This Soft Animal

I was sitting in her office and it was after the nurse left after taking my vitals and I felt my pulse throbbing bounding screaming against the BP cuff and I knew it was high, could feel it, the nurse on leaving just tells me to calm down in a way that seemed sympathetic coming from someone who seemed not often sympathetic. She saw on my file the reason for the visit. "Ain't life a bitch," the only other comment, and I kept telling myself just keep it together just keep it together because I hate to cry in the presence of people I don't trust. Someday I will be brave enough to just let the tears flow whenever they damn well need to. But it was not this day. And as soon as Georgia walked in they started and I'm blubbering through what I'm trying to say and Georgia there with her academic demeanor, so strange and peculiar but so reassuring in some very abstract way.

Mom told me in a text, it's an illness. you wouldn't try to 'just get through it' if you had cancer, you would go get help. And I knew that she was right. It just feels so absolutely ridiculous to say out loud to anyone "I actually have a pretty good life but I am plagued by this deep pit of hopelessness and fear and doubt and anxiety that follows me everywhere, through everything." But there you have it.

We had a good conversation [through the blubbering, why must I cry in such an ugly manner?] and she wrote me a prescription and I have decided that it's not weakness to seek help. And driving in my truck later against the bible black of late Ohio winter evening it struck me how absolutely ridiculous it is to care so much about what people think/may say about me. Woman! Why do you act as though you have to please everyone, do everything, take care of everything, be perfect all the time? You do not have to be good. The only person's opinion you have to worry about is yours! Stop hiding from your nature. It is a wonderful nature. Explore it more, stop playing dress-up, stop trying to impress everyone. The people who really love you will be easy to impress anyway. And what else really matters?

Son of a Female Shark

Only recently did I discover that I have lived much of my life guided by the desire to do something that everyone around me would think was cool, or exciting, or elite. Nevermind the tendency of this timid girl toward that which is comfortable, gentle, safe. I have always thought it right to rebel against what I perceive as my nature; everyone else talks about themself, about their life, why must I feel so clumsy at it? Everyone else chases an idea of greatness and of fame and of success, and therefore so should I. Practice is what I need, that's all! But I never stopped feeling clumsy. And I think I have never really taken the time or allowed myself to acknowledge what I honestly want in life. A flashy display of lights and sirens does seem the most divergent path I could have taken up, given my proclivity for subtlety and disdain for the spotlight. She was missing a piece. And so she set off in search of the missing piece. But he never said anything about the dimension of the whole thing, about how hard it is to discern the one from the other and how you have to roll around with the thing for awhile and it's only after the blister starts to form that you can really know and by then you just look like a damn fool. Seriously, I find it hysterical at times, at age 32, to have all the trappings of success that I had pictured would be there house car man [I cannot make light of this last point, I think at times it to be my only real success, to have attracted a man so absolutely and unconditionally wonderful and devoted] and but to feel so precisely distant from the feeling that I thought would go along.

And I suppose the lesson is that you can really just be absolutely falling apart at the seams at any given point, and you can be totally alone in that feeling and unable to express just how far you really are from where you thought you'd be, at this point on the mountain. The gin helps but I am afraid that I alienate myself. It's really not what I wanted it to be, so far. Why is it so hard to say that out loud and why is it so hard to figure out what to do with the realization? I am terrible at decision making. My innocence would make me weep! By being too kind I have wasted my life.

What's All This Sighing About?

Today,
Trust and be not afraid. Life is full of wonder. Open child-trusting eyes to all I am doing for you. Fear not.
Only a few steps more and then My Power shall be seen and known. You are, yourselves, now walking in the tunnel-darkness. Soon, you yourselves shall be lights to guide feet that are afraid.
The cries of your sufferings have pierced even to the ears of God Himself - My Father in Heaven, your Father in Heaven. To hear, with God, is to answer. For only a cry from the heart, a cry to Divine Power to help human weakness, a trusting cry, ever reaches the Ear Divine.
Remember, trembling heart, that with God, to hear is to answer. Your prayers, and they have been many, are answered.

