Don't Stop Moving

The reasons I am writing this will vary drastically, dramatically from the reasons why you were get angry with, agree with, disagree with, dismiss, or scoff at what I have to say up here on my soapbox, but regardless of how you feel about this, it's the truth: my truth. I want you to read this. Don't disregard this, whatever you feel about it.

We always hear two things when we are down. "Don't worry, things can only get better from here," and "there is always someone else who has it worse than you." For the first one, I can tell you from personal, first-hand experience that that is a bold-faced, outright lie. For the second one, there are few things truer.

My childhood....was bi-polar. Every single day of it. Beauty and ugliness, sorrow and joy, anger and exhiliration. The details are not important, or rather, for the sake of those involved, I will not go into details. From my first (real) boyfriend, things were....bi-polar. So many good memories, so many painful memories. The first one left me because I said no to a threesome with him and his best friend. The next one "took his birthday present" when I was passed out drunk at his 21st birthday party, which I spent $800 on to throw him. One guy left me in the middle of the night, then told me months later in an e-mail that he loved me, but he had to leave, and if he had said goodbye, he would never have been able to leave. Another one was physically violent. Emotional abuse. Psychological abuse. Mental abuse. Seems like I'm trying a little bit of everything. Then the accident - broken foot, knee, leg, arm, punctured lung, burn marks, glass in my skin, fractured nose, chipped teeth. Then the miscarriage.

Nothing has ever come as close to completely breaking me as the miscarriage did. I laid there on my tan leather couch and cried for days, not eating, just crying, barely sleeping....just crying. Then I got sick and even though I hadn't eaten in days I was throwing up. I write. A lot. I couldn't write. I couldn't bring myself to do anything. For all my command of language and thesaurus mind, I can find no word to encompass what I felt. Empty. Desolate. Barren. Nothing adequately describes that.

Still, I must insert a story here that I can neither identify fully with nor honestly fathom the horror and desperation of.

Beth. She was a homeless woman I met when I was working for Valero. She was such a sweet, beautiful, kind-hearted person. The kind that remains alive in our memories for our whole lives. At the age of 8, she walked into her house after school to find her mother overdosed on heroine on the kitchen floor. A few minutes later, her sister walked in. She pushed her sister into the bathroom so she would not have to see what she had seen. Having not known their father too well, maladjustment to life with their father is an understatement. To be fair, she said her father was a good man, he just did not know how to deal with two daughters. He married them off as soon as was legally convenient, and Beth found herself married to a man three times her age when she was 13.

She eventually divorced him, though she had bore three children by the time she did. Two boys and the youngest a girl. Her oldest boy died at 17 in a car accident. Serendipity, too, is not always kind. One day, after school, her daughter, who had epilepsy, died of seizure in Beth's arms. She died....convulsing and drowning in air....in her mother's arms. At the age of 8.

Beth could not get up. She started drinking and hasn't stopped since. She is 50-ish, homeless, junkie, alcoholic, in and out of abusive relationships with various homeless men and vagrants. I couldn't save her. I tried. She couldn't get up, then she got to the point where she did not want to get up. To sober up after who knows how many years of drowning away the sorrow she had not the strength to handle at the time would be devastating to her.

I don't know too many people's true life stories. As a society, we don't tell the bad things too often, not in their entirety anyway. We talk about how we got laid last weekend or high last night or drunk at so-and-so's party and had such a wild time. We talk about the things we think will make other people think we are cool, things that will make people like us because we have been trained, educated, brainwashed, developed to fear loneliness. Even when we are single, we dread the silent nights. So we fill those spaces with friends and alcohol and internet and television. The ambient emptiness would be too much to handle.

But I know some people's stories. Some are like Beth. They just don't get up. Some are strange, like they were born without the ability to feel and therefore nothing fazes them, nothing stops them, nothing floors them. Me?

