Simultaneous Conflicted Points of View

How Can They Both Be The Truth





Surely I am dying. A cancer or poison or slow working illness is creeping in to finally remove me from a world I don't belong in. It's as if no one has ever felt this before and the loneliness of my pain will eat me alive. I am an embarrassment in all that I do, never able to choose the right words for the right people at the right time. I'll never be enough. Leaving me caught between weeks of trying so hard I exhaust every part of myself and others where I give up entirely. Wishing for death because I'm far too cowardly to consider bringing it to myself. Lying alone wishing to be surrounded by attention I know I don't deserve. Paralyzed between what I want, perhaps need, and what I am too ashamed to ask for. Knowing that I'm ruining everyone and everything that I am responsible for, I have the audacity to keep moving forward. Raising children I have no right to destroy and holding on to a husband that could have had so much more. Even my dog looks at me with eyes of "why me?". Clinging to my contributions that mean nothing to anyone as an excuse to keep dragging them all down. The pain is so real, so physical regardless of how it manifested that way or what emotional state it came from. Look at me, Look at me, Look at me. I beg like an attention hungry child hoping that someone will say something to convince me that there is something to see. My body twists and turns in the mirror like a warped animation. Never giving me a clear concept of what you all see, but somehow despite that uncertain view I manage to convince myself it is bad. Not horrific or disgusting, no exaggerations to deter me and remind me I must be elaborating on what's really there. Just a steady well understood...bad... I want so badly to rest my mind in a place of acceptance on a road to contentment but know all too well that place doesn't exist.


I am a healthy capable woman who suffers from well hidden, yet at times, severe anxiety and depression. Due to many different circumstances through the course of my life I choose to manage this without medical intervention and I am aware that I will be ok. Even with the darkest thoughts I can have I am still more than able to run a household and raise well adjusted children. My husband, while wonderful, is not "out of my league" and I know we each deserve each other. We are equally talented and flawed in separate ways giving us at most times a well balanced relationship. The things I do matter.I make a difference and without me life wouldn't be the same or as fulfilling for several people. We all deserve love and recognition and it's perfectly ok to point out your accomplishments sometimes. My appearance is average. Without the aid of vibrant hair color or eye catching clothes I mostly blend in with a crowd and that is normal and ok. Statistically I am slightly overweight but again, nothing noticeable amongst others. On occasion, if I put forth an effort I may even turn a head and attract positive attention about my appearance. I accept I am aging at a normal pace and everything is as it should be. The aches and pains I experience are relative to my activities or lack thereof. The stereotypical weight in my chest, the tingling in my body and the occasional racing of my heart are merely symptoms of my mental illness and if I'm honest with myself I should seek treatment. The illness itself causes me to second guess that and never take necessary steps. I will likely live a long life and people will recall me fondly when I pass at an appropriate time of a perfectly average cause. 

I am a plague of contagious misery

Waking in the morning to a sky which seems to be perpetually grey becomes a redundant and painful experience that i see you struggle even harder to overcome. I once pitied myself, selfishly assuming this was a weight that only I would ever carry. Time passed by and slowly eroded your stoic ability to remain my strength. Never realizing that with each descent into my pain I dragged you a little closer to that place where you can't climb back. Struggling to keep you alive, not breathing but truly living, it kills me more than anything ever could before. No bleeding wound nor moment of grief would ever compare to the feeling of watching all that i know you to be drain out like sand in an hour glass. Counting down the time until you can't see my love anymore. My fears and delusions run deep in these times, always exaggerating a situation that you can't help but deny and downplay. Electric rage for my own destructive nature beams out of me in a way you can't see but I can't not feel. It burns and it pushes back as I try to contain every curious question. Never allowing me to stifle my need to invade your personal pain. Is this Love? Is this devotion, or obsession or just a self sabotaging cycle I can't help but repeat. I can't answer to that but to say it is real, and intense and even in the best of times it hurts like nothing else....just knowing it can't be that good forever. The mania and wild passion will always have an expiration date and that time seems shorter the more intense the joy becomes. It is truly entering into the greatest love story of all time only to experience the end over and over in a loop that leaves you wondering if the next time it might not come back. What if your smiles all become fake and the deep rooted all consuming pain i endure in response never relents? I'll hold this burning ember of all our anguish calmly in my hand until the next flip of the hour glass. Never without the scar to remind me the sand always runs out.

