Sea Birds

Sea birds and ocean spray, sunrise and smoke from last night's fires, solitary pleasure, waiting to celebrate a life. And mourn. The sun worshipper gone, and me left with memories They swirl and hover and dip, Sea birds of a sort. I watch the memories and inhale the beach scents, Bathed in memories good, and not. Still and all it is the public mother I mourn and the private one I hope to set free in the bonfire tonight. Sea birds and ocean spray, the sun higher and smoke from last night's fires, The memories and the beauty take me. I am still.

The Nothing and The Everything

How do I write about The Nothing? I do not mean nothing. I can fill pages and pages with nothing about nothing. I mean The Nothing that comes with low self-esteem; the nothing I feel I am. I mean The Nothing of depression where things that once had meaning and value now are just Nothing. Depression Nothing is day after day of grey fog clouding over all of my emotions. It is a Nothing that is so large it seems like it must be something, except it isn’t. Then there’s The Nothing of anxiety which is like the way all of the colors combine to make white light. Worry about everything, fear of everything, anxiety over everything that has, or hasn’t happened, all combine to make a really big Nothing, a huge, empty, soul sucking space where Nothing lives and Nothing dies. How do I tell you about The Nothing that is everything? My whole body feels The Nothing My heart breaks for The Nothing. My mind can’t see anything but The Nothing. Nothing can penetrate The Nothing. Love slides down its sides. Food seems to poke a little way in, but it brings guilt. The Nothing feeds on guilt. The Nothing feeds on pain and loneliness. It feeds on fear. It grows and spreads. The Nothing pushes out the light. The Nothing lies. It tells me no one loves me, that I don’t deserve love. It tells me I’m stupid, worthless, and lazy, and then it feeds on the pain, guilt, and embarrassment those thoughts bring up. Most days we struggle with executive dysfunction, knowing what to do and in what order. The Nothing will not let me win the struggle, so nothing gets done. The Nothing is walls, a fortress, a windowless dungeon, where nothing but The Nothing can penetrate. The fortress walls aren’t stone, they are layers of felt and fuzz, sandwiching thick banks of fog. The Nothing comes even when we take the medications, though not as often, or for as long. The Nothing is soft and thick, but full of broken glass and knives. Every wrong decision, every embarrassment, every mistake lives there and waits to stab and cut me. The glass bits are the thoughts that self-harm seems like a great way to make The Nothing leak out. The knives are the thoughts of suicide, and the multiple scenarios for how we will do it. These thoughts rip and tear through our minds, hearts, and our skin, and never make even the smallest scratch on The Nothing. Sometimes The Nothing feels safe because we know it. We have lived in it for so long that without it, we don’t know who to be, how to act, or what to say. The Nothing is the known, and everything outside The Nothing is The Everything, with a capital E. The Everything is vast, unknown, overwhelming, and scary. Finding the space between The Nothing and The Everything is the hardest thing. I always think and feel it’s a secret passage that most others know how to access, and I never got the instructions. What do they call that space between? Some call it The Normal. Some don’t have a word for it; for them it just IS. These are the ones who have never felt the depths of The Nothing, or seen the vastness of The Everything. Nothing and Everything exist, but only some have the dark gifts of seeing them for what they are. In The Nothing we want Something, though we don’t know what that Something is. We fight to create even the smallest rift. When we look through the rift, we don’t see the dangers of The Everything. We think we’re moving into The Normal, and we do, except we’re also staring down into the vast Everything. From there we may flee back to The Nothing, or be consumed by the anxiety of The Everything. The in between,The Normal, is an illusion at best, or maybe it’s like the line on a highway. You can walk along it never knowing when you’ll lose your balance and step into The Nothing, or The Everything, never knowing when the line might break, or turn suddenly. When it breaks, you leap, or you fall. The line is narrow and often it’s so worn it’s hard to see, and every step is a risk. Maybe Normal is just a setting on a washing machine after all. People who live in the in between may never know The Nothing. They may never know, or understand the fear of it and the comfort of it. Those people are lucky. The Nothing is full of big monsters. They are memories of traumas we are forced to relive. They are voices of every harsh, abusive thing ever said to us. They lurk in the fog of The Nothing, ready to spring upon us at any moment. They are our failures, the ones that hand us the 2X4 to beat our heads with; a 2X4 that is nearly impossible to set down. The Nothing is where our meds can take us, robbing us of big emotions that can vent the mind, heart, and soul. Medications help us even out, loosen our grip on emotional pain, then they take all of our emotions and we end up in The Nothing. In The Nothing we lose our art, words don’t flow, colors cease to move us, the mind can’t tell the hands what to create. The Nothing is where individuality goes to die. The Nothing is why we go off our meds, to feel again. The Nothing is paralyzing. The Nothing and the Everything stop me. The Normal is an unknown, it’s uncomfortable, it’s a place we feel ill equipped to be. The Everything is all anxiety, but it’s our anxiety, the familiar anxiety that pushes out all other emotions. The Nothing is where we don’t feel, we just exist. It is comfortable, familiar, it is ours. We lose the good feelings in order to lose the bad. The Normal is full of feelings, but we never learned how to feel without giant, overblown emotions. We never learned how to just BE.