Sometimes I miss Highschool, just not home.
Lately things have been changing for the better. That may seem like a far cry from reality to anyone who knows what has been going on in my life, but the truth is, it has. For a lot of reasons. I was put on assignment by my counselor to decide for myself “what love is.” I made a joke of it initially, “baby don’t hurt me,” but the truth is that THAT is EXACTLY what love is. Not hurting someone. Among other things. I have been in a position in which I’ve slowly, gradually, made the call to take my life back, but not at the expense of love. I feel more loved and supported than I ever have. Dear friends, who’ve clung to the tiny strings I’ve kept attached to them, and never forsaken me despite my having forsaken them, are all I need to know how loved I am. My children and my friends. I think back to Highschool in this. Why, I can’t tell you, I just feel driven to remember the lessons that I didn’t take away from it in class. The ones that were right in front of my face as I loitered the day away against brick walls. I had friends then, and some of them remain. We are all grown now, having learned our own separate lessons from a world full of teachers. We all now know what we did not before and that is that we truly were friends. Feeling each other’s pain, keenly aware of one another, and yet stricken by the silence that is fear to reach out. We loved each other in the ways that we felt allowed, we accepted each other in ways unspoken. I feel that friendship is something constructed by God, to get us through things so transparent that we, ourselves, are only slightly aware of them. I had a conversation recently with a new friend and an old one, they were so strikingly similar and yet so removed from one another it has stayed on my mind. We all fight our battles silently, some out loud, but not the biggest ones. We fight them with our eyes, with the way we walk, with the way we breathe life in and out. Some of us, our friends, take only those things to know that we need them. Some of our friends know that just BEING, that having stayed at all, was all we needed to survive it. I want to say thank you to my friends, old and new, to my love, new and old, and to anyone who’s ever looked into someone else’s eyes and just known that they hurt in the same place that you did and prayed for them. THANK YOU.
Fallen… they were all Angels once.
I sometimes find myself in strange places when I open up my sketchbook for the first time in a while. Like things come out that I didn’t realize were there, waiting. It’s not to be dramatic. I usually start with scribbling away at something I “thought I wanted to draw” until I drew it. It’s never very impressive and usually never sees the light of day again. Then comes the second wave, almost always an entirely subconscious wave of nothingness. It comes out, then I see what it is. If that makes sense at all. I’ll start to scribble, charcoal seems to do the trick when I’m feeling emotional and lost. I scribble until it becomes something. Sometimes it’s something nice, sometimes not, but it’s never anything contrived of thought or planning. It jus is. In this case, I think it might have been a self-portrait by the one who looks over my shoulder.
For those who don’t believe in this sort of thing, turn your head. For those who do, please know that as terrifying as it is to even talk about, I’d rather show you than get into detail. Something follows my husband. It has since he was twelve. He’s been scratched up by invisible things for years. When he came to live with me it stopped, for a while, then about three years later it started happening to him again. Seven months ago, it started happening to me. Not so often as him, but every once in a while. The first time was the worst. It felt like fire, like a snakebite, it burned so badly and there was nothing that could relieve it for hours. You may find this to be something you aren’t comfortable believing, well join the club. Fact is, they were all Angels once. Some of them fell with him. They all have duties to do, this one is no different. I just don’t understand why me? I mean I am a child of God. Jesus occupies my heart, no one else shall enter. Scratching me doesn’t break me down. It reassures me that my faith is not misplaced. I am already extremely aware of spiritual warfare as it is, involving me in it physically doesn’t frighten me, it only tightens my grip on the sword that is my faith. Period.
