Healing

When you can’t understand…

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

Well, my last post was one frustrated rant…but back to the usual today.

I’ve started what may be one of the worst anime I’ve seen, but I won’t say what it is yet, I’m going to wait till I finish it to review, but it’s like 30-40 years old, so… (don’t start guessing, you’ll never get it).

Meanwhile, I am still feeling better but not great, and now I have to face going in for my next adjustment, I’m afraid to tell my chiropractor how much worse I felt after the last one, I’m afraid he’ll try the same thing again and make it even worse…

There is always the possibility he is dong something wrong, but nothing he’s doing should be causing any real damage, even if it doesn’t help, so I’m hesitant to come to that conclusion.

And I’ve been thinking that I may actually be more afraid that this is working, that I am getting better, and that the recovery just feels awful. Or ultimately, this problem is more psychological than it is physical, which is the general consensus.

People don’t understand why I am so stressed and anxious, and I have a hard time understanding it myself, especially since often I don’t feel like I am. I’ve been told it’s like I’m carrying something someone else put on me.

It is very much like that, like I’ve just shared my parent’s problems without ever wanting to or choosing to do it myself.

I feel like I believe deep down that this is somehow my fault, and the problem is with me, and I can’t change it. Like Shakespeare’s Romeo, I wish to cut out the part of myself that belongs to this lineage of death and suffering.

Of course, I believe Jesus has already covered that bloodline, Ps 45 says to forget your own people and your father’s house, but it’s easier to say that than it is to really believe it.

I was thinking today that my worldview seems different since my dad moved out, I expected to feel relieved, to see the world as a righter place full of new possibilities. But even in the initial relief, it was much harder to feel that way than I thought it would be.

And then later, I started feeling more grim about the world. Teenage angst started making sense to me, a lot of songs I never liked because of the negativity started to feel like they fit how I felt. In a way it felt like it wasn’t me, but it was me now. I didn’t recognize myself.

I really don’t recognize the person I am now, with so much anxiety, negativity, and temptations to give up and to hate myself, I never used to think I hated myself, but I feel like I do now. I don’t even know myself anymore.

I feel loathing at even having gone through something like this, and slipping, and I feel angry, like it’s just not fair, and why am I the only one who feels like this (though I’m not)

I guess it’s normal for a victim of abuse to feel self loathing. To almost hate yourself for being abused because if you hadn’t been there, this wrong couldn’t have happened, and you were helpless to stop it.

Abuse messes with your head because in a way it doesn’t feel personal, it feels like you triggered a terrible thing in the perpetrator and if you just weren’t there, or were a different sort of person, they wouldn’t have acted in such an ugly way…or at least you wouldn’t have had to see it.

You feel your own existence is the problem…and my dad used to say things like that to my face, and never bothered to retract any of it, claiming it was a joke, I wasn’t laughing.

The wrongness of abuse is like a separate experience from the pain of it to yourself. It’s like looking at an ugly painting, or a twisted, warped, tree. Something just shouldn’t be that way, and to see it makes you feel wrong inside.

Love is a terrible to thing to see twisted in that way, deeply scarring.

It is hard for me to like or accept love, after seeing it made so ugly by my dad and the people around him.

And while that was not something I could have prevented or caused exclusively, the personal connection gives me a disgust with myself.

If you have been bullied or abused, you know this feeling, if you haven’t I don’t think you could really imagine how deep it goes, people rarely talk about it, it’s an aspect of abuse we just don’t understand very well.

In fact, it’s a sneaky side effect I’m not convince ever goes away on its own, I think it has to be confronted directly. People can be loved out of the pain of abuse, but the horror and disgust of it takes another layer of healing altogether. It takes choosing to take up the gauntlet yourself, and face what it did to you.

This ugliness has begun to color my view of life. It didn’t help reading a lot of twisted versions of history, and watching some bad shows, and encountering how sick people really are via the internet.

It’s disgusting what gets justified, the Naruto fandom taught me some bitter lessons about what people will accept in order to like a show, long after it’s become too corrupt to support if you looked at it objectively. (By the time we finished Naruto, we no longer supported it, we just wanted to see the end, we’ve never been stans, and don’t defend or praise it now, but plenty of people do, that’s what I mean by accepting it.)

I realize I’ve gotten more cynical this year, and it has nothing to do with the crisis, the process began before then. My dad leaving has just left a void of optimism in my life.

