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.

Crazy

Sometimes I believe we are all a bit crazy, myself especially. I wake up every morning and repeat a cycle of safe choices or terrible errors, expecting each day to end differently. Outwardly, my life seems normal, safe even. But is anything ever what it appears to be? What is wrong with getting a little wild sometimes? Is it so bad to actually live life instead of just repeating the same safe motions again and again?
I admit I tend to think outside the box, but sometimes the box is so mundane, so ordinary. As a child, I longed for that kind of everyday normalcy. As a teen, I enveloped myself in rebellious individuality. As an adult, well, I am not really sure what I want. I know I want to wrap myself in people who are kind and caring, interesting and uplifting. I long for it, really. But I also crave the titillation of maximizing the potential happiness of each moment. Taking a risk to fulfill a desire. So many people take the safe road through life. I never really have. More often than not, that road has led to great disappointment or caused me enormous shame. Once in every great while, though, it leads me to something deeply emotional and brings pleasure beyond imagine.
So, which road to follow today? The path of safety and predictable consequences? The one of normalcy I longed for as a child?
Or follow the path of the minute? One that is littered with unpredictability?
I have always been a little bit crazy....