A Glimpse of Sunlight (*NEW*)

A Glimpse of Sunlight

Rain falls in torrential downpours

Thunder and lightning

All night and all morning long

The deep gray dark outside

Reflected in my mind

Body

Heart

And soul

It feels like it has always been this dark

Like it will always be this dark

Even though I’ve been here before

And I know it never lasts forever

“This too shall pass”

The dark is so pervasive that it feels permanent

This time

Every time

But then…

A tiny glint of sunlight peeks through the gray

Slowly growing

Until it shines so brightly it’s almost blinding

My eyes blink, unaccustomed to the light

Raindrops glisten on the window screen 

Like stars in the daytime

And in my mind

Body

Heart

And soul

Light returns.

Hope returns.

And the feeling that maybe

Not now, but eventually

Everything will be okay. 

Made of Love (*NEW*)

Made of Love

All my life, I have loved Deeply Fully With my entire being

When I was 15, you told me I was wrong

“You’re too affected by this”

“It’s not a big deal”

“It’s just a game”

(The game of baseball, which was my source of life energy, the fuel for my soul

And the first deep love that taught me everything I know)

So I stopped talking about it

To you, to friends, to everyone

I understood that nobody would understand

So I kept it inside

But my love is too big to hold inside

And I was not wrong

You were wrong.

But still to this day, your words persist

And I struggle to talk about

The things that are most important to me

Because I know that like you, people won’t understand

They will tell me that I’m wrong

That I should stop, or turn it down

That I should love less (as if I could)

And still that love grows inside me

Until it can’t help but explode out

And only now am I finding my people

Who understand how deep it goes

Who understand that even though

It may not look like what society teaches us “love” is

It is still love

And it is a deeper love than most people will ever experience.

All my life, I have loved this deeply.

People tell me it’s too much

Life experience tells me it’s not enough

And still I keep loving

Loving hard, loving strong, loving deep

It’s all I know

Maybe it’s because my brain is wired differently

But it is the deepest, core, defining part of what makes me me.

It is my greatest strength

It’s what I have to offer

It is my superpower

And I love it

No matter what anyone says

I will continue to love

Hard, and strong, and deep

Even if it’s too much

Even if it’s not enough

Even if people understand

Even if people don’t

This is when I feel most fully myself

This is what I return to when I’m floundering

To feel like me again

This is what I can do, and give, and be

This is what I love most about myself

My favorite thing about me

And I will never stop.

This is my superpower

The best part of me

It is what defines me

All my life, I will love

Deeply

Fully

With my entire being

This is who I am.

Untitled (*NEW*)

Untitled New Poem

I decided not to be a psychologist, therapist, counselor Because I can’t keep other people’s big feelings from impacting my own But now all my friends struggle with depression And I’m the one who always pulls them back from the edge And sometimes all of them come to me at the same time I have extreme emotional empathy And I’m hurtling towards burnout But I can’t stop Can’t take a break Because I love them, and they need me, and WHO ELSE will be the one To talk them off the ledge and keep them here I’m so afraid of failing That I won’t be enough this time That I won’t be able to juggle all of them at once Or I’ll crash and burn before I can keep them all from falling I’ve done this SO. MANY. TIMES. Why does everyone always come to me? Don’t get me wrong, I’m honored And so grateful that they trust me Like I must be doing something right Even though I don’t know what I’m doing, and it’s all instinct And reacting to emotional cues With emotional empathy And compassionate empathy (the need to DO something to help) And this is something I can ACTUALLY DO (And maybe something I’m actually good at?) So I can’t stop won’t stop refuse to ever stop Even if I go down in spectacular burnout flames Because I need this as much as they do And that scares me the most.

Musings: On (Un)masking

I just had an epiphany in the shower, so I had to come write it down before I can sleep (so I don't forget it), even though it's 1:00 am and I have to get up in 5 hours.  Hopefully this will be somewhat coherent, but if not, that's why!

