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March 29, 2008
... and here's the goal....
What will it take to get to the point where I am ok inside myself, no matter what is going on around me?
I know it must be possible. I know it must be possible for me to get my mind/spirit to the place where I am just ok. Where I am just at peace when it is just a peaceful day and there is no stressful circumstance. Where the baseline, the default is set to normal. Normal being, "nothing outside of myself is traumatic at the moment, so I don't need to react like it is."
Right now, I am sitting in a bright room overlooking beautiful flowers, palm trees, and green mountains. The sun is low in the sky, and the clouds around it are illuminated. Objectively, it is beautiful. Inside me, there is torment and noise.
Troubled obsessions, cyclical and swirling. The deep emptiness and hunger eating away from the inside. The intense desire to not ever have existed. Knowing that is an impossibility, I ache to escape somehow. I am claustrophobic inside myself, clawing and desperate to get out. Trying to maintain normalcy on the outside; suffocating within. This can't be how people are meant to exist. And yet it is how I have always been. During some periods of my life the torment has been a little more sublimated than others. But it has always been there, and I don't know life without it. I don't know why. I was born this way.
There is nothing wrong with my circumstances. I have an incredibly wonderful family and supportive and loving friends. I live in one of the most beautiful places I've ever experienced. I lack nothing on the outside. But inside... inside...the way I describe the inside makes me feel like a broken record. Please forgive me. It is, and has always been, a terrifying place. I am my enemy. I am inside my own prison. There must be a way to change this. I know it is up to me. What is left to do? I would do it.
I have been through four years of therapy. I am on two different kinds of medication. I have done years of inner healing. I have gone through hours upon hours of all kinds of deliverance. I have asked Jesus to save me. I think he must want me to save myself.
I am trying. I am trying. It must be possible. It must. I tell myself this, over and over.
I cannot give into this screaming inside to self destruct. Breathe in, breathe out. I will learn how to be ok.
Posted by darby on 09:25 PM | Comments (3)
March 21, 2008
The Emptiness
Sometimes I wonder if I should really write how I feel. I don't want people to worry about me, and some do. I know it's just because they love me. But I will be ok.
That being said, I would like to talk about the emptiness.
I'm not talking about ennui, although I understand that too. I'm not talking about an occasional feeling of being lonely. I'm talking about a starvation inside that must be talked to constantly. No, I can not fill you with liquor. No, I can not fill you with food. No, I can not fill you with sedatives. No, I cannot fill you with life-ruining encounters with random people. No, I cannot fill you. No, I cannot make God fill you. I have been asking for years. I cannot make him fill the emptiness. I cannot ask my husband to fill the emptiness or I will drain him of his own life. I cannot use my children's lives to fill the emptiness. I wrestle constantly with a tormenting desire to shut the mouth of this screaming void. I must continually tell myself that I must not fill this emptiness with the available things that promise at least a few moments of distraction.
I'm not saying that I have abstained from all of the above. I feel shame for some of the things I have done in attempt to silence the emptiness for a little while. I feel shame that I'm not the kind of person who can ignore the emptiness. It's always there, always. Sometimes it's been so loud that I have had to go to sleep to keep from doing something I would regret. Sometimes a scalding bath will distract me for a few minutes. But then I emerge, pink and raw looking, and not a moment later it's back again.
I would like to know if anyone honestly feels a sense of peace... a sense of wholeness inside. A sense of integration of all the restless and aching fragments. If you do, please describe it to me. I would just honestly like to know if there are people who are truly at peace, people who are whole. I would like to know from a first hand account what it is like, and it would make me really happy to know it is possible.
Since I have lived here in California, there are things that have brought some relief. Beauty brings comfort... mountains and the ocean and flowers and birds and lunar eclipses and a cool breeze... I try to tuck these things away and retrieve them when I need them...
Do I really want just anybody reading these thoughts? I guess I write in hope that someone else who is eaten alive by the emptiness will not feel so alone...
Posted by darby on 12:18 AM | Comments (8)
March 14, 2008
It Has Been Six and A Half Months
It has occurred to be in recent days that I like it here in LA. It has started to feel somewhat familiar. The flowers outside my house are jasmine, and the whole walkway smells like them.
If you have never smelled jasmine, you must find some immediately. We also have orange blossoms.
I have a routine. A lot of it centers around a little elementary school, but that's ok. It's a simple life for me here.
I don't know if I will do anything significant in my life. At this point, my dream is just to have my piano again somehow. I don't think I can write music without it.
I guess the most important thing to me is somehow bringing some kind of comfort to anyone who is in a dark and (what seems like) an unreachable place. I have been in that unreachable place, and often live there. There is a gentle comfort in hearing, "I understand.." and to know it is the truth.
Why is it so comforting to be understood?
That is what I want. To be a place of understanding, and to create beautiful things, because beautiful things also bring comfort...
Posted by darby on 12:24 AM | Comments (8)
March 11, 2008
I Am Addicted to Oh's
There is a cereal that I cannot stop eating. I eat it straight out of the box. It is called Oh's.
Posted by darby on 11:15 PM | Comments (6)