But before that,
it all started wrong. It was six fourty-five in the morning and a sleepy eyed face came to the door, I introduced myself and he just pointed to a door, a door that led to a stairway that led to darkness and the door shut behind me and the tone was set. A second later, or a lifetime later, the door again opens and my name and a finger in a different direction and large day room with a table and the shift just getting off sitting there and one of them thinks it will be funny to tell me to put my stuff down in the Chief's office but I see the door and that it's closed and that it says Chief and so I just stand there, and put my stuff down at my feet. The other shift comes and they start cold but warm up to me (I make it hard not to! why are people so awful) and by the end I don't know which is worse, to not be acknowledged, or to be treated like one of the guys. The Chief is standing there and it's lunch and the tv is on (has been on all day) ESPN basketball and one of them drops an n-bomb and my face went red and the Chief is looking at me and he says "hey we're not racist, we're equal opportunity haters!" and I feel as though I am looking out of a port-hole safe inside this steel vessel at some surreal and subterranean world that surely cannot exist.

It is shocking when you really feel that you understand what God has done, the watching over us, and His Son, and how you try to live your life in accordance with that, it tears you somewhere in your core when you realize what it really can be like out there. When you realize that you really are looking out from behind a port-hole when you would give your all to just be side by side. But how cutting human beings really are.

This cop comes in so large and in charge and this is like hour ten and I am barn sour. He says hi ladies like I have heard for the fiftieth time [it's an insult, , , I think about my mom and the hot coffee] and I think about my Dad and I think about Dan and I think that someone has to stand for something, that there truely are  men out there who are men, and I feel his eyeballs on me. At this point I'm pretty sure that I'm in a skit from Saturday Night Live. The one call we had, the no-treat, the old man was joking with me as we were leaving and he grasped my forearm and I felt so much compassion and he said to me, "it's nice to see that they have women on the force," and I thought how ironic given this day for what it has been and the one says "yeah and who thought they'd be so good looking!" they laugh but the old man is looking at me and we leave and later that same guy asks me about my status in a way that I'm sure he thought was non-chalant and the one who has made it a point to be a sexist the entire time is taking a quiz online and he can't even say the word catecholemine let alone know what it is. God I know that you have a lesson in this for me. And the cop -- later when we're back at the station -- whips out his taser and is making it go off and asks me if he can tase me and later I tell him about my sister and what she's involved in and I purposefully use words that I know they won't understand and it's awful but satisfying and they finally shut the fuck up but still later the cop is talking about how long it's been since he had a date and I can feel his creepy gaze on me and seven o'clock comes and I am gone in a fury of papers and when I open the front door there is a cop car that drives past and I look over and it revvs its engine and I want to puke.

At least a dozen times I had to fight myself [like when you're at the theater and you start to make yourself believe that if you concentrate hard enough you will end up onstage in the body of the lead but you will still have your mind and find yourself with precisely no idea what to do] to not stand up at the table and annouce "well you guys are a bunch of assholes, this has been a horrible experience, and I will do my best to make sure that no one else is ever subjected to this," I mean it was close, like scary close.

But instead without incident and without puking I got into my truck and I pressed seek and it was the fish, and there You were. And You were talking about how I am the same strong person that I have been in my strongest moments, and that You are there for me in every moment as I have felt you to be in my lowest. It's hard to inscribe that into my heart, but I do know that it's true. And I can't wait until I can really feel it, too. When the light from this port-hole gets so dim that I lose my bearings.

For now,
there is gin tonight, and this big house seems so empty and unnecessary when all I really want is a cave and a waterfall. It will hurt tomorrow, in the ER, because of the gin. But, the only solution is to stand and fight. And you do what you have to do in between rounds because you have to get up when the bell rings. There is nothing else for it. "All is for the very best for you. It was out of the darkness that David cried unto me, and I heard his voice." I know. Tomorrow, in the ER, You are already there.