brightlotusmoon: (Asha)
"...Williams died by the claw of the ghastly inner monster that severe depression lodges in the human spirit, losing a long fight with the unholy ghost." -Brain Pickings (included is a link to a book referencing clinical depression to a holy ghost)

In my last session with my therapist, I kept calling depression The Hollow and a Dark Ghost and The Nothing and, naturally, true pure abyss. In such violent howling emptiness, there could be sound and fury, signifying nothing. And sometimes there is just nothing. Fury would be an emotion, after all.
(And I know why depressed people don't tell the tale, lest they be called an idiot. They'll be mocked today. And tomorrow. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And they are heard no more, and as they are poor players, life is but a walking shadow. Out, brief candle. -And people wonder why we get angry when mental illness gets blamed for so many blameless things and things where mental illness is completely not ever the blame. This is why we can't have nice things.)

People always ask me why I cry when I say I am hollow, empty, ghostly, feeling nothing. Isn't crying an emotion? they say Doesn't it mean you feel something? they say. I think Allie Brosh, who wrote the greatest description of depression I have ever read in her blog Hyperbole and a Half, said it best: It is just something that is happening.
Because I don't feel like crying. I'm crying because my body is having a reaction. A symptom, if you will. Something needs to release. Some sort of physiological reaction must occur, lest I literally fade into ghosts.

I understand some of the reasons Robin did what he did. I don't know why he did what he did. No one knows why. No one can know why, because no one is Robin.
People have the same thoughts and feelings and illnesses as Robin had, and they see everything he saw. But none of them and nobody will ever fully purely viscerally know, truly know why he, Robin Williams, the funniest man of a thousand laughs, physically participated in his own death. Only Robin Williams knows.

Cool story, bro:
Someone who survied her own suicide attempt once told me that for her, there was only pain, agony, chaos, and the kind of despair that consumes utterly. Beneath it was a nearly robotic thought process. Any emotional thoughts came from a distance. As she began the process, she became enveloped in a still emotionless sedating transcendent serenity, and time slowed down, and she literally had no more thoughts. Since she was stopped by other people, she couldn't tell me much more. But she told me that during recovery, she experienced every single one of those sensations at once, from the pain and chaos to the calm transcendence. It took a lot of sedatives and intense biofeedback to help her out of that state and she was put on suicide watch again for a few days. They allowed her family to bring in her kitten, which helped so much that she now advocates for cat therapy when treating mental illness. I think of her when I talk to attempt survivors. I only remember her first name and some day I will forget some of her story. But she lives a different life. Not better nor worse, just different. She has learned lessons. She doesn't regret things. She still battles symptoms and switched to a new drug regimen and still does biofeedback. She hasn't had any suicidal ideations in over a year. She also treats her cat like the most important sentient being in the universe, since he helped save her life. Cats are awesome.
brightlotusmoon: (Snow White Ruby Blood Dragon Witch)
"Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing..."
Hi.

"Now I know that the number one rule to being cool is to seem unfazed, to never admit that anything scares you or impresses you or excites you. Somebody once told me it's like walking through life like this. You protect yourself from all the unexpected miseries or hurt that might show up. But I try to walk through life like this. And yes, that means catching all of those miseries and hurt, but it also means that when beautiful, amazing things just fall out of the sky, I'm ready to catch them. "

I need this. I've spent my entire life catching all of those hurts, and sometimes those hurts are beautiful and amazing - because they live inside of me. Even the painful parts. Even the Monsters. I don't always declare war on the symptoms, I often imagine myself using psychological coping mechanisms, transporting my quiet self to a Zen garden with cats and sunlight and wildflowers, as the warrior parts of my brain battle those Pain Monsters with spears and war cries. It is a mind over matter dance that does not erode the symptoms, but helps me work with and deal with them. I apply creative writing to cope and to run to other worlds in my mind.

It is seen as Positive Thinking. But I tend to flinch at that term, because it is usually followed up with a sunshine up the ass platitude. I do apply a method of positive thinking to my conditions, disorders, and disabilities. But it is my own personal method, and whenever someone tries to insist that I use a different method, I naturally stand firm and stare them down. This is why I am happy that all of my doctors, specialists, and therapists are extremely willing to help me achieve my own positive thinking, because it is my own, and I know exactly what I want from it.
Unfortunately, it also makes me extremely vulnerable to criticism. I am probably Doing It Wrong. I am probably Wanting To Be Chronically Ill All The Time. I am probably Magically Convincing Myself That I Am Getting Worse. I Obviously Am Not Thinking Positively Enough - because my biggest coping mechanism is to write it down, and to share my newest findings with people I love and with people who understand my situation. At least, those are my assumptions. I made a few poor assumptions and lost a few acquaintances. But I moved on. Now, I am still writing, still speaking out. Now, I am determined to hold on to my personal method of positive thinking no matter who tries to change that method.

