“I trust and accept where I am in this moment. I refuse to be my own judge and jury. I love me in all of my emotions. I respect my journey and trust in my own inner strength. I believe in a purpose, a power and a guiding light within and beyond me. I am enough. We are enough. And in both my joy and in my sadness, I shall choose to shine. Not hoping for a better future or to resurface my current existence; but surrendering to the process, while moving through the seasons, within and about these cyclic moments of rebirth; a willing presence to be that both ripens me into the fullness of now and forges a grand adoration of self and all.” ~ Sam
I am a bit confused. I have been visualizing a diagram in my mind, similar to the cardinal directions of the compass: the compass points of north, south, east, and west. On the right I see obsession, on the left fixation, to the top the future, down the bottom the past. In the center is a circle, indicating the present.
Where in I spent much of my life in one direction or another, now I am practicing living in the center circle. Here is my refuge. Only I don’t know what to think about.
I find what seems to be relief in glimpsing the future of hope; but I know too well even glimpses of the future eventually cause me grief. A suffering of sorts. I find what seems to be release in sparring with the past; yet, I know too, the past is done now, and often is marred in my own disillusion of reality.
I used to naturally, almost instinctually, grasp onto a project or special interest, and here I would leap into a state of retreat. The world around me seemingly vanishing as I rose into a protective cloud of focus and revenue, reaping the sum of the parts I had envisioned in mind, and watching as the product of my creation came to life.
I used to unwillingly dance in the cyclic burden of obsessive thought, tiring myself up much within the first hours of the day with either wishful thinking or dreaded fear of illness and death. Now, this too has simmered in my mind. The tragic demise of self tango I forged through daily, hour upon hour, and wrapped myself in, with ribbons of torture, is missed. Not missed for the pain and agony I felt in doing this to self, but for the routine, the normalcy I created for escape.
The dreaming of the ways it could be and what could be, who could be—there I still slip into the easiest—a psychological and spiritual combination of desire, want, lust, love and yearning all tied into the knot of future that shall not be.
I am searching, without actively searching, for a way to be that requires nothing but the center moment.
A journey that is absent of requiring, in essence, and fills me with completion of self. However, I live in a world of constant wants and needs and unfulfilled dreams. Everywhere I look, everywhere I travel, is a someone reaching or inquiring, searching or instigating. People planning, constantly, for the next moment. People reliving, continually, the past hauntings of life they seem to think are real. And all around I am surrounded by this wild charge of inhabitants who are grasping my hand in an attempt to connect; whilst all about I feel entirely alone and isolated.
There is this burning longing in me, so tender, and at the same time so ravenous in its want, that destruction seems inevitable. I have this glow within that aches and burns and turns me to the direction of naught, repeatedly; this growing passionate flame I want someone to see, to hold, to recognize, to soothe. And still, there is no one.
This is an isolation new to me. A finding of self and of purpose, and a recognition of love of being singularly countered with the unyielding desire to be joined as no longer one.
I think of the moments. Of how to live in the moment, without wandering in any direction.
Though, I do wander.
In so doing, I recognize my humanness again and again. Something that is neither a frailty nor curse. Something that simply is. I recognize my confusion equally. Struggling in the freedom of travel. In the choices of now. In the ache of deep carved out awareness. And as I struggle with the need to connect, I also struggle with the need to protect, to hide in a delicate corner and retreat into self for rescue and reprieve. I hover in this in between space of wanting to reach out and find the connective bridge of recognition and longing to remain untouched and unmoved.
Each encounter in which I am present, I am equally vulnerable and exposed. In some ways, I feel as if a boulder is momentarily slid across to expose the cavernous depths of self. And in so being exposed, I am excavated and explored and evaluated. Then, without effort the boulder is placed back. And upon my return to being, I am neither beneath in the unseen dark nor above observing the gigantic barrier. I am equally not the boulder itself. I am nothing.
I am this searching that doesn’t search. I am this wandering that doesn’t wander. Like the circulating air I feel. Only with a voice that whispers: Find me. Hold me. Love me.
And I am left in the center. In the circle of creation, waiting for the bell to chime. To ring of both completion and beginning. To signal my unification with all and bring me to the someone with open arms who in my presence alone is home.
