I am thankful for much, despite the ups and downs of life. Thankful for my intellect and strong spirit, especially, and for the earth angels that are always near—the people in my life that inspire me and hold me in their light.
I am calling all light workers today to send me some love. I can’t figure out what is happening, except that I must be under some type of psychic attack or advanced, warp-speed spiritual growth.
It isn’t so much the circumstances themselves that are the cause of pulling me out of equilibrium, but the constant bombardment, one after the other of occurrences. It seems once I get my head above water, another event occurs.
I went on my knees in the late spring and begged in prayer for direct change, for concrete soul transformation, regardless of the cost. I was, so it seemed, at a stagnant level of pure bliss. Theoretically, I suppose I could have remained here, in this state of zen. Yet, I felt detached from humanity, and this rumbling in my spirit ached to do more…
I know better than to beg in prayer. Seems, if it is a true desire from the depths of me, from my light, I always get what I ask for. Truth is, it is also always in a much greater and fantastically bazaar way than I ever imagined.
Lately, I just am bewildered by my circumstances. I am not without hope. I am still clinging to the light. Yet, I am definitely forlorn and feeling abandoned. I keep pulling myself up, keep getting myself through, and more and more keeps coming at me. In the last day and a half, I have had a severe falling out with a close relative, a serious conversation with a dear one about the potentiality of ending our connection, the experience of over hearing a close friend speak poorly of me, and now, before four am this day, my dog attacked by something wild in the backyard.
In the last weeks, I have been to the ER five times, hospitalized, accused my doctors of inventing my symptoms (after being diagnosed with POTS syndrome by a cardiologist), had little to no sleep, been in the process of selling a house, and on and on.
I have been depleted in all forms. Last night was my first “good” physical night; I could feel myself progressing towards “normal.” This morning I awoke discovering I had five hours straight sleep! A blessing after two months of being unable to sleep much at all.
I was hopeful. For about thirty minutes in this early, early morning, I was hopeful. Now I have a hurt dog in her crate trembling, and I am wondering if this too, isn’t me. Attacked in the dark repeatedly by something I cannot recognize or see.
I have been struggling with issues of the heart, both physical and spiritual. I have been to the emergency room five times and hospitalized for five days. I am still in a state of limbo, waiting to hear back about an appointment with the specialist. In time, I will collect my thoughts, and share more of this ordeal, one of the darkest nights of my soul. For now, I am leaking out bits of my own truisms. Here I have collected a few that have come through the echo of my heart ache. Much love to you. May you know I know your suffering and celebrate the life and light that is you.
I am tired of being misunderstood, seen and then unseen. I don’t know how to walk in this world. I don’t know how to be. Every effort is squashed. When I jump, I jump too far. When I reach, I reach too far. I don’t know how to stop, what I never knew how to start. It seems the only thing I know how to do in this crazy life is fall, to cry, to crumble, to be absolutely demolished despite my efforts, and to then pick myself back up and carry on. Nothing is simple anymore, and never was, and I long for that faraway place beyond complexity, where my mind is still, the ocean my very soul, carrying me in union cross the waters of tears.
*
Do you ever feel like your life is stuck in the second to the last chapter of a novel? You have reached the climax, emotions are on overdrive; you are about to unravel and discover all the truths that came before the foreshadowing, to behold your destiny, and at last reach your conclusion—the hero’s quest complete. When BANG, all the pages are torn out, the words blown away, and you are left hovelled in a puddle of nothing, wondering what happened to your story?
*
I am tired of people loving the parts of me they like, the parts that reflect them, the parts that bring them this self-created false comfort. I want to be loved in fullness, to a degree that has been lost in this world of dictated dangers and frailties. I want to be upheld for my goodness time and time again; not repeatedly told how I should mold and conform for another. I’m so busy trying to understand the complexities of bending for everyone into a shape they need in order to be recognized as worthy, that I get lost in my own self, searching for the light I was born with, a light I want to shine, at all costs, despite the blinding stares from the opposition. Cruel world, stop trying to make me into what suits you and criticizing me for what doesn’t. I have no limitations beyond the reflections pounced upon me.
*
I refuse to be happy when I am not. Covering up what we are in the moment is the cause of the destruction of this world. So much fear of being and feeling the uncomfortable. We have been taught to avoid with all cost the inevitable state of sadness. Sadness is okay. It isn’t scary. It isn’t wrong; and it’s not meant to be celebrated or snuffed out of existence. It just is. This place we call home could be marvelously better, if we each just embraced ourselves as is, in the illusion of flaws and failures; and like the emotion of sadness, if we just let ourselves be at a level state, beyond good and bad, right and wrong, then the whole of us would be free.
*
I love and respect myself in all my emotional states. None is better or worse than the other. All is a sea of me, intermingled and mixed; none is in and of itself, able to be extracted, labeled and classified. Each is a part of the magnificent whole of “We Are.” Each to be celebrated in their unity; reached in their effort; touched for being.