The sad part is, these are only a few examples. In my case I’ve had scratches turn up maybe twice a month in the past seven months. The first ones were the worst, by far. I was walking down my hallway at around 2:30 a.m. having just tended to my sick daughter and I felt this intense sharp lashing pain down my left arm, from my bicep to my wrist, then immediately after the same pain down my right arm in the same direction. I hit the light switch in the hall and saw that I was alone. I watched as whelps raised up, starting at my biceps and working towards my wrists, just as the initial pain had, and then following the same pattern, a hot burning sensation, as though someone held an iron to my forearms, and then blood began to seep out of the wounds. I was alone. I panicked and ran to check on my kids. Nothing, the cats, both declawed, were asleep on my bed at the other end of the house and my husband and all of the children slept soundly. I was pissed. This has been happening to him for 13 years and now it’s attacking his wife? What next, the children? I wasn’t afraid, just extremely angry. I tended my arms with Neosporine and went and laid in my bed and waiting for the morning to come so that I could begin calling churches. I spoke with five pastors from five different denominations. Every one of them believed my story and every one said it is imperative that we have our home cleansed and that my husband be present. That was seven months ago. I have begged and begged that he allow me to do this, he is still apprehensive. He insists that he will not be present if I have a cleansing performed and the church assured me that if he was not, it would do no good. So here I am, hoping and praying for relief from this thing that has attached itself to him. I have no doubt it’s what I’ve seen around the house, I know who it is and who it works for and I know that other than what little physical harm it can do, that it is merely a minion that thrives off of fear. So I refuse to fear it, scary as the situation sounds, and as soon as he can be convinced that things will not get worse I’ll be having my cleansing done by the first Pastor to hit my doorstep and we’ll see how it goes. Prayers, people, we need them around here.
She’s got “crazy eyes”
It’s not entirely unreasonable for me to be drawn towards matters of clairvoyance. Given my history, my diagnosis of “mental illness,” and the presence of my sensitivities in general… it kind of makes sense that I would at some point find myself in the throes of a full on investigation of such things. As I’ve mentioned before I’m in the middle of another book. This one a bit more supernatural, in fact it is entirely so, and while some could argue that I am venturing off of a well-lit path here I proclaim the contrary. The more I study and absorb in regards to Spiritualism, the more faith in God and Christ are nourished within my soul. It sounds completely contradictory but it is far from it. The complete confirmation of things I’ve felt my entire life to be not just my own view of eternity as it may come, but shared by many past and present and reassured by tons and tons of evidence in its favor… well that’s pretty nice. To me it is. I’ve always sat in church and listened to the teachings of hell-fire and damnation and heaven’s eternal gloriousness. I’ve always felt that something was missing. Curiosity led me long ago to, although I am raised Baptist, lean toward the notion of “limbo.” Even that, however, just seemed to simple for God. To me it did. When I look at my life, the life I’ve brought into this world thus far, and the grande undertaking that is my simple existence, in this body, and the sheer amount of intricacy and individuality that is within my spirit, and those of my children, and how I can see the souls of my daughters to be so much older and more developed than they, themselves, are, it makes no sense to think that God made for our souls a “1-2-3” system, so cut and dry. The facets of eternity are endless. I feel like we are really downplaying the greatness of our Creator by assuming it’s as simple as heaven, hell and “maybe.” I think it is ridiculous to think that He created something so completely spectacular as the soul, with free will, and all of the factors at play within that free will so that it could end as abruptly as death. I also feel that His grace and mercy, endless as it is, would far from damn a soul lost in wickedness to hell, but rather keep it separate from heaven. This is why I feel it to be true, the “layers” between us and God. Although I am tempted to believe that while the book I’m reading puts “us” on Level 1… that maybe there isn’t a level below us. “Hell” so to speak, but not as man has embellished it to be. The ultimate “hell” in fact is separation from the light, from God. So why would need be for punishment when sin is sin and we all sin. Those things are made clear. They are without question. Sin is everyone. The only way to God is through Christ, but in that I ask, are we given but this lifetime to set our salvation in stone? I am lucky to have been born believing. That wasn’t an accident. I was born loving Jesus. I loved Jesus before I ever went to Sunday School, I sought him out as a child. I was “saved” whenever I was a preteen, sitting in a van, parked in front of the Jr. High School. In my heart, I felt it was an act of symbolism for something that I’d felt in my soul my entire life. I have always known God. In that I am blessed. Perhaps because this is far from my first go-round and my faith was infused within the fibers of whatever makes up ones soul. I wonder about reincarnation, not as a concrete institution, but rather as a “gift” or an option we are given when our souls have made enough passes to prove that we are developed and responsible enough to go back to Level 1 and have another run at it. To benefit humanity. Bring our gifts back to this plane to serve mankind. I also wonder if that’s not so for those who falter and stumble and stay on the lower Level, if it isn’t some means of redemption, to have another try. It just makes more sense to me than God tossing us into an inferno because we came in contact with influences during our lifetime that were unshakeable, or were born into doom not our own via parents or childhoods that would drive a person’s spirit to be negative. God is merciful. Is he not?