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After reading this I was led back to this post: Day forty-two: On Leadership. The words helped greatly to ease my mind. ❤
The introduction to this youtube is wonderful as well.
1. Don’t ask me to explain or reason my way out. When I am sad I have already evaluated everything ‘to death.’ I have looked at the pros and cons of my own life and my own suffering. I am no dummy. In fact, part of the problem I am so sad, is because I am so dang smart. I am my worst criticizer and have evaluated all the benefits of not being sad verses being happy a thousand times, and the worst part is that I cannot reason myself out of the sadness and feel happy.
2. Don’t tell me I need a pharmaceutical drug. Chances are, I’ve done my research or tried the drug before. My body is so very sensitive that any chemicals I put into my body cause adverse reactions. I get the so called ‘side effects.’ I am that less than 1%. I am the canary in the coalmine. I am the one you read about that gets the suicidal thoughts from anti-depressants and the one that has bizarre things happening to her body when I ingest foreign substances. I am already affected by the environmental pollutants, the toxins in our water and food, the hormones injected into products, and the chemicals that seep out of most homes. Truth is, I likely would be far happier if I lived in a world that didn’t reek of destruction.
3. Don’t tell me you know the reason for my sadness. More than likely, if it’s not my PMS or PMDD, or the result of an auto-immune disorder, or a variant enzyme, an allergic reaction, a virus or illness, or something or another that is deficient or out of whack, perhaps in my intestines or stomach, then it is situational. And not just the typical situations, like a bad day at work or a letdown. I have learned not to let ‘bad’ days affect me. I have ‘bad’ moments, each and every hour, I have ‘bad’ moments, and I choose to spend my day grasping onto the light and the goodness of the day. Only sometimes, I get tired of reaching and trying. My life is a struggle to fit in, to appear ‘normal,’ to follow the ‘rules,’ to even understand the ‘rules.’ I am exhausted. I am a warrior who wakes up every day with the past day erased, all the previous trials conquered gone, all the accomplishes vanished, and I have to start from square one to try to make sense of a world in which I do not feel I belong.
4. Don’t give me advice. You have no advice I have not heard, read, seen, felt, or experienced. One way or another I have studied what you will say. I have studied emotions and reactions in films, in music, in literature, even in nonsensical jokes and in animal behavior. I understand emotions and I understand my sadness. I read to understand myself and I even study you to understand myself. I know more than you think. I may not know the root cause, but I know that there isn’t an answer you have that I don’t have within myself. Your suggestions of correct verbiage, positive thoughts, rest, fresh air, exercise, meditation, visualization, diet, supplements, and the lot, do nothing more than boggle my brain and make me think you care more about your role as a want-to-be helper than you do about my pain. I can’t be the object of your fixing. I don’t want to be and refuse to take on that role. I am not less than you in my sadness and you do not have the secret key I need. I did not express I was sad because I look to you for answers. I told you of my sorrow because I just long to feel less alone.
5. Don’t tell me what I have to be grateful for. Don’t suggest I make a list. That is crap. To me I am grateful for the tiniest of thoughts, gifts, and actions that most people take advantage of. The near site of the dew of the grass, the soft smell of the fire-painted lily, the brilliance of a child’s laugh, the comfort of my favorite blanket, or favorite song..all these lift me. So much of the world lifts me. Many moments I travel in a world so extraordinary and filled with magic that I thank life for just my essence, to just to be in the midst of such glory. My list of gratefulness is not divided by good things or bad things. I stopped judging the right from wrong, and the just from the unjust, a long time ago. I live in the space in between the extremes of yes and no, and laugh at the ones who think their view is the only view. I can’t see making a list of all that is good without classifying at the same time in invisible ink what is bad, or worse, what others are lacking. I am no less and no more grateful than the homeless man on the street. If he is happy, I am happy. If he is sad, I am sad. To even make a list seems to me pompous and unjust, to single out how lucky I am in such a world of misfortune makes no sense, unless I hold greed as a virtue. Unless I see myself as dutifully worthy based on my profiting and others’ lacking. Unless I single out what is entirely missing from another to satisfy my own growing need for satisfaction. And anything of material I would attempt to scribe as benefit, I would rather break apart into a thousand pieces and feed the world. I don’t believe I can classify what happens in my life as good, bad, tragic, ugly, or beautiful. I only know it happens, and is happening. And for what reason is still to be seen. I know to let go and let my higher source lead. But when I am very, very sad, sometimes I forget how to release; I forget how to let go of the clinging of suffering. I forget I am not alone onto myself.
