pain

470: Past Twelve: Aspergers

| Aspergers Girls

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I have to say that twelve was rather easy. I was still very much a child, almost fairy-like, or elven, always into innocent mischief and adventure.

The turmoil hit at the age of thirteen. That is when my hormones shifted and life suddenly became bleak, overwhelming and unmanageable. I discovered a new form of escapism then, a more ‘difficult’ escapism than before; I became more observant of myself and actions, understanding complexities in a new degree that felt unfamiliar and frightening. Before, I would leap into my imagination quite naturally and without pretense. Now, it seemed as if I escaped to get away from some pending danger.

Wherein my world once felt light and airy, full of possibility, and all things magical and hopeful, it now felt dark, dingy and doom-filled.

I didn’t have an active social life for most of my teen years, choosing instead one girlfriend to hang out with and one boyfriend to adore. I had the same best friend from seventh grade until I graduated high school. I never thought to have many friends. I hung out with her, copied her, adopted her taste in music and clothes. I think because I was pretty (but didn’t know it), I easily found boyfriends. I tended to stick with one boy as long as I could or until circumstances forced a breakup. I too, copied what I thought he liked. I tried to appease. But with young men, I found myself continually lost and alone with a separation between us I could not understand or explain. While having a significant other brought me this sense of being less fearful in public and the ability to go out and do more, the relationship also brought me this deep seeded feeling of being complicated, misunderstood, too emotional, and never kind enough.

I could write a full book on the challenges of my teenage years. Here I have attempted to summarize some of the key points:

1. Suffering with feelings of extreme isolation and oddness, but not being able to understand or articulate why I felt this way.

2. Wanting to be like my peers but not wanting to be like my peers. Recognizing their character traits disturbed me, particularly manipulation, game-playing, deceit, cliques (groups of children that didn’t allow other children into the group), lying, cruelty, pretending and gossip.

3. Not knowing why, for most of my childhood, despite circumstances, I had felt happy and content, and that now all of a sudden I felt a deep sadness and a disconnection from the rest of the world.

4. Developing an over-analytical sense of self that encompassed all areas, including how I looked, how I moved, how I spoke and even how I thought and reasoned.

5. Developing a hyper-critical awareness of my appearance, wherein before I could care less. It was an extreme shift from being comfortable in my skin to wanting to change who I was. Along with this intensity of dislike towards my own image, I also did not recognize my own face in the mirror. I had no idea the size of my eyes, my face, my nose, or lips. Nothing seemed distinguishable, and every time I looked in the mirror the image seemed unfamiliar. I consciously did not realize this was happening. I did not understand why I looked at my image so much and analyzed it. I thought I was vain and self-centered, even as I hated how I appeared and assumed no one liked my looks.

6. It did not matter how many times someone told me I was beautiful on the outside, I couldn’t see it, and didn’t believe it. I twisted compliments in my mind. I took a sincere compliment about my appearance and truly believed that the observer was lying, blind, misinformed, tricking me or not educated.

7. I did not trust life. I began to see the unpredictable nature of adults and teenagers. No one around me changed, but suddenly an invisible barrier was lifted and I saw reality more clearly. I had seemed to be coated before, protected in some shield in which the world appeared wonderful and filled with love. I had trusted everyone and believed in everyone; yet now, I believed the world was a scary place, and thought that I had been born on the wrong planet.

8. I didn’t understand my own emotional intensity. I loved deeply. I longed. I was passionate. I was a poet. I was this exploding young woman filled with romantic intentions and the want to get married and have children. I didn’t have any interest in being a teenager. Some part of me wanted to skip from young childhood straight into adulthood. I saw young men as a means of escaping the destitute of reality. I jumped into a fantasy land of tomorrow, when I would be raising a family, and far beyond high school and all its pains.

9. I still trusted everyone. I trusted strangers. I trusted anyone who was an adult. I trusted children. I trusted my peers. I shared from the heart. I told my deepest secrets. I cried openly. And people did not respond in a manner that was beneficial to me. I was preyed upon in all ways: physically, emotionally, spiritually and logically. People could sense I was innocent, naive, and inexperienced. I was very much a victim without knowing I was a victim. I couldn’t tell right from wrong. Because I assumed everyone was good at heart, I assumed everything anyone did was ‘normal’ and ‘okay.’ I didn’t understand that concept of boundaries or self-protection. No one taught me. I didn’t know boundaries existed. I believed people.

