50) Dirty Feet (TW: suicide, sexual assault)
Thinking about suicide has been my main hobby for 14 years, 7 months and 16 days.
You were right about sexual assault, especially for kids.
“It makes you see yourself as a demon. So you check-out, dissociate, a lot of the time, because who wants to be a demon?”
I realize why I kept this fantasy alive for so long.
I believed the only worthy thing to do with my life was make sure my last act will be one of love.
34) Less than half, and none of the important ones: Part 4
I believe that healing starts with feeling.
Feeling the truth of your pain. Feeling the ache of loneliness that seems to open into infinite blackness in your heart. Feeling the guilt that eats away at you for the ways you know, deep down inside, that you have failed people, or yourself. Feeling your awfulness. Your grief. Your desperation. Your failures. If you don’t first stop and FEEL the soft, suffering animal that you are, then you will spend your life trying to hammer yourself into shape. This won’t make you stronger; it will just make you bruised and broken and exhausted. The “road to self-improvement” will become more like a hamster wheel, a treadmill that takes you nowhere.
33) Less than half, and none of the important ones: Part 3
“She said she had made a list of all the qualities she wanted in a partner. At the end, she concluded, “he has less than half. And none of the important ones.”
This was the end of my sanity, for a long time. I don’t know why. I just stopped being a person. I was a blank page. And anything written on me turned into invisible ink.
…..Less than half, and none of the important ones. I hate that phrase. It still haunts me, practically every day.”
32) Less than half, and none of the important ones: Part 2
Independence is a delusion. And it’s a dangerous one. Anyone who has been abused knows the deep truth of interdependence, right in their very bodies. The assaulted. The betrayed. The terrorized. The gas-lighted. But also the lonely. The invisible. The unwanted. The ridiculed and rejected.
People live out, in their consciousnesses, their bodies’ attempts to ‘process’ what has happened to them in life; we construct our entire ‘selves’ around this problem of body-world adaptation. It’s good to remember that.
31) Less than half, and none of the important ones: Part 1
Have you ever been on the receiving end of someone’s harshness? Criticism? Gas-lighting? Name-calling? Bullying? Shaming? Humiliating? Lying?
Well, “sticks and stones may break your bones but words….”
Just stop. Right there. Because “words can never hurt you” is absolute, dangerous, bullshit. Words can break your heart, poison your mind, even destroy your life.
27) Gratitude Day 7: Breaking Your Vows
I am grateful for a Rumi poem. It’s the opening poem to the beautiful book, The Illuminated Rumi.
“Come, come, whoever you are! Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come!”
I love this poem because it is like a flower. Flowers are beautiful. But they grow in the shit and death of the micro organismic world that we pretend we are different from. Without death and shit, no flowers.