I guess my long rant has little point other than the fact that I am lately pondering eternity more than I already did, and am finding a strange peace in my soul in regards to it. I don’t know that reading about all of these crazy ideas, which by the way don’t entirely agree with MY thoughts above, but do offer some version of that to be true and make a lot of sense of things that I’ve felt since childhood about our spirits and “where they go” from here. I’m not really in any panick about where I will go, because I will go where I am meant to go, and the closer to God that is the better. I just think it would do us all a bit of good to give God a little more credit, that’s all. I’m interested in doing that. Exploring the idea that creation is more than we commonly speculate it to be. Call me what you will, I’ve been seeing a lot lately, seeing deeper than I have in my life, focusing my energy and the gifts that I’m given, and I see something great in this life. But then again, I’ve got crazy eyes.
My Cemetery
Sometimes I think my mind is a cemetery, full of plots, each one filled with something that I’ve improperly compartmentalized at some point or another. To me cemeteries are beautiful places. My mother used to take me to the graveyard in Brazoria a few times a year to clean her parents’ and sister’s headstones. Anniversaries, Holidays, and such were the occasion. She’d have me carry her scrub brushes and cleaning supplies and she’d dutifully detail each headstone with her gnarled hands and her feet. I had a favorite headstone that I cleaned each time. It wasn’t anyone I knew. I was just in love with the baby angel that it represented. A little boy who’d died on the day he was born, with a small white marble headstone, a lamb on top of it who’s head had been knocked off at some point. It was just lovely to me. I would always take the old flowers we were discarding from our family’s graves and place the prettiest most intact ones on the little boys resting place. I would imagine the heartache his mother must have felt and how precious he must have been. I would leave him with a bit of loss in my heart each time as though he were my friend that I was leaving in such a lonely place to rest. My mother is now buried in that same cemetery, although separated from the family we once visited so long ago, she is placed catty-corner with my grandfather who I love dearly and so I make my visits to both of them in the same fashion as often as I can. Taking their old flowers across to her parents’ and sisters graves and always keeping a few for the little headless lamb. I visit him just as I always did, only now with a mothers love in my heart and it truly breaks for a mother who is surely long gone, buried somewhere in the same cemetery, long reunited with her baby boy. It makes me appreciate, as I feel that I always have, even before they were ever born, my children. Paige was a healthy baby, who gave me no worry. She sprung into this life with fire in her eyes and has be so ever since. My twins were not so eager to stick around at first. I had to love them a little differently and convince them that it was a far better place here than with the angels. I pulled one over on both of them as they did, in fact, survive those early months spent in NICU in Houston. It was terrible and heart-wrenching and they both faded in and out of life for the first three months of it and I can not tell you how many times I envisioned myself standing over my own two little white lambs. It was nothing I could wish on any heart, regardless of the bond it forged and the strength it instilled in me. I surely compartmentalized that trauma along with all of the others because I feel like I may have never cried about it. Honestly. Even now when I look at them I feel all of this unfinished crying to be done, thankful tears. And so it goes for so many things, buried in my cemetery, stowed away for some psychotic break, it seems. Some day when I find myself scrubbing away at the headstones in my mind, digging in the dust, ready to cry. That day has yet to come and in the meantime what a pretty place I see it as. Magnolia trees shedding leaves as fall fades into winter and I breathe deep, so happy to be alive.
