Dear Catie, S. O. S.

Everyone’s gone.

 

I have never felt so incredibly alone since I was a teenager.

 

You (understandably) left games / even Skype. That was the beginning.

 

Everyone else seemed to follow suit. Zach left the Skype group. Adam got busy with school. Frank went AWOL. Melisha is busy doing stuff in her life. God, I miss all of them. So much. Holidays are upon us, so I’m sure that has something to do with it, but this has been going on for the past two to three months. People just.. trickling away.

 

Aside from Skype, I don’t roleplay anymore. I’m not in that crowd. The new crowd I met in [vox]  is too new for me to vent to. You know how that is. We’re friends, but not friends. Not yet. And my facebook ‘friends’ have dwindled due to divorce.

 

Was it something I said? Was it something I did? What the hell do I do?

 

I have been a great friend to everyone else who went through something hard, something difficult. I have stuck by. I have tried hard to console, to confront, to comfort them in their times of need.

 

I’m crying right now because.. Dammit, I am going through one of the hardest things in the world. Me. It’s my turn. Someone fucking take care of me. Someone fucking tell me it’s going to be okay. Someone fucking reply when I say a fucking greeting, even if it’s just to tell me ‘Hi, sorry I’m busy doing X I’ll talk to you when I can!”

 

I’m sorry. I shouldn’t curse at you. I’m not going it at you, really. Please know that. I’m just.. venting.

 

Help. Anyone. Please.

 

S.O.S.

Miranda

Dear Miranda, These are my thoughts on your struggles with Christians.

So I meant to get back to you sooner. And I wanted to be able to take my time in responding to your doubts. But life just keeps moving on regardless as to my feelings on slowing down (Jerk). SO for right now, until I have more time to give you my more eloquent thought process this will have to do.

My thoughts on God and your struggles with Christians are this. I’d be willing to bet that Christians keep more people from Christianity then any other factor. Religion (in general, not just Christianity) is SO personal that people (even really good ones) tend to become extremely close minded and rationality starts to slip away in favor of reckless judgement. Sin parts from our lips while we are in the act of condemning sin. Let me just go ahead and say right here that there are not just hundreds of denominations in Christianity…. but there are millions of brands of Christianity, because each of us is different and we tie our own lives and thoughts and ideas to our faith. And that is a BEAUTIFUL thing. However it leads to a lot of conflict.

I’m not now, nor will I ever press you to be a Christian. I hope that my thoughts will give you a glimmer of hope if you need it, but I will love you (which includes NOT judging you) regardless of what religion you are, always! People like to point out “sin” and I think they miss the point. All sin is sin. All sin is equal. If you have sinned once you are just as much a sinner as someone who’s sinned a billion times. No one is with out sin.

Really it’s almost a hippy Zen concept. We are all equal. We all mess up. We all know the ache of guilt, worry, and sadness.

The idea of Christianity was not Condemn or to pick each other apart! It’s the opposite. It’s LOVE. Unconditionally. Its hope and joy and peace. It’s a place to rest when you are weary or afraid. It’s the light from a big full moon in the dark. It’s a crackling fire, snuggley blanket, and good book. It is comfort.

And, at least to me, to be a Christian is to be that unconditional love, that comfort, that hope in the world around us because we were given new life. We are made to love God and Each Other.

So I really really hope that no matter WHAT other people say to you about their faith, you don’t let them stand in the way of the relationship you choose to have. Don’t let them dictate your feelings or your faith. Don’t let them steal your comfort. ❤

Dear Catie, I’m grasping at straws. (Warning: Rage)

Okay, real talk. Just so you know, Catie, I am not yelling at you, and as a disclaimer to you and our religious readers, I am not trying to ‘diss’ on any of you, or your Gods. In fact, the world would be fantastic if we could all just agree to love each other because that’s what we’re supposed to freaking do, but I digress. Actually, I digress a lot in this post. Ugh.

