I struggle a great deal with being human. For many years, I bristled at people who said to me, “you’re a human,” wondering what on earth they meant. People go through life with a wide range of definitions for humanness. As a young child, I was taught that to be human was to be flawed.… Continue reading Doing Enough
I entered adulthood wholly uneducated and unprepared for life. I was homeschooled until I was 19. When I tried attending a local university while living with my parents, I had no time to study. I also had no respect for academia. In my mind, my own ignorant Christian beliefs were superior to whatever I might… Continue reading Close Clarity
From what I have read about trauma recovery, the process can take a lifetime. The damage done over decades cannot be overwritten in a few years. I’m looking to the future with cautious hope. While a new year may not be a magical reset, I am reflecting on my priorities. I want to improve my… Continue reading Future Focus
Today to procrastinate on writing my daily blog post, I’m updating my page about the themes I’ll be covering in my memoir. People online have been asking if I’m still writing it, and the short answer is I’m working on it very very slowly. The reason for this is that I’m quite young and haven’t… Continue reading Therapeutic Creativity
Abusers don’t like being held accountable for their actions. One of the best ways to keep an abuser from holding power is to expose their true nature.
When you report symptoms of depression and anxiety, the doctors give you a chart to fill out. Rating on a scale of frequency, it asks questions like how often you feel like you’d be better off dead, or take little interest in doing things. Though I caved to trying psychiatric medications years ago, they still… Continue reading Slow Progress
“Don’t use your memoir to air old grievances and to settle old scores; get rid of that anger somewhere else. The memoirs that we do remember from the 1990s are the ones that were written with love and forgiveness…although the childhoods they describe were painful, the writers are as hard on their younger selves as… Continue reading Art Worth Making
People have been asking how I’m doing, and I answer that it’s all the same as it was months ago. I’m still fighting the monster of depression, I’m still trying to find meds that work for me, I’m still struggling to find my way back to my art. There’s not much to report when it… Continue reading Living with Existential Depression
“When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of the imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal… Continue reading Winter Freeze
“I lay in a bed of resistance Chained to either side I really wish I could, reset, rewind Someone has clawed out my eyes I don’t know what they told you But this place is not what you think Living inside a hole, they put me underground Where they could never find me unless they… Continue reading The Devastation of Lost Faith