10. Concepts that came naturally to other girls did not come naturally to me. I did not understand or follow fashion. I didn’t think to. It never crossed my mind to try to fit in and assimilate to the teenage world. I was still very much twelve inside, even as my body changed. I didn’t start dressing like my peers and learning how to apply makeup until I was ostracized, ridiculed, and singled-out.

11. I didn’t understand sexuality. I had a cute figure and was well-endowed. I did not understand how different ways I walked, sat, or bent over could be perceived as flirtatious and even labeled ‘slutty.’ I didn’t know that I had turned physically into a young woman who men found attractive. Even as they called out names at me, or shouted inappropriate comments about my body in the halls of high school, I didn’t connect the dots. I didn’t know what I had done. And in not knowing what I had done, I didn’t know how to make changes in an attempt to stop others’ behaviors.

12. I copied television and movie stars. I acted like my favorite stars. My role models were a brunette from Gilligan’s Island and a brunette from Charlie’s Angels. And I moved and acted like them, or some other dark-haired daytime soap opera actress. I didn’t know I did this, but I did it nonetheless. I needed a role model, and I found mine on television. Mimicking the traits of sensual and sexual adult females did not add to my ability to fit in; my actions instead served to highlight my inadequacies and oddities. I did things halfway, some very awkward child trying to catch up to her peers and changing body, and not knowing how to even begin, and not recognizing that her subconscious chosen methods were damaging her chances of fitting in further.

13. I didn’t understand my bodily changes and the monthly menstrual cycle. The change had been explained to me in various classes at school, briefly by a parent, and in review of some books, but that information was not enough. I think, in retrospect, I had needed someone to walk me through the process daily for the first year. To explain and reexplain, to reassure me I wasn’t dying or sick, to comfort me when the new and unfamiliar body pains and sensations came, to give me more advanced biological descriptions of what was happening to me. I didn’t do well with change. Change scared me. And here, my entire body was not my body anymore. It was terrifying. I didn’t understand the entire concepts of sex, of the ways I might get pregnant or how to tell if what my peers said was truth or lies. I didn’t understand how things worked.

14. I didn’t understand the concept of holding back. I said things like I saw them and felt them; that is until I was so shamed in school, I clamped up and hid in the corner writing song lyrics in pencil all over my desktop. I didn’t understand social rules and social games. I came across as overzealous, as immature, as goofy, giddy, and somewhat of a ditz. I didn’t understand most jokes. I laughed a lot, out of embarrassment or discomfort. I developed a nervous giggle. I seemed fake to other people, when ironically I was truly myself. People questioned me, especially my facial expressions and body language, and worse they criticized me. If I walked with my head down, with my eyes glued to the floor, my peers claimed I was rude and stuck up, too good for them. If I smiled, I was a flirt. If I avoided eye contact, I was showing disrespect or further showing I thought I was hot stuff and ‘all that.’ I didn’t know how to be. I wasn’t given the tools or the freedom. Everything I did was judged or deemed wrong. I quickly began to surmise the world was a terrible place in which no one was allowed to be herself. And then I concluded I didn’t even know who my self was.

15. I cried a lot. I isolated myself a lot. All the traits of Aspergers were triggered as puberty hit. I was overwhelmed with entirely too much for any child. Not only was my home life unpredictable and chaotic, not only was my body changing, my peers suddenly my enemies, but my own mind was turning against me. I couldn’t tell who I was, what I wanted, and had no idea where to go for help. When I tried to tell adults I was afraid to live, they claimed I was seeking attention, that I was fine, or that I was creating drama. When I went crying to the school counselor, he told me plainly that I was a beautiful attractive and intelligent young lady. And questioned what I could possibly have to complain about. I was attacked on all fronts. No one believed me when I said I felt different and alone. No one believed the deep pain and shattering of my life I was undergoing. I became suicidal, never able to go through with any attempts, but always wondering how it would feel to escape this life. I became more and more of a recluse and found small ways to make my life more manageable. I ate the same lunch every day. I kept the same routine. I knew what path to walk in the halls at school. I knew how to hide. I learned how to pretend to be someone else in mannerisms, dress and behavior. I became that which was nothing but a ghost of me, and I lived that way for most of my days.