The line

Like a child testing limits, poking bears that are sure to attack. I push a little further than i know I should each time. heart racing, mouth dried up and hands shaking beyond my control I toe the line of security. Announcing my secrets, airing the clean and dirty as if they were the same. Because there was never a secret that was far from being a lie that would someday be found out. I won't shame my pain to protect the world. I won't smile through my broken soul. We don't tell you "I'm fine" to hide ourselves, it's only to protect you from the awkward moments nobody prefers to experience. You are not my children, I owe you no safety. Pretending to be the type to alter my behavior would be unfair to us all. I've taken on the love of many who in their entire selves don't always please me but I didn't walk away.
        I am stifled, constantly on the edge of the next thing but chained down and unable to leap. Calm on the outside and running circles of shrieking panic inside. Trapped in a cage I built with you and now you're stuck inside too. Some days the sun will shine, the bars seem further apart and the cage seems big enough to stretch our legs...but I dare you to imagine a time when you couldn't at least see the bars in the distance. Knowing you're never truly free of the restraints we've made. Fearing when the sun is not warm and the space gets constricted. Painfully aware that the good is not permanent.
         

What's wrong?

A lesson that I fear I was never taught, most of my questions are better if not asked. Inside of my soul, though it feels like a physical space, there is a box or bottle or designated cavity meant to house the feelings, thoughts and questions that I'm not allowed to indulge in. Many of these things come from a place which I thought was full of good intention and concern for the well being of others. As I'm learning about many facets of myself, I was wrong. The people in my life that would rather I keep these parts of myself in a tidy and concealed space may change over the years. They come, some stay and some go. Sadly I recall that these people that seem to want to smash and destroy a part of who I thought I was, I love or loved each and everyone with every part of my flawed and obnoxious heart. For 31 years I've been a burden to an increasing amount of people. I'm not sure that I'm sorry, but I do know that I feel some sort of pain for that reality. The bottoms of my figurative feet are scarred from the past and bleeding in the present from the miles of eggshells I've walked upon. I bare this pain not for you or them, but for myself. without walking that path I can't fathom the loneliness and loss I would have had to endure. But where does it go? All of my curiosity, concern, inconvenient feelings, can they really just keep filling that bottle or box? Today as I feel a boiling within me, a trembling of unwanted feelings, I wonder to myself (and the rest of you I suppose) is the space getting full? Is this the feeling of it overflowing or simply that I've forgotten how making a deposit to the box of my less favorable traits can burn. 

Dear Portland

Dear Portland, You are a beautiful city full of art, culture and fine foods. A city filled with intelligent progressive thinkers constantly creating new and innovative ways to keep their home clean and beautiful. TV shows and documentaries have been made about you and I myself idolized you as a place I could only dream to be a part of. But your beauty and wonder is a lie. You are beautiful in the way an old well designed and antique furnished home filled with termites is. You have an epidemic that grows by the day and is being ignored. The less fortunate, the impoverished, the down on their luck, the hungry, the poor. No matter how you choose to label them, your homelessness issue is something I've personally never seen so intensely in my life. As I drove in, my dream of what you were collapsed immediately. Small communities of overused weathered tents lined the grass by the highways. As I entered, people in tattered clothing held signs begging for my help. Your parks were built with statues and playgrounds for everyone to enjoy but nobody does because countless people with nowhere else to turn sleep upon the benches, the grass and even the statues.
      No Portland, I am not naive or idealistic. I am aware that many, if not the majority of these people ,made poor choices. I realize that several continue to make those poor choices. What I want to ask you, the city as a whole, is this. If we tell a child "you are bad, you are worthless, you will never be anything and nobody cares about you" day after day, week after week, creating a lifetime of never thinking anything more, what is likely to happen to that child? I suppose we could all answer this differently but personally I would imagine that child would be all of those things we convinced them they are. Why? Because they are human beings, because they are at our mercy and helpless. Because they trust and depend on us. Not unlike the HUMAN BEINGS living on the streets of your fine city. The ones you won't look at. The ones you step on, laugh at, scoff at and belittle. The ones you reinforce the feeling of worthlessness in by treating them like a species lower on the grand scale of life than yourself. They are all someone's child, possibly someone's mother, father, sister, brother, or best friend. Some are severely mentally ill. Others took a wrong turn and became seemingly hopelessly addicted to things that leave no funds to afford a life. And as time drags on, sadly, some don't know any other way of living.
         I want to solve your problem, but I know I can't. I want to give you the answers and make you what I thought you were, Portland. I racked my brain every day since I left trying to think how I can help, how someone else can help. Sure, I came up with a lot of small ideas to make things a little better but in the end I noticed one common theme in all of my plans. Restoring dignity, giving these people back their humanity. Whether it be through having lunch with them, getting them a shower, giving them a book to read or just talking to them like people...because they are people. Just like you, just like me. We are not made of anything different, we are not worth more than they are. I haven't given up hope of making my way back to help or even doing so with the far smaller population of less fortunate people here. I'd love to start my own movement, but until then at the very least I will remember to look people in the eye. Smile and say hello. I will treat each human being I meet as an equal and do whatever small kindnesses I can to restore any dignity they may be missing. I urge you all to do the same. It doesn't always require money or foundations. If each one of us can help one other person feel worthy, confident, strong and deserving of a better life then we each helped to create a huge movement. In short, if you want to see people do better, maybe you should do better as well.