I've been told two things consistently through out my life. First is that I am strange. I don't care. I am endearing. I smile as I write that, but truth be told, I do care. I won't lie and tell you the silent emptiness doesn't terrify me. But I fill that with music, writing, photography.

Music is a huge part of my life. It can drag back memories I tried to forget, wished not to forget. Make me cry. Make me want to be a pyro. Make me want to scream and punch things and throw an all out tantrum. Make me smile. Make me horny. Make me peaceful. Make me want to dance. Make me want to run. Make me want to save someone, myself, even. Make me thankful, angry, sad, alive.

I try hard not to conform to a mold that would make who I really am disappear into the clutches of what the media says we should be. But sometimes I slip. Bad. Secondly, I am told that I am strong, have to be to have gotten through everything I have.

This is not the truth. This is no where near the truth. The reality between what I am and what people often perceive me to be creates a gulf, trench....a whole universe of difference.

For those of you like me, you will read this, and your heart will break, because you don't want to know that someone else has gone through the same aching, itching desperation as you have. We can't stop. Period.

We see the probable, not the possible, but the probable end to our story if we stop. People mistake this for strength or for insensitivity, and deep down inside we know that both of these play a factor, but the largest part of our story is that we fear not moving. We fear the world and existence crumbling from underneath us, the emptiness within that festers and grows in the night like a refridgerator science project opening up and swallowing us whole, the ambient silence that deafens us when the night takes our sight and that one sense is heightened. We move forward, even if we can't run, we walk, we limp, we crawl forward, because to not move is to give up, and to give up is death.

I laid there on that couch, and if it hadn't been for my son, my beautiful, wonderful, smart, funny, God-sent son....I would have laid there until that silence and emptiness did swallow me and I ceased to exist.

But there is more to this story. Don't stop now. There are lessons to be learned, heartaches and regrets meant for pondering.

Save me. It's not a question, answer, demand, request. It's a mentality. Not necessarily of ourselves, either. Some of us are looking for someone to save because in saving them, perhaps we can save a part of ourselves we need to protect.

But we get to the point where love and protection and strength give out like bad knees beneath us and our solid ground ages and becomes as quicksad.

Stop enabling people.

We think we have to act a certain way, say certain things, agree, acquiese, to show our love for someone. Don't let my mistake be your mistake. Loving someone does not entail enabling them. We all have our vices. Our crutches. Whatever mine is, whatever yours is, whatever the stranger you will pass tomorrows is. Smoking. Drinking. Drugs. Money. Pornography. Speed. Adrenaline. Some worse than others. Whatever it is that keeps someone from dealing with what they need to deal with. We enable.

If you love someone, don't enable them. Do not fall with them, because when you are both on the ground, there will be no one to help you up. Staying out and getting too drunk to understand what you're thinking and getting high to the point of laying on the floor because that is what the other person wants is not the way to be strong for them. Letting them do this, even if you don't, because you know that they "need" this is not the way to love someone.

If you love someone, love them. Be strong for them, protect them, even when it means protecting them from themselves. Because in the end, if the whole world is dragging us down, we have no recourse, and this is not justifiable.



Crying in the shower. Scratching at the place on my chest where I can feel the sorrow.pain.depression.anger.regrets.desperation trying to engulf me and break me. Suicidal thoughts. The darkest place where no one can find you. I've been there. I moved forward. Crawling most times, not running, walking, or even limping....but crawling forward to a light that seems too far away to be possible, to be attainable....move forward.

God carried me through this. I say I crawled, but God carried me through everything. WAIT. Even if you don't factor God into your equation, don't stop moving. Quit enabling. Do it for yourself. Do it for those you love. Do it for those who love you. One day you will look back on your life and realize that you wouldn't change a thing. Because if you had, you would not have what you have now or at the point you realize that if one second, one movement of your life had been different, then you would not have your child, the love of your life, the wisdom, the strength that you will have in that moment. And in that moment, you will reclaim something you lost when you lost your innocence. You will see the beauty in the stillness, feel the lightning coursing through your veins.

Don't stop moving.