“But I want to tell my stories, and, more than that, I HAVE TO in order to stay sane.” –Lena Dunham

Tags

bathroom sink, change, depression, emotions, hardness, Intensity, Living, social work, storytelling, words

The first story I ever wrote was in the second grade, entitled Amy and the Tooth.  It was the dramatic and detailed adventure of Amy, a girl who shrank down to the size of a peanut and befriended a lost tooth who possessed superhero-like qualities.  Together they journeyed through drainpipes, battled rogue nail clippings, and encountered a variety of other bathroom sink horrors.

Now that I’m older (though not any less afraid of what is in my bathroom sink), my storytelling has shifted more towards reality, or at least my perceived reality.  This isn’t because I don’t value fiction; in fact, I devour it ravenously (when I’m not drowning in social work texts).  But as I push myself more and more to participate in the world, to move beyond patterns my brain has established while depressed and suicidal, telling my story has become a lifeline.

So much of the time I feel like a fish washed up on the beach, gills desperately opening and closing, trying to breath in an environment it wasn’t made for. Writing somehow fills my lungs, anchors me when I otherwise feel disconnected and unsure. It’s almost as if writing about my life makes it real.

Yesterday one of the women at the shelter where I’m working told me about her aunt who had recently passed away. She shared, misty eyed, that from the age of 17 until she died at 96, her aunt had written in a journal every day. Every day. Now, though she is gone, her stories are still here, her words concrete and present-living.

I don’t know how much I’m living right now; too often my thoughts and emotions hijack my brain and take it far away from where my body is breathing and moving. I’m overwhelmed, shrinking into myself. But if I keep writing, continue to tell my story, maybe the journey down the drainpipe won’t feel so frightening. And, for now, my words will do the living for me.

“And I found that I can do it if I choose to – I can stay awake and let the sorrows of the world tear me apart and then allow the joys to put me back together different from before but whole once again.” – Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Tags

Awake, being ALIVE, change, emotions, human, intention, recovery

I remember scraping ice off the car windows before school in the winter, my breath clouding in front of me in small, cottony bursts.  It was a slow process, and my younger sister would watch from inside as the world shifted from an opaque blindness to bright visibility in jagged streaks.  The steady whir of the “de-frost” mechanism coupled with the scratch of the tool was simultaneously shocking and soothing, and even once I’d finished visibility was a patchwork of clear glass edged in ice.

I am beginning to “de-frost” my brain right now, and it is terrifying, and humbling, and full of messiness and struggle and little rushes of joy.  It isn’t linear at all; no blinking arrow is pointing me in the direction of blue skies and clarity.  It isn’t relieving either; in fact, much of the time things feel tight and strained, like I’ve inhaled and forgotten to exhale.

But I am Awake.

Because all of this is maddeningly simple in some respects: I’ve been afraid to feel.  All of the behaviors, all of the attempts-at the core these were reactions to emotional overwhelm, panic at sadness and anxiety that seemed so large in the moment that I couldn’t possibly contain them, that something had been stretched so thin it had to snap.

I’ve known this for a while; one of the first things they teach you in eating disorder treatment is how restricting or purging compensate for discomfort; they numb you, allow you to function in the world without being present.

What I’ve only recently realized, though, is that this fog extends beyond the “scary” emotions, the sadness and anger and fear.  I’ve been living without the joy and the wonder too.

Because you can’t pick and choose which feelings you want to extinguish.  You can’t put out the flames of sorrow unless you also reduce happiness into a smoldering pile. It’s all part of being human, and I’ve been a ghost of one for many years.  Without emotions you’re hushed, in a stagnant and silent place where you can’t grow, where change can never happen.

My intention for this new year is to continue to learn how to be fully Awake. To let my brain de-frost and thaw from the freeze it’s been in for so long, and to be open to whatever feelings come with it, though the process is as haphazard as the scraping of ice-glazed car windows.  Because even though I’m still frightened of letting the sorrows tear me apart, I am much more frightened of never allowing the joys to put me back together.

“Begin anyway…”-To Kill a Mockingbird

Tags

beauty, being ALIVE, emotions, gratitude, hardness, Intensity, mental illness, my Brain, suicide

Being in this world is piercingly beautiful and furiously hard.

The hardness can come from the outside, and I am lucky enough to not know too much about that. The hardness from within, though, I know on a deep level.  It is and has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.  I’m still not certain of what to call it-depression, anxiety, eating disorder, self harm-all these Big Words that characterize symptoms I’ve had but hardly sum up the struggle of extreme sensitivity and intense emotions.  I am sure that it has to do with who I am at my core, how my Brain interprets things-these things are always with me.

