“When you say a situation or a person is hopeless, you are slamming the door in the face of God.”
-Charles L. Allen
“Hope is the dream of a soul awake.”
-French Proverb
“Hope never abandons you; you abandon it.”
- George Weinberg
“Hope is faith holding out its hand in the dark.”
- George Iles
“Dum spiro, spero." Translated: "While I breath, I hope.”
- Latin Proverb
“Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all.”
- Emily Dickinson
"But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you.
- Psalms 39:7
This may sound a bit twisted, but I'm always the most hopeful after a rather bad night. When my migraine seems like more than I can bear, when I break down and push everything away until I have no more strength, when I pretend to give up hope. . . that's when I find it again, more powerful than ever.
Last night was such a night. I lost it. I cried until I screamed until I was weak. But I survived. And that's what matters. I came through the pain and I'm stronger for it.
My body may be tired and my head may pound, but right now I feel life within. Just like the song we used to sing in church as little children, there's a light within me that's growing stronger.
I feel like I'm not being completely honest with you, and that's something that I think I need to be. How can you trust me if I'm hiding something? I've never had a problem opening up to people before, well, at least not recently.
I suffer from migraines.
Yes, migraines can be horrible, but they're not the end of the world. Yet mine never go away. I've had a migraine every single day since November of 2006. The pain never seems to end for me.
Doctors don't know what to do so they just put me on a lot of medications. I don't want to bore you with the amount or the names, just know that it's not enough.
I also suffer from depression.
Wouldn't you? If you had chronic pain like mine, wouldn't that make you want to bawl your eyes out? Wouldn't you be depressed if you had to drop out of school twice because you were failing due to the migraines? Wouldn't you be upset if relationship after relationship failed, jobs ended just because you were sick?
As the migraines continued, the depression worsened. More pills followed, which led to me always being tired, yet not being able to sleep. This of course made me more depressed. It was a circle that I was trapped in the middle of. As one problem got worse, so did the other. Eventually I lost hope of recovery. Maybe that's what made me start.
I'm a recovering cutter.
With the depression and the migraines causing me so much pain, I grew numb. I lost control. I wanted to feel something. If I was going to be in pain, I was going to say how and where and when. So I stole pocket knives from my brother's room. I hid fingernail clippers in my purse. I used the razor in the shower. It was never enough, though. It started to escalate. I needed to do more. I hid most of them, only cutting on my arms in my most desperate hours.
Eventually I had the courage to tell my mom. It was my cry for help. But she didn't know how to make me stop.
There are several particularly painful nights that stand out in my memory. One night, I barricaded myself in my room and started cutting on my arm. I was going to cut the entire length of my arm if my parents hadn't broken in and managed to stop me. After that, I took a piece of glass out of a picture frame and broke it. I used the pieces to slice up my arm over and over again. It went on and on until my parents grew so scared, they took me to the hospital. I was quickly admitted to the psych ward.
It's very hard to me to talk about those two day that I was stuck in the hospital. I block out most of it because it's still so raw. That was the first time I hit rock bottom.
I was terrified at what I was doing and I quickly responded to help. I was allowed out if I promised I would attend outpatient services. At those services, I felt like I was on the road to recovery.
The next months are a blur for me. I remember trying so hard at school, but never feeling like it was good enough. I was constantly letting people down. I had so few friends that would talk to me that I felt completely alone most of the time. I was in a new relationship that was quickly going south. I was trying to handle a job.
There were several occasions that my parents had to convince the RD of my dorm to let them in my room because I was so depressed I wouldn't leave the place. They had to drag me home, crying. It was one of those nights that I fell even harder than I had before.
I tried to overdose on pills.
I never wanted to die. My reasoning was, I can go into a coma, I can stop the pain for just a little while, just long enough for me to get the strength I need to win this. I didn't even take enough to do anything. I was too scared, too weak. . . I thought it was weakness. I now know that the real me was fighting too hard to let go.
When my parents had realized what I had done, they called an ambulance. I remember kicking and screaming at them as my brother and father pulled me out of my room. I was not going back to the hospital. But of course, I had to go.
I was laying in a hospital bed, unable to stop shaking, when an arrogant man came in and told me how I was going back into the psych ward. I refused. I wouldn't sign the papers. With that smug little look on his face, he told me if I didn't sign myself in, I would become a "ward of the state." I was 21 or 22 at the time and completely pissed that they would do such a thing. He told me I was going and that I might as well sign it myself. I yelled at him that I had to stop shaking first before I could sign the damn paper.
I was only in the hospital that time for about a day and a half, but it felt like forever. I had to sleep up in the "mature adults" wing because they had no beds down in the regular ward. My doctor, convinced that my actions had been related to a medication change, hurried me through and I was soon able to trusted with shoelaces again once I was out in the real world.
This was a real turning point for me. I finally found a therapist that I clicked with. I found some doctors that were actually helping instead of overdosing me. I felt HOPEFUL again.