*
And she cried out, “Open your eyes and see, awake to the truth of you;” the only problem being that she no longer existed to convince them that their eyes were closed, no longer desired to point out the illusion of distraction, of trickery, of falsehood; all that she was in totality only wished to be free and wild and open; only the others, the ones with the imaginary views, they trapped her in their ways, making her believe she was the one forever asleep.
*
People aren’t blind. They are satisfied with the view. They forget what rests beyond the horizon. They forget that the eyes can’t cry for what the soul can’t see.
*
I loved you ’till the hollowed part of me emerged, and I saw myself emptied; in recognition of this absence, I wept for my return, only to find that you had filled the last of me; and all that remained was this broken shell of the girl I once was. I stand now, a woman formed in her dignity and gratitude, a woman thankful for whatever life was bled out of her; for in the weeping of red I was torn back into whom I had always been—the strength turned two-fold from what was lost and again found–a warrior rebirthed into existence.
*
Starvation and deprivation are two different things. One can be starved and not recognize the hunger, the pangs masked by preoccupation, but once one recognizes deprivation, a dying thirst erupts that cannot be quenched nor ignored. With starvation the soul slowly withers in unknown solitude. In deprivation the spirit calls out to be filled, to be watered, to have the life waters returned. I have often been starved for love but it was not until I awakened to my own deprivation that I knew what was missing.
Some days I see lots of things, in beautiful pictures, pieces of floating loveliness, and I like to piece together what I experience in visual into a collaboration of words that rings cohesive wholeness into my interior being. This is this day’s quilt:
* When I doubt my worth and question my way of being, when I think I am lacking or not acting or responding in the right manner, I remind myself I am judging self by some pre-established norms I have attached to, that I am indeed honoring someone else’s deemed truth to diminish my own light. I cannot be all things to all people. I cannot even be all things to my self. Yet, I slip, time and time again, trying to honor this place of perfection that I know exists but cannot materialize in such a world made by man. It is here, in my troubled state of doubting my worthiness, I often pull closer to my belief in a higher source, and hold fast to the truth that I am established and deemed worthy in my humanness brought to life through spirit. That I am enough in the exact recognition that I want to be more, that I want to be better. That I am everything in my suffering to strive to be that which I know resonates in my heart as truth and love. Here is where I must let myself slip further, back into the place of wholeness, before I was birthed into this world, a place filled with mystery that baffles and complicates the essence of self. Here I must remember, in the inside of my being, that I exist as purity, and without a doubt remember as well that my very questioning of adequacy demonstrates the depths of my passion to be good.
* The world has taught me to hide my dark side, to shine a façade of joyful-bliss and positive being. I have taught myself that no such existence of positive being is found, for I am not the parts of me divided: the good, the bad, the worthy, the unworthy. I am me in completion, in all my states; and no state is fluid in consistency, just as no state is stagnant or definable. There are no lines and boundaries inside of me. I cannot flag who I am as worthy of exposure or unworthy of veiling. For I am ever moving and ever changing, a wave that cannot be captured outside the oceans, outside the element of I am. I have taught myself to shine in all my travels. There is nothing about me I need to keep undercover. For to think something of self must be kept secret is to honor the practice of hiding. I do not exist to conform to the rigid guidelines created by the act of the masses’ ever-changing clutching of the illusion of normalcy. I exist to be the only way I know how: in the totality of self.
* Every time I meet another female with Aspergers, and peer into the depths of her genuine-loving spirit and grasp the miraculous complexities of her pondering mind, I fall in love with my self again and again.
* I go to a place so dark and dismal that no one can reach me there. And in this place, I cannot find my way out. In this place I cry, either inside or outside, more afraid of the whys and reasonings of the experience than the experience itself; for it seems there, in this place, my thoughts are a strange shovel, so that with every passing reasoning I dig myself deeper in, until I am lost. It is an extreme place of isolation and loneliness that no one, absolutely no one, can understand, unless they have been there. And it is a place that seems so far away when it disappears: as if it exists in a distant land I never belonged in to begin with. At moments it seems I will never return, but then it comes again without warning, like some ghost that steals my soul.
* Freedom arrived when I recognized that my heart is pure. Freedom entered when I dislodged the words flaw, imperfection, and normalcy from my reality. Freedom stayed when I embraced my self and silenced the haunting voices of strangers’ unfounded truths. Freedom grew when I accepted that to love myself in completion was the definition of beautiful.
an afterthought…
You might be an aspie if you type something as simplistic as ‘xo’ and then wonder, in depth, if the person reading your markings will assume you really are hugging and kissing them in a non-platonic way; so to avoid confusion, you delete the ‘xo’ and replace it with ‘blessings;’ only to find yourself questioning if, in fact, the word blessings might be offensive to someone who does not believe in a higher power or the ability to bless. Thinking perhaps you might be perceived as a person that is placing her beliefs onto another, the word ‘blessing’ vanishes, and you choose a safe word that likely won’t offend anyone, or lead anyone to question your motives. Then, in the act of choosing this alternative way of expressing self, you question your seeming inability to be your true self, because you are so wrapped up in what others would deem ‘people pleasing.’ This all occurs together with the recognition that you aren’t ‘people pleasing’ at all, but indeed aiming to be as authentic and true to yourself while contemplating all the feasible ways your words will be misinterpreted because others have attached to preconceived norms of right and wrong….
