Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

It’s amazing, the power in a
word

sticks and stones break my bones,
words will only kill me
single phrases, barbed poison
or the absence of them: silent death
where no one hears your soul shriek

If I could give you special vision,
all painted in the aftermath of sentences,
you could see all these things you’ve said to me
and see each way they’ve hurt or healed
Looking at the tender half-healed scars,
you’d weep, apologetic–
but not enough
never quite enough

But even so, I’ll take these words of yours,
fold them up gently
(they have made me who I am)
and I will create with them
little paper birds and flowers,
something beautiful, soothing
And then I’ll give them back to you,
these words,
all folded up in pretty Japanese shapes
(my heart, my soul, my fears as one)

I have one word for you:
forgiven

NOTE: I wrote this in high school, and even though it’s a bit too on-the-nose, it struck me as being particularly appropriate for what I’ve been through in the past 2.5 years. So far, I haven’t been able to bring myself to write about that situation directly, but the wound must be drained in order to heal. I will write about it soon… but not today. Today, the pain is still too near.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

 It’s been a long time since I came here, a long time since I bothered to write about my life in either prose or poetry. Part of that has been my health, of course, but it’s also true that my fiction has taken over the vast majority of my free time. But mostly, I didn’t feel like I had much to say. I certainly didn’t feel like I truly needed to say anything, the way I so often needed to express the turmoil in my heart during my first decade of disability and chronic illness.

But the last few years have been absolutely shattering in many ways–and not just because of the pandemic, political unrest, and other global problems that have affected everyone. There’s been a lot of personal upheaval as well, and even though a fair bit of it is many months in the past, I’m still reeling from it. It’s the kind of upheaval that leaves wounds that are slow to heal, and even once they have scarred over, they can split open again all too easily.

That’s where I am now: battered, scarred, my heart still too tender and ready to bleed at the slightest touch. But blogging has always been cathartic for me, a way of coming to terms with and healing from all the things that I would not otherwise be able to bear.

And there’s something else I’m hoping to overcome through blogging: I have a tendency to shut down parts of myself if they don’t seem to fit in with the people I’m around or the activities I’m currently involved in. In 2006-2015, when my blogging was most prolific, I hid the quirkier aspects of myself for a long time. I didn’t write fiction, never talked about the geeky fandoms I love, and concentrated instead on cultivating a particular image of myself as a soft-spoken, Nature-loving poet and photographer. And even though all those things were–and still are–true about me, they’re not the complete picture.

Over time, I started to feel more comfortable revealing other pieces of myself. I occasionally talked about my creative endeavors and eventually returned to writing fiction, which then supplanted blogging all together. I joined some writing groups online and plunged headfirst back into all the things I’d been suppressing for years: my love for fantasy books, all those fandoms, the whole nine yards.

At first, it felt wonderful. It felt like coming home, like being myself again. But without realizing it, I dropped the poetry and the blogging, and even though I still took photos, I rarely did anything with them. I became exclusively a fantasy writer, even though that is not the whole of who I am either.

Now, after so many years of paring myself down to neat, prepackaged versions designed to fit in with one set of people or another, I want to simply be. Be who I truly am, all of myself, despite how messy and often paradoxical that self is.

Yes, I’m a quiet person who loves to soak up the peace and beauty of Nature at every opportunity. I think deeply, love deeply, seek beauty in the everyday things that others tend to overlook. But the same woman who would happily spend all afternoon stretched out on a giant trampoline communing with the birds and clouds drifting overhead is the very same woman who adores seductive villains, plays bloodthirsty pirate RPGs, and writes dark fantasy–and, as if that isn’t contradictory enough, also writes silly adventure stories for kids.

Many times, I’ve thought about how to keep all these aspects of myself separate from one another, at least in public. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are a number of authors who publish under different pen names for each genre they write in. It prevents kids from accidentally buying a book intended for adults just because their favorite author wrote it, for example. So yes, when the time comes, I’ll probably have a pseudonym or two to keep the branding for all my creative endeavors distinct and separate.

But that’s worlds apart from actually shutting down or hiding pieces of myself, and sadly that’s been my tendency over the past 16 years. I didn’t mean to do that, but it happened anyway… and now I’m done with it.

I can blog about the slow and painful healing of my heart at the same time that I write my dark and twisted fairy tale series. I can share photos of mountain vistas and forgotten cemeteries, then sit down with my husband to play Skull Tales. I can send a friend a care package to let them know they’re loved and still cackle like a madwoman when my favorite onscreen villain does something deliciously evil.

Because I do do all these things, and more. They are all part of who I am, sweet and wicked, weird and wonderful, and I’m finally ready to claim that.