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Everyday Aspergers the book available in 2016. Join our Facebook Clan or follow the blog for newest information on book release, including contests and give aways. 🙂 ~ Sam

poetry from my teenage years

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457: Lost Again

| Aspergers Girls

I am so very sad today.

I have been crying since last night. This is a confusing part of my life; more confusing in some ways than the rest, and less in other ways, but regardless confusing. I find myself alone and frightened, and at the same time protected and guided. I am stepping out of self, as I often do, and watching silently, as I process through what need be done. I am certainly mourning; what I am mourning is not as important, as the reason why I am mourning. I am mourning over substantial loss. The what of it? The who, the reasons, the particularities, the details, don’t matter much. It’s all the same pain. All the same tears. This sadness.

I am mourning because if I don’t I cannot move on, and will find myself in this dreadful place of sorrow far too long. And so I weep, not because I am forlorn or even truly lost, for I know soon I will be content, but because I know I need to go through this to get to the other side.

I feel misunderstood as of late, and this has been a constant in my life, this aspect of being misunderstood.

I have moments of bliss, when I connect to what I choose to call my angels or God, moments of profound insight and reprieve. I find refuge in my moments of connection with the collective, the All, the source. But the instances don’t last, and I am left here; or so it seems.

This morning I am feeling very much ‘left,’ broken and left, as abandoned debris. Even as I know this to be an untruth, I still experience it as a strong reality. I still watch as a part of me suffers so, in the regurgitation of fears and missed opportunity. I am not selfish in my dallying in pain, only staking myself here a bit, until the time comes that I can glide out and be alive again—in the light, and in accordance with my higher self.

This state is difficult to maneuver within; alongside the tears and sense of overwhelming despair, remains the long distance hope, unreachable though it be.

I feel misunderstood in many ways. And as hard as I try, this continues to happen. It isn’t that I am flawed or that the other is wrong; it’s just the way it is. And with each time this happens, I break a bit, having exposed myself fully and been knocked down dubiously. I haven’t yet learned how to not expose myself. Despite the little nagging voices that warn me, that tell me how to be, how to play, how to act—regardless I still don’t ‘act’ correctly. At least not in accordance to the mainstream, not even it accordance to the side-stream.

What is it about me that has to be this way? Why do I have to be different? And so complicated inside. So utterly confusing.
My entire life, I have only longed to be loved and understood. Loved in completion and understood in completion. I always thought there would be someone who could do this, beyond my own self and beyond God. Now I am beginning to think there isn’t anyone; that there isn’t a one or a somebody that can take away any of this pain brought on by isolation. And that scares me to a great degree.

I am trapped somewhere now, between wanting to explain myself over and over and be truly seen, and wanting to hide and not come out. Rather than depression, I would name this yet another trial of spirit, another relapse into the negation brought on by the yin and yang of life. I behold myself on that constant pendulum of rebalance. What goes up, must come down. And I am tired of the echoes that leech out of me, their sadness carried to the depths of my pores; then seeped out screaming, as my entire body washes away in ache.

I become so hopeful and childlike at times. I am this gleeful spirited one, dancing in the miracle of life, and the miracle of all, and then I am brought here, into the dark forest of dimly lit nowhere. A scope onto self and self alone, the rest forgotten and folded away, some unkempt laundry tucked out of sight. And I stand here, suffocating in my own vomit of misery: shaken, lost, alone.

I don’t understand it, why this life is this life, and why I am made as me. Why so much has been shown to me and given, and so much taken away. I don’t understand this at all, and the concept of the inability to understand boggles my brain, causing me to loop and decipher the aspects of my own torment. As if, I, as logical being, could master my own self and recreate the concept of reality, pull myself out of the burden of misery and into the sunlight of hope.

I sit here in battle with shadows, or some form of regret, and I play out this scene again followed by again.