Beautiful Doubt
“I feel sorry for side you do not pick, because you would be very valuable to either.” ~ My Sunday School Teacher, 1994
We are all blessed in our ability to doubt. Whether we exercise it or not is really a reflection of our inner desire to exist in free will. If we never question what we are told, what we read, the way we are raised, how are we anything but open vessels for some other puppeteer to pull our strings? How can we say, with resolution, that we are living our lives? There are some things in my life I shall never doubt. I will never doubt my Salvation, that Christ died for me, I will never doubt the love that I have for my children, and I will never doubt death. The in between, with all that is at my fingertips, I shall without fail, likely question everything that is ever said or read or heard in my lifetime. Why? Because we are supposed to. Wave your bibles and tell me I sin and I will simply answer, “yes, yes I do.” But do I sin by doubt? Or do I simply step further along on God’s path for me, enriched by and leaving love behind me in this life that was made just my own, by doubting what I’m told is right and wrong. I’m not saying disobey the law. I’m not even saying question the Ten Commandments, or the gospel, or what you know in your heart to be true. I am saying that in between that, where all the room in the world for folly lies in wait, do not be fools. Doubt. If it seems too good to be true, doubt. If you don’t feel and see and hear in accord with one another, doubt. When your soul and your mind and your heart do not agree, doubt. We are such intricate creatures, each of us. Every single one of us has a life, a huge life, that is just as big and outreaching and effective in this world as the other. Wrap your head around that, then wrap your head around the fact that each and every one of us has free will and gifts to give to humanity, footprints to leave behind. I don’t know what I am getting at exactly. I read a book this weekend called “Glimpses of the Devil.” Sounds rowdy right? 
Well it wasn’t one of those books. It was suggested to me by a friend. I read it in two days, enthusiastically, and took more from it than I think I’m quite realizing at this point. In it was the analysis of two exorcisms. I know, scary, right? But it wasn’t scary. Not to me. It didn’t frighten me at all. Instead it left me feeling a little more sure of what I already knew. That I am special. Not more special or less special than anyone else, which kind of sounds UN special in its superfluous specialness, but special none the less. We all are. I know, it makes no sense. If we all are special then special are none. Regardless I know that I am here for good reason, with a purpose, and a life to be lived. Which brings me to my point, if we are all here with purpose, to serve in the overall success of humanity, with gifts to bring into this world, then there must also be some opposition to that. There must also be darkness to explain why so many people in this world are self-serving and manipulative, why there is so much evil. It is our inability to exercise our free will that makes us susceptible to lies, to that which should be doubted, to the darkness. I never have questioned the existence of Satan, while I suppose that many do and have, and the book I read over the weekend did no more to concrete this existence than what was already embedded in my soul to be true. What it did to is bring back memories that more or less left me feeling resolute and WITHOUT doubt in at least one thing. I have a soul. It is mine to protect. It is my place to doubt the lies that I will encounter in my lifetime, to doubt those that I already have, and to make certain that the things that I see and hear stay where they belong, outside, where they are weak. I’m in the Lords Army. Of that I have zero doubt.
Shadow People. Straight Up.
Doesn’t it feel good, even if only one person in the entire universe has your back, to know that you aren’t completely out of your mind even in being out of your mind? What I mean is, while I don’t contest the fact that I am mentally ill, in fact I am learning daily to understand and embrace that I am a strange and special little creature, it does feel good to snoop around and discover that other people are just as crazy as you are. Yes I can call myself crazy. It’s my N-word. Do something about it. Anyway, this thing that I saw the other night will not leave my mind. I know it was real. The sick part is that while every fiber of my being wants to prove that I saw this, I hope that I didn’t, and at the same time am afraid that I did. I mean I don’t want that thing to have been in my house, where I sleep, where my family is supposed to be safe from harm. I definitely don’t want something that frightening to exist in reality. At the same time, if it WASN’T real and was another one of my shadow people, then am I getting worse? I take all of my meds religiously. I “feel” like I am less paranoid. I only see things here and there and not everywhere all the time like before, so I’m better right? I mean I feel like it doesn’t get much better. I don’t expect to be “well.” The relief of the less distracted, less anxious life I am currently living is countered by an increased fear that I now have no warning signs when things are happening. No reassurance that I am safe. No dark and light to speak of. I am just walking through my life with blinders on. Why do I insist that this is a real thing? Well for starters it’s my life, I know what I see. I don’t care if they call what I perceive as the world I live in one big hallucination, the bottom line is, it’s where I live. I feel like I have a good handle on what’s real and what’s in my head. The noises are harder to pick out of the line-up and the voices can be tricky, but for the most part, I’ve got this. I say that with a little pride because honestly? Who can be THIS fucked up and still run her life? This gal. For now. My concern is that now I’ve officially had quite a grandeur hallucination ON my meds. What does that mean for me? Am I getting worse? Or was it REAL?