So hello, world, here I am again. I’m finally back, and this time I’m going to stick around for a while.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

When I originally had the idea for this article, it was going to be all about how life in the slow lane can be a blessing in disguise. Chronic pain and illness forces you to slow down, to measure and conserve your strength—and by necessity, to focus on what is truly important. This also gives you the opportunity to appreciate things that most people rarely notice. I see the wonder of the world each and every time I walk out the door precisely because I don’t get to walk out the door very often anymore. So there you have it: life in the slow lane can be beautiful.

Then I got hit with an extreme pain flare and had two months flat on my back to rethink that. From the last week of July on, I was largely bedridden, unable to even tilt my head to read a book or look at a TV screen. I nearly went crazy, not just from sheer boredom but from panic about all the things that weren’t getting done while I languished in agonized tedium. Even now that I’m gradually getting better, it still feels like I’m stuck in the slow lane, watching life speed by from the passenger seat of a car that’s running on fumes.

But last weekend turned out to be something of a minor miracle: the wildfire smoke cleared out unexpectedly, and I felt good enough to go out for the first time in what seemed like forever. I spent the day at my favorite farm outside town picking flowers, buying peaches to turn into cobbler, and sampling the first apple cider of the year.

A second miracle followed the next day: managing the drive to visit my in-laws in Colville, where we sat in the backyard for hours longer than I would’ve thought possible, chatting and watching quail scurry through the raspberry bushes.

That was the last day of real summer heat, and now autumn is on its way. Most of the trees are still verdant and green, but here and there shades of brilliant gold and crimson dapple the leaves, and the intermittent breeze carries with it the first hint of cold nights and the scent of ripening apples.

In a back corner of the lawn, a heap of dying flowers lies amid grass turning sere, each fading bloom plucked from the vase as it began to wilt to give the bouquet a chance to retain its ephemeral beauty as long as possible. This is the time I love most in the Pacific Northwest: the gradual descent toward winter, the dying of the year, so filled with an elegance that is at once fierce and melancholy.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about life in the slow lane: it is a little like autumn itself, terrible and beautiful at the same time. There are times when your engine stalls and you’re stuck for so long you think you’ll never manage to get going again, and there are times when God gives you small, unexpected miracles and perfect days that are all the more precious for their rarity.

It’s the last summer flowers gracefully fading away, the leaves turning more vibrant even as they drop from the trees, the cold rain and gray skies and the days growing shorter and darker. It’s bittersweet melancholy and fierce beauty twined inextricably together, the sorrow of a life more limited than it should be and the joy of a life lived as fully as possible.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

A few years ago, my husband saved a man and his son from drowning in Lake Pend Oreille. Of a dozen people there that day, Steve & I were the only ones who saw they were in distress. By the time Steve got to them, everyone else had finally noticed, but the man had already gone under twice and was barely able to hold the little boy above water anymore. He slipped under a third time while Steve was swimming back with the boy. It would have been the last time if the grandmother—the only other person close enough to help at that point—hadn’t reached him and managed to hold him up until Steve came back for him. Even so, it was a very close call.

All year long, I have felt like that man, drowning in plain sight. In February, I snapped out of a particularly vicious bout of depression just in time for the Covid lockdown to hit and for two close friends to die within two weeks of each other*. As you can imagine, that sent my mental health into an immediate tailspin. I tried to reach out to several friends for help, but mostly got perfunctory responses in return because they were juggling their own problems due to the pandemic. Even though that wasn’t their fault, it left me to struggle with rejection and isolation on top of my grief. Suddenly, I found myself not just mourning Honey and Kim but dealing with old wounds surrounding my dad’s death and trauma from past abuse as well.

I started to spiral faster. My social anxiety skyrocketed, and I couldn’t tell anymore if I was responding to even the simplest situation in a normal or rational way. This led to a misunderstanding with a friend which exploded so spectacularly that I spent three straight weeks barely able to sleep or eat until this person’s final message plunged me straight into suicide.

I had tried to signal for help several more times during those three weeks, but the few people who noticed didn’t understand how bad things were, and the level of help I needed didn’t come through. So I smacked into rock bottom head-first. If Steve had not been in the room with me when I read that message, there is no doubt whatsoever that I would have walked immediately to the kitchen for the carving knife and ended everything there.

Since that day, I have been mostly silent about my problems even though the aftershocks have continued to ripple through my life. The person with whom I had the falling out was one of the friends I initially asked to keep an eye on me, so from that point on, reaching out to anyone felt like trying to sneak past some Indiana Jones-style deathtrap, always terrified that a single wrong move might trigger hidden blades that would slice me up. I eventually managed to tell a few people I was struggling, but I downplayed how bad it was, and I still haven’t told a single person the full extent of what I’m going through. Even what you’re reading now is a very stripped-down version.

