Stethoscope

When I was a child I got sick a lot. Clinics were as familiar as my own home, and doctors were the miracle workers that made my hurt go away -but more importantly they explained it. They looked into my mouth, listened to my chest and tummy and knew things. Doctors made me feel better, simply by caring, smiling and placing a stethoscope on my skin.

From the very first memories I possess I was in love with a stethoscope -the truest representation of everything good in the world. I knew that I wanted to one day don a steth and spend my time and energy giving people more time and energy. I loved stethoscopes with a silent ferocity that I held at the very center of my heart.

As I grew older my love only grew. I sank my curiously hungry mind into reading all about that world I so desperately wanted to join. But one thing I never so much as approached was anything related to steths. I didn't look for their proper name, what they did or how they were used. I didn't ask my doctor to let me so much as touch his, and I even avoided the toy ones.

I loved them more than to approach them as a silly child with a crush would. I had an adult brain in my nowhere near adult body and I was too deeply in love to squander my first touch. I would not learn what I desperately wanted to learn until I earned it. When I knew enough medicine to truly understand I would seek this knowledge. When my papers said medical student I would touch and try it. I would marry my love when I was officially married to medicine.

After three years of medical school I was asked to buy a steth. I touched it for the first time in a pharmacy, and tested its name on my tongue. Stethoscope. My stethoscope. I finally had one of my own and I finally understood everything about it. I was happy.

My stethoscope now lies hidden on a seldom used shelf in my closet. It's twisted and carries the weight of a hundred nick-knacks. It is not abused, it is hidden for its own good. It is hidden because it hurts too much to see it knowing I had let it down. My stethoscope deserves better than bitter tears from a heavy heart.

So I hide it, pretending that not seeing it makes me love it less, and want it with less force. I hide it and pretend I can't feel both our disappointments at it not being used to save the world. 

Breathe..

Soften your heart, lend it some tenderness and let it truly beat. The only reason your mind and chest ache is in objection to the hardness you force onto yourself. Solid does not mean strong, a rock breaks but rubber stretches and resists. We harden our shell to protect ourselves, forgetting that hard is weak in its rigidity and soft is strong in its adaptability.

Soften your heart and let yourself feel. The more you fight your feelings and inject stiffness into yourself the worse you'll hurt. You cannot outrun emotions, they find a way to manifest and trust me when I say they won't leave you until you truly feel them. They are not scary. Being a still stone might give you an illusion of calm but it does not mean that you are alive. We are alive because we feel. Our hearts beat and our blood runs because they yield.

Soften your heart and let it fill with a hundred sentiments and more. Feel everything you've ever fought to keep yourself from feeling. The pain, the hurt, the guilt, the shame, the love, the joy, the relief and the grief. Let a spectrum of contradictions into yourself and let them fill you. They won't hurt worse than your physical pain ever does. There is relief to be found in allowing yourself the freedom to truly be human. If you keep your insides "strong" then you outrun the positive but give the negative room to hunt you down and hurt you worse.

Soften your heart and lend it the tenderness it needs to beat with ease. I will give you directions on how to turn all your rigid into strong soft. Close your eyes and breathe. Let the darkness of your sight calm your jumpy nerves and breathe once more. Bring your shields down and surrender to your every thought. Scream every thought that should come with a feeling but doesn't at yourself a hundred times until you feel. Speak the words out loud. Tell yourself what you should feel. Say it again and again and again until you feel it filling you. Smile as you cry and tell your heart that you are setting it free. Remember that feelings mean you are alive and human, and that soft means you are durable and strong. Breathe, and allow your heart some room to breathe.

For my idiot.. 

Computerized Mind

I wish my mind was a computer, and the inside of my head had a control panel. I wish there was a keyboard attached to my skull, and a command center that responded to my every keystroke. I would simply let my fingers fly across a series of pre-labeled buttons and have my mind do as it's told.

My thoughts would no longer ricochet off the inside of my head and bounce around in games of catch me if you can. The flighty contemplations and the endless nagging of my mind would lose their power and yield to my every command. The ocean of feelings that lies beyond my control and washes over me in tidal waves that shake my core, and stormy rage that is my undoing would disappear at the mere click of Alt and F4. The maze of memories that haunts the back of my lids and courses ache through my veins would leave my consciousness when I order the process to end. Instead of spending days stuck amidst the chaotic pounding of losing past and future I would reorganize everything into neat folders that await my touch before they can release the chaos they hold within.

If my mind was a computer then I could shut it down knowing that with a tiny click I could bring it back. I would lie in my bed and send the command and wait as all my tasks and processes slowly got ticked off and my insides went blank. If my mind was a computer life would be simpler by tenfold. When my pieces broke and I got lost within the firing of my own neurons I would smile and order the faulty drive to backup and format. When I feel the virus of living death clawing its way through my soul I would restore my entire being to the last point I was functional. Time would rewind and my insides would rearrange until my past becomes my present and I am once again new and whole. If I was a computer I would lull my feelings into hibernation and restore the rest of me back to full strength.

