I haven’t been writing as much lately.  Mostly because when my life is in upheaval I tend to push down all emotions and hide within myself.  It’s a defense mechanism that I am trying to acknowledge and hopefully one day work through.  Even those pseudo friends that I have often marvel at how well I tend to deal with things; I want to shout that I don’t deal with anything at all.

I know that humans have a need to survive.  We have the fight or flight response to many problems, but we also will do anything we can to deal and understand the tremors that move through us like earthquakes deep in our core.  We will find ways to survive because something deep inside us demands it.  We survive not because this world needs us, but because we have no other choice.

I am learning that my natural instinct to survive means that I shut down.  There may eruptions from time to time, but those eruptions even when they are happening are easily shut down, as I shove and push the feelings back deep into my black soul.  I move slowly, heavily, but I move without a betrayal of any thought.  Deep in my soul lies a cauldron of emotions, my true self, that I never let another soul near.

When did I become the kind of person that had to hide everything? What moment of devastation occurred that forced me to find this survival technique and to employ it constantly? What event taught me this? Or was it a series of events, moments that I can no longer remember, that brought me to this point? The point where the only relief was from not living?

Suppressing one’s emotions leads one to not truly living.  I was watching a Publix commercial tonight, and it was deeply moving in mother’s spirit inside of me.  And even as I watched it, I wondered where my capacity to weep went? Have I become so protective of my own soul that I have buried my feelings too deep? And what are the consequences of feeling great sadness, great joy, great pain?  Am I this way because I am strong enough to survive? Or weak enough to never live?

This life, this disease destroys so many things.  It destroys emotions that those I love take for granted, and forces one to look beyond the easy to the toughest questions in this universe.  This life and this disease won’t allow one to sleep in the comfort of ambiguity, instead it demands answers, it demands that one find the reasons.  It allows for excuses, but those excuses, the very things that define us, will eventually destroy us for the truth.

I have spent years looking for the truth; listening for it in the weeping strands of a beautiful cello, and in the silent waves in the early dawn.  I have read, I have broken the rules of my own conscience to understand the things about me that define my very being.  I have spent hours staring into the night, first looking at the stars far away deep in their homes, and then staring at the glass and the reflection of me that I only see then.  I spent my youth, my childhood, my maturity and each of my moments inspecting that which most of this world can live without.

And why have I done all this? What am I truly looking for?  And if I am looking for something, yet feel its necessary to bury all of me, how will I ever find it?  When does the need to survive lessen the need to fly? When does the stoic ability to tell stories to my friends become the truth? The painful and absolute truth of life?

I feel like my life is changing these days; upheaval often means change.  And the harder it turns, the more it spins, the more I resent the fact that my soul can only bury the pain.  I hate that there is no soft place to lay my head, no place that I can find the ultimate rest so that I can fight again.  There is no person, no one that I can turn to right now, except the words on this page.  Only through these words can I speak that which has no words.  Only though these letters can the emotions find a place to be free.

As the chaos reigns, where do I find succor? Where do I find the trust to say the truth? And where do I find the strength, the courage, even the faith to find my resting place? Is it there and I am just too scared to find it? Or is it simply a figment of my very lonely heart?  Am I looking for something that no one knows, or am I looking for something that is already there?  How do I find a resting place? A tree in the middle of the field, waiting for me with strong roots and sweeping branches?

I don’t know why I need this so much right now? Why is it a common theme in my mind as I go through times they always warned me about but I never thought I would face? There is a part of my soul that recognizes that others are going through tough times, that some are even going through times I am lucky to never have to imagine much less live.  And I feel selfish for pleading deep into the night, to wasting the wishes of the stars on my own needs.  And I feel wrong, like I am asking for something impossible every time I am forced to recognize this dream.

But it is a dream.  It is a dream of ultimate trust.  It is a dream of the purest love, and the most sacred of truths.  It is the necessary belief that we are not alone, that there may not be another in this world that can understand, but there is someone who can comfort.  There is a mother deep in the night that loves, and there is a oasis in the driest of deserts.  It is that irrational need for love, for comfort, for the belief that we are not alone.

It is the deep seeded belief that one day I will be able to cry, that I will be able to scream, that one day I will be able to laugh in pure joy.  The deep seeded need to be human, and not judged for my disease or judged as nothing but a person who needs more medicine, or a padded cell.  It is the human instinct to be accepted, not only for the moments of insanity but for those few moments of perfect sanity.

So while I try and navigate once more through a portion of life that no one could prepare me for, I will take up the mantel and search for that soft place.  That place that welcomes my screams as easily as it welcomes my smiles.  That place that is whole, and allows me to live completely. My moment of saneness.  My perfect moment of sanity in a world insane.