I had a very long, strangely not-so-strange talk with a dear old friend very recently. I’ve also been privy to the privies of a few others through their own very honest, open, naked blogs and letters and posts. I’ve even been blessed enough to recently be able to spend time face to face with deep, thoughtful people with whom I share some of the past, both specifically, and because we come from a similar place, and been able to open my heart and mouth and eyes and ears and hands to them As strange as modern communiqué has become, as seemingly surreal as “reality” can be – it is what it is, and I am in awe of whatever it is that makes it possible for us to try to reach out to each other in these ways. This was my post (here) on Friday, April 21, 2006:

“we've had a strange tragedy touch us recently, and investigating it led me to read the blogs and live journals of some sad, desperate, broken, lonely - to the point of dangerous to themselves and others - people. i wrote this in response to that, as a prayer, as a message to people to ask for help, as a reminder.

A Prayer for Strength and Time

God make me a prayer wheel.
Let me be a drum that hums and sifts the sins of our imagining.
Let me be the etched, worn, scarred and resonant cymbal that sends the pleas of broken people to your infinite ears.
Let me be spun, and sung to, weathered by the hopeful pressure of all hands, each different, each worthy of at least one bid to Heaven.
Let me be a voice,
Let me be a vision,
Let me be a call to fall to one’s knees and weep, open-hearted in gratitude.
Let me be part of the subconscious tremor, deep and rhythmic as the night sky,
that breaks mountains and moves your Heart.

-s.l.lovelace 04/21/06”*

I find that when I am either completely unable to express what’s hurting me, or when i truly need some creative comfort – to feel like i am DOING something – that I go to prayer. I think: what does my heart really desire? What can I really do to try to help, and I am always called to prayer. For me (and I think a lot of people) that means trying to calm myself, find some peaceful place within, no matter how small or temporary, some little inner shelter where I can stand long enough to light one spark, and then I try to magnify that into the best, most loving light/thoughts/intentions I can imagine and pour it into the direction of the sadness/pain/worry/fear, sometimes specific people or creatures, sometimes whole nations, sometimes the universe, if I can stay peaceful that long. SOmetimes specific words come to me, and I write them down; sometimes I write them into songs. [i see that the link doesn't work - i'll repost it in a day or two, along with another i wrote.]

After a few long talks in one long day, and a good long talk with myself, I broke down again, poured out my own misery and found myself once more praying. I wrote two things down

Poor us,
poor beloved Us,
with our flaws, passions,
insanities...
Whatever ‘mother feeling’ there is in this Universe,
call it compassion, call it love, luck or glory,
but shine it on us,
help us to shine it on each other.

I just wanted to be able to hug the whole world and let it cry and then help it clean it’s kitchen.

I wrote this too, I guess always with levee on the mind. Not my metaphorical one either, it is a minute pathetic joke to the reality of what happened when Katrina hit the Gulf... I am haunted, and partly because I believe I should have been there to help. That does affect my metaphorical levee, as does the fear of it happening again. There’s always an ecological thought in my prayers and day to day actions, for the whole world - that is a constant prayer. I also read that my "oldest kid" (16) doesn't know what he'd do if there was a fire (though I think he would know, immediately and instinctually...). I know that might seem odd - for me to worry about that, I mean, but believe it or not, it bothers me that he doesn't swim - nor my little sister. I knew how to handle pretty much any emergency by the time I was 10, and it's a good thing. I worry, though. I can't imagine how actual, 24/7 parents cope, day in-day out... I guess on pondering all of this and thinking ‘what’s right and wrong? what can I even do? what’s my purpose here?’ I scribbled this.

If water rises fast – help your neighbor move his life,
If water rises slow – teach children to swim.
If house catch fire, save the life.
If you can, save the house, if you can’t, let it burn and
know you tried.
Then in that silent gratefulness, you can see the face of god.

I hope no one thinks I’m pretending that I’m Blake here, or some visionary. I feel more like that old artist in Junebug who’s developmentally disabled and yet compelled to do these strange, primitive but beautiful and compelling things. They’re from some place outside of me, I think. I’m just here for them, in a way. All of my spontaneous art – meaning art that I do with no direction other than where my mind and hand go when they touch the medium (my comics, my sketchbooks, my big ink drawings and paintings, collages, books, big and small sculptures, a lot of my photography, and all of my music) - is like that. I don’t know what I’m going to do until I begin, and if I try to plan it, it’s very hard. It’s why I don’t take certain commissions. I guess with ‘art’ like this, it’s not whether it’s good or not, it’s whether it makes a difference to someone. Inspires someone else in some way. And it really does sound good with a blues guitar and a mellow clarinet.