 

These are the things that I feel or know:

• I know that we are not alone in this universe or else-wise. There is so much untouched and undiscovered that we can’t be the only aliens alive.
• Despite attempting to see the other side of things, I cannot in my heart or sound mind assume that everything is for nothing, and that the creation of it all wasn’t the work of some greater power, some fantastic God or Goddess, a high power – if you will.
• Things in my life have happened that are so miraculous or coincidental that I have a hard time second-guessing them as proof of either karma or divine intervention.

What I would like to believe:

• That God exists. One God. A solo, single god. Be it that all the religions are just talking about the same god under different names or one or the other is wrong and it’s actually this guy not the other. I’d like to believe that one exists.
• That whomever this God is, he is merciful. That he realizes not everyone at all times is going to be on point all the time – or even the majority of the time. That he won’t belittle them or show them the door just because – as humans – we continue to fail.
• That God truly does forgive, and doesn’t hold the grudges of the things you’ve begged forgiveness for.
• That God saves. That his son really did die on the cross so that you could make those mistakes.
• That the bible isn’t just a string of great moral stories fabricated by man to explain the things around them that they didn’t understand, and also to grant us a great sense of morals to follow by so we don’t all kill each other like morons.

Believe me, fellow readers who are of a religion, that I am in no way trying to bash your religion. I am not trying to cause doubt in your minds. I am not trying to shit all over Jesus. What I am trying to say is there are things that I know and have cemented in my mind, body, and spirit and then… there are things that I just really wish I felt the same about. But the honest truth is, I have a hard time, a really hard time, with just about everything in the ‘What I would like to believe’ section. I don’t want to doubt it. I don’t want to disbelieve what millions upon millions of other Christians so readily believe and have gone past the trials of not believing. I do.

I’ve been trying to think of the reasons why I can’t wrap  my head around them just yet, and a lot of it has to do with:

• Guilt / Shame of my life and some the choices I have made. (I’ve made some really good ones, but… we all stumble.)
• Pressure of very strict religious environments and their lack of acceptance of pretty much anything I’ve ever felt needed some mercy and understanding.
• People I know directly who are so devout and mean well, but truly, they just push and push and do not understand that they are driving a wedge between myself and wanting to talk to them about anything other than the weather – which, by the way didn’t you know, is a gift from God for those of us who haven’t royally screwed up today/this week/this month/this year.

I’m being catty. I don’t want to be catty, but I’m about to explode. I felt like I almost had a grasp on God, and having a relationship with him, and screw anyone else and all the organized religion that everyone wanted to push on me, and the communities that scrutinized me, and forget them because I had a God that was forgiving and loved me despite my flaws and was working in my heart in the most beautiful ways.

But wait, I’m doing it wrong. He’s merciful… if you deserve it. He forgives you… if you really try to change. He loves you… if you love him back. You can have him… if you change absolutely all of your ways and shed off any sin you currently practice.

Weird. It sounds like he’s becoming a human being instead of an Almighty God. But wait, this wasn’t his doing. This is some of his followers. This is humans, talking about him. This is humans talking about him to me.

Slowly, I began to realize that nothing makes me want to give up religion altogether and stop struggling to believe… more than the people who follow him.

I. Absolutely. Love and Adore. The people who make me feel this way, and it breaks my heart. I also recognize that I, myself, am giving them the permission to get under my skin and grind my gears with their pressure. It is not their fault I am being pushed away, not really. I am within my own power and right to not give them that chance, to not let them in. So I haven’t been. When religion comes up, I bottle up and bow out. When something is said I don’t agree with, I give up even wanting to argue the issue — especially on social medias, where everyone is a winner as long as someone agrees with you. 

I wish I knew others who felt about Him the same way I do – without the bullshit of condemning me and all of that shaming, guilting. We all get it, okay? Just because my sins are on the surface and yours are well hidden doesn’t make you any different from me. People make it so hard to love God with all of their damn nit-picking and rules and … I could rant for days on this agitating experience.

I’m ranting.

I’m sorry.