Things are better now, but I still feel like I’m drowning more often than not. Grief heals slowly. Old wounds don’t scar over well once they’ve split open again. Suicidal thoughts and behavior hover like ghosts long after the initial craving for death passes. But even though it’s a struggle, my head is still above water. And even though no one swam out to bring me in to shore, that doesn’t mean I’ve been treading water alone all this time.

Here’s the thing: Steve didn’t rescue those people all by himself. Yes, they would have drowned if he hadn’t swum out there. But if the grandmother hadn’t managed to keep her son-in-law afloat while Steve got the boy, that man would have drowned. And when he finally did make it to shore, he still had a dangerous amount of water in his lungs. If someone else on the beach hadn’t called the paramedics, or if the paramedics hadn’t arrived so fast, he would have died anyway.

In the end, every little thing done by each person on that beach contributed to saving his life. I was the one who made Steve take his shoes off before he swam out there so they wouldn’t weigh him down. The boy’s mother was the one who made it to the buoys just in time to take her son so Steve could go back for her husband. The only other family there with kids were the ones who took the terrified boy off to the side and played with him so he wouldn’t distract the paramedics. The man who called the paramedics, the elderly woman who prayed, the girl who had extra towels ready to warm people up… Every little thing mattered, and it saved his life.

So yeah, I’ve been out here drowning all year long. But there have been people on the beach all this time, and every little thing they have done for me has kept me alive. And yes, I mean that quite literally. That day in June may have been the worst, but I have faced suicide many times since then, and many times it’s been a single act of kindness that’s kept me afloat a little longer.

And here’s something else I know: things won’t magically reset when the clock hits midnight tonight. Will I be thrilled to say goodbye to this horrific year? Hell yes! But tomorrow morning, the world will still be reeling from Covid and I’ll still be patching up the pieces of my heart. That’s just how it works. But I also know I wouldn’t be here to see 2021 at all if not for those who helped me in so many ways.

So as we close out 2020, I’d like to raise a toast to the people on the beach. Most of you didn’t realize you were throwing me lifelines because you didn’t even know I was drowning, but those lifelines did their job anyway. You’re the people who asked how I was doing when I couldn’t reach out on my own; who followed through with checking on me when I did ask for it; who said something kind and beautiful to/about me when I needed to hear it most; who offered me compassion and forgiveness when I screwed up; who did anything, no matter how small, to show me I was loved and valued even when I believed the world would be a much better place without me. All my love and gratitude to goes out to each of you on this final night of the year.

*I have since discovered that it was actually two months. Grief impacted my ability to think so powerfully that I have very few memories of that time–my brain simply erased most of it, leaving me with the impression that only two weeks had passed between their deaths.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

She walks on wounded feet,
carries white roses to the willow
by the pond on the hill:
three roses,
the number of those lost or those left behind–
she can no longer remember which.
This is a sacrament;
the willow is her cathedral,
the bare earth at its roots her altar.
She scatters ashes and tears
into the silence of sunset
and feels all the forgotten words take flight.
The long years of silence are at an end.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

I was twelve years old when my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It was one of the most terrifying and lonely times in my life, a horrible roller coaster of fear and loss as I spent the next five years watching my father fight through surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, only to have the cancer come back a hundred times more virulent and finally take his life just before I began my senior year of high school.

There are many memories from that time that are embedded deep in my heart like a shard of glass, painful and crystal clear: watching his body quake violently in the throes of a seizure, the terror of coming home to a dark house and finding him lying unconscious on the floor, curling up with him in the hospital bed after his first surgery and crying myself to sleep.

But there are good memories, too. When my father first got sick, I was still at the private school where I was bullied by the majority of my classmates. For the most part, my father’s illness didn’t change the way anyone treated me–the means kids kept being mean, while my friends gave me the same love and support they always had. And yet two of the most powerful acts of compassion I experienced during that time came not from my friends, but from people I would never have expected to show me such kindness.

To understand the first, you need to know a little about Mrs. Pomplin, the school secretary. To say she was unpleasant is a serious understatement. No one liked her, not even the other staff members, and she despised everyone else in turn–children most of all. Every time I was sent to the office, I was more afraid of her than I was of getting in trouble with the principal. Her scowl was as permanent a fixture of the school’s daily life as the mystery food in the cafeteria, and not a single person I knew had ever seen her smile.

My father’s first surgery was scheduled on a school day, so I was forced to go to class and wait for news of how things had turned out. All day, I was jittery and nervous, unable to concentrate on anything going on around me. Hour after hour slowly crawled by, while I felt isolated even amongst my friends and sympathetic teachers. Somewhere on the other side of the school, my younger brother was also suffering alone.

Finally, during theater class, Mrs. Pomplin came in and asked to see me in the hall. I was certain it would be terrible news–otherwise, she could just tell me in front of everyone else. I got up shakily and followed her out of the room. When the door had closed behind us, she said simply, “Your father is out of surgery, and he’s fine.”

