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

There’s a wonderful quote by Meg Ryan’s character in the movie You’ve Got Mail : “When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does.”

I’ve given that quote a lot of thought over the past few years, largely because I have found it to be so true in my own life. There are many books that I have loved as an adult, and some of them have had considerable impact on me, either as a person or as a writer. Yet nothing I have read as an adult has shaped me as profoundly as the stories that formed the backdrop of my childhood.

One of the things I’ve come to realize is that every single theme that resonates with me as both a reader and a writer is something that I was exposed to early in life through a book or books I loved. But even more, these stories have shaped who I am as a whole and how I perceive the world around me.

For example, I was four or five years old when my mother read Amy’s Eyes to me, a beautiful and surprisingly complex children’s novel that is now out of print. In the character of the Bad Sister, I encountered for the first time a person who had been forced to hide her identity, and who struggled powerfully between remaining true to herself or being consumed by the mask she wore.

One scene in particular, in which the Bad Sister catches her reflection in a mirror and must confront her fractured identity head-on, stayed with me from that first reading until I rediscovered the book in my teens. By that time, the concepts of duality and the struggle for identity were already firmly entrenched in my mind–even though I was unaware of it then, those themes were present to some degree in every piece of fiction I had written (and still are, to tell the truth).

Of course, there were many other stories that influenced me: a long line of spies, superheroes, and fugitive princesses who dealt with conflicting personas in the pages of my favorite books. But it all began with a single unforgettable scene that lived on in my imagination with such power and vividity that it became part of my artistic identity forever.

It became part of me on another, more fundamental level as well. All throughout elementary and middle school, when I was incessantly bullied for nothing more than being myself, I fought to keep my own identity intact. But I remembered how the Bad Sister became so lost that she no longer recognized her own reflection, and yet at the end of the book she was able to reclaim her true self.

That is what I clung to all those years, what gave me the strength to hold onto the very identity that was under daily assault from my peers–and what gave me the certainty that the struggle would be worth it in the end. I never looked in the mirror and saw a stranger staring back at me, but I read and wrote stories about women who did, and it saved me. And like all the stories I loved as a child, it continues to save me still.

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

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