what then?

What do you do if the person you love, the person you pledge your soul to morphs physically and emotionally at the hands of a disease like cancer or dementia or even addiction? Does love cover all bases? Are we expected to stick around when life shows up, reality reads like a horror story, and smiles are caught for instants, like butterflies in the wind.

It is important, at least for me, to believe in that perfect, mindblowing love. It might take years and labyrinths to find it, but once the puzzle pieces click together, nothing else in the world really matters. Your minds are in sync as you finish each other’s sentences, your skin responds like lightning to one another’s touch, your bodies provide warmth, arousal, safety. You whisper to each other in the quiet of the night, mumbling words like “love” and “you” and “forever” against each other’s skin.

When you walk together in the light of day, your hands seek each other out. Your proximity decreases to the point where you begin to nearly walk as one.

When you are separated, whether it be between walls or continents, you feel disconnected, not just from your lover but from yourself. When you define yourself by your love for another, when that love is gone, even for a moment, it changes you. You struggle with every step, every  breath.

Is love worth sticking around for when it becomes unrecognizable? When the love that looked so bright and alive, skin olive against the emerald of the grass becomes starchy, like the color of the sheets it rests against, what about then? When the breath that provided loud and hearty laughs and kisses that seem to last for days suddenly can barely sustain, coming out labored and shallow, what then? When your lover can barely see you, barely recognize you, when you see just fleeting pieces of who they were, what then?

When they are begging you to carry them, but you have lost the lover to carry your own weight, what then?

transitory

I am certain, both sadly and excitedly, that I am in a transitory period of my life. Having lived in the last 3 years more than any of the twenty-seven before them, I have been moved and educated and inspired and go forward, take what I have experienced, and apply it all to the next phase of my life. The sadness comes with the prospect of letting go, of saying goodbye, and of releasing my hand from the grasp that has kept me on my feet for so long. I couldn't be more grateful for the gifts of bravery, connection, leadership, friendship, and the kindness of strangers, and all of these virtues have both saved my life and helped me to salvage it and mold it into something new. I needed to lean on it all, keep it close, and follow it like a beacon light. I have realized, though- and this is where the sadness comes in- that I have been given the ability to hold myself up on my own, and no longer need to lean into the arms that pulled me back from the edge. In order for me to move forward, I have to leave some of the weight behind. I don't need it like I used to, and I can't risk being anchored in place today, reaching but never touching the substance of my dreams in the ether.

someday

Someday, somebody is going to read these words and be moved by them.

After hitting an emotional, moral bottom as a rabid drug addict, I entered a substance abuse treatment center called Challenges in 2005. I kept a notebook/journal with me at all times, and wrote in it anything that I found significant or worth remembering. Looking back on it for the first time in over 6 years, I find many of the principles that carried me through my darkest days still exist for me today. Here are some excerpts from the notebook.:

• why does thinking about my inner child make me sad?
• Pain motivates. keep the pain up front- remember it. 
• "Progress Not Perfection"
• you are who you were five minutes ago
• "I am my own Jesus. I am also my own Pontius Pilate.
• what the fuck is up with all the powdered coffee creamer?
• i don't know if it is the cold or the honesty that is making me shiver
• "speak when you're angry and you will say the biggest speech you'll ever regret"
• 15% of addicts stay clean for a year with regular attendance in NA/AA. the other 85% of us are fucked.
• "the only way out is through"
• "for a lesson to be learned, it must be lived"
• anything negative anyone has to say about me is none of my business

...more to come.

challenge your shame and discomfort

Write in spite of your motivation (or lack thereof). Create even if you feel like you are working with nothing. Make commitments to honor your talent and stick to them...

Easier said than done, I know, but damn is it worth it. If one page out of 100 moves you and inspires you, then you have succeeded. As with photography, that chilling shot out of an entire group of throwaways is what makes the process worth it.

Lately, I have written a lot about NOT being able to write, about writers block, lack of creativity, and discouraging empty pages. It feels like a cop out, but it is my reality at this moment. All I know is that no matter how far into the dark I am reaching, I must not stop. I must not make excuses and I must not walk away without putting something, a word, a paragraph, a memoir, anything, down on the page.