I’m also sure, though, that the hardness is the beauty.

There are times when I am so full of hardness that I sink-when I get so angry, so sad, so afraid, that my Brain is the way it is.  I don’t want to feel so deeply, I don’t want to think about everything to the extent that I can’t sleep, I don’t want to be someone that other people experience as “too much.”  It’s a slow kind of drowning, where I can look up and see the bubbles from my nose rising towards the water’s surface and am aware of every breath I can’t take.

But there moments when I resurface, when I am aware and grateful for what those intense emotions allow me to do-care fiercely about those around me, have empathy for people in pain, work fervently and passionately on things that I value.  It’s why I am moved to tears by poetry, why I laugh until I almost wet myself when I watch cat videos on YouTube, why I put songs that resonate on repeat for days.  I feel everything all the way

One of my favorite books is To Kill a Mockingbird; my copy is worn and coffee stained from the amount of times I’ve read it, my cats are named after the two main characters, and I have a quote from the story tattooed on my wrist: begin anyway.

I love those two words paired together because they conjure up hope and newness with the acknowledgment of fear and hesitation.  To begin anyway is to dive purposely into the beauty and the hardness.  It is to continue to fight when everything seems pointless and I long for a different Brain.  It is to hold those moments when I experience intense joy up to the light and say thank you for my Brain.

And, on this Worldwide Suicide Prevention Day, it is to be grateful that my Brain is conscious, that I am typing these words and allowing the flow of joy and sadness to rise and fall within me.  Every moment is the opportunity to begin anyway-thank God I am here to do it.

“Each moment is all we need, nothing more.” -Mother Teresa

Tags

being ALIVE, emotions, human, Living, memory, mindfulness

and in the midst of it all

an egg shell, furiously turquoise against the pavement and

startlingly fragile next to the city’s leftovers-empty beer bottles and 

limp take-out wrappers that echo of last night’s 

stumbling and slurred chatter

a bird egg that, when spotted,

interrupts the internal dialogue for a moment, 

breaks through the tangled thoughts with its

cracked simplicity,

gives voice to hope, to

beginnings and

first flights, 

says in-between the rush and the rumble

there is always a

speckled pause-

a small and unexpected reminder of

life beyond meetings and bills and the

thick thoughts that crowd,

life that exists in

the details that can be found on the cracked sidewalk,

in the streaks of the morning sun,

in the midst of it all.

#mindfulness  #DBT_MF 

“These little earthquakes…here they go again.” -Tori Amos

Tags

being ALIVE, bravery, DBT, emotions, Intensity, journey, mental illness, recovery, thesamedifferent

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the word recover.  We talk about recovery in terms of physical illness and injury; you can recover from cancer, a broken arm, a sunburn.  These all have fixed endpoints, clear indicators of when healing has occurred.

Then there is recovery in the sense that you regain something that you’ve lost, like recovering a document after your computer crashes.  This, too, is specific, tangible.

With mental illness, though, recovery seems murky, nebulous.  I keep hoping there is some plateau I will reach when everything will even out and things will feel firm and easy.  The more I search for that, however, the less I believe that it exists.

I’ve changed behaviors related to my illness, certainly, and I’ve not been in the hospital in months.  These are markers, I guess, of being in a different space.  But emotionally, I still feel the tremors of despair and sadness and anxiety.  Perhaps this is what recovering is? Responding to the big, painful feelings in a different way? Not being rid of them, but accepting that they will always be present, learning to allow room for them rather than running?

It’s not what I had initially hoped for.  When I made the choice, about a year ago, to shift my focus to living, I did it with the mindset that I might, someday, feel differently.  More and more, though, I believe that my life will always be a series of earthquakes, that seismic emotions will constantly brew under the surface.  I think I’ve just gotten better at functioning with them present-and am still constantly working at improving even more.

I’m not writing this to convey hopelessness, and it might be true for some people with mental illness that they reach a place which is entirely new, a state of “being recovered”.  But for me, this is a chronic part of my life, and though not who I am, very much connected to it.  And sometimes I wonder that, once you have almost died, once you have gone to such extremes, once you have felt dehumanized by a system and lost completely, if you ever totally come back.

