myself have held the theory/belief that part if not most of my depression and anxiety was due to my environment. Maybe I’m overmedicated now that the environment has changed or maybe I’m so completely overwhelmed (I had my car broken into after the memorial service and I drove myself to see my sister C. run in the Carlsbad marathon, I lost my job when I lost my mother, going back to school in February, and creditors filing suit). I’m overwhelmed. I guess I should stop trying to push myself so hard and try to do things one day, one task, one blog post at a time.
I’ve had some dark days, but in general I still have the light and hope for my future, so I don’t believe I’m back in the void, although, truth be told crawling back into that warm dark place to hide sounds really inviting.. I’ve had more bouts of anxiety than depression, I’m becoming more aware of my desire to take care of myself (like eat, bathe, change clothes, etc.) In some ways I feel like I’ve been reborn into this world but I’m going to have to fend for myself. I’ve got to find a job that pays well enough for me to write until the nectar of creativity runs dry.
My nephew gave me the best advise yesterday. I didn’t want to go home, it felt like a trap so he told me when he feels that way he goes out into the world and tries to find something beautiful. So, I went home briefly and grabbed Sammy and we took a trip to the coast and watched the boats in the marina and on the way home on Highway 35, I got pictures of a beautiful sunset over the foothills in the valley. It was beautiful and my anxiety was calmed.
Everyone knows that time flies, and I’m getting to that rounded age to see it zoom by at super-sonic speeds. I was looking at the calendar of this blog, how many times I wrote in one month, how when I was in crisis there would be a darkened square two to three times a week, and when things were masquerading as ‘normal’ it was lighter. Then I saw when I birthed this baby my jaw dropped. May 2011!! It’s been over five years, and before that it was about five years before with round one. I’ve been trying to grapple with this for over ten years now.
The goal of this blog was to find my way back into the light but to make sure I didn’t trip the dark fantastic again if at all possible. I know life isn’t going to be all sunshine and flowers, there will be bouts of sunburn and allergies too. Now where once there was blackness and anger there is hope and joy . I am not cured, I don’t know if there is a cure, but this is working for me, the writing thing, I just wish it didn’t need to take so freaking long. I guess I should work on my instant gratification issues too
The new goal is to re-post the enteries and figure out a plan of attack in the event of a fresh hell in the void and to shore up the processes I found helpful. Time willing it shouldn’t take another FIVE YEARS!
Reverse pride isn’t humility. Humility is humility. Reverse pride is when you are prideful of the fact you aren’t better than anyone else. We all know this idiom:
Pride goeth before the fall.
I didn’t think that really applied to me because I was on the floor, I would never be ‘worthy’ of the grace of God, to take part of the sacrifice Christ provided for me. Which is why my thoughts when I do something less than Christ-like I hear, “It doesn’t matter, I’m going to hell anyway” I wrote it off to self-esteem problems. I’ve been reading a book called “The Miracle of Forgiveness” and in the beginning it talks about pride. It talked about how pride is also telling God who/what/where/why anything that isn’t in your responsibility to change or judgement you can pass. I realized in a moment of clarity I hadn’t just been telling myself I’m bad and unworthy but I’ve been telling Christ I’m bad and unworthy and the grace He secured with his blood isn’t going to save me. EVERYONE will have a share of His grace, no matter what they’ve been in this life. Life is eternal, growth is eternal, the Grace of Christ is eternal. With this knowledge came the realization of there is absolutely nothing I can do about my future, well, other than be the best person I can be. No matter how messed up I perceive myself to be. I have no control, and I am not perfect and neither of those are within my grasp or prevue anyway so I’m trying to figure out how I can better utilize the time feeling like an eternal-bug-in-the-radiator kind of person. I’m moving forward towards my future again, it’s nice.
This begs the question: Why do I feel this way? I’m not a bad person (in comparison to like Hitler, Dahmer, and the ilk). They’re going to receive grace. I’m not ‘useless’ or a ‘waste of clay’. Where do these thoughts come from? Is it that sometimes when someone corrects you by calling you stupid, where every other time it just bounces off your psychic armor until one day the chink is displayed and you are mortally wounded? I’ve called myself stupid most of the time when I do something wrong, from burning dinner and blowing a tire to stubbing my toe on something I’ve left on the floor. I’m far from stupid. I still compare myself to others and, yes, that’s wrong, but I’m finding out all the useless information I seem to gather has made me rather intelligent. Not to be prideful, but my last IQ test (online) I hit in the high 120’s. If I could do math it might be a little higher but I suck at math. How can I be so easily fooled and so completely without guile that I would believe everything bad and evil that I am told both inside and outside my head? The bigger question is, how to I seal up that chink so the darts of negativity aren’t hitting the pink flesh beneath? I am correcting my thoughts when I become aware of them, I try to keep positive quotes handy on my phone, my notebook, my walls, but how can I paper the inside of my head with them? Any suggestions? Please share.
Sorry, I’ve been distant, silent even. Mostly because I did something wonderful and it confused me. Let me explain…..
I went on vacation with my family, it was a wedding onboard a cruise ship and we were invited to join the happy couple for the honeymoon. We all had our own rooms of course. I brought a long two books; one pleasure and one enlightening. I chose the Enlightening book first. Before the end of the first day at sea I grabbed my book and went up to the top deck, sunglass/reading glasses in hand and a hat and read. Within the first ten pages I came across a statement (that I can’t quote because it’s not exactly what I read but what I needed to hear) to the effect of:
There comes a time when introspection becomes indulgent.
It struck me so perfectly at that moment and I realized, every aspect of me said it was time to move on and move forward. There was nothing more I could do with the deep dives into who, what, and why that makes me who, what, and why I’ve become. I needed to put myself out there and try to put into place what I have learned, to build on the foundation that I have laid and hopefully not have any dead bodies hidden in the cement. At many points in life we need to stop and do the self evaluation/inventory/mind-tripping that helps us move to the next level, but I feel like I’m all caught up now….
Crossing that line, the invisible line between the two worlds instigated a miraculous change in my psyche: I’m happy, I’m hope-filled, I have more energy, I am making plans for my future and are anxiously waiting to put that plan into motion. (Mom is still doing well, so things are still as they were). Crossing that line also gave me the push I needed to start whittling down my meds. I’m off one of my anxiety pills completely, I’ve cut my Lexapro in half, I’m still taking all my puppy uppers (Welbutrin).
I don’t know if I’m ready to go down another 10mg on my Lexapro. This last jump down brought up the realization that I don’t really have the skills that I thought I had when I was fully medicated, and emotions are starting to break through the chemical barricades. I’m getting caught in the angry loops, but I have more success of talking myself out of them before I spin out of control. I get overwhelmed and stymied easily , but if I just plug away at it, it gets done. I’ve had to put some exercises into place so I could deal with the mental stuff, one of those is writing every day. Which brings me back to the confusion….
For the longest time I used this blog as an integral part of my self exploration. Anything too private was taken care of in my journal, and I’m back to journaling now too, but if continual introspection is self indulgent, it’s not something I should be engaging in if I want to move forward in my life. And I’ve made some major strides in my life from March to now, but I didn’t know if I should start a new blog post-depression to write all the plans and the executions with both successes and failures or if I should just continue here; or should I do it at all? I miss it, so I need to keep doing it . I found that blogging my personal truths out into the world is an act of courage and bravery that makes me feel more courageous and brave in the real world. I think it’s not self indulgent if it isn’t wallowing in the dark but instead sharing the joy and excitement of rediscovering my life now that I’m outside the void.
Any input from my readers would be helpful. Please,
Miracles abound when you have faith enough to welcome them.
Last Thursday I took a trip up to visit Sammy (the parrot) as my sister spends time with Mom on Tuesdays and Thursday evenings which gave me the freedom to go. (Sammy didn’t want anything to do with me other than take a chunk of flesh out of my fingers, but that’s another tale of woe.) I called to check on Mom while I was there, as I’m want to do when I’m not home to make sure she knows that I worry about her and she said she was anxious for me to come home because she needed to talk to me, but she was soooo apologetic I wasn’t sure if I should believe it to be good or not. The last thing I needed after a long drive back from one valley to the next is to have another “talk” in *that* tone of hate, disgust and disappointment.
I guess I should back track at this point. The day before, Wednesday, it was written on my calendar that I should put her name in the temple for prayers. They rotate out the names ever two weeks so I call and put her name back in. I didn’t want to. I fought with myself because of the way she still talked to me after we had our fight over Sammy and the lock on my door, which in her mind was the greatest betrayal I could have ever perpetrated against her. She doesn’t have boundaries, so no one can have boundaries. I asked her a few days after the bird was moved to my sisters if she would ever like me again, she told me it still remains to be seen. And from that point on she has tolerated me, sniped at me every chance she got. I remained happy and chipper and trying me best not to flinch at her tone. There is some sort of dark hollowness that you feel when your mother treats you like you are the worst person in the whole universe. Needless to say, I didn’t want to, I didn’t think she should have it because of the way she treated me on a regular basis the anger started to push everything else aside to pour salt in my wounds. I had to stop, redirect the anger out some sort of internal overflow spigot and rethink my position. She can treat me how she wants to treat me, I can’t do anything about that other than not let her hurt me but I made the decision not to let her behavior dictate my actions so I put her name, a friends name and my name in the temple. (who couldn’t use extra prayers)
Okay, back to last Thursday….
She apologized, she was terribly sincere. She wanted me to know that she loved me, appreciated me and was truly proud of what I have accomplished in my life. She didn’t relent and let Sammy back in the house but the air purifiers haven’t come in by that time, so hope still spring eternal on that front. The other portion of this was she realized she can’t keep trying to make me secure a happy end of life for her. She has to make that choice, and she has to make the efforts to do so. Now THAT is a miracle and a milestone for her.
My milestone is unemployment….again. Only this time I have a plan, I have hope and faith and determination to make it worth while. I also have someone to take care of Mom during the day so I’m not the only one with her. I’m going back to my post The End Is Nigh…..Or Not. Mom is afraid of dying alone, without someone who loves her there for her. She’s having more and more problems in the night sleeping, or rather breathing well enough to stay asleep. I’m thinking during this time I will do more watching at night, so if she needs me, I’ll be there and then sleep while the other caregiver is there with her. I do want Mom to have a good end of life, I don’t want her to be alone, that said, I don’t want her to do it during the holiday season. My father died on Fathers Day, and now I associate both days….actual death date and the holiday….with him. I can live without two death dates for her as well.
It’s amazing what happens when you walk in faith and hope for the best by letting go and letting God.
Blogging From The Void 