Breaking truth

“We create all sorts of lies, all sorts of stories and metaphors, to avoid the final truth, which is the fact of falling.  Our stories are seizures.  They clutch us up, they are spastic grasps, they are losses of consciousness.  Epileptics, every one of us; I am not alone.”  – Lauren Slater, Lying

I have no lies to tell, only the truth that up until this decade has haunted my every breath.  It is getting easier to see between the shoulds and should nots, a little easier every day.  Although, I’m still hiding in myself.  I hid in this blog for a while… I hid and then snuck out to see some old friends and people who would be able to validate and corroborate my stories… that wasn’t the right thing to do.  These are stories that I need to tell by myself.  If anyone who knows me is listens, the stories will surely exit as lies because I cannot trust my perfectionism to tell them.  So I owe it to myself to keep it a secret, a secret name in a secret town in a secret world through a secret mouth.  I’ve always lived two lives – I’m whoever you need me to be at the moment… and who I am when you leave… I’m taking control and finally turning the mirror back around and breathing the truth back into every crack and crevice that breaks me.

I am tired of walking on broken glass.  I’m changing the tone of my stories… I’m letting the heaviness reign.  There is no other way to get it out OUT of me.  And I have to get it out… the truth is lying dormant underneath my fear that it will never come out.  I’m not sure what I’ve been waiting for.

No more waiting.  The truth doesn’t tell itself.  I think if I could understand the truth, then I could know and come to understand myself… and I need to understand myself or my life will never change.  Today, I sat comatose at my office desk, staring into my computer screen… I felt like I was caught in between two movie sets: Alice in Wonderland and Office Space.  Pretty insane side by side, ey?  Well, I can’t think of a better way to describe how I felt.  I felt like I had no future, motivation, or hope in the present moment… however in my mind I was the little rabbit, running around telling everyone how very late I am for a very, very important date… only the “date” is my life.  I feel like I am late for my life.  I think if I don’t start telling my stories and telling them raw and open and uninhibited, they will continue to eat me alive and steal away my happiness.

I have an obligation to my concept of happiness – which currently resides in my 2-year-old.  I owe it to him to not give up on trying to figure things out inside of my heart.  To try and figure out why I can’t seem to shake depression, why I manage to always convince myself that I don’t belong where I am…

While I was rocking him to sleep tonight after he had a crying fit for almost a solid hour, I think something changed inside of me.  I realized that I was letting him cry because I felt like that was what a good mother does… assumes that he is being manipulative or sneaky or defiant.  What I forgot was that this morning my husband and I were screaming at each other almost at the top of our lungs… and we did the same thing yesterday morning, and evening.  I have taught pre-school and I know what a tense household can do to a child and yet here I am, living in a tense environment and somehow letting myself actually yell in front of my child.  I forgot about this for almost a whole hour… I forgot about it until I was holding him and he was clinging to me for life… in that moment I realized why he suddenly could not calm himself to sleep like he’d been doing every other night up until tonight.  We took away his security with our voices.  We stole a bit of his peace because we couldn’t control our anger.  So, in that moment with my son, I carried him to his rocking chair and started rocking him and singing to him and holding his cheek to my cheek… giving him all the assurance he needed that I was not going anywhere.  I stayed in his room for a half hour, restoring, hopefully, some of the innocence my anger had stolen earlier.

I’ve been writing this blog for over a year now, and have come to realize that I’m dancing in this circle as it turns, just like my husband is.  Except, neither one of us is joyfully moving.  We are just doing the dance of marriage and of life and we are both miserable and stuck and for what we’ve just figured out are very physical reasons, we have not had the appropriate energy to make lasting changes.  I’ve evolved in many ways in the last two years… in the last six months my body has taken over and I have been kicking and screaming in the form of one physical infection after the next.  My husband was just diagnosed with diabetes.  We have just been hit with an enormous wake up call.

So, I decided to take my blog back, take my secret story telling time back, take my voice back.  I want to change, I want to make things better and right.  And I can’t do that if I’m constantly looking back behind my shoulder to see who is listening, approving, judging, validating.  The only validation I need now is my own.  And so, here goes.  I’ll continue telling you things I can never tell anyone – only this time, I promise a little more raw truth… a lot more weight, and a few hundred deep breaths…