Closed doors and open doors and right around the corner doors, each encounter filled with a lesson, an experience that grows and perfects.  The strain and the backward glances and the questions all start to dissolve as a heart encounters the Love that tears down walls and burns up boundaries, where every door feels like a blessing, even the closed ones, because they are framed inside of a love unconditional.  Where even the tears feel important because in some way they cleansed and left the heart open again to beauty.  

The forgiven much love much and there is nothing like a hug from the truly grateful.  There’s something about their eyes, how they shine deeper than the sorrow encountered on the journey.  How they let restoration and new dreams fill their hearts with a sensation beyond words.  A hope beyond all reason.  A joy unspeakable that takes hold and doesn’t let go.   They teach you something beyond words.  Something that they carry in their very being, their very DNA, that echoes loudly that loving well is what it all comes down to in the end.  

Sometimes I don’t know how to fight for another’s heart other than with words.  Other than with a poem, a phrase, a quote, a song.  Sometimes my heart feels the injustices around the world, and in searching for a way to show up and change things, all I find myself able to offer today is a prayer.  A prayer and a plan.  A plan that may take years of preparation and sacrifice, but the end is worth it.  Someone once told me that the freedom of many is on the other side of a singular person's obedience.  How obedient must I be to change a nation?  To turn the tide of history?  To turn back time and see the slave set free.  And again my heart feels the cry, “Whatever it takes.  It’s gonna be worth it.”  

Home to Unravel

I'm not sure if it is due to growing up in a christian environment where joy is more acceptable than sadness, or if it is just simply due to being human and avoiding vulnerability, but talking about depression is difficult for me.  The admission of such emotions always feels like defeat, where the only safe place to feel anything remotely broken is on journal pages that no one will ever read.

My view is changing quite rapidly. Depression scares me.  And I don't want to avoid talking about things that have me scared anymore.  It’s like your brain is stuck in darkness and you have no idea how to get the lights back on in there.  I need a brain engineer and mechanic.  Someone to go inside and figure out the faulty wiring and why all my neurons seem to be angry with me right now.

 As I hear stories from friends and acquaintances who have experienced large amounts of loss over the past few years, I realize that until there are safe places to be honest about feelings of deep sadness and grief, the healing won't come as naturally as it could and should to bring people to the other side, where they experience both joy and fresh perspective again.  And when I think about being honest about feelings, I don't necessarily mean using lots of words.  Just being given space and time to really feel all the feelings and not be viewed as forever weak.

Home seems to find a way of uncovering things I always run from with the next great adventure or idea.  But maybe I always return home because out of all the billions of people in the world and the hundreds of major cities where I could live and find community, there are only three people out of those masses who understand my story down to the gritty detail (those three people are my siblings).  Maybe they’ve interpreted things differently than me, but their experiences and mine are known to each other on a different level than when I try to get to know a friend.  And the truth is, all the friends I knew growing up knew me when my life was in survival mode and included an instinct to hide.  So whoever I am now is not the person I was then, and as much as I wish I could take those friends with me throughout life, it doesn’t seem probable or even possible.  

Maybe to survive I need to make peace with this place and with who I’ve been up to now so that I can become something new.  Which is why I don't want to run into the next adrenaline rush adventure until I know the tears I need to cry have been cried and the healing meant to come in this season has come.  

When I close my eyes, I want to again see open fields and smiling faces in all the nations where I want to one day travel.  I want to wake up wanting to be here.  Wanting to embrace a new day.  I want to feel again the passion of being alive and the fierce courage in waking up every day believing that my life matters just as much as the billions who occupy space and time with me.  That all of our lives matter.  That we aren't just organic chemistry and atoms strewn together.  We're the ones who get to breathe and feel and remember.  There must be a point to it all.  There must be a point to me.  To you.  To us.  Something powerful and wise and strong in the big picture of it all that includes us.  

So to those bordering the land of the living and of the dead, who have discovered the place called grief, may we be met with strength and vision to keep going and to find meaning while also feeling the missing.  Feeling the morbid and the unknown and the unfinished.  Feeling the lack of closure and hearing the questions that yell loud yet often remain in the heart, mind, body...unheard.  And may we start to realize that grief unprocessed is often heard in chronic disease, in stress, in depression and insomnia and panic attacks.  As a culture, I hope we begin to recognize the great need and strength found in giving people moments to be weak, to be honest with what hurts and let the healing come.  