Hello, I say to the downcast one, hidden in her corner, huddled and terrified.

Hello, I say again. My lips moving and my voice carried, yet somehow captured and set aflame before reaching the hovel where the child rests asleep in fear.

Hello, I scream, shaking the ground and the space in between us; the separation so narrow a fleck would serve as bridge.

And still she neither moves nor reckons I am here.

Instead she gathers herself as garbage and recollects the foul smell of the world must be her, and if not her, at minimum her own doing.

She is lost again, in some forgotten place, between this world and the next, trying to find her way back to a place in which she does not belong.

453: The Waterdrop

| Aspergers Girls

I have been caught in a rut. In a spiraling stream of water that is heading down the drain. I have forgotten I have the tools I need. I am reclaiming these tools today, at this moment.

Physically I have been sick, very sick. Mentally, I have been suffering. And spiritually I have been fighting some unrecognizable battle.

hospital me

I have found the answers, the passageway, my ‘out’ through careful observation of self, of others, and through letting go long enough to gain perspective.

I had a rumbling of insights that were more disturbing than pleasurable, like bad food on an empty stomach. I keep gurgling up something of self, and pushing it back down, in an attempt to stop this ghastly taste of me from penetrating my taste buds. I have been forging through the forest of reason in effort to find the end, the stopping point, the light into the resting field.

I have had no success in my futile ways. No success in the instigation of force or the instigation of spinning logic.

My only refuge has been in dismissing ego long enough to take a good look at the circumstances unclouded and without residue of pain and fear. To peek through the window as the observer and not the trembling wounded child. This has been difficult. Not an easy task: to dismiss the part of self that wants attention, recourse, answers, and love, and to let in the part of spirit that is complete. I have fought this process with clenched teeth and starving nails.

Essentially dragging my own physical self out of the cave she wished to remain within.

In stepping back and watching me gyrate, from one retched cave of bitter-pain to the next, I have noted the effect. I have witnessed how the deeper I dig in self-pity and remorse, the deeper I fall, and the more I attract further elements to solidify my pathetic state.

I have witnessed how like attracts like, how the more I became what others thought I was, the more I brought to me others who saw me the same.

Effectually, I was a metamorphosis in full swing, becoming what I focused upon.

I was told, while in a weakened physical state, that I was wrong. That I was twisted in my thinking. That I was creating my illness. I was told this repeatedly by doctors. But then the other doctors would come, and claim what illness I had. Explain to me the sickness, validate my physical pain. I could not find any reprieve. For one minute my reality was one person’s and the next the other’s.

I was so fragile in self, from the continuing weakened physical state, that I took on whatever the onlooker perceived me to be. I became a yo-yo in truth, vacillating based on a random output from others. One minute I was up with hope, one minute I was down. Of course, somewhere inside of me I became the judge and jury of right and wrong, of hope and no hope. I took the stimuli and decided within which person’s words were damaging and which were helpful.

Here was my first turn off the course of love: In thinking anyone beyond self could dictate who I was, how I felt, and how I would be.

I got caught up in the concept of time. In the clinging to output and the desperate need of outcome. I began to focus on the end and not the present. I began to fear the future and the unknowns. I forgot that there is no definite, there is not stagnant, there is no way to control anything.

Fear consumed me. And soon the past became my hauntings. And all I could here was the doctor’s judgments. I wanted nothing more than to be protected by the next onset of judgment placed on me. Nothing more than to sleep the time away and wake up outside of the hospital back in my bed with solutions, with the ability to live again, outside the debilitating illness.

My future became my only hope and my past my only nightmare. I was consumed in helplessness and dismal self-fear. I began to reach out for any glimpse of rescue. I began to panic. Terror took over, and I slipped further into the net of ego consumption. I became the feed, the broth, the stock for the over-bearing demolishing ghost of wanting. My desires took over. And everything began to collapse.

In my weakened physical state, having barely slept or eaten in weeks, I began to see everyone as the enemy. And in turn, they began to see me this way. This validated my worthlessness. This fed the fear further. Until, soon, there was nothing I could see clearly. I began running faster from my core self and began slipping further into self-demolishing-demise.

