off and on - 06/18/03
the urge to believe is mostly stronger than belief itself.
I had this plan - more a proposed perspective than a course of action; it's already failed. I'm disappointed because now I feel helpless and overwhelmed again; I don't know how I'm going to deal with everything, when of course the answer to that is obvious. Feel. Deal. Do nothing. And eventually the perspective that will really work will arise out of the dust of dreams and beams of hope scattered on my landscape. For some reason, though, I feel the need to detail what didn't work. Maybe some part of it's redeemable, maybe there's some beauty in it, maybe I just need to over-analyze right now.

I don't have the fifth Harry Potter book yet, it's not possible to distract myself from the situation, and there's very little to do in this house, which I cannot escape. I think this temporary remedy will serve about as well as any other I can cook up inside my weatherbeaten brain.

I'm listening to Ks Choice, and they're saying all sorts of things that make sense to me and even a few that make my heart feel softer, less at risk. A lot of the lines have to do with spirituality, which I just mis-typed as God. I've been thinking a lot about God lately. Noticing the number of adored artists I have who mention him/her/zir in some form or another...noticing changes in what I remember of my old beliefs. I remember when atheism scared me, made me feel alone. What was atheism? I would ask myself, and the answer was always, "the belief in nothing." How could you base your life on a belief in nothing? I would think, and considering the idea that God, of any sort, did not exist, would link to that lonely, frightened feeling that nothing existed. I learned to feel safe by believing in the existence of some sort of God even when I didn't rest on that belief in anything near my daily life... I learned to broaden my definition so that people who believed in music, in people, in love, (most recently, even) in science, felt safe to me also. I had a hard time with religion anyway because of all the sh*t that went down in N*land, and I swallowed less concrete beliefs more easily. I didn't like to hear specific traits of anyone's God, but I needed the idea of God myself. Up until a few weeks ago, the idea that atheism is not, after all, the belief in nothing but the belief in something that does not include God, left me feeling hollow, lonely, neglected. I guess we all feel safer if we know someone is looking after us, and without that someone embodied in my day to day life, I had to dream it. But do I really believe it? When Tracy died, harps and clouds and heaven all seemed stupid suddenly. I hadn't believed in hell, in fiery pits that tortured souls, for years, and even though - in the days and weeks following her death - I wanted desperately to know that she was somewhere safe and wonderful, I couldn't make that place "heaven." Whatever belief in God I'd developed between my early years in Catholic churches and middle school when I struck out in blind desperation for spirituality, lost all reliability at that point. It also became desperately important, more important than it had ever been. And since then, like now, I couldn't begin to understand, let alone explain, what I believed in the moment, I focused on collecting what knowledge of myself I could from my past beliefs.

I guess, for me, spirituality is constantly evolving, and it's hard to tell from one day to the next, how things look different. Right now, outside, the entire world looks green, and in four months, it will be yellow and red and blazing orange... I won't be able to describe the coming, and even less will I manage to detail the day to day changes. But overnight it will look to be autumn, and I will say, wasn't it just summer a few days ago? My beliefs are like that; my self is like that. I'm with them too often to notice their development. So I talk about the foliage of past seasons, guesswork my way toward a present explanation, and go about the day. I can't tell you what I believe, only what I might, what I have, and what I want to.