Not everything went wonderfully from that moment on. I was trapped in a relationship that had ended a long time ago. I had managed to convince myself that things were fine, not realizing I didn't even know who this guy was that I was dating. I should have seen the signs: isolating me from my family, putting people I care about down, telling me I was a failure, calling me unattractive. . . It was emotional and verbal abuse. And then it was physical. I should have run away at that first time he shoved me, but I was in too deep. I convinced myself I owed it to him because he stuck with me through the really hard times. HA! What the hell was I thinking?
Somehow I escaped. I really felt alone because then I had no friends. No one had stuck around during all of this. I don't blame them. Who would want to be around depression?
I had to start from scratch. I built a new life. I found a truly pure heart in an old friend. He and I have now been together for 6 months. He constantly encourages and makes me believe that I can do this. While I'm not in school full-time this semester, I am taking classes at the community college and I feel capable of handling school again. There are bad days, mostly bad nights, but I'm able to handle them.
I now believe that all this happened for a reason. Through this I've discovered that I want to use everything that I've gone through to help others that are suffering. I want to ensure that no one has to live without hope, because I know how scary that is.
Unexpected. Nearly surrendering hope
And then. . . you walked in.
From the first touch, the first
Deep look, I could feel that -
Nothing would be the same.
Within me, I felt the stirrings of
My soul finding an old friend;
Through the steadfast faith of another
I realized that dreams soon end
Where love just begins.
Love, can it be so easy?
Roses fade and sunsets wilt but love,
It endures. It conquers over everything else
Until all that remains is
Sweet, pure music.
Words fail, yet you already know:
A haunting song that brings the tears,
A moment, a feeling that leaves me longing for
(Dare I say it?) ETERNITY
With you to finally begin.
Love: a modest word that contains
So much. As beautiful as
The fallen snow, as calming as
The sound of summer rain,
It is; overwhelming.
But in the silence,
When I'm just standing with you,
When I can no longer breathe from
The beauty of the unexpected,
That's when I've found My Heaven.
What do you see when you look on me? Am I a child, quietly weeping under the covers? Am I a swimmer, flailing about, waiting for someone to come rescue me? Or maybe you don't see past my facade of someone always in control, makeup always perfect, never a hair out of place. Could you see the real me, I mean, if you tried? Do you even care?
There are occasions when I find the strength: I peek out from under the covers to see who is there; my head breaks the surface of the water, and gasping I reach my arm out to my savior. But it's no one, nothing, emptiness. . .
Do you even hear my voice? I feel like shouting this to the world, but what echoes back is the cold, hard truth: you just don't care. I don't blame you. I doubt I would care myself. Maybe you're preoccupied with your own life. That's only fair. You shouldn't have to worry about me.
But I'm tired of worrying about myself. I'm too weak to keep fighting to stay afloat. The water's frigid, my lungs ache for air, everything's getting so dark. . .
For a long time I have felt as though there is a dark veil hiding me from the world: a darkness so strong no man can tear it apart. While I'm trapped behind this veil, someone else has taken control of my life. She may look like me and speak with the same voice, but her words are harsh, cold and unfeeling. She brings pain to those I love; she brings pain to me.
You can look into my eyes and see this dark hold, covering the life you can see within. In vain I fight...
Slowly the veil fades and I return again. Yet I'm not completely the same. Guilt fills me, guilt for what someone else has done. But like the scars on my arms that haunt me, I cannot erase the past. And so I must cope with the memories. Still I cope.
One day will come when I can move past all this. One day. Until then I will cling to hope after hope after... still hoping for something more than this. Something more than just living to live, just surviving to make it to the next day.
As I write this, it's the beginning of January and all I see is covered with new fallen snow. Like the glistening snow, this new year signifies a new start: a blank canvas. Yet it's all an illusion. Underneath that vision of white is the same street, the same ground, the same life you had before. Instead of covering the parts of our lives that we aren't happy with, we should reshape them so come spring all we see is the beauty we want to be surrounded by.We spend a lot of time and energy surrounding ourselves with things we find beautiful. Yet we allow ugly, toxic people into our lives so easily. Why? These people tear us down until we tear ourselves down.Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." So why do we give consent? Why do we hand over control of our lives to someone else?
There are certain events in my life that have transpired in past few years that have made me who I am today. At times I would have labeled these events as traumatic or unfair, but I've grown wise enough to know that they happened for a reason. Maybe that reason was I needed to find my inner strength. Or maybe it's bigger than just me. I hope that I can use my story and my life to help others; first, my story must be told.To tell my story is harder than it sounds. I don't know what the ending will be, I can't remember the really emotional parts and I'm extremely jaded when looking back at my past decisions. However that all doesn't really matter. What is important is that it's told, so that girls like myself know. After all, education is our most powerful ally. I believe that since I was ignorant of what was happening to me, it escalated into something no one should go through.None of my words are meant to hurt. I simply feel I must be honest to move past this stage of my life. I know that a lot of this will be hard for me to write, but since I've made this decision, I feel compelled to write. This is the first time in years. That must mean something, right?