I was never depressed, but I was constantly forlorn and terrified.

None of what I had studied mattered. None of my angels could I hear. And none of my hope could I find.

People I knew found me in this state, and I became in their eyes what they wanted to see. I could feel it happening. A part of me watched as the others about me began to project their fears into me. I became a sponge of sorts, absorbing their negative energies—their shadows. Being an empath since birth this was my natural tendency. And being so weak, I had no will to protect myself from their self-reflection.

I became a mirror to everyone about me. I became sensitive to all their plights and pain. They put into me what I was putting out: disbelief, suspicion, fear, accusations, desperation, rescue. And the others, who were not in this state, the ones that were more content, more or less pleased with their world when they met me, they soothed my soul. I could feel their energy. Still it seemed some giant game of cat and mouse. I was being chased down by whatever mood the cat was in, either batted like paw to a string or scratched and scratched, the post itself.

Soon I was such a mess, I was hysterical. Fear entirely consumed me. I could not help but cry and rage. I exploded like a child. I was helpless in all degrees, every part of me severed. Still the observer of my own self watched from a distant, though he faded in and out now.

At home, the situation did not change. My children were enough dismissed by their own actions, that my mood and altercations did not affect them enough to project my fear back to me. But the adults were not as removed. They were too close to me. And soon I became what they saw, too. They absorbed my fear, and I absorbed theirs and we existed as this interchange of pain, blame, and desperation.

Had I known how to stop, I would. But I could not see the all as an extension of self. I could not see that the poison in me was leaking out everywhere. I was already so weak and afraid, and all I wanted was support, but my own power, my own ability to manifest from my emotional state my physical world, became my own greatest injury. I was limping by my own doing, using fear for a crutch, unable to look and realize the situation.

Soon more and more around me became my enemy, validating my worthlessness and fear. Soon their fear grew exponentially. At a time I needed nothing more than unconditional love and affection, I was judged, controlled, criticized and belittled. All of me became subject of fixing. Here I felt in defense and went into fight mode. Here I let fear entirely take over.

I’d forgotten how beautiful I am.

I discovered myself perpetuating this ‘fear,’ bringing this fear into other friendships and relationships. I began to spill out. And more and more ‘unfortunate’ events transpired. I don’t accept blame for my circumstance. I refuse to self-punish. I refuse to bring further fear into me. I also do not blame others. I spent enough of the past day doing so. I still have a quench of anger and a quench of distaste for those I encountered. But I recognize if others project into me, then I must in theory project into them. We are equal players. A tango exists, and neither is the leader or the follower, both trapped in this movement where fear is the dictator.

I have found my only refuge is in the continual release of all anger and blame; this means for self and others. Holding onto self-punishment or the punishment of others is detrimental.

I have remembered what I have been taught in the last two years, through readings, meditations, dreams, and daylight visions. I have been shown how to alleviate my pain and suffering through the release of past and present, through the release of all emotions not representational of love. I cannot go back and fix what has happened, nor can I make amends for what was. I only can stitch my own wounds back together with the thread of awareness and growth and confirm to self I did the best I knew with what I had. I can treat myself with self-respect and enough love to dispel the fear. I can let go of what will be of the future and what will come of the past. And stop replaying the ghosts in my head, the ones feeding me horrible lies of self. These are in my control: letting go, being in the present, focusing on love and love alone.

This is my life boat. To be. To love. To live.

home me

I have had a hard time of it for certain. In some ways, I know I created the chaos. In some ways, I know others were active participants. Where I end and others begin is still a grand mystery to me. Many a reader has told me I read his or her mind when I write. That I seem to capsulate the aspie experience. But what if they are reading mine? What if we are one mind? What if this is just one giant stream of consciousness, and I’m just a water drop with a voice?

452: Scarlet White

| Aspergers Girls

The agony is torture, pure fire to the soul—the way such solitude is split into ravenous venom, devouring me as leash to the chain, choking the breath of life.

I am that I am. And then I am not. Lost again in some unfathomable labyrinth of thought.

Where and why eludes and leaves a trail of dust dried blood. Help, I scream from somewhere else. Inaudible and out of direction. No path left. No place to go. But inward, where I already dive deeper in the vine of self.

