Shame is such a complex animal.  It really feels like this dynamic being, like you can't think about it or write about it or sometimes even breathe about it because it is coming for you.  And it is just beneath the surface, waiting to get out.

 I do not understand how I exist in a space with this human nor do I think I ever will.  I know it to be unhealthy and dysfunctional.  And full of shame.  It's taken years for me to loosen my feelings of shame around sex, and now I think I have a healthier relationship with it.  But never would I have fathomed taking the things from this person that I have.  I know that he does not respect me.  

And he's not the first.  There exists so much shame.  Around sex and relationships.  I consider myself to be a strong independent woman, but why does my will bend when it comes to love?  I must feel as if love equals this, like I deserve to be loved in a smaller, uglier way than people around me.  In a way that is for dimly lit alleyways and narrow sidewalks with flickering street lamps.  

That I do not think I deserve a real, solid redwood forest type love in the foggy sunset of Muir Woods is shameful.  And it's all I can do to whisper it here as I wait for a text back.  The shame.

I know I'm 35 and all.

I am grateful to have a job during these times. But I don't know when I've been so tired. I really just want my momma, her food, and to crawl under that big wonderful gold duvet and listen to the rain outside or swim in her pool in Austin. To watch my little Sammie bean fly up the stairs and run outside. I miss it so much. I want to work on puzzles in the big main room. And watch Sammie fall asleep on my mom, happy and full. I'm so depleted. 

Hold me close and don't let go

 This is just a small thing. From my phone. Sammie wakes me and stands on my chest. I can hear his heart everywhere with my stethoscope and his murmur is awful. I don't want him to suffer. Not for what he's given me. I held him.and sang la vie en rose in English because it's pretty. Often I have to hold him for a half hour to an hour before he gets comfortable and goes back to sleep.

He may be a little dog. But his love is the biggest love I have ever known in my thirty-five years here. And a dog's love is the only truly unconditional one I have ever experienced. Without being dramatic, just entirely honest.

He brings me so much joy. My heart feels like a balloon even when I'm crying as I hold him, feeling the washing machine murmur thrum on my chest, heart against heart. Thank you, God, truly, for this little dog. I will always carry him with me.

 Please God take me before Sammie. Or at least give me his suffering and pain. He doesn't deserve this God. He doesn't. He is so good and pure. He is true love embodied. 

Yesterday was one of the hardest days of my life. I stood tall because I have to for him. He is my everything. 

I am so afraid of what I am without him. Each day I have so many moments of joy and they are thanks to him. He is such a blessing, he is such light. I am so truly blessed and thankful. And I have given thanks. And I will continue to. But he does not deserve pain and agony. I can bear it for him. Please God if you are listening, please please please let me. I love him so purely. He deserves this. He is so good. 

 In my chest there's a hole where a heart used to be. 

 I think now I want to change.

I’m finally ready.

12.2.20

Aunt Barbara.  I cannot write anything yet, I tried. The feelings are too big.  She was part of why I wanted to be a psychiatrist at a young age--I can say this; I had a keen sense of compassion for her and people like her, and I did not understand a world that would shun her.  The manic-depressives, the bipolars.  The different.

I was watching some documentary on HBO the other day, and I thought--this is what it is! I love so deeply, so fully, my fellow man.  I cannot fathom how any human or man can hate or discredit or ignore another merely because of some categorical box they have put another in.  I am incensed by this love, and it comes across as hate but at the foundation of it, at its core, is love.  I cannot fathom how anyone can hate another and kill another because they are of a different color, or they love a different sex, or they are trapped in a body that is not right to them or so and so forth.  I cannot explain it.

For me, Aunt Barbara could be infuriating and difficult and especially selfish as a human--separate from her illness--but she was also special and permanently altered by the medications she was forced to take and her very existence, my how truly painful it must have been.  I truly cannot fathom it.  I know she brought pain to her children, and I am truly sorry for them, but I am also so very sorry for her.  And I know she is in Heaven and no longer suffering with the angels.  

I love you.  I wish I had told you more often.  And that you had been able to listen, and to hear it, truly, when I did.  

“Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images...it bleeds relationships through suspicion, lack of confidence and self-respect, the inability to enjoy life, to walk or talk or think normally, the exhaustion, the night terrors, the day terrors. There is nothing good to be said for it except that it gives you the experience of how it must be to be old, to be old and sick, to be dying; to be slow of mind; to be lacking in grace, polish and coordination; to be ugly; to have no belief in the possibilities of life, the pleasures of sex, the exquisiteness of music or the ability to make yourself and others laugh.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness