What It Takes

I feel as though I am falling apart. I feel like I will break into a million pieces and not ever be whole.

The only good news in this is that I am letting myself fall apart....for the most part. There are days where I claw and scratch and do anything I can think of to make the pain stop for a moment. Most days though, I'm just letting it happen. I joined BSF (Bible Study Fellowship) and this morning before the lecture started I began to cry. So I went out in the foyer and cried through the entire thing. They pipe it through the speakers so I was able to listen to all of it as tears silently streamed down my face for an hour. If this is what it takes.....

I called a pregnancy center in my town and have signed up for a weekend thing they do to help women who have had abortions find healing. I had to go to an interview for that Monday night. It was short but the questions were tough. I left there and went to a friends house and once her husband went to sleep I completely broke down. Never in my life before have I allowed myself to fall apart in front of another human being. Sure there have been a few quiet tears that I couldn't suck up.....but never all out weeping, sobbing, heaving cries. It was strange and I still can't quite believe it happened. If this is what it takes....

The fourteenth anniversary of my abortion is next Monday. Now with all the memories filling my head, some that have always been there, some newly faced and severely painful, my heart is feeling that it's had about all that it can take. Fact of the matter is though, as bad as I feel now, knowing the worst that can happen is it kills me really doesn't sound all that bad. If that's what it takes....

How I Feel

I found this online today and it so describes the inner workings of my brain that I felt the need to share it. It will probably give you a headache, welcome to my world.

Fear strikes me from all corners of my being. What, what is it that I am not seeing? Is not what I perceive what is really real? Why is it that I am the only one who sees what I see, just the way that I do? What does this mean? Surely this is what is wrong with the world right? I mean it can't be my problem. I am not afraid. I am not scared or weak or vulnerable. I need you..... NO!! ....I am strong and I don't need you. If you let me need you I won't want you anymore. And if you say I can't have you then I've got to have you. If you let me have you then I don't want you anymore. I want you when you don't want me and I need you when you won't help me. It is the biting and the pain of this cold distance that I know that somehow is familiar and is the feeling that I need to give me the illusion of safety. If I were truly safe I'd be exposed and not safe at all. Get away by coming closer and come closer by getting away. I am exposed most when I hide and hidden when I try to be who I think I am.

Feeling alone, again, abandoned as always, alone, again. I am everyone and everyone is me. Who am I again? Oh yea, that person, and that person, and this person, and this person. Where does that leave me when I am alone? Who am I then? Do I cease to exist if I am not in the company of someone off of whom I can bounce my existence and from whom all of my validation must come?

What is wrong with the world? Why can't they see my pain? Don't they know how incredibly much I hurt? Can't they see that I need them to hold some of this pain for me, validate it, and take it away; for my soul runneth over with agony. Why should I have to bear my own agony? It is not my fault. I didn't do this to me. I didn't choose to hurt like this. I am beside myself with all of this pain and anger and grief as is an infant whose mother is angry with him or her. What do I do with that angry face? It is not acceptance, it is rejecting me.....but I NEED it.....what am I to do? I don't know what to do so I put it beside me. Whatever it is, I leave it to sit there....and it builds over the course of a lifetime. It builds and it always hurts. It hurts even when I don't feel it at all. I need to get what I need. I'll die if I don't. I'll just die. I am dying to live and in my attempts to live I die.

And so I have remained trapped inside this isolated, and insulated place of youth stunted in my emotional growth. I am a victim. It is not my fault. I hurt and I hurt and I hurt. Why don't you care? Why don't you care? Make it go away. Make it stop, just love me from over there. Love me, but don't you dare really care. It would hurt too much if you were to care. I wouldn't understand who you were caring for or about because I don't know who I am. I hate who I am and what I am. I hate whoever the hell I am. I have come to hate what it is that I might be, or sometimes am. I don't like the voided vacuum within which I feel like my being exists under a glass bubble. So close, yet so far away from others am I. So close, yet so far away, from whoever I am, am I. Who are you trying to care about? What does that mean, that you want to care about me? It would mean that I needed you to care. I don't need you to care but I am dying for you to care. Still, care from over there and don't act like I need you.

Rescue me, by leaving me alone...it'll kill me. Leave me alone but rescue me. I need you to rescue me if I am to live. I am not alive. I am dead. I am dead when I try to be alive. I am alive when I act like I'm so dead I can't feel anything. There is such a sharp feel to the pain of numbness. Feeling the absence of myself like this. Where do the feelings go? Where does all of that pain hide? I dissociate from all that hurts. I give it to others. It is their fault, and their problem, not mine. Help me, while you leave me alone. Leave me alone while you help me. NOW!

I am the center of the universe. Yes I am. I am it and it is me. I will act this way too, if I feel like it. No, you can't win. I will win. I'll get you coming and I'll get you going and there will be no way that you can win. I must always win. I need to control because I feel so helplessly out of control, but you can't know that. You can't know that okay, you don't know that about me. I don't know that about me. I don't know you because I don't know me. You can't know me either. No, I won't let you in to a place that I have yet to gain access to. No, me first.

