Today, although I am up at 2 AM, I am not 'suffering' from my MI's (mental illnesses.) Although that's a subtle point to make. I am not in active pain today. I had bad dreams, but who doesn't? Today, I have shelter, food, animals in my life. I have a support network, and a best friend who really is the "best". I have a shrink I adore, a therapist who laughs a lot, a group that I love. I take my medications today, at the urging of practically everyone in my life, and I can laugh about that.
This is a rare moment in time for everything passes. "This, too, shall pass" means the good as well as the bad. It illustrates an intransigence that can drive someone with borderline personality disorder over the edge. I am not close to the edge today. I would have to take a long ride in a 1968 Aston Martin, to get there. I don't have one...
Tuesday is Pancake's 'launch' date, going to a new home. She will be a frequent visitor, so I will keep you updated with pictures. Right now, she is an adorable pile of arabian carpet-colored fur, stretched helplessly in sleep. Last night, she fell asleep in my lap, with both front paws stretched above her head. I have done a good job with my fosters, socializing them into trust with humans. I hope their parents live up to that trust.
This is my post: I don't like to think that I am acceptable only on medication. But time and again, I have demonstrated that it makes life so much easier on those around me, and myself, most importantly. I don't want to go out of this life as lonely as my mother did. She withdrew the last 15 years, as only deafness and mental illness can impel one to do so. My heart twists when I think of her.
I have lost jobs, due to lack of medication. That's the tough one to face. After I was assaulted at the workplace by a coworker, and ground into the dust by Southeast Rural Community Assistance Project, Inc., their CEO and lawyers, I suffered consequences, that cannot be addressed. Jobs cannot be unlost, time cannot be unspent, things cannot be unsaid, nor actions untaken. I feel my anger is justified. Which is always a dangerous thing, friends. Always. It corrupts as surely as power, this justification. It is produced in quantity by humans in general. How else could atrocity exist? It must feel justified. And justified anger produces resentment, which will only get me drunk.
These are mists that cling around my ankles in the darkness morning when I wake. Add some sexual assaults, and a penchant for cold, calculating bastards when it comes to personal relationships, and voila! A hodgepodge of diagnosis and addictions, with a dose of me thrown in there.
To take my medications, uses a ladder to climb out of the morass. It takes years of therapy that can be grueling, agonizing, and lonely. It takes losing friends and gaining enemies. It brings me here, today, this morning. It brings me a lovely kitten, and 3 adorable, unicorn meat eating cats. It brings me a dog, not to replace my Eddie, my service animal, but to succeed him.
My HP has brought me to this apartment, with some turmoil, but also with good memories, that shine like the polished mahogany of the pink chair. There are candles, here, and bright white walls, and lovely works of art, given by friends. There is the garden, my garden, with zinnia and lavender, and impatiens, dahlias and daisies. And, beyond the maple tree, there is the field, bordered by forest. In that forest is the HP, Healing Power, that follows and guides me.
It is a real, physical presence that supplies real love to the wounds on my mind. It supplies grace: that elusive quality that makes life, literally, worth living. Grace gives me strength, where there is none. It gives courage, that I thought long vanished. It builds the field, and the forest. It helps me communicate and connect.
And it gives me this: I am not my mental illnesses, or my animals, or the sky, or the god, but part of the whole. Some portion of all of this is simply me.
Grace.
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