Thank you Portland, thank you for opening my eyes, for showing me the truth and for making me want to do better.

Mirror, Mirror, Where am I?

Too many words can go unsaid and too many gestures stifled. So many feelings that should have been shared fall victim to fear. Fear of a faceless imaginary monster that we have placed inside of people we love and care for. A beast that I have come to believe will swallow me whole if I let anyone in. Don't tell them you love them, they might not feel the same. Don't tell them you want them, they might not have that urge. Don't wear that shirt, what does it say about who you were, are, or someday could be? Don't bother deciding on a meaning to life, there's too great of a chance you are wrong. Go through the motions, doing only what you think they may want. Eventually you won't remember what was so hard to hide. Whoever you were stretches thin. Each person you see gets their own version of you, because if you can't find way to smile you may as well make everyone around you do it instead.

    Until they don't. It starts with the ones who once knew you, I think. Assuming that anyone ever did. Your likes, dislikes, flaws and strengths all start to swirl together into a confusing mirrored image of themselves. They wonder where you've gone and if you were ever really there. You haven't noticed. You can't see. This is the most debilitating aspect of the fear, the monster, the invisible beast. You never saw it coming and you didn't notice it while it stayed.  Little by little it drained you like a slow leak in a balloon. Music, art, food, religion, political opinion, love, sex, parenting, social interactions at the lowest levels. One by one seeped out leaving you lifeless and confused. 

    This is not their fault. Nobody beat you down into this hole. Nobody scooped out your soul leaving the mimicking mirror shell. Not even you. Not marriage, not age, not children. The beast is not embodied, but I like to believe it can be fought. Every awkward laugh, one point for me. Every time I uncurl my hands from crippling anxiety and reach out to a person I love, a breath back into the balloon.

      In case I forget again. I am a human being with a purpose. Though I have accomplished many incredible things, I have not found that purpose yet. I will. I am a girl in love with a boy. Though I doubt this and challenge it often, that boy also loves me. I will always crave the epic romance that has probably already run its course in my life. I am a mother, a good mother who often hates herself at the end of the day but knows she did everything she could for her children. I am spiritual in a way I may never find words to explain, but it runs through me sure as the blood in my veins. I am a friend, a friend that sometimes tries too hard to be everyone's best friend. I am emotional in a way that I wish to share but never quite know how. These feelings all embarrass me. Almost anything that i feel deeply becomes the first victim to the fear. Perhaps recognizing this is the only step toward protecting the air I have left. It's time to shatter all the mirrors until the only image left is your own. 

Denial

A certain amount of time passes after an event and when that time has passed we are then expected to move past it as if it never happened. Each event gets its own separate time limit depending on the severity. No one will ask you how long you need, this time limit won't be discussed. Shoulders to cry on will simply shrug away. Listening ears will go deaf to your words. You will be a redundant bother to many but no one will tell you out loud. As your faithful companions begin to lose faith the weight grows heavier. Staying quiet so as not to stir up problems, you will soon forget what your voice would sound like if you were to allow it to speak. So many times your mouth will shy open only to close quicker than you could process the thought. Why stand up when you'll only have to sit back down. Driven by fear and pain the sickness has already consumed you when you weren't even looking.
       I am no more than a memory in my own mind of whatever i once may have been. I hold no life in my heart and I cling to the remnants of what I thought made happiness. I am torn down and unable to rebuild no matter how solid I may seem. I go through the motions wishing they meant more. Wishing every day that I could simply wake up and FEEL. Feel anything at all, something more than empty pain. Something real.
       How do I simply step into the other side of stagnant disappointment? There is no more mask, no cover, no way to hide from the dependant lives around me. If I knew how to be the person trapped inside I would gladly open the gate. If I could trust her just to "be" and not only to perform perhaps the clouds would just drift away.