Pieces of Me (Excerpt)

I refilled my empty glass with the last of the Riesling and bantered for several minutes with some friends, both old and current. My best friends thought they knew how involved my life was, others could only guess. With all of them, I was just elusive enough so they remained uncertain. A private person at heart, admitting just how lonely I’d become would be acknowledging something I just wasn’t able to. Loneliness, along with anger had become my constant companion as well as my greatest motivator. All we ever are to the world is what we pretend to be. We are in constant conflict between the person we are meant to be and the person the world expects of us. My life, however outwardly functional, was a dismal mess.

Pieces of Me (Excerpt)

My fingers frantically pounded the keyboard. The louder he talked, the faster my hands moved, an attempt to block out the nastiness that filled my ears. Writing was my coping mechanism, but he knew me too well, and now even that was corrupted. He was envious of anything I had that was just for me.
Married at twenty-one after one child out of wedlock and I still couldn’t believe that this is what my life had become. Twelve years. Twelve years of marriage to a man emotionally stunted by a dysfunctional childhood. We’d recognized that dysfunction in one another and clung to it. Two lonely and scarred children futilely attempting to piece together a semblance of the family neither had ever had but both had always wanted. Constructing a faulty bridge to happiness with no blueprint. Two damaged individuals destroying one another bit by bit.

Alone

Sometimes it seems we spend our whole lives searching. Searching for satisfaction and for peacefulness. Searching for a sense of worth and most of all for connections with others. We convince ourselves that those connections will change us somehow, and they do. Within those connections we feel whole, joyful even, if only for a brief moment.Our relationships with others is where love is,and within that is a brief glimpse of what happiness could be. Yet, in the end we are really just alone. Alone with ourselves and our choices. Alone with our mistakes and our failures, our flaws, with the knowledge that the very connections that make us most alive are the same that leave us most alone.

Chaos in an Orderly World

I am chaos in an orderly world. Disorderly, demanding and potentially destructive. I am weakness in a structured life, creating cracks and fatal flaws, but causing the realization that things were broken. I am a storm, a strongly blowing wind, whipping, stirring the calm and sweeping loudly through, changing the landscape in unanticipated, unexpected and often unappreciated ways while clearing away the clutter, causing heartrending loss. I am
the rain, torrential and hard, pounding painfully, but soaking the ground to create new life. I am unafraid, unapologetic and unable to stop.
I am chaos in an orderly world.
But chaos can create change, can cause inspiration, can lead to uplifting clarity. Chaos can cause you to feel more deeply than you have ever felt before. Chaos can show that you are stronger than you ever thought you could be. Chaos can lay bare your life and make you carefully examine what it means to live, to love, to be. Chaos forces creation, creativity, and consciousness that the most powerful thing on this earth are the relationships we build with others.
I am chaos. Chaos can be beautiful.

Broken

Trust is a funny thing because once it is broken, it cannot be fixed. Each day, we set a series of small expectations for people in our lives; to get a report done, to answer a phone message, to meet an obligation here or there. We trust that these needs will be met. At certain points in our lives, we risk a much greater trust; our safety, our future, our hearts. The last may be the greatest leap of faith At least for me, to trust someone with my heart is a thing I have great difficulty with. It requires a choice to open myself up or close myself off in self-protection. My heart has been so mistreated in the past that I tend to build a wall around it, protecting it from the inevitable brokenness that will occur. Once in a great while, I slip. Persuaded, charmed, trusting, believing that this time has to be different because of words spoken and promises made. Wanting it SO badly that I am willing to take a chance. Needing to believe I am worthy of experiencing happiness and that, yes, greatness can happen to me. Yet I find myself again, picking up the pieces of my broken heart. Pieces scattered and discarded by the carelessness of others. And I find myself wondering again, what makes me unworthy of love? I realize that I must be fundamentally flawed, constructed wrong, broken, like my worthless heart.

SO we circle back around again....

Life tends to circle back around on us, biting us on the ass from behind. And so, while we think we are experiencing something new, something we are willing to take a risk for, in actuality we are riding a merry-go-round back to where we began. A vicious cycle of the same mistakes repeated or the same heartache experienced over and over since childhood. I guess, really, the only way to avoid the heart breaking pain and devastation is to step right off the merry-go-round.

Happy

It does not take much to make me feel happy; a small kindness here or there, a tiny reminder that my company is desired, an acknowledgment that my thoughts and ideas matter. I was trained for years to set expectations low and be content if peacefulness is accomplished. Phenomenal elation and exquisite pleasure weren't high priorities or even likely possibilities. So I am easily pleased by simple things.
Conversely, I am quickly disappointed by the smallest slight. A too-short smile, an abbreviated attention to things, a missing focus on my needs. Daily life can lead to a massive heaving from high to low. Desperately, I attempt to strike a balance between. The mediocrity of not really feeling, in full, the emotions that each day brings.
But I wobble, ever so slightly, back and forth, up and down.

And so the slightest thing can make me smile...or cry.