“I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.” -Ursula K. Le Guin

Tags

bravery, gratitude, light, Living, mentor, storytelling, words

I think the act of living has always been a story for me.  I can’t see the ocean without words cresting in my mind along with the tide, can’t feel the fur of my cats without adjectives coating my tongue.  Words are the pictures, the taste, the meaning in everything.

And maybe this is why, at first, depression was so startlingly hard to bare; it enveloped all the words.  Storytelling takes energy, vigor, light; without it, words dry up somewhere inside you without ever reaching the surface.

And perhaps this is why we still struggle so much with the concept of mental illness.  If you have no language to describe what is going on within you, there is no way to communicate your pain to someone else.  Words make things real.  If the very disease that is gripping you removes them, what is left?

I remember an evening in the Emergency Room, checking in at the registration desk. I was crying, and when asked my reason for the visit, couldn’t think of anything to say. The receptionist kindly said, “I see; you’re sad.”

And that’s just it; depression is not sadness.  I’m not sure how to describe it beyond that-what it’s not.  But in some ways I’ve grown to see that as a gift.

One of the reasons I’m alive today is because someone believed in my light, saw the glimmer of my story even when my words had long been dormant.  This person showed me how to be in this world in all the ways that depression is not.

She showed me it is possible to get out of bed on mornings when panic clogs your throat and it feels like all the awful possibilities are closing in on you.  She showed me it is possible to dance in an emptying auditorium just because, for a moment, you feel giddy with joy.  She showed me that you don’t have to settle for the status quo, that it is possible to innovate with fervent empathy.  She showed me, through her own willingness, what it means to truly be yourself-something I had lost in hospital rooms and prescription bottles, and probably long before.

Depression is not dancing, not words.  It is not connection, not light, not life.  It chips away at who you are, piece by piece, like a strong wave pounding on a rock, until you are a grain of sand lost amidst millions of other grains.  What a gift I have been given, to know that what it is not can prove a daily guide. That my story can continue through the pounding, even when words are harder to find in the swells.  And what a gift that she, by shining her own blazing light, gave me back my own light, my own story.

“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.

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” -Rumi

Tags

change, dark, dialectics, Ghandi, light, Living, the bus, thesamedifferent

It’s the hardest of simple things, and the

heaviest of lite loads,

that all i have to do,

and all i can do,

is put one foot in front of the other,

with my eyes truly open,

and notice the gentle ways in which

i can shake the world,

walking out of my wounded Darkness

and into my own

Light.

“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.

“Take me to the breaking of a beautiful dawn” -The Wailin’ Jennys

Tags

light, Living, mindfulness, poetry

Morning Pages

Dawn thoughts-

Dream murmurings like last night’s leftovers cooling in the fridge,

There in the edges of your sleep crusted mind

Nudging,

Unfolding the brain as when you draw back the sheets and

Place your feet firmly on the cool wood floor-

First tentatively, easing into the hardness of the panels, then

Deliberately,

Solidly,

Taking in the chirping beginnings of the day.

“Can you understand? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that – I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much – so very much to learn.” ― Sylvia Plath

Tags

dark, Emily Dickinson, emotions, light, panicjoy, poetry, skillz, Sylvia Plath

Last night was one of heart-clawing panic.  It was one of those “Evenings of the Brain” that Emily Dickinson knew well.  If that sounds Intense, that’s because it was.  It’s difficult for me to even acknowledge that in Words now that I have a small, expanding window into the Sufferings of this world.  My pain last night was a sand grain compared to the mountains of famine and loss and injustice.  And it was still Intensely Intense.

I’ve learned that my Brain interprets the world in big, bold colors, in the shadows that hover between lights and darks.  I feel things in a Big Way-the Intense Intensity.  When I am truly living in my Sarahness, the experience of joy is a physical bursting that has me dancing on the sidewalk, the experience of sadness is a weight behind my eyes that is oceans deep.  It’s a gorgeous way of living, and it’s one that nearly killed me.

I know this to be different from the way many other Brains work.  Last week I stood at a busy downtown intersection, fogged with that empty-tiredness that sometimes comes from truly Living.  My attention was caught by the honking of car horns and swerve of tires that are leaving tread; there was a seagull in the street.  This isn’t uncommon where I live; we are surrounded by Ocean.  This bird, though, was injured, or sick, or both.  He looked like an old man, gray tufts of feathers sticking out haphazardly from the top of his head, stooped like a cane.  And he couldn’t manage to get himself out of traffic.  Over and over I watched as he was narrowly missed by trucks and taxi cabs, would just barely hop flutter out of danger, only to settle for a second and be almost hit again.

Watching this unfold, I also became aware of two men standing next to me.  They had ID badges hanging from their belt loops and ties loosened around their necks, and they were laughing.  “That one sure isn’t gonna make it,” one told the other, nodding his head towards the gull as it dodged a fender by inches.  They chuckled, and then shifted towards dinner plans.  My vision expanded-I saw the bird in the road, these men who saw it and then moved on, the tears in my eyes.  I felt incredibly alone.  My urge was to run into that intersection and scoop that tired soul up, cradle it and comfort it.  I felt angry that these men could find humor in such pure suffering, and then anger towards my Brain that couldn’t-can’t-witness suffering (or perhaps it is more accurate to say suffering I can’t immediately change?) and then move on to the next meal.

The layers of that experience are still unfolding.  I try to describe it because it makes me feel less alone when Words are put on it, because it is true that I have a way of existing in this world that I believe is foreign to many AND familiar to more than is apparent, because it’s a way of validating my Intense Intensity when it is so easy not to.

The anecdote to Panic is moving towards it, turning to face the roaring beast in the eye, staring it down and then welcoming it in.  It’s some of the hardest, scariest work I’ve ever done, being that I’ve spent most of my life desperately trying not to feel my Intense Intensity.  I’m still figuring out what it looks like, exactly, when I make friends with the Beasts.  It’s an imperfect process–thank goodness.  And because I’m newly facing it with my Sarahness, it is Intensely Intense.  I wouldn’t have it any other way…and still I have so very much to learn.

“But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own” -Mary Oliver

Tags

dark, Emily Dickinson, light, Living, Mary Oliver, ocean, skillz, voice, Walt Whitman, wants, words

This is all about Light and Dark.  This is all about Starstuff- the gaps that allow light to shine through. This is all about Words.  This is my Journey.  This is my beginning, again, until my next beginning.  This is my weapon against the “old tug at my ankles” that Mary Oliver writes of.  This is my reminder to myself of myself.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable…I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world” -Walt Whitman

This is my barbaric yawp.  This is me using my wild, trembling voice.  This is me saving myself through metaphor, through storytelling, through the lovely, messy vine-tangle of Words.  This is me returning to a Truth of mine that has been buried underneath hospital gauze and Labels and Intense Sensitivity.

“Everybody will get their wants, when they heartily want.”
-Santosh Kawlar

This is my Hearty Wants List.  This is my road map to my Essence, my Self undistilled.  This is my declaration of my Sarahness.  This is my Opposite Action to shame.

“PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there’s a word to lift your hat to… to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that’s the genius behind poetry.” -Emily Dickinson

This is my Manifesto.  And that is this:

I want to find my Phosphorescence, my marine Glow that penetrates even the blackest of Darks, my Light Within, and hold it tight, and let it shine inwardly so that it may reflect out into the world.