Check this out. I googled “shadow people” per a friends suggestion today.
http://www.monstropedia.org/index.php?title=Shadow_people
Now, I’m not saying this website is factual or not. I am not saying that the people who assembled it aren’t batshit crazy themselves. I am just making my point that I AM NOT THE ONLY ONE who sees this shit. So. Am I insane? What’s really debatable is whether or not I should tell my doctor tomorrow about my mothman-esque encounter. What will she tell me? My luck and fear? More meds. I feel like if I am too confident that I don’t need more medication and that this is an isolated incident, which it tends to be now, that I’ll look that much more insane to her. Really I feel that things are so much better. I’ll have an entire day of mental antics and then be fine for a few weeks at a time. Used to it was all day every day. So this is just an “episode” assuming that the thing I saw wasn’t real. God, I feel like I’ve lost it with this one. Speaking of God. My husband took it upon himself to tell his parents, who have recently begun attending church (as in, they’ve gone twice in the past few weeks so are now officially church-going folk,) that I saw a demon in our house. So last night I am painting, a cross ironically, and in comes his mother with a small vial in her hand saying “Eddie wanted me to come by the house and bless you real quick.” She proceeded to put oil on my forehead and behind my ears, saying a short blessing with each criss-cross of her fingers and then on she goes into the bedroom where she blesses everything she can touch with this oil. She got dangerously close to the naughty section hidden discretely on the windowsill behind my bed and I suspect she may have blessed it as well. I asked her to go ahead and hit up the door I keep hearing slam while she’s at it. Now I am a fan of Jesus. A firm believer. You could never convince me that He isn’t my Lord and Saviour. I am not, however, easily convinced of where the fine line of superstition dances with religious so gayly as to have us all convinced that with the swipe of a finger, something as haneous as a real demon might haul ass in fear. I know His name defeats all so I am torn on the subject but was relieved at the idea that just maybe, I was blessed. I took a bath and relaxed a little and then last night for the first time in months, be it mind over matter or the Lord Himself, I slept like a baby. So, since then no shadows in the house. So far. I’m still not opposed to the salt thing my friend mentioned but I’m optimistic that while it may be short-lived, I might have a little peace. Who’s to say? I guess what I’m getting at is the mind is a powerful thing. Just as powerful, perhaps, as the unseen forces at hand. While I battle with my own demons, sometimes it feels like they tend to find me all on their own. We’ll see what the doc has to say tomorrow but I really feel like my battle is a part of a much bigger one and I should maybe be a little more confident that I am fit for my part just as I am. Medicine or no medicine, it seems to find it’s way into my eyes regardless. Who am I to question that?
Making peace with crazy.
So I’m sitting on the floor in my kitchen trying to explain, during a hot flash, that it turns out I am bananas and I’m all pilled out so don’t mind me or be offended by my waywardness of late because I didn’t mean to ignore her or act like a little bat and only come out at night at which point I still was blind to all interaction, our neighbors and ourselves are very close. We eat at each other’s houses a lot and our children are dear friends. It’s all been so hard to explain. I felt relieved when she nodded knowingly and said she understood what it was like to go through withdrawals. I explained that I was in a position now that I had to choose my path wisely. I have to medicate. At least until my kids are out of school. I have to do it for them. I can not function with all of the distraction and after a week off of meds I came to realize that it is, indeed, dangerously distracting to see dead people and shadow monkeys and hear voices all day every day. I was so used to it, at nearing thirty, that I had no idea what broken silence could lend me in terms of “life.” I mean I was getting shorted. I was so distracted by everything and just total awareness that was given to me surely for some reason, but at the same time, I am not using it now, and am certainly not serving through it, so I am sure the Lord can understand where I need a break. Schizophrenia, as I love the word itself so much I can’t tell you, is extremely exhausting. Period. Let alone everything else. My list goes on and on. The least I can do is take my meds until I can honestly say “this isn’t me” and at this point I have NO idea who I am at all so how can I say that THIS isn’t me? Or THIS! OR….. that? Who in the hell even knows? Jesus knows. He knew me before I was a twinkle, this I know, for the Bible tells me so….. I mean it does. So Jesus knows what I am going through and honestly, that is such a relief to know I am perfect just the way I am, as soon as I figure out what way that is… I’ll probably selfishly blog about it. Lol.
Oh how Daddy loves you: Our Superhero Strikes Again.
