Pain

Pain is my nemesis.

My cross to bear.

Burning spreads across my chest.

Tentacles snake up my neck ... across my shoulders... down my arms...

If I drew it, it would look like a molten heaving mass - black, and red, and yellow...

Fatigue melts my flesh ‘til it feels liquid and heavy... 

the only respite - 

Be a horizon on a bed of relief. 

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

My soul whispers...

“Let go of the sea of shame.

The dishes will wait.

The floors will stay unswept.

No one is coming to judge your decor.

Let go.”

I lay as an horizon. 

My body at rest...restore...repeat.

I’ve been here before,

I’ve risen.

I will.

Again.

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What’s in a name?

A thousand years ago, or so it seems, when I started this blog I had no idea what to call it. At the time, I was living on a farm in the picturesque Noosa Hinterland, at the end of a very long drive way, on top of a hill. God I miss that place. It’s the longest I have ever lived anywhere.

I started blogging originally as a way to record what was going on in my life. The interesting conundrum of having a foot in two different parenting camps - a baby, and tweens, that became a toddler and teens. The break down of my marriage to my youngest child’s father. The recognition that there was more going on in my fractured brain then PTSD.

As time passed, and I moved, my blog name became synomous with my life. Like a hill, there has been ascents, descents and good old plateaus. On reflection, probably not a lot of plateaus, and an awful lot of ups and downs. And my blog morphed into a place where I talked about child sexual abuse, attempted to venture into the “commercial” blogging arena - unsuccessfully, shared words that formed poems that captured my moods and feelings, talked about breast cancer.... and then I stopped. I didn’t stop writing. I just stopped pressing publish.

I felt too raw, too full of emotional turmoil, too loud, too honest. Too much.

I shared my blog with someone new recently. It prompted me to read through my words and I was surprised at how well they read, how elequont they were. In a beautiful moment of synchronicity, the next day I was invited to a group that had been formed on Facebook, “The ‘Old School Blogger’s’ Reunion page, full of people that I had met and conversed with online and in real life. Some are still blogging, some of let it go. As I read through the conversation and recognised names, names of people that had been a very real part of my life, I realised that I need to start writing again, and pressing publish.

So here I am. Renewed, reinvigorated and real.

And if I’m too much, then too bad.

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Fractured (June 2014)

I wrote this in mid 2014, but never pressed publish. I have several posts that have sat in the draft folder waiting. I have all these words inside me, constantly pushing against my psyche, demanding to be told. So tell them I shall. 

"It could be worse."

I've lost count of the number of times I have had that said to me.

No shit sherlock. Tell me something I don't know. I could have had invasive DCIS, had to have chemotherapy, and all the horrible things you have to endure through that, or had to have a bilateral mastectomy, or be terminal stage 4.

Knowing all those things didn't make me feel any better. To be honest, it really pissed me off when people said "it could be worse" to me. I wanted to say, "Well, when you get diagnosed with cancer, let me know how you feel about it then, mhmm? ok?" But I didn't.

For the most part people say things not to minimise your experience, but instead to highlight the positives. Unfortunately, when you are first diagnosed with cancer, you have trouble seeing absolutely anything positive about it. All you can see, feel, breathe is the fact that your body, for reasons unknown to you, has turned on itself. That there are cells in you that have the potential to kill you. Take your life away. Destroy you.

That is what was going through my head back in March this year. That, and a big WHAT THE FUCK!? Had I not already suffered enough? Had I not already fought and wrestled with a enough demons to last several peoples lifetimes?

I thought I had endured battles before. But this year... this year has to have been the biggest battle I have fought. A couple of weeks after I was diagnosed, and making the decision that my boys needed to go and live with their fathers,  I had what I can only describe as a psychotic break. I completely lost it. Flipped my lid. Lost the plot. It was not pretty, and I believe the closest to insanity I have ever come.

I got in my car, left my boys behind - a hurt that I will carry in my heart forevermore - and screamed and howled and sobbed as I drove. I didn't know where I was going. I didn't care. I was beyond caring. My brain had fractured into a million tiny pieces. Nothing made sense. Reality and fiction were one and the same. Rationality and irrationality had merged into a black vortex of confusion and despair. I couldn't breath, I couldn't think, I couldn't see, I couldn't feel, I felt too much, thought too much, saw too much. I was numb, yet feeling everything intensified infinitely.

My beautiful boys were picked up by the police - a hurt that I will carry in my heart forevermore - and taken to the police station, where someone, who was once a friend, picked them up and looked after them. Me - I had ended up in a car park of a popular tourist attraction, punching decline, decline, decline, as my phone kept ringing.

The screaming, howling, crying abated. My consciousness left my body and hovered above, in a state of disconnect.

And there I stayed for far longer then I thought I would.

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