This is the 1st step.
Not really, of course, dramatic narrative aside. I have been on this path, or a path, for a very long time now, years of steps bringing me to this place. So it is Another Step, the Next Step, but maybe not just any step. Because this year I want to point myself toward that proverbial cliff, shut my eyes, and start running for the edge.
Just me and the sky and a wholly uncertain faith.
While my hands have been busy lately with a cross-stitch project or finger knitting or clicking away on Pinterest, my mind has been watching a vision dance about, some sort of journal or scrapbook about my journey with mental illness. Just imaging myself creatively embracing the very thing I have spent so much time and energy hiding makes my heart pound and my stomach churn. Even those words, 'mental illness' are something I instinctively want to deny.
So I'm thumbing through my piles of self-help/self-discovery books, digging through the Internet to find all the treasures floating about, and signing up to receive an email every week from A Year With Myself. A few weeks late. Of course. It may end up being a few years with myself...
And after letting another week pass before finally reading through the Week One material, I find these questions from Ms. Patti Digh...
"What spaces are you standing between? Now, and then? Here, and there? Whole, and broken?"
In a few weeks I will turn 40 - now, and then. Less then 6 months ago I moved from the Southwest to the Northwest - here, and there. Just over a year ago a got a new diagnosis, and with it, treatment that might finally be working - whole, and broken.
I don't think we were meant to take the assignment so literally, but I always was kiss ass.
But the Instigators weren't done messing with me yet.
Jennifer Louden asks, "What gifts do the parts of me I don't like have to offer me? What gifts could the parts of me I'm afraid of have to offer me?"
My greatest fear is exposure. The shining of a bright and unblinking light on all the dark and musty places, the hidden spaces. Making myself available for snarky comments and petty (or not so petty) criticisms, or worse - indifference.
Because I am still broken.
And I am already whole.
Not really, of course, dramatic narrative aside. I have been on this path, or a path, for a very long time now, years of steps bringing me to this place. So it is Another Step, the Next Step, but maybe not just any step. Because this year I want to point myself toward that proverbial cliff, shut my eyes, and start running for the edge.
Just me and the sky and a wholly uncertain faith.
While my hands have been busy lately with a cross-stitch project or finger knitting or clicking away on Pinterest, my mind has been watching a vision dance about, some sort of journal or scrapbook about my journey with mental illness. Just imaging myself creatively embracing the very thing I have spent so much time and energy hiding makes my heart pound and my stomach churn. Even those words, 'mental illness' are something I instinctively want to deny.
So I'm thumbing through my piles of self-help/self-discovery books, digging through the Internet to find all the treasures floating about, and signing up to receive an email every week from A Year With Myself. A few weeks late. Of course. It may end up being a few years with myself...
And after letting another week pass before finally reading through the Week One material, I find these questions from Ms. Patti Digh...
"What spaces are you standing between? Now, and then? Here, and there? Whole, and broken?"
In a few weeks I will turn 40 - now, and then. Less then 6 months ago I moved from the Southwest to the Northwest - here, and there. Just over a year ago a got a new diagnosis, and with it, treatment that might finally be working - whole, and broken.
I don't think we were meant to take the assignment so literally, but I always was kiss ass.
But the Instigators weren't done messing with me yet.
Jennifer Louden asks, "What gifts do the parts of me I don't like have to offer me? What gifts could the parts of me I'm afraid of have to offer me?"
My greatest fear is exposure. The shining of a bright and unblinking light on all the dark and musty places, the hidden spaces. Making myself available for snarky comments and petty (or not so petty) criticisms, or worse - indifference.
Because I am still broken.
And I am already whole.
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