Wow, there's something in the Bible I can wholeheartedly agree with?

This passage gives me goosebumps. I freaking want this hanging in my house. (Brackets mine.)

1 Corinthians 13

 ¹ If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 

² If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 

³ If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to the flames that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

 ⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 

⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 

⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 

⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

⁸ Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 

⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 

¹⁰ but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 

¹¹ When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a [wo]man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 

¹² For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

What I seek is clarity of mind, strength of body, and surety of purpose.

It's raining softly outside. The light is soft, but clear. It's 8 AM. It's perfectly cool, and the air smells like honeysuckle. Every leaf perfectly formed, some eaten, some already fading and passing into their next phase of existence. It's just so perfect out there, it's hard to describe the feeling. I took some things out to the mailbox, slipping on some heels because they were the closest thing, and wandered around outside just taking everything in. The sense of peace of being out there, alone, on a tiny spot on the most beautiful rock in the sky, is amazing. For a while everything I'm trying for slips away, and all that's left is me. And it's the me that only has to answer to my own heart. I am there, busy thoughts removed, breathing in and out, an incredibly complex creature that has been reduced to the perfect appreciation of her surroundings. The early, rainy morning means few bugs, and I'm not itching or sneezing. I'm free. In this moment, I have the things I want. My goal in life is not so much to acquire things, but to shed the things I am burdened with. I don't want to move to a cave in the forest somewhere with not a stitch on me to commune with the elements, or anything - but I want a simpler, purer life. I want a piece of land, away from noise and annoyance, and I want to build a house on it with my husband. I want to build that house from the ground up, with the ground. Cob. I will know what is in every part of that house. We will shape every component of it ourselves. Hopefully, I'll be able to make some special things that will go inside the house. I want to learn to sew and embroider so that I can mend things well, but I also have this idea of making quilts/blankets for each of my children. I had a really special blanket I called my Green Blanket that I used until it fell apart so much I really could not use it any more without it ending up as rags. I know I still have it, it's packed up safe somewhere. I'd like to make something like that for my kids. I want things to be special, made with care and love. I want a life that is full of things that were not created solely for the money they put in someone's wallet. Material things and immaterial things alike. I make bread, and jam, and I want to make cheese and other dairy products. I want my entire life to be like that.

I got distracted and can't continue this right now. But if I save it as a draft I KNOW I will never come back to it in a timely manner, so instead, you get a half-formed post. :) Is it better than no post?

There's a possibility I'll come back and finish it, but I won't make a promise. Because I'll feel shitty if I break it.

Clarity

I either think too much or not enough. I haven't come to a conclusion yet. Maybe that answers the question - if I can't come up with an answer, I'm still thinking about it. So I guess I think too much... I can never slow down and make sense of my world, and the trillion thoughts that have passed through my mind in the last day. Case in point: a little more than 24 hours ago, I was laying on my bed crying with no end in sight, for a million reasons, and none. Right now I feel like I'm a million miles from that moment yesterday, but one more mile and I might just end up in the same spot all over again. And I can't quite decide if my thoughts then were important or not, or where they fall upon that spectrum. I'm having trouble remembering them clearly, which is really my problem with everything. (That alone could span a hundred blog entries.) Snippets.

Worthless. I can't bring myself to do anything. I could force myself to get up and do something, it's in the realm of the possible, but I cannot summon the motivation to do it. I am so tired of trying, of not trying hard enough. I am so tired of the way things are; it feels like nothing will ever change. And if it does - see it coming back to me? - what good will I be, because if I cannot handle this, this nothing, how can I ever handle anything more? I want more, but I'm not fighting for it. Or not fighting hard enough for it.

[Normal people would interject here: So start fighting for it. Well, I know that's what you'd say, so I tell myself that. A number of problems arise. I don't see how. If I see how, I can't motivate myself to do. You can say a lot of pretty things, and I can, and do, recognize them as true, but it goes beyond the words. Words, either yours or mine - let's just call it the Voice of Reason - have a poor success rate of grabbing me by the throat and forcing some life into me in these moments. The Voice of Reason doesn't often connect with emotion. That's why there are pills. This is the entire difficulty. Where were we?]

...So I don't deserve it. I don't even deserve the chance at it. If I don't feel like fighting for a little bit more than stagnation, how will I ever be able to fight to hold on to what I might gain? It seems to me like I am fighting a losing battle. And that, I suppose, is the core of what I was feeling yesterday morning. You can ask my husband, and he will tell you that it took the jaws of life to get me off of that bed yesterday. I don't like putting myself back in her position, that girl I was yesterday. I had to slog through all of that in the first place to get to the current state I'm in, to be this girl, the one with her fingers determinedly hitting the keys right now. It's hard work. It's so hard I wanted to give up and be done with it all yesterday. But when I do, sometimes instead of losing all my progress, I hit a brilliant moment of clarity. I have had several throughout this post. I don't even know where to put this one, so I give up on organizing it neatly: the perfect mental image for this just hit me. My life, bipolar life with Heather-seasoning, is crossing the same distance that a normal person crosses, but to get from mutual point A to mutual point B, I don't cross flat plains or gently hilly terrain. My physical and mental legs are having to cart me up and down steep mountains and deep valleys instead, a comical line-graph of a silhouette. Everything (There is no "normal", but I have to have an average of human experience, a reference point) people experience, but I experience it quicker, harder, higher, deeper. The highs and lows last longer. "When she was good, she was very good indeed, but when she was bad, she was horrid." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Remember that one? I want to add so many qualifiers to this, but instead I hope you'll just understand what I was trying to say. I've run myself in circles and spent perhaps an hour on this last paragraph alone. Measure any stretch of life and I guarantee you I'll run myself in circles over it so much that I may as well have crossed that ground thirty times before passing over it.