Is it not this place again? The familiar place of no sunrise and no sunset. Where the cold dribbles down the walls of caves, and placates the answers with sweet soft denial. Is it not this somewhere found in the furrowed causeway of my mind’s nimble foresight? My meanderings all leading back to here. Some forgotten spot of eternity missed.

I am a vagrant, a vagabond, a ghost traveler to my own shadow. Unable to distinguish between in and out, what is penetrating and what is piercing, what is poking to release its plundering poison and what is slicing to divide where I begin.

I am invaded by darkness, the soul long forgotten in the night, the enemy out to demolish the light. I am what is not in the way I move without motion and touch without rhythm, stagnant in an air of dismal lies. Here I stand in the place I was, only the place no longer is. Here I stand in the place I was, only I no longer exist.

Wobbling is my fortitude. Swaying, ignited by the dreams unwound, the sword plunged further into the stream of mystery spat open. Coughing up the remnants of who had been. Torn down into oblivion, obliterated and left as carrion to the greedy hunger of naught.

They find me, these naysayers, and call out to the lost sheep I am, with doings undone in their torturous view. I am but what they wish, set asunder below them, and made to bleed about as the rabbit sunken in the snare of despair. My white coat diminished by the scarlet fever set upon me.

Who am I but this child undone, left in the valley of rivers, and blown into the sea of forgiveness? Chiseled and chiseled, as if stone were the heart of me. Made to blend in with misery, to melt in the doorway of pain. Charred to the bone with the starch black of misery.

And here, still, he comes. With his arrow strung across the shoulder of time. His answer seized in the windstorm. Here, still, he is. This gentle grace of knowing naught and knowing all in the splinter of thyme. He enters me as clear day. The light upon my forehead new. The pressing spot of hope spun open into the rebirthing. Come, my lady, he declares, pronouncing me the victorious one, the homecoming of his awaiting. Come, my lady, he mends, his words the golden thread of healing.

And I follow, as blind lady lost in his rapture, spread open by the seams to his glorious name. Come, I do, and trace out my destiny in his waters, dancing in the stream of desert turned dream. At last in the home of home. No longer chased down by the dark ones seeking to erase what has been brought to them as buried treasure uncharted. No longer stalked by the nightingale’s ghostly brother, who pecks out a song of bitter vengeance.

In only this way I am free. In only this way. When the darkness sets upon my soul and the bleeding ceases to flow without follow, and the voice comes, from the seeping of my chaliced tears. Only then I am home. Only then, in the making of self whole.

446: Morning has Broken

| Aspergers Girls

A caring friend sent me an affirmation yesterday, as I am facing some health challenges and uncertainties.

An interesting thing has happened during this process of unknown. After about three weeks of literally freaking out—panic attacks, high blood pressure, rushing to the ER—I have grown weary of worrying about my ailments and future. I have grown plain tired of trying to figure things out, solve, and fret. And in so reaching exhaustion, I have found inner peace.

My body is seemingly out of control, doing all kinds of spastic things. I have some inklings of what might be happening, but for the most part I am in the dark. I’ve had plenty of time to reflect and digest this process, as I have been unable to partake in little physical activity, do to lack of energy and physical limitations, including pain that is further induced when I stand or sit upright.

Through this I have gained further compassion for those of us suffering with chronic illness and conditions. I do say suffering, as ailments truly inflict the mind, body and spirit. There is definitely a suffering period. Though, the suffering doesn’t have to remain, at least not in the mind and spirit, and sometimes, with those two freed, the physical body can breathe easier, in turn.

I saw a poster yesterday about freedom being found in the moment we accept things as they are. I have found this to be true. It is far easier, and far less work, to let go and go with the flow of whatever is happening to me, then to be in constant battle of wanting something to be different than it is. In accepting I am where I am and things are as they are, I free up energy to ultimately heal and regenerate to a state of equilibrium.

I accept I am where I am. Where I am might not be what society dictates as ‘ideal.’ Where I am might not be representative of what my mind has latched onto as ‘ideal.’ Where I am might not be what others would claim as comfortable or easy. But that does not mean I cannot be where I am in total freedom and submission to the process. That does not mean that I cannot claim this experience as ideal; for in the act of choosing this process to be ideal, I am simultaneously recognizing that cause and circumstance do not hold the power to dictate my own inner peace.