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this in here before, but I'm recently self-diagnosed autistic.  I was having a conversation with a friend earlier tonight about high school, and masking (if you don't know what autistic masking is, look it up!) in high school.  I mentioned that I was very heavily masked throughout high school, and that thought continued into this:

I started really masking in middle school.  Nobody "got" me, so I stopped trying to explain myself, and just started hiding all the parts of myself that people didn't understand.  But what I just realized is that a lot of people mask to fit in.  I didn't mask to fit in.  I masked to not stand out.  I essentially made myself invisible, and I did it REALLY well.  I spent all of high school, and a lot of my life since then, being intentionally invisible.  But now, as I'm starting to try to unmask, I'm noticing that it kind of backfired, because I am really triggered by being - you guessed it - invisible.  When my kids ignore me when I talk to them (I mean full on ignore me, like don't respond, or look at me, or acknowledge in any way that I'm speaking to them), I immediately react with anger.  There's no buildup, I just explode right away.  For the longest time, I've thought I was a bad parent for not being able to control my reaction enough to at least say it nicely first.  Now I understand - it's TRIGGERING me.  I spent so long trying to be invisible.  Now all I want is to be seen, and accepted, and loved for ME, for who I really am (whoever that is).  But I don't know how to do that, or even to convince my brain (which I've trained so well to mask for invisibility) that I am worthy of that, or that anyone even would, or COULD react to me in that way.

I've been really struggling this weekend with my brain spending every moment that I'm not actively engaged in conversation with someone trying to bully me into believing that everyone secretly hates me, and rehashing everything I've said or done that might be perceived in a negative way over and over and over again.  I'm pretty sure this is all related.  My brain has been SO thoroughly trained to make me invisible that when I do anything that would counteract that, anything that would lead to me being seen, noticed, PERCEIVED...it rebels against it.  It's trying to protect me the only way I've taught it how.  And while that served its purpose in middle school, and high school, and at various points along the way since, it's the opposite of helpful in this unmasking journey.  

I really believe that this might be the biggest hurdle I face in unmasking, and I feel like I'm constantly taking two steps forward and three steps back with it.  I don't see it resolving anytime soon (my brain is SO stubborn), and I'm not sure how to retrain my brain when this is so deeply entrenched.  But I do feel like realizing and understanding this is a breakthrough of sorts.  It's the first step to changing it.  So I'll keep trying, and maybe one day, my brain will allow me to drop the invisibility cloak for good and be seen, accepted, and loved.  Maybe.  In the meantime, the struggle continues.  Unmasking is hard. 

Tangible Proof: An Anxiety Poem (*NEW*)

Tangible Proof: An Anxiety Poem

"It will be okay.  Everything will be fine."
How the fuck do you know?
You can't see how this ends any more than I can
So your empty words mean nothing
As I spiral down
Down
Down
Kicking and screaming into the darkness
Twisting tighter and tighter to the brink of explosion
One single point of focus
The answer I need
Somewhere out of reach, beyond the dark.

Trapped in a room with no doors
Or windows
I frantically search the walls with my fingers, seeking any little crack
Through which a tiny breath of air
A tiny hint of secondhand proof
Might trickle into the desperate cyclone of my mind
And buy me a few precious seconds of respite
Before it consumes me completely.

But even if I find that crack
And catch my breath for just a second
The effect is temporary, fleeting
And the swirling vortex quickly swallows me again
Desperately seeking the only true solution
The ultimate resolution
Because anxiety requires tangible proof to stop.

(Note: This poem was inspired by a truism that I stumbled upon in conversation with a friend, which ended up being the last line of the poem.  I wrote most of this back in September, when my anxiety got really bad.  Things have been much better since then, but the unfinished draft was driving me nuts just sitting there for 3 months, lol, so I decided to go ahead and finish it.  I'm not totally satisfied with how it turned out - it feels clunky to me, like I can tell it was written at two different times.  Maybe I'll come back and tweak it next time my anxiety flares up.  For now, at least it's finished!)

Musings: On New Years

 New Years has always been my favorite holiday.  I've always loved the feeling of a new beginning, a clean slate, where no matter what happened the previous year, anything and everything is possible.  There have been a couple of exceptions, when I've had a really good year (2012 and 2015, I'm looking at you), and I didn't want the year to end, because the new year couldn't possibly measure up (and in both cases, that was absolutely correct), but for the most part, I look forward to New Years every year.