I don’t remember saying anything in response, but the relief was so powerful it must have lit up my face, because she took one look at my reaction… and smiled at me. A big, beautiful smile that said she was happy to give me good news and happy for my family. I floated back into the classroom with that smile etched in my memory, reflecting my own joy back to me until it grew even greater. To this day, I treasure that amazing, unexpected smile as proof that even the most hardened person can open their heart to another.

Five years later, when my father died, I had an unexpected encounter with one of the bullies from my old school. I hadn’t seen any of those people in years, and it was really a fluke that I ran into David at all. Like most of the kids I had known, he attended the church that sponsored the private school, and yet on the very Sunday after my father died, for some unknown reason, David visited the youth group at my church. We saw each other before the service started, but did a little dance of mutual avoidance–he obviously didn’t want to talk to me any more than I wanted to talk to him. Even when he ended up sitting in the chair directly behind me, we continued to pretend we didn’t know each other.

After the sermon was over, the pastor always shared prayer requests for kids in the youth group. That day, my brother and I were on the top of the list. I was sobbing as the pastor told everyone that our father had died, hunched in on myself to try to contain the pain. And then, from the row behind me, David reached out and laid a hand on my back. He kept his hand there until the tears finally quieted and I stopped crying, a silent gesture of compassion and support.

This was one the kids who had belittled me and pushed me around for six years; the boy who, only a year before my father got sick, had taken great joy in stabbing my legs with a sharpened pencil during music class every day. But it was his hand on my back and no one else’s, and in that moment every terrible thing he had done to me fell away. His kindness was all that mattered.

Such simple things: a smile, a single touch–and yet, they were all the more powerful for their simplicity, and because they came from such unexpected sources. It’s easy to be kind to the ones we love, but it is our compassion for others–those whom we don’t like personally and those whom we don’t even know–that truly defines who we are. It’s the capacity to look beyond ourselves and love wholeheartedly… and love, after all, is “the greatest of these.”

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

Last summer, my husband saved a man and his five year-old boy from drowning in Lake Pend Oreille. The little boy was scared to swim, so his father Tony coaxed him out into the water by carrying him on his shoulders. When Tony reached the buoys that marked the end of the swimming area, he kept going, unaware that the lake bottom drops out sharply at that point. At first, he was able to stay afloat, so he continued carrying his son into deeper and deeper water, oblivious to the danger. Soon, however, the boy’s weight grew too much for him and he started to go under.

Our first clue that Tony was drowning came when the boy started to scream. Steve, my husband, quickly handed me his shoes and dove into the water. By the time he reached them, Tony had slipped beneath the water three times, struggling more each time to hold his son’s flailing body above him.

Steve grabbed the boy, almost drowning himself when his swimming trunks came loose and tangled around his ankles. But he managed to kick them off and haul the boy to the closest buoy, where Tony’s wife was waiting frantically. As soon as the boy was safe, Steve swam back for Tony, who had gone under yet again. When Steve got Tony back to the buoy, they both clung to it for a long time, panting for breath.

Paramedics from the closest town were called in once Tony finally made it to shore, where they gave him oxygen and expelled water from his lungs. The little boy was unhurt–a little bit terrified, of course, but completely unaware of how close he and his father had come to dying.

Truthfully, even Tony never knew what a close call it was. Steve and I weren’t supposed to be at Oden Bay that afternoon. We wanted to go to another campground with better facilities, but decided to change our plans at the last minute for no discernible reason. You could call it luck, I suppose, but I have come to believe that we went to Oden Bay because we were meant to go there. There was no voice from God or vague inner sense that directed us to the right place at the right time, and yet we ended up there anyway.

If we had gone to Trestle Creek like we planned, there is no question that Tony and his son would have died. All of the other people at the beach were too far away to reach them in time, and several of them didn’t even notice what was going on until it was almost over. By the time Tony’s wife swam out to the buoy, her family would have been gone, swallowed beneath the cold water.

I’ve thought about that a lot in the past year, as I’ve struggled with where life has taken me recently. Last December, my back pain was so crazy that I lay on the couch for almost three weeks, unable to even read or watch TV because that strained my neck too much.

And then there was the trauma of losing my last job, which started out so promising but plummeted me back toward suicide for the first time in four years. So even as I have fought to win back my physical strength, it has been tempting to believe that my life has stagnated.  Even now, eight months since I started my new physical therapy, my body is capable of far less than it was at the beginning of the year; and after almost ten years of blogging, I felt compelled to shut down my original site to protect myself from an online stalker.

But I think of the day Steve saved Tony at the lake, and how easily it could have gone the other way. How we were meant to be there, meant to save that man and his son, and how this is the way God works. And so I know that even though I can’t see it right now, this is exactly where I am meant to be.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain