Missing branches

I think perhaps we're all like trees, and some of us are mighty oaks and others temperamental maples; bristly pines or the social butterfly birches. Our shapes are different...some of us, like the oaks, born more resilient to the elements of the earth, to unexpected storms that threaten to transform us in ways we may not like. I'm a jack pine, I think - I grew up fast and skinny in a lot of ways, thin in places that ended up mattering later on, bent by the winds of my own secret life.

I've been myself at times, sometimes bravely, sometimes barely. Even recently, coming out at work and to my children freed me from another layer of shame that has blanketed me since I can remember emotion. Yet, however dear the new re-envisioned relationships of today, loss of daily intimacy in our most basic humanness - sleep, drool, sex, snoring, unconscious vulnerability - this opens up a deep channel of longing of such an intensity it twists us into a vortex of greed or need, never sure which. Reality is skewed by the pull of that need, as if it's only along for the ride, like a security blanket trailing on the ground behind a child bound for mama. 

Holding embers

She says that people like me are living in hell on earth. The searing pain of our situation has us grasping at any means possible to escape the torment. Including deciding to climb up the hot aluminum ladder leading up, even though that is sure to cause more pain with each step. Problem is, she says, I've climbed the ladder before, seemingly "out" of my personal hell, but I've done it on willpower alone. I slog through my disappointment and discontent; I pull up and up into happy and unhappy cohabiting. Beyond that, I keep looking, straining upward, so sure there is something more. Most people are happy just to live in the quiet of this space, and they never glance upward. But I do, and I see a light that leads to another level - joy and despair. To hold on to the emotion and solution at once is like a hot coal in each hand. 

Up here, on my way to radical acceptance of both joy and despair, is where I either fall off the ladder or the level, if I make it that far. Just like that, back in hell.

To be inflated is as certain as to be crushed...extremely good and extremely bad dancing in the neverlands. To be here is to be vulnerable, to risk everything every time. No wonder I fall back in.

How will this next climb ever be different? Have I any say in recovery at all? The hopelessness of it all weighs me down when I would take flight to escape the burn inside.

Is counting joys safe? I guess not. I keep counting for today - my gesture of radical acceptance of all of this to the universe.
#2052 Bits of joy ARE beginning to creep back in for the cracks
#2057 ice cream on the weekend!
#2061 phone call from a friend at a crucial moment
#2063 husband's cooking
#2068 little hands reaching in the night

Breathing

Beams of God's radiance glint off the plastic footboard of the hospital bed and send a rainbow of prismatic gold over the bleached white sheets I have pulled up to my chin. The window is cold and the draft sneaks under the blankets and cools my toes. Across the room, a roommate snores off her hangover and overdose. I stare up at the pock-marked Styrofoam ceiling tiles, lost in time.

The odd paradox of melancholy and joy has lived in my breast for a year now. I learn to name the constant ebb and wash of emotions with words like "disgust" for the acid burning, "shame" for the head-bent-low grief, "joy" for the sparkling champagne of the soul. 

The days are long and quiet here, punctuated with an all too brief hour of Eminem and painting in the middle, meals like clockwork arriving cold from the bowels of the hospital. The first day, my brain races double time through the silence of my hospital room. By the second day, everything has slowed with a deep hollow bass tone, and I start to uncurl from the fetal position I've been stuck in, glued to the plastic mattress with a cold sweat of anxiety and the cheeks flushing with shame. Third day, I laugh for the first time, again. Day four, the doctor says I can go home. Home I go, chauffeured by beautiful country blond, to the house mourning the last days of a holiday studded with pain, to the children buoyant with the homecoming of Mama.

I sleep under the moon and the down comforter, sandwiched between my two men, husband and child. I wake up breathing slower than I have in a long time, to the sunrise and the wind whispering through the rattling leaves of the woods, the spring-like air, the owls hooting their last night songs across the valley. I am thankful for this week of rest, vacation from mental hypervigilance against darkness, a blank slate of mind that has been so busy fighting through December's bog.

Tabula rasa. I start again with a clean slate. Benigno numine. By the favor of the heavens. Bendictus que venit. Blessed is she who comes in the Lord's name. Dabit Deus his quoque finem. God will bring an end to this. Deo adjuvante non timedum. With God's help, nothing should be feared.

Cruce, dum spiro, fido.

While I breathe, I will trust the Cross.

God is looking for people through whom He can do the impossible. What a pity when we plan only the things we can do by ourselves.” -A.W. Tozer

A set-back

I just arrived home from a 4-day stay at the hospital for continued treatment of depression and other mental health issues. I am feeling better than I was Tuesday, when I was admitted. I would appreciate prayers for the coming week and a half with my family prior to my next separation from them for a cancer scan on January 18. Thank you, dear friends!