Oh to say the shit I’d love to say to you. I find letters I once wrote, when I was young and still afraid of your hands. I’d say I was just that young until yesterday, Daddy Dearest, before the fire landed in eyes so blue that will hate you forever with a fury that you only think you can wrap your head around. Such a typical scenario. The girl that writes, the girl that paints, she has Daddy Issues, go figure. She’s called a “pathological liar” her entire life. A “whore” from ten years old and a “bitch” from 12, she’s labeled all the things that women are to you, but you can not keep your hands off of her. She’s “messed up and always has been, everybody knows that” so don’t you go believing anything she says, now. That’s what I call a weak attempt at damage control, don’t you think? Weak because I hadn’t even begun to splay your name like fresh guts, smeared across the billboards that are a small town for all to see what hideousness lies within your ice cold stare, your heart. You think yourself so clever that the simple act of cutting off at the pass what was yet to happen would somehow set your innocence in stone. Think again. So many memories flood into me, like an aquifer, long empty, years abandoned and suddenly the water pours in. Thunderous. Terrifying for both of us, I am sure. I am not on this earth for hate. I am not here for vengeance, and if you fell at your knees and sought the forgiveness that you CLAIMED to seek of me not one month ago, then I hope that you did not speak too loudly when you renounced it all as lies. I have spent my entire life being called a liar by a liar. Yes. I lied. I lied to protect myself. I lied to protect my baby sister. I was told that my implying abuse was simply a selfish deed that would only displace and endanger my innocent sister who I loved enough to resist the urges to bleed out onto the carpet every night at 3:20 a.m. when his footsteps came, like a stampede, like my heart beating in my chest so hard I could not swallow and he would be there, every night, like clockwork, looking for the comfort of a woman in a child. You looked in the mirror every morning and you shaved your face and you never once winced at your reflection. Why can you look yourself in the face when I can not. Why can you sleep at night when I can not. Why can you call me a liar when I myself am drowning in lies that you wove so delicately to keep me bound for the rest of my life that you might never have to pay for your deeds. I am grown now. I do not love you anymore. I am grown and I am on fire. I will burn you.
Like that stinkin’ Garth Brooks song.
So I pose first the question, “Have you ever heard that song by Garth Brooks where he’s talking about learning to live again and how it’s killing him and it’s in reference to learning to live and love after a divorce?”
Ok, well yeah, I’ve got a divorce under my belt, but that aside, I feel like I am learning to live again. It is not really such a stretch to say that is exactly what I am doing. I mean, I’ve been painting again. It’s not like you forget how to do something that you love, or that the brush is suddenly foreign and your eyes no longer process color or some dramatic spasms overtake you when you try to imagine life onto the canvass. I mean I guess it COULD be like that, if we wanted to get dramatic with it. I just have never painted happy. I have never been AUTHENTIC “happy” all by itself but I surely have never painted when I felt peaceful. My new marriage has had it’s ups and downs but it is in the best place it’s ever been at this point and my children have kept me busy but feeling needed and more than anything loved. Those things have spun a little web around my fingers and kept me, despite my total tail spin regarding my step-father, off of the canvass. I’ve decorated my home and built things as an outlet but my paint has be left to dry and my brushes to rot. This whole epiphany, my little trek for sanity, like a little hobbit, because I have gigantic hairy feet, lmao, has put me in a place where I’m feeling brave and pretty much ready to take on the world. I have no idea why. I’m in no condition or position, I just want to paint. It’s all I can think about. I’m at work thinking about painting. I’m painting thinking about the NEXT painting. It’s what I want to do when I grow up. I’ve said it my whole life but I have lived stifled by all of my eartags and stuck in the broken cycle of painting my sadness out. Like splaying my organs out for the buzzards, here are my guts, judge me by them. I could not part with anything that I did out of fury or emotion, broken heart, lust, all of these things, parts of me, smeared on canvass, hidden away. What a waste of a gift I don’t deserve to have. I guess I just wanted to say that while all of these scary things are going on in my life right now, I am excruciatingly grateful for my family, for my life, and for Gods sweet mercy that I do not deserve. I hope that I leave at least a smudge of me behind and I take advantage of every moment forward. I have never been happy before. Life is terrifyingly good.
Charming Aberration 