I believe "God" (which I am trying to find a substitute word for; you may have noticed I've started to type "Godd" whenever I'm using the word irreverantly...I used to say Deo, which of course means the same thing, but has less connotations...for the moment let's define God as the collective in which I believe, the overall Good/ Love, etc) is, essentially, the opposite of codependency. I know that a lot of people use religion and spirituality to find their way out of numerous illnesses and addictions, but for me "God" makes the most sense when it comes to codependency. I've spent so much of my life trying to control the way the world works, trying to keep myself on steady ground, with steady allies, despite the ever-increasing dangers of the hurricane in which I grew this far. When people, mainly Christian people (few others tend to bring up their beliefs to me), brought up God, it was as if he (and yes, he, the man with the beard, sitting on the throne, up in the heavens) had already planned out our entire lives, and I didn't have to worry because if I let God in, everything would be ok. The problem with that for me began and ended with my own responsibility for my life. First, I didn't like to think my life was scripted out already (although it did offer a sense of security), and secondly, the real steps that I needed to take in my life in order to continue (and better) it, couldn't happen when I thought God was doing everything for me, and I was - by believing - doing everything I needed to for God. I had other problems, too, but what it came down to, was the idea that I had to carry the world on my shoulders or realize the world was carrying me. I had to choose between life as a burden and life as a support. I started to understand, and obviously prefer, the latter, but I still felt I'd lost something. If God was "the universe" or "energy" or something less concrete than a human (which made some sense to me; I wondered why we were so sure that God was human, considering all the other creatures...I wondered if the elephants prayed to an elephant God), I felt less protected. Energy spread out across a massive universe was somehow less comforting than a personified being that I could talk with in my bedroom and ask for guidance or strength. So I decided (believe what you need to believe to get by - one of the cornerstones of my general life) that if God wasn't an old man on a throne up in the heavens, then I was okayed to see him that way at any time. The universe had approved me to personify "God" (as a man, woman, child, adult, blonde, brunette, punk, prep, etc) at any time I felt the need because it makes sense that, for someone as social and human-focused as I am (how much can I love the wild world, which I *do* love, when I'm allergic to almost all of it?) it would be easiest to work with something familiar. I decided I had the right to personify God when I needed to, within our relationship, but I believed God was more than what I perceived, i.e. more than energy, more than the "person" I spoke to, more than the universe. "God" (which I still hear as male, Biblical, and stifling - hence the need for another term) was something so multi-faceted, so spectacular, that all across the universe people (and perhaps animals and plants and rocks and other beings) saw different sides, interpreted, interacted, and related to zir so differently, that one could think they didn't see the same thing. As for me, I believed they did see the same thing, simply not the entirety of it. The entirety of it was too much responsibility for any one life. I believe in paranormal realities (they've become close to normal in my life, and acceptably so in some of my family members'), but there's a certain point where that sort of information overwhelms. Who really wants the full gift, the full responsibility of the gift? And so I started to think about that God who could help me with my burden, with my need to control, and save, and separate people from their pain, and one day a few months ago, I found myself leaning against the sink in the upstairs bathroom, muscles prepped like I was stretching for a track meet, saying something like, "Just take it then. Just take it." Another time I found myself balancing with a hand on either side of the doorway saying, "Give it to the one who can carry it all. I can't carry it all." I know a lot about pain and illness and wrongdoing, and I simply can't hold onto it. I definitely can't act on, or cure, everything I know. God became a force to lean on then. I felt like I was in one of those trust exercises where you fall backwards, and if I felt the need to test it (which I don't, thank goodness), I could tip myself backward on my heels and the air and the energy and the love I can't name would catch me.

I rarely pray with words. Words were my way to keep from feeling for a long time, and so generally when I get to an emotion so keen that I need to share it with this copilot of mine, I do so using something other than English. Sometimes I exhale quickly, imagining the toxins exiting, being caught up and managed. Sometimes I lift up air, lift up my hands as if to say, "How am I supposed to carry all this?" and then feel it taken from me. It's not a robbery, really; it's more like a safety-deposit box. I can give things over to "God", the way I can give something over to the doctor (but much bigger things for much longer time periods), and I'm free to not focus on it, not be overwhelmed by it, to keep living and come back to it when I'm ready to carry what I can. I still have the right to all the wisdom of the experience, but I have the right to postpone knowing. With knowing comes responsibility, and I know a lot already; my resources for dealing with it all need to develop more before I can take on the full load of what I know. Besides, my life must last a lifetime. There isn't any rush.

So, "God" is the solution (most directly) to my codependency, which is not to say that believing in what I believe has cured me in any sense. I still read Melody Beattie, still struggle through days when I want to caretake instead of take care, still challenge myself, still push myself, still go to therapy, still ask the questions, and do the work. I generally do my talking with people I can see, even if I'm not seeing them in the moment. (As I told Sara once, I talk to people in my head. "And do they answer?" she asked, laughing. "Yes, actually," I said. "They do.") I lean on visible allies because I need that. I learn from and find comfort in people the same way that I learn from and find comfort in experience. I would never try to recover without the more immediate forms of professional help in which I partake because those are all parts of God. I step back and forth between believing that God created everything in this universe, so I can feel free to gather any part of it to aid in staying my course, and the idea that "God" is this universe. Somehow it means more to me to imagine the universe developing slowly into something so huge, so beautiful, so entirely made of love than to believe in someone standing by creating it all. It's like the world's most impressive flower versus the world's most impressive floral painting. As chained to art as I am, life means more to me. I relate to life.

Then (by which I mean after I've detailed what answers I have to the normal questions), there's always the issue of time. I don't know why time became part of my answer to questions regarding spirituality, but it is, and it needs to be told. I'm not sure I still believe this, but I did once, and that needs to be understood, if I'm going to make sense out of the handful of "poetry" I put together the other night. It became clear to me a few years ago that time, if it did exist, was not even close to linear. (And this made many a history project that much more annoying; trust me.) I experienced my life in cycles, spirals, seasons. I imagined that the most basic unit of the universe was a cycle made of cycles, and the whole uncharted universe that same pattern magnified exponentially. I decided (who knows why) that time was a place rather than a moment, that we could pinpoint ourselves on the universal time globe but could not say what came before or after us any better than we could say Europe and Africa come before or after America. I started to believe in simultaneous incarnation - the idea that souls lived innumerable lives, but that one individual (manifestation of the soul) could not say they were the reincarnated or preincarnated version of someone else because time wasn't linear. The only sense of relationship that could be measured, were it possible to do so, was a distance. There couldn't be a before and after.