May we give ourselves permission to sit down for a second (or as long as it takes), take a breath, regather energy at the cellular level, and regain hope.  

"Pry it open with your love/ it is steep, it is stone, such recovery/it has found what we orphaned/

...your love is known, I'm standing up on it."

 -Bon Iver

October, Welcome Back

After my birthday month, this may be my favorite month of the year.    There is something crisp and alive in October, especially as the mid-eastern part of the States begins to feel fall again.

The winds are welcome to blow through this whole place, through my whole heart, shaking off all the dead leaves so that new ones have a chance to grow after the cleansing freeze.

Ah seasons.  How much hope I find in the change.  In the fact that the earth rotates and the sun gets further and closer and we get the chance to find poetic meaning in it all.

Cheap wine, dessert made from a chocolate bar stuffed inside a day old butter croissant, a bed scattered with Rumi and my Bible that has barely been opened over the last few months and a journal with few entries even though its purpose was to document the past few months of life...

 and a billion thoughts firing all over the place in my brain, seeking for some sort of stilling.  That is what makes up my evening.  What's been making up my evenings for the past few months.

Some people disbelieve me when I try to tell them how depression has been a foe and friend of mine since before I hit my teens.  It's like a fog and a clarity all at the same time, and in a strange way its arrival at moments of my life feels like a dysfunctional comfort.  I've battled and surrendered often to an existential angst and sadness more often than people tend to believe, and I'm still learning how to ride the wave when it hits like a hurricane and no one seems to know how to reach me out in the water.

If I knew the pursuit of medicine was going to be such a challenge, I wouldn't have started the journey. That makes me grateful that the initial decision was made without seeing the future.  But reality and my track record pretty much convince me that even if I stuck with journalism and filmmaking, I would still be hitting depression turbulence.  It has nothing to do with my career choice.  It has to do with me and how I feel everything and how I go through the highs of wanting to change the world met with the lows of realizing how broken everything feels.  

There must be something good that comes out of all these thoughts.  I even want to believe that there is a reason for disappointments and dashed hopes.  Still waiting for that revelation and transformation.  In the meantime, thank God for Langston Hughes. And I'm sorry to all my friends to whom I have been unresponsive and absent.  I just haven't had any energy to even look at my phone on days.  I will return soon.  I can't promise that, but I feel it to be true.  Hopefully my sense of humor and wonder are on their way back as well.

Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die,
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams.
For if dreams go,
Life is a barren field
Covered with snow.

~ Langston Hughes

Big Eyes

I wonder about him.  About those big eyes -- how they drink in the world. When will they recognize the things not innocent?  The humanity of this place and how decisions create a certain way to the space that is different from the original.  Not bad.  Just imperfect.

 Still beautiful.  Still worth drinking in.

And I want to be wanted.  To be understood.  To have a heart known and chased after.  Yet fleeting infatuations and momentary obsessions seem like a high price to pay when looking at a long term self that's being made. Looking north but feeling tugs east and west.  Knowing deep down that the fleeting things will hurt and that pain and rejection can't be avoided, but that the lasting things will still call out to me even when crossing into detours.   And that faith in the calling out, that the voice will always find its way to remind me,  is what puts courage into the step.  It leaves the second guessing and the escape routes and the obsessing over Plan B and closed doors in the trash.  They don't matter when love is the motivation.  Because you can't get so far that you can't come back.  You can't go so deep that you can't come up for air.  Even when it feels that way.  Even when feelings of rejection try to steal your sense of dignity.  Your courage.  Your belief that you matter.  Even then the strength somehow finds you.  Urges you to believe again.  To keep going.  To not surrender forever to the weakness and doubt.

I want eyes like his.  Drinking it all in.  Fear gone.  Reservations gone.  Obsessions with being liked and understood gone.  Rejection's heaviness in the way it makes you feel like you are a small person who doesn't matter-- gone.