(How can something be an afterthought? I don’t get that..you are still thinking…it doesn’t come after thought, it is still thought. lol)
“Most days on my newsfeed for my like-page on a social media network (Facebook), I offer out many so-called ‘positives.’ I make posters with messages about love and light, sometimes about experiences some of us share. I giggle, lol, do the heart thing, poke fun at my quirks. I post silly you tubes. I post my son being handcuffed, a link to my mammogram ‘taking the ladies out,’ and/or teenage puberty puns.. I try to maintain a balance in my life of seriousness, introspection, and humor. Face-to-face my friends and I crack up all the time. I love to laugh.
I have chronic pain and have been in the house mostly for 3 + weeks, but I am getting better. Yay! I am also waiting for a brain MRI result. So yesterday I scanned through posts 321 – 340, the dark night of the soul part of my blog. And the depth of self and spirit brought me solace. Most of what I posted here yesterday was links or poems from there, or from an advocacy piece ‘I Am Elephant.’
What I posted here yesterday was not how I was feeling all at once… I am not that complex and prolific. lol. And not depressed. I am reflective and in that waiting stage of wanting to know health results and letting go of the attachment to the outcome, as I’m sure many of you know well.
It was not my intention to bombard anyone with ‘negative’ or ‘sad’ posts. I just know as a sensitive soul, that when I can see someone else is feeling or has felt the same as me, I feel far less alone. I share my sadness, not to be lifted or to be sheltered or cared for…I have plenty of that. I share because I have been to deep places that some others can at times not comprehend or understand without placing judgment. And I want YOU to know I understand and do not judge where you have been or will be.
I know I will be evaluated and sliced and diced by some, and yesterday was no exception. And in truth, that is still the scariest part for me: Risking my entire self and knowing I will be evaluated. But the illusion of fear will never stop me from shining my light. Never stop my authentic self.
If I need to be melancholic one day, or share melancholic works one day, to shine brighter the next, I shall. And it’s really up to the reader to decide what my motive is. I can’t decide that for anyone. I hide nothing. I know it’s not the current trend….. I know I am not all smiley faces and think positive and be the best you… but I am ME.
I choose you and your light over fear, over trends, over anything. Thank you for allowing me the space to be me. I truly feel we are family.”
****
I still feel more when someone critiques me verses compliments me. In fact, I still feel close to nothing when someone compliments me. I just can’t feel it. I don’t know why. But it doesn’t feel like a bad thing. It feels quite good—like others’ opinions are not who I am. However, when someone is passing judgment in a way that does not resonate with my core being, I feel this intense rattling.
I then go through a process similar to this:
1. Is this truly reflective of where I am at in this moment?
2. What is this teaching me?
3. Is this something I can learn from?
4. Is this of value to my journey?
5. Did I overlook something?
6. Do I need to look at this more deeply?
This process either takes seconds or hours.
I then decide if the gift someone else has offered me is for the betterment of my being or better to return calmly. In the case of anger, I often return it calmly. Not in manners or actions, but by spiritually sweeping the energy away. Thank you, but no thank you.
I visualize, (as I was taught in Buddhist readings), a gift being presented to me with outstretched arms, and me smiling, accepting and saying thank you, holding, and then reaching out my arms and returning the gift, with a gentle ‘no thank you.’
Oftentimes a surge of energy moves through me as I am holding the gift offered that does not resonate with my core being, and I write this energy out with a powerful force.
As I write, I have to shave off the ego, the defensive me that wants to barge through and proclaim: I AM right. I have to laugh at this ego-part, and recognize I am being humbled and growing further.
I notice that when I am concentrating on spreading love and light and connection that the bombardment of judgment about me comes on stronger. It’s a definite one-to-one. The evaluations of me come in huge waves, typically. Not just one person, but several, a building momentum that I find fascinating. Gifts of all sorts come tumbling towards me, one after the other.
I understand, too, through all this, that anything anyone thinks, feels, or says about me is an evaluation; whether interpreted as truth or falsehood, or right or wrong, or good or bad by me, makes no difference. It’s all judgment, at one level or another. It’s all resonating, deciphering, rejecting, and sifting,this process people go through in observing another. I think perhaps I can feel this process though, like tentacles fingering into me. And I think it can be oftentimes discomforting: some alien life form penetrating into my bubble of space to feed into who I am and conclude what I am.
It’s the conclusions that are hard for me to digest—the end product of what is brought out into the light.
I keep waiting to be seen in completion, and keep realizing that this is far beyond the capacity our limited human senses.
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.)
(A photo taken about a year ago, that I believe shows an element of vulnerability and uncertainty.)
Everyday Asperger's 