In my short, tumultuous, almost-twenty-but-still-nineteen years, I have come to believe that being an adult, for me, begins or reaches some sort of "I Am A Grown-Up" milestone when you get to the point where you can share your life with your parents, warts and all. It has been and still is a big fear of mine to let my parents see into my head. (I have to keep reminding myself throughout this post to unclench my teeth.) I think you want to be the best you can be with your parents, or whoever raised you, no matter who you are. And I have been struggling with seeing myself alternately as 'a genuinely good, cool person,' and 'a complete waste of space and molecules' for years. The level of desperation I had to reach in order to admit myself to the hospital for psychiatric care the first time was insane. I let it nearly kill me before I admitted that the things I was experiencing and feeling were literally killing me. I have a very, very long way to go and it is not a linear path. I am, quite frankly, terrified of the experience of dealing with this for the rest of my life. For other people, stability is something you might achieve and maintain for months or years at a time. For me and other people who are of and near to the bipolar persuasion, stability is this dream concept that eludes us in our minutes, hours, days, and weeks. We seem perfectly fine, until we're not. And there's no predicting when it will begin or end...

Our lives are definite maybes.

This makes us incomprehensible to the world around us, and most of the time I am incomprehensible to myself, as well. It just makes everything harder. For every thing about myself I think I have figured out, there's ten I'm too swept up in to realize they are "things." A friend I was getting reacquainted with several months back told me, "You are like a puzzle with all the pieces, but they don't fit unless it's Saturday with nothing on TV and the moon is alignment with Mars." I could kiss you for that, Johnny. It makes me smile every time I think about it. It's so true, but it's so much funnier when someone else notices it.


The process of my thoughts creates a dizzying spin. Ironically, this whole post started with and was supposed to be about a moment of clarity that brought me into the eye of the storm.
I had been looking at different books on Amazon.com and reading the reviews, previews/samples, etc. I've added several more books to my ever-expanding wishlist. I want the "It Gets Better" book, this book about a gay couple adopting "The Kid" (look inside and read the beginning, I'm hooked on the story already), and somehow I also ended up looking at memoirs about dealing with anorexia and bulimia, and really, really wanting to read one or two of them. Particularly this one by supermodel Crystal Renn, who I've never heard of, but whose story sounds incredibly intriguing, and (Ellen's wife) Portia de Rossi's memoir "Unbearable Lightness". These are things that do not directly touch my life, but I am hungry for other peoples' experiences. I don't have an eating disorder, but I do understand struggling with your perceptions and with self-harm. I understand in some small part, but I want to understand more. Their lives are very different from mine, and it was taking myself out of my own sphere of life that gave me my moment of clarity, where I could breathe and think, "Oh." And while I was reading part of Crystal Renn's book introduction, I realized this, and put it up on Facebook:

Sometimes you need to take a minute to remember that you're only halfway there. It doesn't matter where 'there' is or whether you even know where you are. Life hasn't come to a standstill. It never can - the earth is constantly spinning and rolling through the galaxy. How could your life do anything but follow the same pattern?

After that, I started this post... Yesterday, I was really fucked up. I was at a point I return to a lot, where I cannot see myself progressing beyond my current spot. The thought process I wrote down near the beginning, I still don't have answers to most of that. But for now I can hold on to the thought that I am only halfway to wherever the hell I am going... And I know that if I end up where I want, it will be pretty different from what I see in my mind. I am, in essence, in the same place I was yesterday. I still don't know how to get a step farther, and the underlying problem is that I don't know what to do with myself when I can't do anything [useful] at all. This is a mental rabbit hole that goes too deep for me to follow right now. I can't find anything to grab hold of inside. I can be useless as long as that is smothered in guilt, but the guilt creates major problems that get bigger the longer I am useless. I don't know how to handle letting myself be useless - being gentle with myself, as if it were a physical injury - without the guilt. I can't breathe easy. I don't know if that's right. 

But that realization was a breath of clean air, that I am not truly in stasis, that with the passage of time flowing all around me, it is not so absolutely crucial that I move my world forward by myself, with my own two hands. Other things are trying to slide into place. Garret is taking care of me - how and why that man loves me so much I cannot grasp - and still trying to get a second job to support us and move us into our own place, and I am waiting on Social Services' decision as to whether they will grant me Medicaid or not. These are things that are not in my control and can happen without my pushing. I don't know where I am, but for this moment, that's okay... 

