Be Gentle With Yourself

Dear Shame, I’m trying to figure out why you keep coming back…or what to say to you when you’re there. I want to be loving and understanding; because love is the best defense right? But I’m also angry, my gut instinct is to put you in a corner and shame you right back.  You come out in bitten and bloody nails, the familiar crave of a cigarette flowing up to my lips. The purge of all things comforting. Little spirits coating my recycling bin. My leg taps over and over and over again, begging me to listen to its word. No patience, no empathy. Unable to hold the space for my monster as I do all those around me. What do I even say to you? I’ve been able to put the word "shame schema" to you for about 3 years now and it still makes no fucking sense.  What do you give me… Protection, disassociation, you rip me out of my body and into my mind. Enabling me to analyze and keep myself safe. It doesn't feel safe, it feels like you are sitting on my throat, throwing me ag...

They are looking at me. I can feel everything about them, him, and her. I don't know why, Why are you sad? What's making you angry? Where does your pain come from? What do you need? Other than the connection, hope, and love that we all do. Is that it? They pull me towards them, or maybe it's me sprinting into their life and heart. Do I feel obligated to enter? Or maybe it's meaning. Or running from and to something to love and nurture. I don't know why. Why do I see someone on the sidewalk and immediately see the world through their eyes? I feel a bubble unwrap between us, or entrap us both together. This brief moment of interwoven-ness, is where everything I do matters because it will stick to them. Is it ego? A hope to impact someone else, to be one good moment of their day? Who hurt you? Who loves you? What are you thinking/feeling/hoping because your soul is screaming loudly at me. I don't know why, but I know it's important.

You can tell them. Tell them I've changed, that you don't recognize the person looking back at you anymore. Tell them I'm fat, tell them I'm skinny. Tell them I'm broke, or rich, or lost, or alone. What they'll never see is the map lines. The GPS coordinates my feet have danced through. The scars on my body, like the topographic lines of an unknown place. They don't see the streams my tears have fallen through. The fences my feet have jumped. It is my story. My journey. It has been my hands 10 and 2 across the country. My knuckles clenched in anger. My stomach flipping in unease. The butterflies shooting from my heart; soaring to the moon. Close calls, whispered words, pillow flips, lunges through time. Your compass is not mine. Mine doesn't point north. It points straight to my heart, into my soul. Reflecting in my brown eyes, written in my words.

I remember specifically the last time suicide, as an option, crossed my mind. It's always a little bit there, underneath the surface of my love for living. That's quite the paradox isn't it? I love life so dang much, I love everything about being alive and on this planet. And also, sometimes my depression comes through my mind, and just lays a blanket on my optimism. It's extremely frustrating. I was staring out the window in the backseat of my parents car. It was January of 2017. The scenes passing me in the window had no color, no life. I felt pure exhaustion. I had spent the morning wondering if life would always be like this, if I would always be this tired from constantly fighting the demons inside of me. Next thing I knew the word suicide shot across my brain. I immediately felt tears just jumping out of my eyes. Right as that level of hopelessness grabbed my wrists, I was terrified. How could I be here AGAIN?! I thought I beat this the past two times I consid...

Every time I feel it I panic. It comes swooping in, stormy and scary. It feels like I’m running from that rhino cloud from James and the Giant Peach. Usually I go into full defense mode; like when you can feel a cold coming on and you start major immune boosting. I pop those Vitamin C supplements, drink some lemon ginger tea, take a bunch of emergen-c, and sleep more. It’s different with depression though, it comes in quick and dark. My hope staggers, my smiles fees forced. Sometimes I just stare into space and don’t know what’s happening in my head or around me. The tears flow more often, or I feel like an empty vessel, numb to anything good around me. Everything feels so very heavy, sitting on my chest, choking both words and joy from my body. Oftentimes I can feel it coming, I get a few warning signs: I want to drink more, I crave running into the mountains, I get irritable quickly with others, and my nails get bitten to bloody stumps. So about a week out I can notice these thi...

  find the new beginnings the smell of snow and rain the energy of the moon during transition that fly that lands on your knee in the opening of spring find it in nature you belong there walk into the canyon arms you are an old friend the mother I never had and the father I know too well. a new partner, a lover when the leaves fall and the birds sing on that first silent snowfall, with the moon swinging above in the disarray of the stars and in the trunks that hold the canopy up find your hope search for it in every smell, sight, and feeling believe in it, cling to it, wrap your limbs around it and never let it go.

  12 years ago I carved my first scars. She asked me to help, but couldn't stop. I wanted to help, so I started. 11 years ago I had fallen into a hole of fake smiles and a hatred for myself that I couldn't name. 10 years ago was despair, nothing to believe in except the words on my wrist to convince myself there was something more. 9 years ago I was weightless, skin and bones, and craving the destruction of myself. 8 years ago I was weighed down by you, while carving my skin in secret. 7 years ago it was all new yet the sadness and anger still bleeding from my soul. 6 years ago I was escaping my shelter of shame and confusion to a whole new independent disarray. 5 years ago didn't exist; slathered in hangovers, cigarettes, and mistakes. Blurred from reality. 4 years ago I fell, I slammed, and then I awoke. 3 years ago I questioned, I decided, and I hoped. 2 years ago everything was scary and wild. I was alive on top of mountains, my soul screaming. 1 year ago I felt everyth...