That sort of thinking could come in handy right now, with the thin slice down my life, shutting it hard into two sections. I'm keeping it at bay a little with false hope (that they'll reconsider, that the doctor will make them change their minds), and the entries from the last time life was split so completely, so permanently. It reminds me of the reason I left out when Dr. R asked why I kept going in spite of everything: because even though there is always a reason to relapse (you don't even have to want one; it's there), nothing can warrant it more than Tracy's death did. Nothing can be more difficult, more unfair, more horrible than that was. And that's not a challenge to my life ("God" knows I've had enough pain to set me for awhile) ... certainly this is a hugely difficult thing, and there are things that could happen that would be equally painful, and - thrown on top of everything I'm dealing with now - feel as bad or worse. But I will not diminish her death by surviving it only long enough to be beaten by a bad test grade. I will not diminish her life by refusing to live my own.

Picking up before the last paragraph's tangent, simultaneous incarnation gives a very specific definition to "soulmate." My understanding of the soul's individual lives was that each one helped that soul to further understand, to learn, to grow, to create greater peace. So while I'm battling every after-school-special topic ever written, there's probably another soulmate struggling with several thousand physical diseases, and another who has to worry about make-up and lip gloss and popularity and similar high school bullshit. The idea was that in this universe with its many facets, so many that we could not and probably would not want too see them all, each incarnation took on a little bit, learned a little more. My life, my lesson, etc. There's still a lot of truth in this idea to me, by which I guess I mean there's a lot of peace. The one question that remains unanswered is the value and the outcome for the individual incarnations. That's why I stopped discussing this philosophy after Tracy died. I knew her spirit was ok. I wanted to know about her fingers, her mannerisms, and her laugh. I wanted to know what had happened with them.

Sara and I are close like sisters. We call it sisters because the only words we know are familial ones. The reality is we're closer than that. We're closer than girls genetically linked, raised in the same world. We communicate instinctively, silently, across large distances. We heal each other without being healed ourselves. What I'm trying to say is that she's the type of girlwoman you might in passing call a soulmate, and if you've gone through the string of beliefs that I just detailed, that might mean that you're working together. Then again, maybe you're just working together because Rogers means everything for both of you, and you are each the way it stays clear and safe inside the other. Either way, what I know is, she and I are going through something similar. We have a thousand differences, but we are similar about Rogers. And I am here trying to figure it out from the outside (enduring such pain), while she's there - in the pain of that, - trying to figure the inside out. We so often have those parallels, and I think there one of the ways we help each other, beyond the powerful love... I think, maybe, if I can be brave enough to take on the pain of not being there, and find some understanding, while she takes on the pain of being "there" (Twilight Zone Rogers; Rogers-two-years-changed), we can help each other move on. She needs to be in a hospital; she needs to prepare, while in the hospital, for the time when she's no longer there. I need to understand the home I found in a place where it no longer exists. I need to understand how the same streets can lead to the same paths to the same building with the same floors, and everything can be gutted, gone. I'm grateful to Sara for going back. I can't imagine sleeping in that room, the way she did her first few nights, the room I shared with Tracy. I can't imagine walking down those hallways, meeting new RCs, trying to convince myself of the same things I told her - that no matter what happens this time around, no one can take away what happened the first time. But the truth is we have to figure out this home thing. We have to. And I have to admit that throwing myself into this, grasping it with all the zeal compulsivity provides, analyzing it from every direction, and pretending that just because it was the better home means I don't feel anything at the loss of the-home-that-should-have-been (that is a should I'll keep) will not bring me closer to freedom. I need to take a lesson from myself, from Sara, and from the extra hardship of these past few days (which I'd call weeks, if I didn't have calendars telling me otherwise; silly human attempts to measure time) and just feel. Feel. As much as I can. Journal, write bad poetry, or that non-poetry silliness where I just hit the enter key a few extra times to help myself feel free to not make sense. Write like I did after Tracy died and whatever else I must do. (I picked up yarn so shortly before I knew; you would have called it premonition.) This time I'm not even going to sort of relapse. And it's not because I'm choosing to become (even more) vigorously recovery-oriented, so intent on preserving my health that I refuse to do the one necessary deed in order to achieve it. Feel.

Don't let them tell me I don't have a right to be angry. Don't let them tell me I don't have a right to feel anything I choose / don't choose. Don't let them tell me I can't scream and wail and struggle and still make it through stronger for all of this. Dr. R said, from my report, that I am handling and will handle this the best of all my siblings - for two reasons. 1) I am the youngest, and it's been proven and reproven that the younger a child is when divorce occurs the better they handle it. So much for the "at least they didn't do it while we were growing up" line. Number 2) is my emotional awareness, the inability to shut myself off that's been so irritating this past week. I have to remember that my awareness of feeling and the methods of dealing that I have learned and will continue to learn (my own personal wizardry) are my asset. I must play to my strengths, pick up each tool and use it well.^ I must give myself permission to learn about home over a long, confusing period, during which I generally feel less like a pupil and more like a lunatic.

As far as I can tell, that's how I've gotten this far.

chord

^harry potter references...the obsession is mounting

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