That is why I love this message from Sarah Kay. No one else can work inside my mind like I can. Each of us has the power to think positively in a way that works for us and us alone.

The next time somebody tells you that you need to stop doing it This way and start doing it That way, think long and hard about it before you even reply. Some things are just not worth debating. Sometimes all you can do is smile and nod and say "Thank you for the advice" - and move on. It is your mind, after all.

http://dotsub.com/view/e8f7d701-e410-464d-9051-eeae8a1ddd44/viewTranscript/eng

http://www.upworthy.com/watch-the-ted-talk-that-inspired-two-standing-ovations?g=2

I will probably listen to this video enough to memorize or recite most of it, and my poor memory will do its best to hold it close.
brightlotusmoon: (Default)
It's amazing how a single seizure early in the morning can erase any ideas of what I was going to do today. So I am watching Animal Planet and eating a cinnamon bun.

Tonight, Adam comes home. Tomorrow, I'm going to to to avoid news television, news websites, and anything discussing the obvious. I'm dealing with it in my own private way. However, since I've made the poem an annual thing on LJ, I'll post that now:

The Brave Ones

What price we pay
What cost innocence
What graves we dig
To bury ourselves.
What world is this
Just outside
Touch forbidden
Unforgiven.
Bury me not in the shroud of your tears
But in the soothing soil of your soul
Where I am withered
Only to heal
In the night
At the price
Of my innocence.

I have a headache, and more weird/strange pains I don't want to dwell on. This will be a weekend of rest.
brightlotusmoon: (Default)
The first free verse poem I've written in ten years. I have no idea where it came from. Probably influenced by my chronic pain disorders and disabilities, I don't know.
(People asked about it on Facebook, so I'm copying it to LiveJournal.)



Dear My Self

All that fire around you.
Where are you going?
We stopped running after you fell;
I never could get you back up.
Remember the way we used to cry together?

There was a lonely god who would press his finger to my lips
Tell me to think for myself, to only hope for the world.
I want us back the way we were
Don't you remember?
I can't sleep unless I touch you.

Today the stars are shining around the sun,
And I am watching you fly toward the moon.
I hope you find what you need
I hope I find you again.
After a thousand years,
I hope you will tell me to
Think for myself
While I press my finger to your lips
And wish for the world.
brightlotusmoon: (Default)
The Brave Ones

What price we pay
What cost innocence
What graves we dig
To bury ourselves.
What world is this
Just outside
Touch forbidden
Unforgiven.
Bury me not in the shroud of your tears
But in the soothing soil of your soul
Where I am withered
Only to heal
In the night
At the price
Of my innocence.
brightlotusmoon: (Default)
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"Harbor" by Vienna Teng
"Her Diamonds" by Rob Thomas
"Ever The Same" by Rob Thomas
"Ocean Rising" by Justin Sullivan/New Model Army
"Queen Of My Heart" by New Model Army
"Ballad Of Bodman Pil" by New Model Army
"Whole Of The Moon" by The Waterboys
"Universal Hall" by The Waterboys
"Desert Rose" by Sting
"Valparaiso" by Sting

I didn't pick specific lyrics for these songs, because each of these particular songs, as a whole, send shivers down my spine and hit me emotionally.
brightlotusmoon: (Default)
The Brave Ones

What price we pay
What cost innocence
What graves we dig
To bury ourselves.
What world is this
Just outside
Touch forbidden
Unforgiven.
Bury me not in the shroud of your tears
But in the soothing soil of your soul
Where I am withered
Only to heal
In the night
At the price
Of my innocence.
brightlotusmoon: (Default)
The Brave Ones

What price we pay
What cost innocence
What graves we dig
To bury ourselves.
What world is this
Just outside
Touch forbidden
Unforgiven.
Bury me not in the shroud of your tears
But in the soothing soil of your soul
Where I am withered
Only to heal
In the night
At the price
Of my innocence.

Written by Joanna Capello, 9/13/2001
brightlotusmoon: (Default)
"Bodies, I have in mind, and how they can change to assume
new shapes -- I ask the help of the gods, who know the trick:
change me, and let me glimpse the secret and speak,
better than I know how, of the worlds birthing,
and the creation of all things, from the first to the very latest."