6. Don’t tell me how wonderful I am. I know who I am. I know through and through. I know I am kind, gentle, sweet, generous, forgiving, genuine, giving, smart, keen, and many other positive attributes. I am not sad because I have lost sight of why I am enough. I know I am enough. I am sad because the world has lost sight of me. Because I long to reach out and connect but when I do, I often feel nothing reaching back. To touch another fully, is all I want. To touch in full extreme, without pretention, want, need, expectation, goal, or outcome. To just touch. I, as I wait in my own self-created exile, as I wait without the sense of feeling another, grow in sadness.
7. Don’t tell me ‘this too shall pass.’ I know the sayings and tons of other random words collected to form reprieve. I am an avid reader and collector of quotes. I am a philosopher, an artist, a creator. I have the heart of a lover, the mind of a composer, and the spirit of a warrior. I am brilliant in my creation, and I understand the ebbs and flows of life. I move like the sea with the moon. I move like the willow with the wind. I am affected by the give and take of the world, by nature, by weather, by other people, events, and tragedy. I dream things. I see things. I experience emotions in extremes, and sometimes cannot tell if I am carrying my own pain or the pain of another. People find me. I don’t know how, but they do. And I am a vessel of sorts, harboring the lonely through the storm. They crawl in with their tears and woes, and their aches leak through me, crushing me to the core. I know everything will pass. And I know still that life is a cycle, and like the seasons, my sorrow will come again. Do not attempt to help me to look forward to the end of my pain, help me to go through my pain.
8. Don’t criticize or mock me. I cannot help how I am. Do not call me ‘overboard,’ ‘too much,’ ‘too intense,’ or the like. I cannot help that I am the way I am. I can often control my behaviors and be the best person I can be, and I do this daily. But my emotions sometimes take over. I don’t know how or why, beyond conjecture, but they do. And the more I fight the wave of pain, the more the pain comes. Sometimes I need to submit. To be in the turmoil, so that the tunnel evaporates and the light comes again. I fret over the tiniest of perceived imperfections in the way I treat others. I judge myself for not being caring enough, attentive enough, or loving enough. I cannot lie without deep remorse. I cannot have enemies. I cannot even hate. I know not this emotion hate beyond the emotion of anger turned deep sadness. All is huge to me. There isn’t a small suffering. I hurt for the tiny spider as much as the buffalo. I long for the rescue of the persecuted innocent as much as the child without parent. I feel and take in such extreme happenings, and know not where to lay my burden down. Just as I spend all day, moment to moment, contemplating how to maneuver in a world that remains unfamiliar, I spend my inches of time trying to figure out how to again release my burden, where this time to bury my woe. Shall it be in words, in rhythm, in rhyme, in the deep wilderness real or the serenity of my imaginations? Will I get lost again in my escaping? Where shall I take this misery and when will I have my fill? Do not criticize me and do not tease me. Do not laugh or giggle your way into a stream of mockery aimed at me. I do not do what I do for attention or purpose. I do not do what I do because I want to. I do not do what I do because I am confused or made wrong. I am perfect in my being. I am just sad. I am sad. I am sad.
9. Don’t abandon me. Do not leave my side, if I need you there. Do not hang up the phone, if I am crying. Do not say you will return, and then not call. Don’t say something, and not mean it. Don’t lie to try to make me feel better. Tell me straight what you think. You covering up only makes things worse. The world is already unsafe with its lies and trickery. I need you to be safe. I need your word to be strong. I need your integrity, your honesty, your truth. I need you to be that light that I am, to prove to me again you are here and I am not alone. If you do this, if you are loyal and true, when my sadness goes, when it is lifted, I shall be at your side with the beauty I am, pleasing you in your times of suffering, and holding your hand in your deepest need.
