Sober

Sometimes I still feel like I might be dying, like I could just black-out,
collapse, and that would be it.
When my heart is noticeably beating, causing physical pain in my chest.
Ok, well perhaps dying is a little dramatic,
At times it's more like I might snap.
Just completely flip out,
and it's at those moments I'm a little scared of what I might be capable of...physically, emotionally, reputably!....If I did it would seem to be a point of no return I would imagine, so instead, I implode on the inside and deal with the consequences of the inner wrath unfolding.
and deal with it i do, and in a much more improved way than last year 
and all the years before that, thankfully.


It has been One Year since I hit the wall and slid down it into a miserable heap at the bottom, requiring eight months of weekly psychologist appointments.
One year of complete undoing and re-building,
of learning to do life differently.
Almost One Year of not wanting to hurt myself, cut myself & of allowing myself to sleep properly without lying on top of my own hands for fear I might hurt those closest to me in the night hours.
A year since those I'd desired to nurture and have in my care under church ministry had to be gently, excruciatingly and necessarily pried from beneath me and into other's capable, stable hands. A time for the microphone to be put down also, 
for a new song to sing was to be written.
IS being written.
A year since I drove alone a few hours away for four days with a suitcase, a bible and some pills that could have finished it all. A year since I could fight no more but just roll with current of the ocean I was drowning in.

"Have your way here, keep me afloat cause I know I'll sink without you. Take this ocean of pain that is mine. Throw me a lifeline." 

-from Brooke Fraser's "Lifeline"

Welcome to my ugly.


A few posts ago I vowed to write about 'the darkness'...well I hadn't forgotten about it, 
quite frankly I wished you had!
I mean, how does one write about something so ugly?
So consuming,
so evil,
so incapacitating,
so sick,
so deep,
so dark,
so lonely,
so powerful,
so *insert vomit sound here*,
so....well...almost
Normal.
or so it seemed.
Depression had taken up residency from a very young age with me, I knew no way to function without it. So instead I lived in a bubble for years, kept afloat by an array of things I thought were important, or expected of me. But last year the bubble burst and I ended up popping it myself because i was suffocating inside of it. The very life was sucked out of me, I had nothing left to give. In some ways it could sound like I was actually better off in those days back there,
where I used to cook & bake more often, organise my family life with meal plans and shopping lists, decorate this and that, host parties, sing, sew, have a booming social life...and while I usually love all of those things (ok perhaps not so much the organising part)...I was doing much of it in the hope that the responsibility of ministry, marriage and motherhood would grow me up into the person I thought I had to be.
Oh what an undoing this year has been,
EVERYTHING has changed.
Starting with just me,
and it's had to be from scratch.
With the help of my God, my husband, my Christian Psychologist, my church & close friends I began a journey to Whole and made it to the other side. The gate is shut on that side of life...and although certain things attempt to jump the fence from time to time I am better at booting them back out.
I'm gradually discovering things I like, things that make me, me. Growing a backbone, gaining strength, adding and subtracting from life where necessary -(who would have thought I'd ever be good at math?!! hee hee)... Seriously though, a major part of the professional therapy I received, and put here now quite plainly is that I've been a little girl stuck in a big girl body! I had to come completely undone, there was no other way. I had to go back and meet 'her', that little girl 'me', to love 'her', nurture 'her' and take her to a place she could climb up on her Daddy's knee and sink into His loving arms. (our Heavenly Father that is!!)
I wrote a lot during the dark days, during my breakdown,
my Sweet Release, I would call it, as it spilled out in words over the paper.
Perhaps i might share some snippets here someday.
But as for now, it's been a year 
a bare, raw and lonely one at times 
but from the level and depth of darkness i was dwelling in, I'm glad to report, 
a stunning redemption awaits,
Mine.
for I am Sober.

"He will rebuild you on a foundation of sapphires" - Isaiah 54:11