Until this year.  It's December 27th, and I am having extremely mixed feelings about New Years.  2022 has been a generally craptacular year, but it's had some really important positive moments, too.  For the past couple of days, I've been trying to sort through these emotions I'm having about New Years, and this morning, I stumbled across a facebook memory that made things a little more clear.  This is from 6 years ago, December 27, 2016.

2016 was a really horrible year, especially for my anxiety.  It did not let up until the very, very end, when the clock struck midnight, and the year was finally over.  I remember getting angry when people would say the year was "almost over" in those last couple of weeks, because the way that year was going, it was "almost over" at 11:59 pm on December 31st, and not one minute sooner.  I feel like a lot of people learned that lesson that year (which was validating to me, as I'd learned it YEARS before, and felt like people were always dismissive of my "paranoia" - but "it's not paranoia if they're really out to get you"!).  But what struck me about that post today was something different: the difference between 2016 and 2022.

2022 hasn't been great for my anxiety either.  But 2016 was PREDICTABLE.  In 2016, the anxiety was so prevalent, and so constant, that I knew beyond any doubt that I needed that year to END.  There was NO part of me that wanted it to keep going, because it was consistently doing the same thing over and over.  2022, on the other hand, while there's been a lot of bad stuff, and a lot of anxiety-heavy days/weeks, hasn't had quite as consistent a pattern.  Despite all the crap, I've been on this crazy journey of self-discovery this year.  I'm learning so much about myself, understanding myself better, and connecting with amazing new friends who really GET me.  I'm returning to parts of myself that have been buried for SO long, parts that were once integral to my identity, and are becoming so again.  I don't want that to end (and I know logically that a new year doesn't mean abandoning everything from the previous year and starting from scratch, but the symbolism of a new beginning is SO strong for me that it kind of feels like that).

Also, 2022 feels unfinished to me.  There are a lot of loose ends that won't be tied up by the end of the year, and I don't like non-ending endings.  Again, there's no logical reason why a new year would necessarily mean that those threads would be cut and never be able to be tied up in the future, but the symbolism of New Years is SO deeply rooted in my psyche that it does feel that way to some extent, and that makes me uncomfortable and a little anxious.  I'm not ready to cut those threads.

I also feel like I'm going into 2023 completely blind.  Some years, I have a strong gut feeling that it will be a good year (2012 and 2015, I'm looking at you again), and when I do, I'm always right.  Some years, I have a gut feeling that it'll be a bad year (2016 and years that end in 9, I'm looking at you), and when I do, I'm always right.  Most years, I don't have a gut feeling at all, and this is one of those years.  If I really focus, I can sense a generally positive feeling about 2023 WAY deep down...but it's very quiet and subtle, and it's not strong enough for me to trust it, because if I have to look that hard for it, it feels forced, and not like a true gut feeling.  There's so much that could be amazing about 2023.  And there's also so much that could be a complete disaster, worse than 2022, 2016, or any one of those years ending in 9.  It could go either way, or both at the same time (or neither, I guess, I don't know).  I just feel like I have no idea what 2023 is going to do, and that leaves me feeling unsettled and a little anxious.

Only time will tell what 2023 will bring.  But in the meantime, my feelings about 2022 coming to an end and 2023 beginning will remain a mixed bag.

September 11, 2001

 September 11, 2001

Bright blue sky
Sun shining
Golden silence

CRASH!
Shattered silence
Shattered lives
Shattered hopes
Shattered dreams
Shattered.

The Aftermath
Gray
Smoke
Screams
Debris everywhere
Dust fills the air
No room to breathe
A city stifled
A nation stifled
Freedom stifled
Snuffed out by the flaming ash
The foundations
Of a nation
Shaken to the core

(*Note: I wrote this poem at 10:35 pm on September 11, 2001.  I was two weeks into my freshman year of college, my first time away from home.  Thousands of miles away, worrying about friends and family members in NY and DC.  This event absolutely shaped my generation, as we ventured through the cusp of adulthood in its immediate aftermath.  I feel like this poem is one of my better ones, especially considering that I was only 17 when I wrote it.  Today feels like the right day to share it.)