Who am I? I thought I knew just a minute ago. Then, suddenly nothing felt familiar anymore. Nothing felt okay anymore: nothing felt SAFE anymore - nothing felt as it had before. Why does this happen and what does it mean? What do you mean you don't know? You are supposed to know. I expect you to know. And if I expect it then I have a right to demand it from you. Don't go asking me for anything, NO, it depends how I feel, and what I believe in any given moment...you just never can know cause I never know what I'll do or say or feel. Every moment changes and shifts from one to the next. What is real, what is truth, whether or not I think I can take care of myself or what I feel, or right or wrong, from minute to minute changes, so I really just don't know. I don't care to know. Don't bother me about it. Leave me alone, just stay here. And be quiet while you talk to me. Talk to me silently. Words can hurt. Don't be too quiet in your silence though, because silence can kill a soul. I know, it killed mine over and over again. Dead, time and time again, risen hopes, only to fall and to die, unanswered, arms outstretched, never reached for, never grasped, arms that hung outstretched while a little girl screamed in terror and fear and had more need than any infant could possibly bear to hold. Arms...that had to hold themsleves, suspended in mid air, left alone, ignored. Arms that would take another 36 years to ever dare to reach out again. So hold me, and rock me -- rock me to stillness -- gently okay, just don't touch me really, you know?

Truth, you want to talk truth? Whose truth, yours or mine? Is there a truth between? No, my truth is truth. Your idea of truth is a lie. I don't lie. If I don't lie and our truths aren't the same that makes you a liar. Does so....just does. If I am right then you are wrong. Yes you are. No I'm not. If I am good then you are bad if you don't agree with me and or see things my way. My way isn't just right, it is the only way. What matters is what I want and need. That's my truth. And my truth is the truth. Don't you even try to lie to me, don't...

I know things but they seem fleeting. What is real and important one minute is fragile and or gone and or misunderstood-misperceived and misinterpreted by me the next minute. I don't know why? You were here a minute ago and it mattered. But then you left. While you were gone for three minutes and fifty-four seconds (clock time -- forever in my own sense of the reality of time) I forgot that you mattered to me and now I find it incredibly impossible to believe that you could love me and leave me just like that for three minutes and fifty-four seconds...to wait and to suffer like that, alone, isolated and afraid. Don't ever do that again. Promise me! Do you have any idea what you put me through? My parents left me like that. It's not alright for you to just be you and not be me -- while I'm being you too. I know things seem fleeting. Things keep changing. I can't hold anymore than I am whether I am holding anything or not.

You live in a "big picture." Life, so I am told unfolds in some "big picture" of reality. I live in millions of little pictures. Millions of pieces of reality. Snap shots from the whole, fragmented seconds of minutes that seem to encompass hours. I can't tell what is going on around me like you do. No, it does not make sense to me. Part of this picture lined up with part of that one...what am I supposed to see? What can I know from these mixed up jigsaw puzzle messages? I get part of it. I don't understand the rest. First you seem to make sense, then you don't so I get angry and frustrated. In one part of the picture I care about you but in another part of the picture I remember out of context when you said this or that and then I can't trust you anymore, or not until the next moment when two picture pieces fit briefly together. This is my experience. So one minute I want you close, from a distance and the next minute I want you distantly-close. This is what is going on inside of me. I don't want to hurt you like I do I just don't know how to make sense of all of these jumbled messages and fragmented pictures that bombard my mind constantly with images and thoughts that do not fit together, not now, not ever, hardly ever anyway. If memories are pictures of the way things were (or the way things are?) then my memories, like strewn screams, echo to a voided-abyss in a cavernous canyon. Imagine all of that sound overlapping itself. Could you hear me then, any better than I can hear you now?

Ms. A.J. Mahari - February 29, 2000

Ponderings

I need to process, feel free to disregard.

I am in a war. Naively I could say it is a war with myself but I know it goes much deeper. I know my battle is not just flesh and blood.

I am watching a television show and a woman was trapped in a small box. Tied up but screaming and trying to bang her way out. My first thought is that I would give up, just lie there and die. But I know me better than that. I am a fighter even when I long to just give in. I know I fight against that which seeks to destroy me. I know this because in actuality, I really should be destroyed by this point. The problem is that I also fight against that which seeks to save me. I let no one in. I trust in no one. I cry out to God but never allow Him past arms length. I don't make these choices consciously but my life is evidence that it's truth.

These are good revelations. They are, however, useless if I can't figure out how to stop this cycle. This pattern of searching for love, being offered it but refusing ever to accept that what is offered could very well be my saving grace.

I am actively fighting even as we speak. One second I am trying to think of any way possible to lock all this madness deep back inside myself. The next I'm praying He won't allow it because as terrified, exhausted and alone as I feel, I still want to be free. If I have to suffer through this to get to that freedom, I will. I want a guarantee though. I want His promise it will work.....and I'm not going to get that. Ugh. Okay, processing over now.

I'm just asking for a break. Not a husband, not a child., not a million dollars. Just a break. A minute or two to catch my breath. I don't feel like that is asking too much. Apparently I'm wrong. So i'll go finish crying my way through the second coat of paint and hope like hell that He sees fit to lessen this load before I am destroyed beneath the weight of it.

So, in effort to escape from myself, God, whomever, I decided to go for a walk. I walked the trail once already but my ipod died and I'm trying to give it time to charge so I can go again.

It occurred to me on the first walk that I make it a habit to never stop. Don't get me wrong I can veg out with the best of them. Inside, however, I'm always running there is no rest and it's exhausting. I wish, and told God as much, that I knew how to stop. But I'm just not sure how that works. I think if I could just get a little reprieve, a brief respite, then maybe I could survive this.

The bitch of it is, I know it's my fault that He can't heal me. I simply don't know how to get out of my own way. Oh well. Back to walking. Hopefully nine miles will be enough to make me feel better for now.

Have You

ever been so tired that you dreamed of never waking.

so alone that being surrounded by people only compounded the loneliness.

so afraid that you'd trade your life just to remain hidden.

so desperate that anything had to be better than this.

so sad that smiling was painful.

so ashamed that you knew you were worthless.

so weighted down that it hurt to breathe.

so broken that healing seemed a pipe dream.

This is how I feel. It sucks.