Let’s go out with a bang. Or, at least, a few provocative thoughts instead of the “writer’s block” silence I’ve been displaying lately. 2018 has been a year. Quite a year. A roller coaster year. Highs, lows, joys, sorrows and everything in between. Or, as one might conclude, life.
The birth of my second granddaughter was the highlight of the entire year. And, honestly, that miracle outweighs all the negative stuff that happened. And there was another miracle in our family, with the birth of our nephew’s daughter. And there is another baby on the way, for another nephew. All good stuff. All God’s amazing gifts.
The sorrows and fears were just the price of living with diseases and illnesses we can’t control or predict. But we’re learning to conquer the fears and face the music; rigorous honesty, integrity, progress not perfection, and all that good stuff that works. Step by baby step.

So, we’ll say goodbye to 2018 and welcome in 2019 with all its hopes and possibilities. January 1st is, after all, just another day. With the potential to be anything you want it to be. It’s all about perspective. Gratitude, grace and elbow grease go a long way. Happy New Year.

I spent the better part of the day today at a friend’s lake house here in Maine. A house I had never been to on a lake I didn’t know was there. It was a gathering of women, friends who met through a shared struggle. A group of strong, brave, caring women with a common purpose: survival.
All I could think, while I drank coffee and ate home baked scones and muffins, talked, laughed and shared stories of life and loss, was how very blessed we all were to be there. To be here, to have lived to tell about it, to be on this side of the battlefield. We are warriors, this group of women. We fought for our lives and fight still, one day at a time. And we will hold each other’s hands through heartbreak and grief, bad moods, bad days, births, deaths and everything in between. This day was healing for me and I am filled with gratitude for these women. My tribe.

This was a tragic week here in the harbor. We lost a young man to suicide. Walked away from his home and ended his life. He was the son and grandson of two dear friends. It was a long, dark week spent searching for him, fearing the worst, hoping against hope for the best….they found him yesterday. This is a community in mourning.
Today the CDC put out a report that suicide has risen twenty-five percent since 1999 in the U.S.
Clearly we are doing something wrong. Failing at life. People are lonely, depressed, isolated, fearful, anxious. When a baby isn’t loved or cared for they don’t grow and are said to have “failure to thrive syndrome.” I think our country has failure to thrive syndrome.
This was a tragic week here in the harbor.

I keep wanting to write. And then…not writing. I suppose this falls under the heading “writer’s block.” I think it has to do with the incident last fall, when I put something personal out into the World Wide Web and someone in my life saw it and things got ugly for a while there. And I cried and said to my husband “There go all my hopes for writing. How can I ever tell my story if I can’t even put a comment out there without my family going tilt?” And I haven’t written since. Until now.

Take the leap, they said. Face your fears. Deep breath and

let go.

This creative process is not simple. I’m finding that I’m not being pulled into the writing like I used to be, as a therapeutic tool, as a way to unload, as a survival method. Because I’m not in survival mode anymore. I’m living. Actually living a real, healthy, good life for probably the first time ever.

But so much of what I want to write about is the past. What happened, what I went through, how I got here, in this good place. From there, that bad place. And I’m mostly okay with that but I find that I have to take those backwards glances in small doses. Otherwise I begin to feel the pull of the dark side….the place I crawled and clawed my way out of to get to the light. And I will not sell my soul to that demon of darkness again, even if it means I will need to work in small increments over a long period of time to tell my tales. So be it.

And so my task is the re-creating of myself as a writer. Because when I was on the dark side I thought that that was part of my identity as a creative being. The sadness, the despair, the drinking, the drama, the tortured soul; it was, I believed, who I was and part of the writer persona. I cried, I poured my anguish out onto the blank page, I poured another glass of wine, I cried more…the cycle went round and round until I was drowning in that darkness and could not find the surface to come up for air. I could not write, I could not think, I could not function.

It took a village and a God to help me. And I am grateful and breathing and smiling and living a life I did not believe I deserved. And I want to share the journey with others who are lost in the night. So I have to tread lightly and take small backwards glances.

It starts with the First Step.

It wasn’t long ago that I was the poster child for everything that is the opposite of hope; wretched, forlorn, despairing,  despondent. I was in such a dark place that I had, finally, lost even the smallest shred of hope. I wasn’t living. I was spiritually empty. Hope was a four-letter word that was not in my vocabulary.

Now I run around like an angel of mercy spreading the word: there is HOPE! Don’t give up, don’t despair, if I can be saved so can you. And I mean it. When I speak in meetings or groups where people are suffering and sick and sad, whether it be from addiction or depression or just the hard knocks of life beating them down I always try to share a little bit of hope with them. Not false hope, not you-can-do-it cheerleading rah-rah-rah hope. Real hope. From a real person. Who had none.

