Today, I need to get personal, and I need to get real. I could ask the question, “What does it take to become a minister?”, or make a comment regarding hypocrisy, and how most people (including myself), will make complaints about what other people are doing, but refuse to see it in themselves.
Today, I’m not going to do that. One of the promises I made when I started this blog, was that it was going to be a way for me to heal myself, and try to be an example for others. I’m not always good at either of those. Minister or not, I am still human, and I still have to find ways to overcome my own failings, of which there are many.
I remember at the age of 3 not being willing to join my ballet class again because I was about to have my 4th birthday, and people wouldn’t like me because I was going to be different. I remember growing up, my mother telling me to not believe anything I heard, saw, read, etc. I wasn’t supposed to trust anything or anyone (except her and my father of course). I remember my mother bragging about being vindictive, and holding onto her anger and paying whoever she was angry with back at some future point down the road. And to my knowledge, she did, every single time.
That was one of my examples growing up. I also wasn’t supposed to help people (apparently singing Christmas Carols in a homeless shelter was a bad thing). Extra-curricular activities were required, but she hated being a “taxi service.”, and if she had her life to do over again, she wouldn’t have married my father and had kids.
No, today’s blog isn’t about my mother. It’s about all of the garbage that I have to fight every single minute of every single day to overcome. All of this is sitting in the deep dark recesses of the cesspools that are still in my head. You see, overcoming the negativity doesn’t mean that the negativity goes away. It means that you see it, and try as hard as you can to not respond to it. Eventually, you hope, with time and practice, maybe you have less of the negative times. But it doesn’t ever mean that they go away completely.
Sometimes, all of the negativity roars out in a wave of depression so severe and debilitating that functioning in any capacity just doesn’t seem like an option. That’s why I’m writing today. I’m writing so that the thoughts of worthlessness, the thoughts of being a failure, that I can’t do anything right don’t come back in knocking me on my ass again. I was always told growing up to “box it up and put it away.” Obviously, that method failed drastically.
Talking about what I’m going through, not yelling, not screaming, not throwing things and breaking things, seems to be what helps the most. Plus, it has the added benefit of being able to connect with others who have had similar experiences. It is a sad thing for our society that we connect more through our pain, and not through our joyful experiences.
And that is one of the other things I need to deal with and face. One of the subconscious things I learned is how to destroy the good around me, how to kill the joy in others. I have learned to love the joy, and I hate every time I find that I have destroyed the magic and beauty that has grown. So it becomes all the more important to me to try and create it again, not by hiding from my darkness, but by acknowledging it, talking about it and learning to heal as many of the wounds as I can so that I can be a person who is helping to heal the world, not destroy it.
The Warriors Den 