 

You have no idea how hard it was to get this all to come out. I hope it is halfway coherent. I would drive myself mad trying to make it clearer. Going back to edit it might actually make it worse. I don't know how this all comes together in the reader's eyes, but this is a big thing for me, because I am sharing this with my parents, and this is a part of me I have tried hard to hide for years. I want to be the perfect daughter in their eyes, and it kind of kills me to openly show that I am flawed and fractured, even though I know that's plainly obvious. It's the difference between everyone knowing you're gay, and formally coming out of the closet. I want our relationship to grow and evolve into one where we can be more our true selves with each other. I don't need to conceal these parts of me, but it makes me sad to admit that I am not the person I might have grown up to be, because now I'm stuck with all this damage and these scars, and the pretty child that might have accomplished so much more is gone. I was really smart and I was happy. Now, I struggle with the simplest things. I feel slow and witless, and I'm something of a raincloud. How much of it was my fault? I think a lot of the hurt and difficulty I've experienced has made me a better person, and I've gained wisdom and a strong empathetic ability from it. I feel like losing things has made me more appreciative of their value and aware of their importance, and when I have them again I know I will hold onto them and savor them. But I also feel like it all might go to waste. I'm still trying to keep myself together for the people I love, but at times I feel like I may be too crippled to live up to my simple dreams. I worry about my capacity to be a good mother to our future children and frequently feel like I'm a bad wife. I keep fighting because of the people who love me. They are what I hold on to when I cannot find any other reason to keep going. So here is all of me; it's all I have to offer. I am afraid it isn't enough, but maybe I set my standards too high.

Look, Ma! No steering wheel!

Hurt...

I just accidentally posted in a guild raid chat telling everybody "I haven't cut for months but right now I really want to." I suppose most people missed it, but nobody (except the person I was talking to in whisper who I meant to say it to) said a word. Not one word.

Talk about feeling unloved.

A Little Conflicted

If you know me, you probably know that one of the things that bothers me the most is when people use faggot/gay in a derogatory way. It makes me uncomfortable, and it's hurtful. Most of my friends have said at least gay one time or another, and I usually speak up about it. I try to be gentle about it. It's very important to me but the last thing I want is to offend in turn. And usually, most people don't mean anything by it. They use it thoughtlessly, generally as a word synonymous with lame. Plenty of people who use it have no problem with people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. And for that I'm very glad. :) But it's a pattern that can eventually have completely unintended harmful consequences.

You've probably heard my explanation of why this matters to me, so I'll skip that. I wonder, though, am I too forceful about it? I don't want to seem like someone who just has a stick up her ass. I want to make you understand that words can have consequences whether we intend them to or not. It's like talking about a celebrity of whose weight is average, but more than usual for famous, "beautiful" people, and calling her fat. Girls in our culture are very sensitive about their weight. They grow up seeing these fashion models, these celebrities, who are all terribly skinny, and told by it that this is what you have to look like to be beautiful. This is what you have to be if you want to be accepted. And it's not a whit true, but repeated exposure embeds the concept in their minds. Many, too many, girls develop eating disorders. Many more are simply made very self-conscious and try too hard to be someone else's ideal of beauty. It's the same with gay kids. Hearing 'gay' used negatively all the time embeds the feeling that being gay is something to be ashamed of, a feeling that isn't helped by lack of acceptance in conservative and religious communities and even from within their own families.

I was extremely fortunate to have a family who supported me wholeheartedly. Coming out as bisexual was no big deal for me. My mom noticed I had been reading some gay webcomics, and one day at the store it came up in conversation, and she asked me, "Are you gay? Because it's okay if you are." I told her I was bi, and she said okay. And that was that. At another point, she told me that she didn't care whether I ended up with a man or a woman as long as I gave her grandkids. "But not too soon!" Similarly, it was a non-issue with my dad. He jokes about it, and we can admire hot girls together. My grandma didn't have any problems with it, and told me she had experimented in her youth. I love my family and wouldn't trade them for the world. But I have known friends who have faced rejection from their families, and I have been with a girl whose parents hated me and did everything they could to keep us apart. Seriously, can you think of anyone who hates me?? Everybody loves me.

So this is a big deal for me. I would love it if everyone made an effort not to use it. Lame works just as well, and if you don't think it's a big deal, then it shouldn't really be too hard to switch to saying lame instead, right? (MWAH to Wesley for trying very hard at this.) It bothers me a lot more when people say faggot. It's a cruel word. Its influence is far less subtle than 'that's gay'. Whenever I see it, I feel like I've been punched in the gut. It makes me sick and sad. I almost never see this one from my friends, which I am very glad of.

Am I too zealous about this, though? What do you think, when I tell you that it bothers me and why? Does it bother you, annoy you? Or do you take it as I intend, as a request to think about what you say and how it may affect people?