Fragments, Twice

If I were to be entirely honest I would have to admit that I've been running away from writing, especially any writing with the intent to share with anyone beyond the self I encounter at three in the morning when everyone else is in bed and I'm alone with the darkness and the ticking clocks and the creaking pipes reaching up from the basement and through the walls to the second floor. There is something about putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard that pries away one's inner secrets, something about writing that bares the soul, and I've been trying to avoid that until now, trying to avoid it because I desperately want to stay concealed in my little imaginary safe-house, where I can push people away and keep all but the most superfluous of thoughts to myself.

Well, that hasn't been working so well for my girls, and it hasn't been working so well for me either, and now that events have pried my fingers away from some other methods of purging my system of stress and thrust a pen back into my hand I am confronted with the necessity of writing, and writing honestly. Speaking honestly, really, but somehow writing wraps up nicely with living and talking and acting with transparency, since words on paper—words on screens—will always be my first method of frank communication. The other things I'm learning: the meeting of eyes and the freedom to touch, verbal confession and reassurance, silence at the right moments, a well-timed gift. Those are coming, if slowly. It'll take a lifetime of development to grasp them. The words, at least, I have now. The words I am using to sort through a brain wrecked by everything from life to love to my own terribly destructive habits. The words are already in my hands.

So is the coffee, black and cold, but that is hardly worth mentioning.

~ ~

For the past several months I've been mulling over progress, over what it means to be "getting better" when every day seems a redundant cycle of physical pain, emotional lagging, and general lack of wellness; when sleep patterns are still as volatile as hormonal fluctuations; where my body thinks functioning properly is an out-dated notion; when I have nothing I can carefully box and label and say "This is why I'm a worthwhile person: I do this task well and this person desperately needs me and here is where I'm going." It's hard to accomplish any noteworthy achievement, however small, when the journey from beneath blankets to the Keurig in the kitchen for coffee is a journey that exhausts the day's energy reserves. It's hard to find relevance in other people when too discouraged and sick to be of use to anyone, even oneself. It's hard to have ambitious goals that somehow justify one's existence on the planet when the thought of living past one's twenty-first birthday seems too overwhelming a thought to be entertained.

To be quite frank, I don't feel like I've made any progress at all from that place of ruin in which I stood not last winter but in the winter previous. I don't feel like anything is being mended. Right now there is more cause for despair than anything else, because my dreams of finding something that would snap me back to life have been reduced to shambles, and I know very well that I'm still a horrid mess, in so many ways. But what I feel means little.

What I feel is not all that relevant now, because, regardless of the negative emotion churning continually through my head, the tiny moments of concrete decision throughout each day and night have become my touchstones for sanity. Saying no to a third cup of coffee for the day. Snacking on vegetables instead of punishing my body by skipping food. Exercising instead of brooding. Choosing to focus attention on a task in front of me, however irrelevant, instead of spacing out in order to review everything that I cannot fix around me, everything that is broken and driving me mad. Determining that moods, however relentless, will not be the compass by which I travel, and any sort of mood will most certainly not be my North. And perhaps last night's choice most of all: I went to sleep. Finished watching a movie, then shut down the laptop in preparation for bed before proceeding to sit silently in the recliner, rocking back and forth, for forty-five minutes, and instead of getting up and creeping through the dark to the kitchen to brew a mug of coffee and spend the next three hours giving free reign to despair and lonely fancy I wrapped myself in my fuzzy blanket, flopped face-first on that oh-so-comfy leather couch, and went to sleep. Forced my brain, trained to play insomniac, to let go of something that was bothering me and acknowledge my body's need for rest.

Funny how something so small and apparently inconsequential can seem so much like victory.