"Walk as far as the ends of the earth. Look for a pool of water that reflects the stars at night. Wash your hands in it and there is a chance that everything will be restored."

"Never think, never think that you can be safe from love."

"It's just inevitable. The soul wanders in the dark, until it finds love. And so, wherever our love goes, there we find our soul."

-Walking down the street at night, when you're all alone, you can still hear, stirring in the intermingled branches of the trees above, the ardent prayer of Baucis and Philemon. They whisper:
-"Let me die the moment my love dies."
-They whisper:
-"Let me not outlive my own capacity to love."
-They whisper:
-"Let me die still loving, and so, never die."

"Farewell."

--Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman

witch/druid

Feb. 2nd, 2007 08:32 pm
brightlotusmoon: (Default)
This is a lovely, lovely, soulful poem that every pagan should read. I find that it speaks most clearly to the Druid in me, since in the philosophy of Druidism, nature itself -- including all elements -- is one of the most powerful deities known. Slightly different from witchcraft, which is less a philosophy and more a practice. Many pagans who see that I'm a witch and a Druid scoff at me for it, since apparently you "can't be both witch and Druid." But this poem speaks something for everyone, I think, and it doesn't matter who can't be what and why I can't be two things at once.

Catechism For A Witch's Child
When they ask to see your gods
your book of prayers
show them lines
drawn delicately with veins
on the underside of a bird's wing
tell them you believe
in giant sycamores mottled
and stark against a winter sky
and in nights so frozen
stars crack open spilling
streams of molten ice to earth
and tell them how you drink
a holy wine of honeysuckle
on a warm spring day
and of the softness
of your mother who never taught you
death was life's reward
but who believed in the earth
and the sun
and a million, million light years
of being
© 1986 J.L.Stanley
brightlotusmoon: (Default)
I will be putting this in the info for [livejournal.com profile] womenofthemoon.

***
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
-Marge Piercy

The construction of a woman:
a woman is not made of flesh
of bone and sinew
belly and breasts, elbows and liver and toe.
She is manufactured like a sports sedan.
She is retooled, refitted and redesigned
every decade.
Cecile had been seduction itself in college.
She wriggled through bars like a satin eel,
her hips and ass promising, her mouth pursed
in the dark red lipstick of desire.

She visited in '68 still wearing skirts
tight to the knees, dark red lipstick,
while I danced through Manhattan in mini skirt,
lipstick pale as apricot milk,
hair loose as a horse's mane. Oh dear,
I thought in my superiority of the moment,
whatever has happened to poor Cecile?
She was out of fashion, out of the game,
disqualified, disdained, dis-
membered from the club of desire.

Look at pictures in French fashion
magazines of the 18th century:
century of the ultimate lady
fantasy wrought of silk and corseting.
Paniers bring her hips out three feet
each way, while the waist is pinched
and the belly flattened under wood.
The breasts are stuffed up and out
offered like apples in a bowl.
The tiny foot is encased in a slipper
never meant for walking.
On top is a grandiose headache:
hair like a museum piece, daily
ornamented with ribbons, vases,
grottoes, mountains, frigates in full
sail, balloons, baboons, the fancy
of a hairdresser turned loose.
The hats were rococo wedding cakes
that would dim the Las Vegas strip.
Here is a woman forced into shape
rigid exoskeleton torturing flesh:
a woman made of pain.

How superior we are now: see the modern woman
thin as a blade of scissors.
She runs on a treadmill every morning,
fits herself into machines of weights
and pulleys to heave and grunt,
an image in her mind she can never
approximate, a body of rosy
glass that never wrinkles,
never grows, never fades. She
sits at the table closing her eyes to food
hungry, always hungry:
a woman made of pain.

A cat or dog approaches another,
they sniff noses. They sniff asses.
They bristle or lick. They fall
in love as often as we do,
as passionately. But they fall
in love or lust with furry flesh,
not hoop skirts or push up bras
rib removal or liposuction.
It is not for male or female dogs
that poodles are clipped
to topiary hedges.

If only we could like each other raw.
If only we could love ourselves
like healthy babies burbling in our arms.
If only we were not programmed and reprogrammed
to need what is sold us.
Why should we want to live inside ads?
Why should we want to scourge our softness
to straight lines like a Mondrian painting?
Why should we punish each other with scorn
as if to have a large ass
were worse than being greedy or mean?

When will women not be compelled
to view their bodies as science projects,
gardens to be weeded,
dogs to be trained?
When will a woman cease
to be made of pain?

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