Dark Through Light

November 12, 2015

If there is one thing I've learned in the past few years it's that sometimes we have no control. Sometimes no matter how hard you work, how much you try, how often you pray and will something into being it doesn't work out. That's just the way of the world. It spins even if you want it to stop. Life does things you don't want, and takes things you do.

We can't always have what we want or what makes us happy. I know as much, I've always known as much. But I've only recently realized that I am foolish, and that I let myself love so deeply that I dared want what I knew I wouldn't be allowed to have. I fell for peace of mind and comfort. I fell for having a purpose. I fell for things I haven't had in years. I fell for learning, and I fell for a home away from my real home.

But what does the world care? I am getting ripped from them anyway. I have to keep saying goodbye -but you know what? The fact that I keep saying goodbye just means that I keep coming back. Maybe not coming to stay, but I still manage to get a dose of my home, however minute it might be.

So for now let me attempt to divert my mind from the pessimistic and redirect it to the optimistic. I am blessed. I am lucky far beyond many out there. I have two homes, and that is something no distance or time apart can ever shake or change. Where people are homeless, I am overcrowded with homes and I have somewhere to run to when I feel suffocated. I have two families, one that I was blessed with when I was born and one that I found all on my own and joined their blood to my veins. I have two sets of people that make me feel like I belong, and I have such abundant amounts of love filling my life that sometimes it feels too much.

I lived a good life. I lost a lot, but I've gained so much. I am living a good life. I am blessed with things that I can't lose. Somethings are under my control, and seeing the dark through light is a choice I will make right now. I am full of love, I am loved, and I have things that make all the bad I go through bearable. I have things to miss, I am so lucky that I am crying because I'm leaving one home to go to another.

I am blessed beyond belief. I love you, my home, until we meet again. 

I Miss Him

April 14, 2015

Everything feels surreal. Like my life has been one long nightmare for weeks, and my mind refuses to admit that the nightmare is reality and not a dream. When I sleep I see him get better, I see him leave the hospital and I see him smile and laugh off what happened. I see him assuring me that he's alive, telling me not to worry, that reality was the dream and this was what's real. And then I open my eyes and I'm in bed and the truth sits on my chest and keeps my lungs from expanding.

He is gone. He did not get better. I saw him for the last time lying in a hospital bed, his chest vibrating as the ventilators fought to keep him alive. The last I know of him is a number on a machine. The last I ever heard his voice -I can't remember what he said. It kills me that I can't remember. I've tried so hard, but I can't even remember what he was wearing on that last night, or what he said before he left.

I don't even know if he ever knew that I loved him more than I ever showed. I don't know if he knew that he mattered.

All that is left of him now are memories that hurt more than I can bear. All that is left are things he left undone, and words he left unsaid.

I miss him.

Empathy & Disdain

I used to be empathetic. That was one of my best qualities. I could put myself in other people's shoes as easily as I could breathe. But somewhere along the line my shell hardened, and my empathy turned into sympathy, from there to compassion, on to indifference until it finally became contempt and disdain. I used to appreciate everyone's struggles, be they big or small. But something has changed.

I am jaded. My once sensitive insides have grown hard and unfeeling. Life hacked away at me, and in my fighting back I ended up losing pieces of myself. My war was so terrible everything else began to pale in comparison. My battles were so deadly everything else began to seem trivial. I was so hurt and so busy in my own huge war that I forgot that the struggle is real no matter how small the fight.

I don't like what I've become. I don't appreciate losing what I once deemed my best quality. A change is necessary. Back when I was full of empathy, I used to imagine myself as another person and write from their perspective. Like an exercise of sorts, to see if I could get the feeling right, if I could truly feel what they feel as I put it on paper. That is my challenge -to immerse myself in others' feelings, until my empathy returns and I am once again who I used to be.

And so it begins. 

Falling, and Flying

Stop clawing madly at the air around you. Stop kicking and screaming, stop panicking. Stop trying to find a handhold, stop trying to somehow stop falling.

Just let go. For once in your life surrender. Allow yourself to fall with careless abandon. Cease all movement and let yourself feel the undeniable freedom of falling into unknowns. Let the air you cut through fill your lungs and let the speed of your fall force your heart to beat at a new rhythm. Feel the pull of gravity and allow it to render all your thoughts silent and speechless.

Stop thinking, consciously and subconsciously both. For once in your life find the will and strength to silence every part of your mind, even that distant corner that you believe lies beyond your control. Let the fall fill you with such wildness that you break free of the shackles that are your mind, your thoughts and your subconscious.

Surrender your precious control and accept your own helplessness and the inevitability of your limitations. Stop wondering why you're falling, stop wishing you had a rope to cling to, stop hoping to find a handhold, stop dreaming of a safety net and stop fearing the end of your fall. For once in your life shut your mind down and enjoy the moment, enjoy the freedom of being helpless and the lack of responsibility that comes with having zero control.

The reality is that you are falling. Whether you struggle or not you are falling. Whether you fret and worry or not you are falling. If you think and fear you're falling and if you don't you're still falling. You're not in control, and there's nothing you can do to change what's happening. But if you fight it then you hurt yourself to no end. But if you let go, if you relax and surrender, then you'll realize that falling can feel exactly like flying.