10. Don’t perceive me as something I am not. Try not to label me. To find the answer that brings you closure. It is not my job in life to fit neatly in a box for your comfort. My moods are my moods, my pain, my pain. My emotion is not a reflection of you, nor a product of you, any more than my happiness. I don’t expect anything of you in your pain and sorrow, so please don’t expect anything of me. Don’t make me your martyr, your angel, or your giving-spirit. Don’t make me the melancholic one or the hopeless creature. I am what I am, and what you create of me is neither here nor there, no less truth than what I create. I need you to try to not see me through the eyes of fear, but through the eyes of love. To bathe me in acceptance and forgiveness. To love me enough in my completion that you in turn love yourself in completion. If you can do that, if you can look past my ‘flaws,’ past the definition and existence of ‘flaws,’ and see into my suffering the very spirit reborn into darkness, soon to be sprung into light, then I shall have hope. If I can see me as hope, I will be hope. If you can hold me as hope, I shall be the very essence that you perceive in your grasp. And we can meet there, in that space between the suffering and hope, and merge, per chance, in that shimmer of a second, as one.
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To read about this image, visit my other blog Belly of a Star.
A spiral of question upon question. Answers seeping out and morphing into more queries. Butterflies that burst, each birthing from a singular, a thousand more flutters; and my mind, this tiny hook to stringed-wing, traveling into a symphony of thoughts.
How I long to be understood. To be held under the stars, in a world, where as hard as I try, I cannot connect. In a world where to be loved fully, is to lose my sense of self in the process.
To live in anguish of ever-present disappointment, pleasure turned agony, and extreme isolation or to give up this sense of self, love the All, and dedicate my life to service.
There appears no middle road.
Abandoned, let down onto myself, and then lifted up above myself. Loving bliss or extreme suffering; while the rest, in form or belief, seem to sleep in a twisted agony of their own.
The one dedicating herself to help the other, when her own self remains in dismal suffering. The one dedicating himself to a cause, when his own ability to feel and be is sacrificed.
If I am not a ‘self,’ then why would I want to be what I am not? And if I am not, then what am I to be?
The souls thinking themselves following or leading; thinking too, the sign shall come. Stepping untied alone into an illusion of nowhere, hoping to find the no one.
To sacrifice my very humanness, the quest dismissed, for universal peace. To circumvent my hollowed out self of sadness and fill it with a layering of illusion undone. Poured into the divine, into God and Goddess form, and perpetually served, sacrificed. All desire dissipated for the All.
Momentarily safe, momentarily comforted, momentarily brought out of self and back through self, and afforded the moments to blend in with the universe. The trees alive. Angel kisses. As walking ghost, carved, in this mystery undone and hidden before the finish.
I am a foreshadowing of future chapters. The ones in which I turn the pages to discover I am back on some island onto myself; victim of nothingness, grander within the nothingness of am, than the world appears in the everything of naught.
Lost in the exact canvas of eternity created through the concept and thoughts of eternity. No self creating no self, until self emerges and claims self again. Spinning in recognition of circle, defined within circle. Parts dismissed and whole returned, and whole dissected into pieces.
Onto my self, I awaken as the dreamer, and then fall asleep twice over, to awaken to the un-free one; cycling through.
Longing for the flesh and flesh alone, the timeless one to fill me complete in his coming. Longing for the one star that can see me.
To bring another one to the one I am not.
Split and made. Two becoming the unified. Split into the two again. The one splattered across the other; neither satisfied and both smothered.
How I long for rescue, as two lay clasped and connected, gasping for the breath of wisdom.
How I long for a hand to be the hand. How I long to know, to no longer be in this me. To hear the whispers behind another soul, a very spirit split open and dispersed and fed to me. No pretty fool. No ugly beast, yet secretly tucked away in between the points of eternity.
To move is to cause the other to shift. To sit is to risk falling, again and again, into the deep of nowhere.
To suffer in this humanness perchance to create the one hand I reach for that is reaching for me.
To suffer in the aftermath of bliss to connect in the river of pain.
Or to bleed out every last sense of me, and become blended in the peace of nothingness.