I can be exactly where I am, experiencing exactly what I am experiencing, and find this comfort and ease. I proclaim it so.

I choose not to live in the past mourning the activities I was once able to do. Nor do I choose imaginings of what could be or what I could be losing. In actuality I am losing nothing. In embracing this change and transition, I am gaining everything. I am gaining opportunity, open-heart, and open-mind. I am surrendering to what will be. I am surrendering to being.

I just am. I am right here. I am reformed again and again, continually transformed from one ‘thing’ to another. I am the same water molecule in the stream, the ocean, the cloud, the air. No matter the manifestation of my physical form: I am the same. I am movement. I am existence. I am part of the collective ocean. There is no way to detect where a wave begins or ends. The wave is the ocean. I am a manifestation of the whole. And in being a part of the whole, I am already in completion.

I find solace in the fact that I have been through challenge after challenge and always chosen to shine brighter. I acknowledge my divine inner strength.
I have been reformed continually. This isn’t something I have chosen or sought after, but something that is my existence.

Nothing has ever been easy. Nothing has ever been simple, either. But who is to define easy and simple? It’s all, like the rest, a matter of perspective—sensory input, society, environment, biological make up, scaffolding off conclusions, energetic influences, and so on. Events are not good nor bad. What is happening to my body is nothing to be feared. And in truth, nothing is happening to my body. My physical form, as a collective whole, much like the pond, is working in unity to regain balance and function at optimal level.

My body is not my enemy. What is happening to me is not my enemy. The unknown is not my enemy, either. As life is a constant unknown. Any truth I think I have about the next moment is illusion. And any truths I have gathered from the past, illusion two-fold.

I have peace in the fact that I have truly lived. In reviewing feasible ‘future’ avenues of my life course, I can see that if per chance this is the so called ‘end’ of life or ‘end’ of full-mobility, that indeed I have already led a very authentic, love-filled life. I have no regrets. I have left nothing undone. I have been true to my calling, true to my self, and true to my soul. I have embraced life fully, and continue to do so.

I have been to doctors and healers. It seems when one mystery remains unsolved and turns dormant, another mystery appears. I seem to take on ailment after ailment, each wearing a different mask and speaking with a different voice. They are my teachers. I see this. Even as they are illusion, manifested purely by my body re-shifting and seeking equilibrium; I can see these manmade conditions as a force that reveals parts of self. I can choose to make this experience for the betterment of my soul. I can choose again and again to be a student.

I can choose to make every experience anything I wish.

There is true power here.

Wherein I might have very limited access to dictate how my body reacts at this singular moment, I have full opportunity to choose how my spirit reacts. I have true ability to decide to use any of my perceived suffering as a benefit for the all. I can embrace the rest that are suffering and hold them with me, and we together can move as the wave. We together can be the ocean. Much less afraid, and much more joined in hope. Encircled in union, here is where I find the deepest solace of soul.

As I break upon the shore, so you break, endless beauty, rising and falling, again and again.

In Peace ~
Sam

My Healing Mantra

I open my spirit fully in the understanding that all people associated with my healing process are able to assist me. I open my spirit fully in the understanding that I, in my being a part of the collective whole, am able to be at a state of equilibrium and balance of body, mind, and spirit. I recognize that I am experiencing life in fullness and that everything is unfolding as an integral part of the natural flow of nature. I acknowledge the wisdom of nature and the wisdom of my body. I recognize that all possibilities are ever present in this incredible universe. I accept that the spiritual laws of the universe support and love me unconditionally. I accept that all prayers are perfect in their expression and accept all beneficial energy, thoughts and prayers provided to me from loved ones. I am not distracted by the illusion so named fear. I claim my complete healing at this moment and extend this proclamation and understanding to all other beings in need of complete healing. I give thanks to this and to the ALL of us.

(Thank you Pat. F for inspiring me with your light.)

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(A photo taken about a year ago, that I believe shows an element of vulnerability and uncertainty.)