It may just be where my head is at right now; exhausted, scared about the future, overwhelmed by a crush of different feelings.  I think there is a little sense of peace, though, in acknowledging that things might always be rocky for me.  In that imperfection there is space to stretch and grow, to make mistakes and learn from them, even if at times it’s painful and slow.

Recovered means I’m stagnant, a marble statue representing health and wholeness in a Psychiatric textbook.  Recovery means I get to keep living every day in my humanness, moving forwards and backwards as I try to figure out who I am, what I want, and how I can embrace my sensitivity and intensity.  It is living with the emotional earthquakes, not shutting down or self-destructing because of them-and maybe even, sometimes, causing the rest of the world to tremble too…for it’s the ground shifting beneath us that makes us stop to re-evaluate, try something new-pushes us to soar. 

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.” ― Agatha Christie

Tags

being ALIVE, emotions, memory

Life these days is like slogging through damp sand; emotions come at me thick and heavy, get stuck in my nose, on the back of my tongue.  I imagine my brain right now as a rock on the tide line; when overturned, crabs scuttle out of shrinking wet and sand fleas flop in distress at the sun’s rays.  My thoughts and feelings are scrambling, some trying to get a new foothold outside of the old, well-worn trenches, some disappearing rapidly, hiding under different rocks I can’t uncover.

Minutes pool into hours, hours into days, until time is a swirling eddy, memories lost in the froth of rapids.  There are moments, though, that flash like silver fish darting in between bubble blooms, easily missed except for brief leaps out of water into sunlight, scales glinting if you look right.

I’m casting a net, trying to scoop up heaps of fin and gill, wanting to hold these precious pieces of time in my hands, attempting to guide the crab-like thoughts in new directions.  I want to embrace being in this world, stay wide-eyed for each detail, while also holding some of the past, what memories and former emotional experiences have to teach me

One thing I know to be true amongst the wave-carved rocks and driftwood that fills my head: my brain is conscious.  Things are difficult just at present; memories might be lost or hard to retrieve, emotions and thoughts may be intense and sometimes frightening or challenging to control.  And, like the creatures exposed at low tide who are capable of moving between saltwater and fresh air, my brain is strong, adaptable, and capable of survival.

I am alive…and it is a grand thing.

“Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, were something happened, and then there are all the other places.” -Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness

Tags

emotions, faith, Intensity, labels, light, notenoughtoomuch, vulnerability, words

***This post may contain material that might be triggering for some.***

Too much is sometimes not enough, and not enough is sometimes too much.  This sounds like a tongue twister, a spin on words conjured up by dark-suited advertising men with slick hair and thick cigars.  I’ve found it to be mind-bendingly true, though, now that I’m shining the light on it a little.

I didn’t stop eating all at once, or even consciously.  It happened in a series of moments, entirely separate and contained, that somehow compacted like a rock gathering speed down a snowy slope.  When first set in motion, a rock rolls aimlessly, and slow, as an art-lover walks among museum paintings when an entire day lies before them. As it continues, however, the rock’s course becomes smoother, aligned; it is hard to catch the shift in speed until it is careening, with wild and precise abandon, downhill.

So when exactly I stopped eating enough is impossible to pin down; it happened gradually and all at once.  I didn’t notice, or want to notice, at all, and those around me didn’t notice until the rock was going full force, collecting flakes of snow and bits of pine needle to form a growing, evolving mass, impossible to catch.

At this point, enough for me was a fluid word, a feather blown about erratically by gusts of wind.  Some days enough meant breakfast and that was it.  Others enough was a calorie count, or three Diet Cokes, or as much gum as my aching jaws could chew.  It shifted rapidly and almost unconsciously, though the word repeated in my head rhythmically like feet slapping on a treadmill.

Simultaneously, too much became fragile and without shape.  It was ice cream and peanut butter, then any kind of bread, then red numbers on a scale.  And then the two concepts become almost intertwined, vines ensnaring a trellis, until not enough became too much, and the control that had seemed so concrete and logical crumbled like old brick in my hands.

Family and friends and doctors told me the amount I was eating was not enough, that the weight I had lost was too much.  What they couldn’t see was that notenoughtoomuch was the rolling rock, a new word with its own muscle and grit, a force howling along with its own cruel agenda.  And this entity was no longer external, but inside me; I was notenoughtoomuch, and I was the only one that seemed to see it, seemed to understand that the way to conquer it was to embrace it with bony arms.

It’s strange, looking back, how much I deeply understood my eating disorder in some ways, how I befriended it and protected it and cradled it like a small child.  Even before treatment I recognized it for what it was, and that was not the calorie counts in my notebooks or the rigid exercise routines I followed daily.  It wasn’t even an eating disorder, at the core of it; it has manifested itself as cutting, and drinking, and binging, and “risky behaviors” that are hard to put a diagnostic code on, like trying to please others, desperately attempting to fit neatly into Labels placed upon me, at the expense of loosing Myself.  If I were writing the next version of the DSM, I would put notenoughtoomuch as a spectrum “disorder,” because if a doctor really wants to help me on my path to wellness, asking me about notenoughtoomuch would be the best place to start.

That is probably too much to hope for, though, because notenoughtoomuch is so frightening, so hairy and hard to look at, that it scares people who know me well and who don’t know me at all.  Even as I write this, I tremble with the fear of sharing these notenoughtoomuch Words.  And yet, what I can do-must do-is allow notenoughtoomuch to manifest itself in healthier, Shinier actions and Words.  Hold on to the Faith that, while I am notenoughtoomuch for some people, there will be others for whom that is not their Truth, and rather than fearing the vulnerability, I can gather them as part of my tribe.

Notenoughtoomuch is a force, something within me, of me, is Me.  I can’t escape it. And I have glimpses every now and then of not wanting to.  Because I can train my Brain not to fear it, and maybe someday even love it, and allow it to be loved.  My toomuchnotenough Self will always have a wild, speedy course, but now it will be on a path that I blaze for Me.

“It is important for the poet not to be emotional because you cannot see the world clearly with tears in your eyes.” –Billy Collins

Tags

dialectics, emotions, poetry, vulnerability, wants, words

And what if

what the world needs-

and the world is too grand so

i’ll begin-again-with me-

what if

what i need-

and i don’t need

having Water

a Roof

Air in my lungs-

what if

what i want-

for i do want, though i have to practice

the saying of it-

what if, what i want

is a poet who allows us, allows

-me-

to witness the salted rains of stormy emotions

as each teardrop falls onto the keyboard,

releasing their Heart

releasing their Brain

lightening-Lighting-

my own

-because what if, what

I Want

is proof that i can be more Powerful,

See as clearly,

when i face The World

with tears in My eyes?

And so i’m left with

the gift of

what is

instead of what if.

And what is,

is that the only proof i might ever have

is the Words i type

and the tears i allow to fall as my

keyboard clacks and

I Write On…

“Good things come, and I’m not just referring to riding the buses.” -Lionel Blue Read

Tags

dark, emotions, faith, human, light, the bus, vulnerability

The day bus and the night bus are different.  In the sunlight, people board brief-cased and fresh.  We have a purpose, or the air of one, a destination in mind as we check our watches with a practiced flick of the head and sigh into our Smart Phones.

In the shadows, riders come and go unseen and silent.  We move with a weight, the stench of exhaustion heavy on our sloped shoulders.  Defeat is a passenger on the night bus, and Poverty, and Loneliness.

The bus itself is an entirely separate creature in the dark.  Like the fluorescent fish that haunt the ocean’s unlit trenches, the bus brings streaks of dazzling glow to the sullied and tired corners of the city.  It lures the drunk and tired with light that bursts forth, effulgent amidst dingy brick buildings and parked cars.  Alleyways that remain mired in gloom even in the noon sun are suddenly exposed by headlamps, and people crawl forth like termites from the woodwork, scuttling towards the blaze and quiet community of fellow riders.

I realized, recently, that even when I’m riding next to Defeat, musty and crumpled, I’m sitting three seats away from Hope, too.  I can catch an eye-glimmer from Glee, who is wearing a sunshine-yellow suit and whose jolly-nosed red shoes seem to be tap dancing under the bench.  It might be me who is Sorrow, walking in the trenches of my well-trained Brain, until I look up and see Joy bouncing down the aisle with an alligator-grabber from the Zoo gift shop and the wide smear of a chocolate grin.

At a time when it is scary and uncomfortable for me to Come As I Am, the bus community reminds me that sometimes it is okay.  Evenings right now are especially challenging, as the fatigue of the day wears through my protective coat, and I long to be alone and held all at once.  So as dusk settles in, the bus pulls blazingly, blindingly up to my downtown stop, and my fellow termites and I scurry on board, join this tiny subsection of the Human Community with all its Emotions and Thoughts.  And in a strange way, I am held by this sea of people, even as they are all alone in their own heads.  We are alone, and yet forced to connect for a split second when we stand to allow someone else to sit, united when we hear the giggle of a child.  Whoever I sit next to, whether it’s Shame or Frustration or Happiness, I get to hold a little piece of it for a short time, even if they don’t know it.  And I get to give up a little piece of Who I Am, in the moment, too.  In a strange way I am struggling to articulate, we strangers on the bus share the Weight of being Human until we get off at our stop.

It is imperfectly perfect, this Coming As We Are, this showing up as Human.  I’m going to keep trying it, with Faith that good things come-on the night bus, on the day bus, and beyond.

“It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” -David Foster Wallace

Tags

emotions, faith, Ghandi, Intensity, panicjoy, suicide, voice, vulnerability, war, words

Alert: this post may contain material that is triggering for some. If you find yourself in crisis, you can call 1-800-273-8255, or visit www.crisischat.org for support.

What I know to be true in this moment is that mental illness is like faith.

Some people say they believe absolutely in whatever they believe in, do it blindly and without doubt even if it is something they can’t experience through their 5 senses.  They call this Faith.  To me, Faith is believing absolutely, except when you are doubting absolutely, or when you are somewhere in between. It is having Faith that the only constant is change.  It is absolutely believing it is okay to doubt, and okay to believe, and okay to be in the middle.  Faith is believing, absolutely, that it is okay to come as you are, that you can show up as your True Self, even if you are punished for it.  Joan of Arc was punished for it.  Ghandi was, too.

Mental illness is scary, and full of suffering and pain and panicjoy.  Pain and suffering, both physical and emotional, are subjective; there are pictoral spectrums for people in hospitals to help their doctors and nurses understand the amount of pain they are experiencing, because Words are of little help in accurately describing an internal experience (though for me they are the closest I can get).

Joy is subjective, too, though we don’t like to think about that, because it is a shiny, sparkly emotion that we like to think we can share.  And we can share it, just as we can share pain-but my Sarah experience of Joy will never be experienced by anyone who doesn’t have my Brain.  And the same is true for my Sarah experience of Pain.

And so I believe that Faith is subjective.  My definition of Faith, as described above, is true only for Me in this moment.  It might be true for others, in the moment that they read it, too.  I can only hope, because that would mean that I’m not quite so alone.  And it would mean that they aren’t quite so alone, too.  Because even though my Sarah experiences will only ever be my own, they might resonate with the experiences of others who are Living, or trying to Live.

People start wars because of Faith.  They always have.  People start wars because of mental illness, too-it just isn’t spoken out loud.  And I don’t mean that the people that start them do so because they are crazy.  I mean that wars begin because of fear and lack of understanding, and the fierce desire to stand in Your Truth, even if it means killing someone else who is trying to stand in Theirs.  Mental illness is biological, chemical, Real things happening in your Brain.  And it is, for me, being surrounded by fear and lack of understanding when I am Living My Truth, and being punished, sometimes, for Living In It.

Mental illness is scary to talk about, because when you are experiencing depression, or mania, or anxiety, or suicidal ideation, It is a uniquely You experience.  There are common threads, there are links, there are helpful and unhelpful things to say that are true for most humans when they are in It.  And what I, Sarah, look like when I am in It, and how I feel when I’m in It, only I will ever know.  That’s terrifying.  And that’s where Faith comes in.

My Faith is that, as I continue to show up as My True Self, in my Sarahness, it might allow others to do the same.  That in giving Words to this subjective experience, it might shine the light on the fact that it is subjective, but not unique.  That because I have personally been trapped, I have personally felt the flames, that I can truly “understand a terror way beyond falling.”  I’m on the sidewalk, now, and I’ve done the jumping.

David Foster Wallace understood the flames, too; he wouldn’t have been able to write those Words otherwise.  I wish that he had known, in the moment before he hung himself, that his Words would help someone else, like me, be a little more brave, a little more willing to use my wild trembling Voice.  Perhaps he would still be alive.  Not because I have any delusions about my power or impact, but because what saves me, daily, is people around me modeling bravery through vulnerability so I that I can imperfectly attempt the same.

And so,  as Intensely Intense as I am, today, I am so very grateful that I am Alive, and so very saddened that he, and many others, are not.  And all I can do in this moment, despite the very real risks, is continue to stand in my Truth, to say the Scary things, and to hold on tightly to My imperfectly perfect Faith as I press the “Update” button on my blog.