At the end of the day, I want so badly to believe in God. The same God that every other Christian believes in, rejoices in, and prays to. I want Him to love me so badly because I get that I am not perfect, and never will be, and that’s why He completes me. I want Him to wrap His arms around me and sing to me in the car when He plays that special song just for me – because He knows that’s how I hear Him best – and He knows that because He is God. When I think of Him alone, I am content and peaceful and feel like I can do this.

I’ll let you know how it goes, but I wanted to be open and honest about my feelings. Hopefully, in time, I’ll have posts about how great life is with Him in my life, but today is not that day. Today is a day of great struggle, as now I’m fighting against myself and the world.

Wish me luck,

Mojo

 

Dear Catie, Catastrophic Thinking.

I am posting this because it is one of those things that I feel is highly relatable to others in our positions as parents, moms, or anyone who gets weighed down by how big the world can feel when we let our minds run away without us. This story was written for my creative writing class by yours truly.

Enjoy.

With the best of intentions, I crawl in to bed at precisely 8:46 in the evening. This is after I have brushed my teeth, gone to the bathroom, taken a shower, cleansed my face from the day, and taken a glass of water with me to the bedroom. I am quite certain that if I get in to bed at 8:46 in the evening, I will have estimated the correct amount of time to fall asleep by 9:00PM.

I want to fall asleep by 9:00PM because I have set out an endeavor to awake by my alarm clock at 7:00AM. This grants me an allowance of ten hours in which I may rest which is honestly more than enough. In all likelihood I will wake up earlier than that if I am truly to fall asleep by 9:00PM.

However, as insomnia would have it, by 9:13PM my heart is racing as the ideas gallop across my brain and in to words. I hear my voice reading a bedtime story to me. I’m intrigued and delighted so much that I surrender any attempts to fall asleep and spring from the bed. There will be no sleep until this idea is placed on a memo and tucked away for when I have more time.

I don’t get back into bed until 10:57PM. By now, I know that if I can force myself into slumber, I will not even get eight hours of sleep, which is commonly known as the correct amount of sleep required for good health. If I don’t have good health, then I am not going to be very good at anything I have to do tomorrow. So, I really need to fall asleep. Like, now.

I sigh and open one eye to sneak the time reading on my alarm clock. Somehow, my alarm clock has malfunctioned. It now reads 11:21PM. How can this be? Did I doze off into a nap? I don’t feel like I did, but then again, it could have been one of those cat naps where time jolts forward and you feel energized and ready for the day. The only problem is that I don’t want to feel ready for the day. I want to feel exhausted. Maybe I’ve just been thinking too long and time trickled with each rabbit hole I jump through. I look at the clock again and realize I’ve lost another twenty minutes.

At this rate, I am not going to get a healthy amount of sleep. This means I won’t want to wake up at 7:00AM. If I don’t get up at 7:00AM, then I am not going to want to work out. If I don’t work out, then I am not going to lose weight and build muscles and boost my metabolism and get more endorphins. If I don’t get all of that, I will fall into a rut of exhaustion and depression first thing when I wake up.

I check the clock again. I’ve lost an hour thinking about all the weight I need to lose and in all the places I wish I could thin out. My hips. My thighs. My stomach. My arms.

Now, I am beginning to ponder if it will be worth it to go to class in the morning at all. Perhaps, I should sacrifice class and regrettably my grade for what really matters in life: my job. My job is needed to make money. I need money to take care of my son, my husband, and my obsession with organic food which is ridiculously over priced. But wait, I don’t want to forget school or I’ll have wasted all this time working so hard to stick with it and get good grades. I’ll have wasted every morning I didn’t sleep in when I desperately wanted to, but I can’t fall asleep and it’s — I sneak another look at the clock — already 2:00AM.

I might as well call in to work. I can stay home and keep my son in my arms all day. We can have an impromptu Mother-Son date at the park. We have look like all of those ads about having a family where everyone is smiling and laughing at the funniest thing in the world.

Wait, how am I going to do that? My son is three years old. My son is testing his boundaries every fifteen minutes and driving me up the wall. If I don’t get any sleep, my son will have to face off with my grumpy attitude and then I’ll be the worst mother in the world because I can’t fall asleep to take care of my son.