Writing about my lack of motivation, and the frustration that comes with it is an uncomfortable truth to acknowledge, but what I have learned is that discomfort is often the key to the door of brilliance. We all know how to write about the things that we relate to, appreciate, and our grateful for. Those, quite often, are the easy things. Human truth comes from a darker, more primal place deep in the brain, and when it is pulled to the surface, it often invokes feelings of anxiety, discomfort, fear, guilt and shame, and the desire to run.

I questioned my limitations, wanting more than a daily planner with a tiny block in which to write the happenings of the day. I wanted to push past the wall I was stuck behind. My truth was much deeper than I was sharing, and that scared the shit out of me. What if death and grief, addiction and recovery, sexual identity, mental health issues and chronic loneliness were too much to share without fear and shame? What if my writing opens doors not ready to be opened?

What I have learned over the crucial last years of my 20's, however, is that discomfort is the key to true passion in writing. Writing about the stories that make my heart race, my head spin and my hands shake, I have realized, is what pulls the best of my craft out of me. My truths, even my darkest ones, leave me with a piece to be proud of, and the relief of pushing past the shame and fear.

The best writing comes from our fears, our shame, our discomfort, and our passions, yet we often step away from transcribing these stories from our mind to our empty pages.

Several of my mentors in life have instilled in me the following message: "If it makes you uncomfortable, explore it." Go deeper, following your fear, because that winding, treacherous road will lead you to relief, and the biggest breath of satisfaction you have ever experienced. Challenge your shame, and win. Be brave, and share it all, for no ones sake but your own.

sleep hygiene

Insomnia locks me to the couch, my eyes closing, my head bobbing. Sometimes I wake up suddenly with my forehead resting on the coffee table, or with my computer on my lap and nothing but gibberish and excessive punctuation looking back at me on the monitor. I know that I am tired, as I can barely move or keep my eyes open. My body is begging for rest, but no matter what I do, I cannot shut off my mind. It races with thoughts of the day, the days to come, and the ones that have past. The moments that have inspired and encouraged me, along with the ones that incited fear, shame, and heavy emotion are what keep me awake. It all twists and turns in my cranium, and the inability to put myself to bed without passing out in a sitting position with the lights and TV  still on. Believe me, that level of sleep is barely satisfactory and takes away the rejuvenating aspect of laying down in bed and essentially floating. Instead, my body poses in an unattractive twist, my neck is sore from hanging my head,

I am dedicated to learning how to better my life by improving my sleep hygiene. I never knew how significant sleep is until I seemingly lost the ability to do so.
....Aaaannnnnnd, my head is nodding, so I am going to practice what I preach and let my body and mind relax

still here

the words arent gone, i'm just waiting for some important ones to come along.

Bicycle Race

The human mind is a well-oiled machine, with a multitude of functions. The relevant information is moved to our consciousness as needed, while our memories unrelated to the current story are moved away. They may as well no longer exist, until a moment comes along that brings the event back into our mind's eye, almost as if it never left. Sometimes what we see is mundane, boring, like someone else's home movie, and we save it and put it away. Other times, we watch our defining moments like high-definition, technicolor blockbusters.

They say that you never forget how to ride a bike, but do we always remember the first time we tried and succeeded? I hadn't thought of it more that a few times over the last two decades, but the senses of pride and accomplishment help to round the details of the day.

My training wheels had been removed from my bicycle, and my father walked alongside me as I pedaled, stopped myself with my feet, and fell- over and over and over. I was especially jaded to see a young neighbor who couldn't have been much older than me, riding with confidence and bravery. I was frustrated and humiliated. I cried and stomped my feet like little girls at that age tend to do, and I was unreasonably certain that I would never learn to ride my bike.

While my brother and I were playing on and around our long driveway, our parents would park one of the cars at the end to discourage us from venturing into the road. I had mastered the art of pedaling down the sloped concrete, but hadn't quite figured out how breaking came into it all. I typically rode down the hill, gaining speed before crashing into the family station wagon. I did that over and over, growing more and more frustrated at my inability to keep moving, or to stop efficiently.

On one summer morning, early enough that dew was still on the leaves and grass, I set my bicycle up in its familiar starting line, at the top of the driveway pointed straight down, towards the car waiting at the end. I pedaled with a huge amount of effort, pumping my legs and standing up to gain momentum. As I approached the car, I veered around it, continuing to pedal as I rode into the yard. I hadn't fallen, I hadn't stopped, I hadn't crashed. I had actually ridden my bicycle, in the correct sense of the word. I don't know what the difference was. Perhaps it was patience, or focus, or determination, and at this point I am not really sure of the answer to that question, but I had figured it out. That was really the first time in my life where I could see the fruits of my labor present themselves. It was one of the first memories I had that is associated with pride.

I am going to try to make the conscious choice to be brave in all my endeavors, no matter how afraid of the crash I am. It worked at the tender age of 5, so I have the faith to make it happen today.

save

cut a rectangle out of a piece of poster board and you have yourself a much cheaper camera... you just have to save the images to your brain rather than your computer.

wait for it

I can't let this go down the tubes. I can't. It's too important. It's my life. I think in prose and in the lyrical quality of words, but you can only write so much in your mind before you lose it... Some days its just easier to lose it, though. Sometimes, having the self imposed expectation to write... something, ANYTHING is just enough to make me want to back away, at least for that moment. That mechanism, that switch, that shut-off scares me on a deep level. Writing is akin to breathing for me, even if I can count the people that read it on one hand. No, that's not the point and it is the wrong reason to take on this passion, this dream... or this hobby? Please let it be more than that...

I've given up everything and put it back together, I've experienced the darkest and most desperate places a human can go. I've also lived and seen the beauty and light that exists in the world... And I've always documented pieces of it all. No matter how preoccupied or depressed or dysfunctional I became, I always had with me the drive to write. Sometimes, and I truly believe I speak for all writers here, the desire to write does not exist in a certain moment, and trying to unnaturally pull it from where it resides produces nothing but shallow fallacy.

Sometimes, to have that honesty, you just have to wait for it.

words lost

You could say, it seems, that I am much less prolific since I found the life to light my way out of the dark. That bit of light appears to be a sign of the positive space that I appear to be in. The intensely frustrating part is that without my writing, I feel that I am only a fraction of the person that I could be. If I don't pick up a pen and a pad of paper or tap on the keys, I feel empty. I feel like I haven't accomplished what I should have at the end of the day, so my potential is never really reached.

Writers block, or The Midnight Disease strikes without warning, and feels akin to trying to play a concert without instruments or a voice. I feel progressively less committed to doing the work that will guide my life and carry me to the place where my dreams are waiting for me to make them come true.

I need to take every offer, every opportunity seriously. Life or death, I need to commit and recommit every single day if I have to. I have played this game before, and I always lose if I am waiting on the sidelines. Always...

At times it is disheartening to know that essentially no one is reading the words I am publishing here, but I have to continue to remind myself of the journey. Part of that journey is writing because it is what I love to do, and not because I want to develop a fanbase. That is the dream of a failure-to-be, because shifting focus to the wrong things make the right ones blurred and fuzzy and harder to attain.

I have many dreams, and I will do whatever I can to make them happen. Right now, though, most of my dreams lie in the words and ideas that spin themselves into my consciousness. I am just trying to get to the place where I don't lose them before I can write them down.

The Permission To Lose Control - 2007

Written 11/5/2007 by Stephanie Picher

"There are some times when I just can't think of how to put pen to paper. Tonight has been one of those nights, and I am fully aware that it all comes back to a fear of writing sub-par, and of writing something less than meaningful. I have, at times, become a prisoner to that fear, for it keeps me from really learning, from truly growing as a writer. I am afraid to explore and afraid to experiment with ideas and words and subjects. I am afraid to just write. In a sense, this struggle makes me realize just how much trouble I have centering myself and being in the moment. I can never just do or say or write something without looking at the line I wrote 5 minutes ago or contemplating how to end something I've written out of fear that if I keep it up, it will get worse. I edit what I already know is "good" writing because it is never good enough. If it is not "good enough", if it is not "perfect", then it is bad. It is an all-or-nothing frame of thinking that has gotten me in a world of trouble before.

One thing I have read in countless books on the subject is that in order to be a decent writer, one needs to be willing to "write badly". That idea is frightening to me, but the blinding truth is that my inability to "let go" is what keeps me stuck in a perpetual state of forced journaling, or writing solely so I don't lose the skill. It is control and self-will run rampant. I need to give myself the permission to lose control."