Thank you for sharing. Please keep sharing. Thank you for hearing me and for adding your prayers to mine.

-s

*James, if you ever read this, know I will never forget the look on your face the night I read this at Melrose. And thank you, no one has ever asked me to read a poem immediately again. I felt like a poet just then.

Sympathy for the devil.

I'm trying to keep in the vein of "from now on", at least in the present. The main problem with this is that even that concept remains me of the deepest hurt. When I was about to "go away", I was trying to tell my parents what was happening. Dad didn't ask any questions. When I told him the diagnoses and the treatment I was to undergo he was completely unsurprised. He said he'd always known I'd had these problems, he was glad I was getting help*.

Mom's first reaction was: "Oh, you've just got a vitamin deficiency!" When I tried to explain further**, to tell her how sick I was, she said "Well, you know, they have this new kind of therapy where you just start from now and just go forward..." well, I think that's when I finally started to realize (believe it or not) how desperate and sick she really was. Believe it or not, it was the first time in my life, after all she'd done, that I had begun to feel sympathy for her.

I'm glad I'm capable of feeling that, but let me tell you something, it is a thing I could live without. She can too, apparently.

We all know how hard 'just going forward' is. Living in the moment is really the best we can hope for. It's hard to do that as well though, because the past presses against you like an unwanted body in the dark. As an adult, you can keep your self safe(r). You can keep the light on. You can say 'no' and 'go away'. But if you spend all the 'caged' years of your life (until you are independent of family/adults) living in a steady state of fear, you still have to live with all those years, the years in which you became who you are. All of you. Even the parts that others can't see.

One of the problems I've been having lately is that, sometimes – often - if I close my eyes or relax from distraction in any way, I have instant flashbacks. I've had this happen at times over the years, a 'sudden recall' of a place or moment, but for the last few months, it's been steady. I manage to keep it at bay fairly responsibly, but when I'm tired or stressed, it haunts me like a ghost. These days it's almost always different houses. Sometimes the house itself, other times the yard or exterior. It's usually just a flash, no people, no incident, but yet the image, the place is laden with emotion. It's as if that image is the cover of a book I've read a thousand times, and if I see the cover, I remember the whole book. It's almost always different places – I moved and traveled constantly as a kid, sometimes almost daily. Visiting strange places with various family members, babysitters, places where adults met other adults, bars, businesses, road trips, constant motion. My shrink made me count number of times I'd actually changed residences and I am now on 65. I changed schools 15 times. My parents were married 5 times each*** - you get the drift, and unfortunately, so do I. All that lost, buried, hidden memory sifting back through my head... it's never left me. None of it.

I know I opened Pandora's box when I chose to go into therapy, but I had no choice. I did/do hurt myself, but I was in danger of hurting others BY hurting myself eventually, I couldn't afford to not be able to function and take care of myself. Bottom line. It worked at the time. I was released from River Oaks in April. My father and Robbie died within days of each other, within six weeks of my release. In the following year, I cut significant and difficult ties in my family, watched my husband lose his mother to cancer, started the process of separation and divorce and began to plan to move as far away as I could manage.

What I learned there helped. No doubt. It still does. But I have changed. I'm trying hard to understand why these flashes. What I'm trying to get me to see. If it were a specific incident or incidents, bad things, that I was remembering then I would think I was just obsessing. But what I really think is that the weight of the past is like the high water behind a levee, and the levee wasn't very well built in the first place, and hasn't necessarily been well maintained for the last 10 years. It's leaky. I know it's all related to the bigger picture – the other things that are happening to me, besides the 'flashbacks'. I even know why now. I've had deeper and deeper depressions for the last few years, then October before last, when I got hit by the motorcycle, and all the bad that followed started a real steady decline. I fought hard against it, but again, in the high/summer/fall of last year I began to have a pretty constant struggle to stay on top of things. Then December. Luna's death – and what I learned about myself during that time - knocked a LOT of sand out of my sandbags, and despite the efforts of you all and my friends here, I'm still just having a hard time keeping it all together.

