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Atlas

Sometimes self hate looks like trivializing your own trauma; comparing your handle on pain to others’ handles, with your superficial understanding of their metaphysical navigation.

Sometimes self love looks like you beginning to understand that you are strong beyond measure because the things you go through are heavy for you. So heavy, in fact, that you are weighed down. And that weight you feel is in your mind but also outside of it because it textures the fabric of your life. Yet, this weight is sometimes lifted. You are able to move around under it. Yes, it forms the clouds above you and that is it’s own grey issue. But the weight is sometimes lifted, and you are the one lifting it.

So the next time you doubt your own suffering, the next time you feel like you should not be weighed down by the triviality you have decided is your life, understand that you are brave beyond measure, strong beyond will, and that part of the measure of a good life is our willingness to continue shouldering  our barely manageable burdens long enough to receive our light.

Inspiration Prose et Poesie
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A Shaky Breath

What is the sound of resolve?

A crackling

Fanned flames of frivolous hopes framing the doubt dressed in darkness?

The firewood of punctuated ululations severing ties that leave

you on your feet but do not feed you on your toes.

 

A scraping

Rubber licking asphalt one grain of hard-fought grey after the other?

Barren boots warring against the smattering of wet skin on

fiery hard packed ground

Toppling time and again because you knock yourself down as often as the world does.

 

Like nothing

Silence so absolute with a world not watching

Breath held, waiting interminably for the other shoe to drop

When you know you never intend to let go of the laces

you cling to; because you are in control.

 

Bet it looks like a shaky breath-

Arms crossing, folding into one’s chest

Mouth agape, teeth bared, eyes focused

Above the “insurmountable best”

 

And it feels like a reckoning

Like fear and faith, or fear alone

or an emptiness – a will wilted, but alive

Whispering secrets of your unmalleable core;

Bone to unshakeable bone.

Prose et Poesie
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Strength

Hi you. Yes, you.

You’ve been telling yourself that you aren’t strong. A direct contradiction to the face you put out every morning; the one others filled with their own expectations and emotions judge you by. And that contradiction is killing you. Slowly.

You’re strong! You’re strong. Not every time, now. Not every hour of every day, and certainly not every day of every week.

It’s okay that you struggle with yourself and your mind, and the anxieties of work, which you can’t stop conflating with the anxieties of life. It’s okay when you feel like the people in your life with whom you can be vulnerable for their strength, no longer have their own secure foundation and so cannot carry you. It’s okay to want to take a break from them then, as you learn. It’s okay, too, to forgive them for being human, even as you forgive yourself for being the same. But then, remember, you are strong. You’ve just gotta pick yourself up.

 

Inspiration Journaling
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Save.

Come, pour it all out to me. In a moment of true need.

 

Shiiiiiittt. You woke up hella late, slept through hella alarms, and cost yourself 20 bucks this morning. Best believe you’re broke enough right now that that makes a difference. A huge one.

You’re having a rough day – can’t you tell? Can’t you smell the doubt, anxiety and self derision – sulfur fumes rising from the well? You’re tempted to gather, to push through, to self-love, to pull loose of this infernal grip.

But today? No. Today, you could have maimed a man in a UPS outfit, if he’d turned out to be a burglar.

Save.

You don’t save. You haven’t yet managed to save yourself. It’s been years in this war that you’re fighting; Constantly engaged and projecting to the world so you don’t have to face yourself. So you can face another and hate the shell. It’s hollowed out – that hologram, because the mirror’s a hoax.

You can’t project your worst on to the world and then face the demons that stare back because you can’t slay a reflection of a problem when the problem is you.

Save.

How can you save others, how can you save yourself? Service. Full service pain. Full service problems. A continental strain.

Why you can’t win at this war? Why you’re always losing? You’re not being you. You’ve been hiding under years of rock and shield. Under years of cover from soul. Sometimes you can’t feel it anymore, what you would do. You see it sometimes in quiet bursts. In eclipses of fear-defying proclamations. You see it hide, retreating tactically as you backtrack your ‘lapses’ and pad over the cracks in the sculpted suit you present as yourself. You see it. Can you save it?

Can you save you from you?

Being honest to yourself is a war you have been losing. But the war, not the battles. You see the truth through the chinks in that armour. You will save yourself – piece by stone, hard, metallic, piece. Then you will save that armour. To remind yourself of what it is to live in the fear, in emotional squalor.

You’re having a bad day.

No one can save you but yourself.

Because no one else can save you from yourself.

Journaling Prose et Poesie
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You Did Not Die, You Lived.

So. You were bested.

Was it not temporary? Will you not stand again?

 

Did you not get back up? Did you not survive? Did you not breathe again – deeply?

Don’t you just hiccup now at the thought?

 

At the time, in the very beginning, it seemed that all was lost.

It was not.

It held together as most things tend to do, when will is the glue piecing them through.

Save your victory lap, though. Get to the end and that was not the end. It was a part of the journey. That

Was not the beginning. You remember the beginning.

This was one stumble.

One out of a great many, parsed out over the journey.

Convoluted, hard,

Not an easy route.

Save that which you can, and remember to breathe, when you can.

Deeply.

Just so. And when you consider it later, I want you tempted to hiccup at the thought.

Close your eyes and savour it. But just for a moment.

I need your eyes open to continue down that road. And to know you will not die.

It will not kill you. Not till it is your time. And then, even then, you will breathe- deeply

As you go.

Prose et Poesie