I can’t fall asleep for my son. I can’t fall asleep for my job. I can’t fall asleep for my school work and classes. I can’t fall asleep for my happiness. I can’t fall asleep.

It’s 3:00AM and I start to feel very small against this mountain of regret for things not yet to pass. The future seems to miserable and the past only proves the pattern waiting for me. If I am destined to fail, why bother trying at all?

I’ve started to cry about not being able to get to sleep and how it’s going to ruin my life at 3:13AM. I give in to the miserable acceptance that I will never get my life together on a schedule that so many other people seem to run the pace of. I begin to curl into a ball beneath the covers when the door cracks open to my bedroom.

In comes my husband with a blanket bundle in his arms. My son peaks out from beneath the blankets with sleepy eyes and mumbles, “Hi Mama.” My thoughts stop. My heart races in their place.

“Someone couldn’t get to sleep,” My husband explains of our son. I thought he had spoken of me. He brings the bundle to my side of the bed and I wrap my arms around his shoulders. He is warm and comforting. My husband slips into bed on the other side, wrapping his arms around me.

In a quick moment, I hear my son begin to snore. His eyes are closed tight. I smile and new thoughts swim in a calm pool of my mind. I am the key to my son getting any sleep tonight. I am the comfort my husband comes home from work to. My arms are the strongest thing in existence because they hold my whole world in their hands.

If I don’t wake tomorrow at 7:00AM, then I will sleep with my son beside me. My husband will wake up an hour or so later, and I will awaken because the bed springs back up without his weight. I will have enough time to shower and drive to class. I will feel so good about getting out of class that I will smile at work today. My smile could be the comfort someone else needs. It most definitely will be the comfort my son reaches for when I return home for the day, and when I get in to bed tomorrow night at 8:46PM, the knowledge that I can reflect the world that I hold in my arms tonight will prepare me for a brighter morning.

I don’t know what time it was when I finally fell asleep, but I do know in whose arms I was in and whose arms were in mine. This is no catastrophe.

Dear Catie, I have to Let It Go.

(See how I tried to make a joke because this depression and reality is too much for me to take?)

There are very few things in life that I don’t want to talk about on my (or this) blog. There are very few things that I won’t put in to words because I like honesty and I like expressing pain and happiness when it comes. I seldom care if it’s humiliating for others to read and what they will think because it’s already out there, off my chest, out of this tight cage where I keep all things hidden. However, there are still a few things that I just can’t talk about.

The worst of all about this is that it’s the one thing I want to talk about the most, but I know it would cause too much harm to anyone it is about (including myself). Thus, I have to be as vague as possible.

My biggest pet peeve in the entire universe of pet peeves is people who are given ample opportunity to fix or have a solution to a conflict they complain about, yet they don’t take it. It bugs me to no end when the universe is working in such a way that all they have to do is to take a step forward, but they continue to stay in the past.

I don’t know why this is my biggest pet peeve. I don’t know if this is some allusion to myself and hating myself because I am just like them, or if it’s because they are truly the most annoying and difficult people in the world because their step could be the next big thing. If they would just take that step, it could influence the world so much around them, and the world wouldn’t be such a shitty place to them or others… But alas.. They won’t take it.

I find myself hoping they will take it every time. I build up expectations and standards for everyone who ever needs to take that step, and I get so pissed off when they don’t do it. Genuine anger. That’s my anger, my problem. And I have to learn to let… that.. go.

That’s what’s holding me back. I literally have to

let it go.. 

And I don’t know how. It is the hardest thing in the world for me right now. I have been in a depressed rut for over a week. I literally wake up and struggle to get out of bed even though I’ve slept already for 12 hours. I have skipped Tuesday –  Thursday classes just this week because I can’t decide if it’s worth it in the grand scheme of things. It won’t change the person I love, and it won’t make them be proud of me.. And if disappointment is what I get from them the most, it’s still an emotion, right? It’s still something?

I am trying desperately not to eat because I feel like it’s only counter-productive with what I want to do with my weightless. Yet, after not eating, I end up binge-ing out…which is counter-productive to my weightless. Dum dum dum. And everything around me just seems so dull.. even though I have reason to celebrate. Up until this week, I was doing fantastic in school. I have a new job opportunity at work which is actually fantastic. It will provide full-time hours and benefits. I’ve never had either (officially). Oh, and vacation time. Health insurance. (Also never had before). I am at a gym that is just about costing us nothing every month. They just announced in April that they will be expanding – which includes child care. I will pay $10 a month for a 24-Hr gym with child care. There are a lot of good things going on lately, but because I can’t let this one thing go.. Even if I realize that I have to let it go.. I can’t enjoy any of it.

I sit here in a pool of depression because letting go of this one thing, means letting go of the people I’ve cared most about, the people I’ve hoped the most about would change so that things could be easier between us. I hope that it wouldn’t have to be so hard anymore. I have to let it go because I’ve become that person that all I have to do is take one step and it’s fixed. But because I refuse to take that step, I have expectations and standards of them, the people I care so much for, but they will never meet them because my expectations are not their own… And they may never be. And thus, I’ve become the problem.

I’m causing the problem between us. I want too much, and when I get disappointed – no, when my world gets shattered… That’s it. Why live anymore? I don’t want to hide the fact that last week, I almost did it. I almost left the world, but… Something in me told me to call someone. Message someone. Do anything. There are people who care about you right at this very second who are available to take your plea of help. They love you, and won’t see it as a burden. They just want you safe and alive and to hear that you’ll be okay.

It is the hardest thing and most depressing thing in the world to be the very thing you cannot stand. I’m also taking a group-therapy session that is going to cut me open a lot more and make me realize my denials and hopefully in the end, recover from it. After the first week of answering questions, that’s when I made this realization. I also realized if I continued with this study, I am going to be opening every wound that I’ve tried so hard to hide in order to be a normal functioning member of society. I am going to get back on medication, even though I’ve hid from it because I want so much to be just like everyone else and to not be over emotional in the negative ways that I am.. But even when I did hide everything, I still had outbursts of anger, manic depression, and fits of rage that almost split me in to another persona that I began to call Her. I would watch Her do all of these awful things because I didn’t want to admit that I was making myself worse, and that it was me that I could no longer stop in it’s path… I think Her is gone, now, though. I admitted that it was me who was the monster, and not she. I think that destroyed her.. But it also destroyed me. I was not getting better, and I was not hiding it very well. And everyone close to me was beginning to notice.

So I guess I’ve been lying so much that now I realize I’m going to need to take the medication again, and just like you, I know it’s the biggest pain in the ass to find a doctor under your insurance, to make sure you can pay the ungodly amounts for the psychiatrist, the prescriptions, AND the expensive counseling. And you have to try all the damn medications, and the one that works best for you, and to do that you have to be on them for a couple of damn months and possible feel WORSE than you were before, and then when you change you have to wait another few damn months to get off the effects of whatever it used to be, in order to feel what might come.

And then you have to find time in the middle of everything else in your life to go to the damn things, to sit in the appointment rooms waiting for your appointment which started two hours ago to finally call you in so you can be in and out — and late for work, or class, or picking up your kid. Thank God school will be done in May 15th. My only goal is to reach it.

I feel you Catie. I really do. The line that scared me the most of your last blog post was that you were going to fight this if it kills you, and I don’t want to end on that note because lately that thought has been way too close for comfort and all I want to do is get help. I know it will be a pain in the dick to get there, but if I hadn’t buried it so much, I might be there by now and that much closer to being as ‘normal’ as I can be while drugged. I’ve been trying to take the cowardice and easy way out for so long, and it’s caught up. I can’t anymore. I can’t. I’ve got to go and take it… Otherwise, I may never be able to truly let go. Really let go.

So… Good luck to both of us.
Miranda

Dear Catie, This is one of our greatest fears, I think.