You are the ever-gladness of my everglades; my gratitude lifted from the waters of greenery; the etching of my soul made new. In you I see eternity; your eyes the light of my lantern, the cave to my longing. To glance but once is to see the distance song awoken, the beat of my heart renewed, the pavement marked with the blood of footprints red.
I follow, and I follow more. Your steps, my steps, your way my way, and reach to anchor what is me into what is you; forging through the sun-swept grasses to lead my soul within the trappings of kindness. If I could ascend, I would, my foot, my hand, like the climber upon the stronghold of rock, lingered there at the sandy-grip between my limbs; how I long to dive and slip into the places you are made, into the very start of your beginning; to see you form and bend in completion, to watch as witness as the light of my world is first sparked.
How glorious if I could be your maiden and set each braided dream upon your lap, as you, like the purest of daylight, move past my flesh, and penetrate me with the grandest of sweetness. I cannot but imagine how dreams become answer, how I become found, without the drumming of your castle, calling me forward, a lone soldier centered and marked, inching her way to the trumpets of your name.
I awake to the morning day, and yours is the face I see. I dance in the starlight, and yours is the wish I make. I mend my own existence with the remnants of your memory, waiting beyond the blindness of what can only be such bitter spell. My darling enveloped babe, I cannot but hope to be nothing less than your maiden, my kisses upon thy cheeks, thy lips, thy buried chest of grandeur. To whittle my fingers into bare bone, to make my flesh peel asunder, my eyes leap, my scars each burst renewed in the aching. For I would die for you a thousand deaths upon a thousand more, and ring my life around the circumference of your calling.
Take me as sweet river, my beckoning, the one that rushes through the caverns of my heart, rupturing as the gold dust glitters upon the landing. Am I but this remainder, this fragile broken shell, scattered on the endless shore, glistening in the break of day; my pieces fallen from the lost sky, my tears hidden in the lines of the encasement? Or am I true, the one formed with your first breath, moved by your ocean, chaliced view rendered through the breaking of bread of two; for you, my darling, my eternal lover of the ever-time, have with first step, with first entrance, with the ancient tumbling of my name, awakened the angel who slept in the shadowed swell. You in your mercy, in your truth, in your direction, have laid way for the dawn of passion so deep that the carving of universe would do no justice.
Can you not see how I love you? Can you not see how I wait within the waiting? How each day that grows becomes centuries spent? Each second a reminder of your destined departure? Can you not see me here, cradling you in your own goodness, lathering you in the light turned and aged as fruit rendered wine? How I carry you through the meadow beyond meadow, in the space of pure joy, and await your coming. For you are my mystery unborn, my dream unawakend, my precious feathered dove gently set upon my threshold; and though you hear me not, as I cry from the hallowed space of light, I shall guard thee in the blanketed folds of eternity, my wishing heart made whole, with the needle that threads through the layers of my woven knight.
I started singing You Light Up My Life, around the age of eleven. I think it was the only song I wrote down the lyrics to and memorized. That, and Away in a Manger. I used to sing songs at the tippy-top of my lungs, squeaking and squealing to anyone that would listen, including my downstairs duplex-landlords, who sometimes brought me indoors for cookies. I could tell when I sang, by looking in the observers’ eyes, that people didn’t think I sang super well or close to on key. I could tell they thought I was a lonely child searching for attention. I could tell that they were smiling in an attempt to help me feel accepted. But I couldn’t say all that. I didn’t think to say it. I didn’t know that everyone else, or most everyone else, didn’t think like me. I figured we all knew what was being unspoken. That we all just pretended we didn’t.
When I sang my heart out, I slipped into a fantasy world. I leaped across time and stood on stage. I imagined refuge in a bountiful light. I imagined being lifted and protected and seen. The song itself didn’t free me; nor did the audience observing. What freed me was the freedom I was—the capacity to be me. What trapped me was the realization that all about me others weren’t free.
There was a time where people approached me for my light. They were drawn to me. Something about me pulled them in. I know now it was and has always been Spirit. Then I did not know, and I didn’t wonder; I thought everyone had this; I thought everyone heard God and could see through people.
I remember going to the church around the corner, a Catholic cathedral where I never once attended mass. I was drawn there, at times, the little girl I was, with her un-brushed hair and with her big searching eyes. I would swing on the monkey bars in the church playground over and over, until my hands blistered. Then, if I hadn’t already entered, I’d walk quietly into the empty church and just breathe. I felt safe there. I felt connection. But I didn’t know why. The candles, the light of the candles, they spoke to me, as did the colors of the glass windows and the movement of sunlight through the grand space. I wasn’t frightened. I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t anywhere. I just was. Sometimes time stopped and I traveled into the future where I would walk in as full-grown woman and be, with the others, I would be.
I wasn’t a religious child. I wasn’t even spiritual. I was magical. I believed in magic everywhere. I believed everything, each and everything. I believed in everyone around me. And I loved everyone. I trusted them. I gave myself freely: my attention, my time, my love. I had an over-flowing abundance of love. And I was me. There wasn’t anything about me that I had created. I radiated from within.
Something about me, or perhaps something within me, gave me the incapacity to be anyone but me. This gift of being authentic was beautiful. But because I trusted and believed others so greatly and so freely, when they told me what they thought, I believed them. Because if they were beautiful and I loved them and they were perfect, then they must know, they must have the answers.
I believed when they, the others, told me that I was just a child and didn’t know things. I believed them when they said life was hard. I believed them when they cried and cursed what was wrong and unjust. I believed it all. And I began to see that I lived in a world entirely complex in its simplicity. I began to see that I held all the secrets of love and joy, but that none could see them. I knew how to laugh and how to make other people laugh; and I did so without intention or want; I just was joy.
Then came the passing of days, when I learned my joy was not enough. When I learned that my heart, no matter how big, could not make a difference—at least I thought. Soon as my friends grew older, they changed. Their views became more broken and fragmented, their opinions stronger, their hatred taking shape. Divisions were made, as I watched, fingers pointed, sometimes at me, but mostly at others. And everyone started playing this part that didn’t make any sense; except that their ways kept people, for the most part, in an imaginary role of control.
I began to see that love was divided and measured. I began to see that love came and went, as did people. I learned that love didn’t mean love; what some called love actually meant conditions and fleeting moments of spiked emotions of some sort that didn’t feel or look like love at all. I learned that whatever shape I took, I could receive part of this love, that wasn’t love. But since I couldn’t find the other love anymore, the one I held in the backyard during slumber parties and collected, as the others laughed with me, without cause or pause for judgment; since I couldn’t find that love anymore, I took what I could. It never felt right. It felt false from the start. It was false love created by my want for connection and the growing emptiness I had inside.
My actions seemed to define me. I seemed to become who people thought I was. It didn’t matter how much goodness I had inside me; no one could see it, unless they chose to. No one. And when they did think to see the goodness, it was because I emulated them; I showed them a part of themselves they liked, or wished to like. I showed a commonality or I complimented them by my presence or in my spoken words. I collected false-love this way: pretending to be who they wanted me to be in an attempt to connect. To say I played, would be false, as there was no joy in this. To say I fought, would be false, as there was no friction. It was a space and place that I am incapable of defining or marking. For how can I define a place in which everything was false—the only thing real my want to fill the emptiness of falsehood?
This falsehood permeated much of my life, far into adulthood. A falsehood that eventually blinded me as well, to my own inner light. I had to snuff my light to continue to exist. I was given no choice.
I had to extinguish who I was, if I ever wanted hope of connecting. At least this is what I conditioned myself to think. I learned to track the actions of another to determine my next move. I could tell from every flinch, every switch of voice, every motion. Responses were my indicators. Reactions my compass. I stopped feeling inside my own body. I became numb to my needs; everything was masked in my effort to predetermine how to respond to the responders. For I could see in their eyes the judgment, the dislike, the wondering. I could see so much that they wouldn’t ever say. Particularly their thoughts about me, or about the way they perceived me. I knew they thought what they dare not say. I knew there were all these connections going on just in seeing me. I was being categorized and dissected and figured out. It’s not that I thought I was that important, it was that I thought they were. I think all along I knew they were a reflection of me or at least a mirror to my own experiences. I knew we were one and the same, but didn’t know how to define the feeling. And so I would watch, until I laughed and joked, trying to squeeze the joy out of someone whom had seemed to forgotten where he or she put it.