[insert previously scrapped blog here].

It's not an impossible time, but losing my job was a pretty big storm front. Being unsure if I should wait to see if what my boss said was true, and that we will get our funding passed, or go ahead and take anything out of desperation is like watching the StormWatch and holding my breath. What I am really having to face is that this IS the present, and this is going forward, and that it is often not easy to convince myself that it's worth it anymore. I am so worried about the whole world. I know that my story is just one, and that compared to the majority of the world population, I've had it pretty easy all of my life. I feel helpless, I feel selfish, I feel that – despite all I carry and all I do, it can never be enough – and the levee just creaks.

What I really want is to write a book, tell the whole fucking story. Evacuate the town, blow up the levee, let ALLLLLL the flood water out, clean up, rebuild better and go on. If the goddess willed it, I might even sell it and make enough money to live at least one or two more dreams... It'd be nice to be able to help some more people. Kids, displaced moms, others who are trying to help and make a difference... for me, I really want to travel, with all my heart and soul. I get the drift – in fact, it seems that I can't leave it. I've never wanted to own home or have my own family, though I very much appreciate the comfort of a nice (temporary) place and the people who really love me, but I'm most happy with less stuff and a next destination/adventure in mind. I've dreamed all of my life of seeing the world, and have actually seen very little. If I die in that same state, then I will definitely die holding a big fat plateful of regret.

I've started to write this much requested miracle (it would be a miracle at least for me) book again and again. I've tried it in comic format, letters, diary, you name it. There is a point I can't seem to pass. I always freeze at the same point. Maybe that's what all the flashbacks are related to. All I know is that the uncertainty and extremity of memories combined with an overwhelming fear of hurting any of the people in my family that I actually give a !$% about is crippling. It's not for want of ambition or drive. I'm embarassed over the thought of outsiders seeing my journals/sketchbooks/etc. after I'm gone, and the volume of all this work. Even Chris has no idea of the volume of stuff I've tried to put down/get out. What I've said here today is the most succinct, comprehensive, brave general overview I can ever remember writing. A few days ago, during the worst of my most recent break-downs, I said a lot of this to Chris, trying to help him understand what was happening to me, trying to summarize the main issue. It amazed me that I was able to say so much to him, so clearly. Not only that I could say it, but that I understood it so well. It seems that only in telling it to someone am I able to make sense of it myself. Another good reason for a book.

I know I need therapy/counseling again, but that's not feasible. I may be one of those people who always needs it, in some capacity. I tried going through the local social system, but as I told my friend Angie, it was like using an umbrella to deal with a tsunami. Meds, unfortunately, are just not the answer. I also tried counseling with the parent of a good friend, but the trust issues on my side were WAY too serious and I couldn't make even a second session. Looks like blog/comic therapy it is, until I find a way over the hump...

Luckily, I live in an area where it's fairly easy and inexpensive to get help with the physical aspect of it. Easy availabilty of a good diet, making sure I get my vitamins and some good steady exercise helps me a LOT, as does being outdoors and just generally busy. Being involved in fun things (like little theater, local fund-raising and other events, music, etc.) is a definite life-saver, if I can manage to make myself commit. There is definitely plenty to do and be involved in here, at minimal or no cost, if you have time and even a little talent. Needless to say, I do better in warmer weather. Winters – even the mild ones we have here - are hard on me, mentally and physically. This one has been so bad, and though I long for light and heat, the warm, pretty days when I can be out and about are when I miss my girl the most viciously. I never thought I'd dread the coming of spring.

So. I should have mercy on both of us and stop here for now. That is another thing that stops me short when I try to write: Why? Who cares? Who really wants to read this? It may only be me, but that's who I have to worry about, right? It does help, this telling and the subsequent finding that someone else DOES care. You know who you are. May you be blessed for your kindness, always, may you find a way to enjoy the moment.
much love,
-s

*The fact that he'd always known this – although even I had been unaware of most of it, in all but the most visceral manner – and never did a damn thing about it is a subject for another blog. It will come.

**– without in any way saying "THIS IS HUGELY YOUR DOING, YOU PSYCHO FREAK!!!"

***my father was not legally wed to one of them, but they share a child who is my brother and has my last name, so i absolutely count him and his mother. they are ours, we are theirs.