I was without hope of even the smallest glimmer. I was broken and empty. I could barely get out of bed and, some days, I didn’t. I thought I had lost everything worth living for, most especially the love of my family. I had no self-worth, no purpose and no will to live. This did not happen overnight. It was a slow descent into this hell and at the core of it was my self-hatred, which began in childhood and was fed by the very people who were supposed to nurture and love me. There was no unconditional love in my childhood. There was plenty of shaming and criticizing and scolding. The good little girl could never be quite good enough. So I learned to turn everything inward. The self-hatred, depression and suicidal thoughts started very, very young. The drinking to self-medicate started later and turned on me when my mother did, around my fortieth birthday. Her final betrayal sealed my dark, hopeless fate and put her stamp of approval on my innermost belief; that I wasn’t worth it.

It would be a decade before I began to climb out of the hell, out of the despair and grief of the losses suffered. A decade during which I came close to dying more times than I dare to think about now. And it would be even longer before hope arrived, the tiniest piece of hope, like a speck of dust, in the words my daughter spoke to me one September day;”I need my mother.” Hope. That I had a purpose. That I was needed. That I was worth it.

It’s Monday morning, November 9th, and I have more things I want and need to do than there are hours in which to do them. It’s as simple as that. And, so, I remind myself once again that I must take life one day at a time. One hour at a time if I need to really keep myself in the moment. So I will break it down into very small pieces of the day, prioritizing and getting the most important things checked off the list and then see what time is left over for things I want to do. And there’s the real issue; I’m at an age now when I want to throw the “need to do” tasks out the window and just pick from the “want to do” list. And in the end I will compromise and do a little of both. Which is much better than how I lived most of my life, doing all the things I was “supposed” to be doing and very little of what I wanted to be doing. It’s a balancing act, to be sure, and at least I’m not falling off the high wire anymore.

News alert: there might be a Lego shortage this holiday season. The company is having trouble keeping up with the demand. No joke-I just heard this on the 11 o’clock news. Well, now they’re really in trouble because after that report there will be a run on Legos. Can you imagine kids not getting Legos for Christmas? My boys spent hours building spaceships and airplanes and robots and anything they could imagine out of Legos. I marvelled at their skill. I remember Nathan digging through the bin full of the tiny plastic pieces searching for a specific tiny plastic piece. How does he know what he’s looking for, I wondered. And, even more perplexing, how does he know when he’s found it?! But then, much to my amazement, he would hold up a tiny piece of white or red or blue plastic and shout “got it!” and the construction would continue.

They can’t run out of Legos. One of the greatest educational tools ever invented. Disguised as a toy.

I don’t get it. Denial. I really don’t understand it. There are some people close to me who say I was in denial at one point. But I was never in denial. I just didn’t know what to do about my problem. But make no mistake, I knew I had a problem. There was no denial.
I have, however, lived my whole life surrounded by people in denial. My mother has lived this way her whole life. She can deny the very nose on her face. She can look in the mirror and turn around and tell you there is no nose on her face. A number of years ago she had a blood clot that burst in her lung. She landed in the hospital and asked to see me. We are estranged and I guess a near-death experience is the only thing that could possibly draw us together. I went to see her and I was a kind and dutiful daughter, if somewhat reserved. Our estrangement is due entirely to her denial and ultimate betrayal of me. She did what she does best; she talked about herself. She told me how she had ignored the symptoms she was having and how, at one point, she had walked straight into a sliding glass door. “You know your mother,” she laughed. ” She doesn’t see what’s right in front of her face!”

No, I don’t get denial. How can you not see what’s right in front of you?

I don’t worry anymore. At least not like I used to. I come from a long line of worriers and I learned the practice well and young. But now, finally, I have learned what the wise ones know: worrying serves no good purpose. At all. It doesn’t change the outcome of what you’re worried about, it doesn’t have any effect on the matter, and all it does is make you, the worrier, stressed and anxious. (At the very least. It can lead to serious health issues.) It is, quite simply, a foolish waste of time. So I don’t bother anymore. I do, however, pray a lot. Prayer is my replacement for worrying. If I am troubled or anxious, scared or worried, nervous or terrified about something in my life I pray. I give it to God and let it go. It’s not always easy. But, with practice, it gets easier. It becomes automatic. God is my go-to guy. I also talk to my husband, my adult children, my friends, my counselor…..I use my resources. I mean, let’s face it, life is tough. But at the end of the day I have very little control over anyone or anything. And to keep trying to control the world around me is a futile exercise. So I let it go and pray. I pray a lot these days. And I sleep very, very well.