Mine, my joy, was always there, right in me, never gone. Even with all the poured in sorrow, I had this joy. It was always growing and blooming. There was always hope. It seemed no matter how much the others responded in a way that carried the potentiality to sting like thorns, that I still kept my hope. There was this unstoppable faith. Something in that song about the light through the window, about the light itself; I knew this. I saw the light n my dreams and I heard light in the whispers. I knew my destiny. I knew my calling. But this too, I was often told was wrong. I was made in form divinely perfect, but undoubtedly I frightened people. And this brought me to a place of confusion, so very great, I dare not venture there even in thoughts and rememberings.
For how could I, one held by the angels and light, have been so terribly flawed? And why did all around me seem to be such blindness? I searched and searched as a child—in the trees, under the school buses, in the grassy fields—for reprieve. I slipped into my imagination. I hid in the shrubbery and shadows documenting my own thoughts. And I came to the conclusion I was someone made wrong; though even this, deep down I knew to be untrue.
In time, I learned to conform. I learned to tuck away the voice of truth and the rays of light. For I believed the misery of disconnection to be far worse than hiding my light. And so I hid, for a very long time. And though I was a keeper of the light, it dimmed.
And here the dark found me. So very freely, as if beckoned by the very ache of my soul. I walked forsaken to my self for decades. I learned, through my mind, to hear the lies before the truth. I heard the negative talk, and I collected this, for if I did not believe them, I could not be with them, and then I would have to be alone. In order to connect, I had to believe what others said about me. If I believed in my light and my angels, and in my very soul, than I would be without the company of humans. I would only have the invisibility of my hope and joy—and alone whom would I share anything with?
Eventually, the lies became my truth. My whole truth. I was what others created me to be. And then a shift happened, in which they were what I created them to be. I began to see like other people. I began to believe the lies. I began to think that yes, only my point of view counted. That yes, I am in control of my world. And yes, I am the most important and special. I began to be a love-leech collecting falsehoods. Love, love, love ME! I demanded. Love me through validation. Love me through listening. Love me through answering back how I expect and want you to respond. Outcomes became my life. Hope became my misery. I latched onto the yellow brick road of illusion. I thought, if I was just good enough, and right enough, and had all the answers I would WIN! I would be LOVED! This is what I was taught. This is what was walloped into me. This is what I ATE because nothing else was offered.
Until the pain of emptiness became so great that I knew I was wrong. I knew that life was not meant to be like this. I knew somewhere inside my little girl protecting the light was dying to come out.
For me this has been my greatest gift: my affliction.
My very agonizing pain was what set me free. The very discomfort that kept shouting within of the falsehood was my greatest joy. I was given a lantern since birth. And I walked four-decades pretending I was not, in hopes of gaining false love.
And now, as I step back, very much the little girl I was, with my lantern bright, I see I kept this light hidden for a purpose. I suffered for a reason. I suffered because everyone else was suffering. I didn’t retreat because I was so different after all. I just retreated a bit later along my path. I just retreated knowing I was retreating. There wasn’t anything different about me, except I was born awake. I was born with the affliction that is both my teacher and my cross to bear. I was gifted the wisdom at a young age, and through this affliction I was formed and made, through this affliction my lantern was fueled. I see this clearly, more clearly each moment I am here.
I see that we each have these lanterns, and that for some of us it hurts more to hide them. But we all have them. For some of us we know we are hiding them: this is the affliction.
I see now that I am struggling to turn up the lanterns of all, when all I need do is turn on my own.
In so many ways, in every way, I am that little girl, with her joy, with her lantern strong, standing on the hillside and beckoning my friends onward. Only this time I can see. I can truly see. I know now my once perceived greatest weakness is my greatest comforter. I know my need to be love, my need to shine, my need to be free is the only need I ever choose. I know that in my affliction I am made whole. I know that in my wholeness I honor each and every soul. For in the embracing of what has always been and shall ever be, I have embraced the world. I have embraced the light.
Everyday Asperger's 