Partly because I realized he was abusive, but also because I couldn’t fix it or get answers from him about it. It’s not safe to be around him right now, but I also lack closure.

My certainty about some things got shaken.

I always used to think that bad things were somehow preventable, and avoidable if you did enough right. You could preserve yourself. This idea is popular in the church to, “name it and claim it” and so on.

My dad’s exodus from our house was like a huge case-file of proof that not all bad things are avoidable, or fixable by us. I couldn’t make it work with him after all, I don’t regret making that choice.. but I hate it.

Maybe you know what I’m talking about, huh?

So, I lost the illusion of control about anything outside my house. And I’ve begun to see how futile it is to talk about things like that as if we can really control what happens…we can make changes, but we don’t always make the changes we intend to.

I can’t simply choose to be better, can I? We can’t make the problems with the world just go away, to be blindly optimistic seems foolish to me.

I used to be much more of an idealist, and I am sad to have lost that, but I can’t logically go back to it, idealism seems to be only man’s imperfect solutions to me, good as far as it goes, but not the ultimate truth people treat it as.

I’ve learned a lot about God, I think, but I’ve stopped liking people so much. Even the people I like, I don’t see the same way.

I know it’s not fair to them, and that believing the best of people who deserve it is important to do. But it’s much harder now.

Once I tried to believe the best of my dad, and that ended up being a nightmare, so now how can I be sure anyone else is worth it? Or myself.

What if everyone can turn into a manipulator, abuser,or a neglecter? How can I be sure they really care about me… and do I really care about them?

Now that I’m writing it out, I think this is probably only a natural part of the process. This is the part people get stuck on for years though, if they don’t acknowledge it.

First, there was Shock, then Denial that I was really having a problem, then Fear and Anger that I was, then the Frustration of the cycle and trying to break it, and the Guilt of feeling like i just repeat the same mistake, and this is just not happening fast enough.

The phase dangerously close to Despair is the one I dislike the most.

And Disgust, that phase is not fun. It’s kind of an intermittent part of it, disgust accompanies pretty much every phase of abuse recovery, at least for me. It’s just so ugly to think about what happened. How people can be so terrible to each other.

Then I hit this Wall: God, how can I love people if they can be like this? How can You love us? We hurt each other over nothing, and we twist your most valuable gifts into terrible shapes and use them as weapons., how is there grace for that.

Yet, somehow there is, and I don’t want to be the Jonah on the edge of Nineveh, railing at God for being so merciful.

I guess the only way I can understand it even a tiny bit, is if I think of children. Who can do manipulative things, and deliberately be mean and cruel. But I still love them and want to see them become better. That must be how God feels.

Perhaps to Him, the crimes of a 50 year old perp are not really that much more serious than that of a child who shoves someone else on the playground just because they can. We see a difference, but the intent of the heart is the same, whether it’s a child or an adult. In fact, we attribute a lack of conscience more to kids because they don’t realize how damaging their actions are.

Children can be more pure than adults, but in my experience, it varies just as much as with older people. It’s just that the cruelty and kindness of children are both far ore open than adults, they are not more or less common.

But to God, all our sins must seem completely and utterly foolish and immature, as well as evil. While He must punish them, perhaps He can no more take them as serious threats to Himself than we can with kids. As always, the greater concern is how it affects us and each other.

I am getting at an idea here that I really can’t express well without sounding like a fool, even if it has a grain of truth in it, so I should probably move on.

The point is, God is so much bigger than our sins that He can see how to overcome them, and I can’t. Not the idea of it, nor the actions of it, nor the damage left over. But that’s me.

I’m well aware it’s not hard for Him. It’s hard for me to receive that.

I was saying last night to my family that I don’t even know what to ask for, but maybe that’s okay, maybe God knows, and I just need to ask for that. Maybe the ultimate trust is trusting God not just with what we know, but what we don’t know.

Corrie Ten boom wrote of that in “The Hiding Place” when we can’t unerstand cruelty, and suffering, will You carry this too, Lord Jesus?

Perhaps we cannot understand suffering because it is an experience we share with God, and we can’t understand any of those. Love, Joy, Perfect Peace, those are the nice experiences that are beyond our understanding, but Suffering is too. God suffers, and sorrows. We do so because we are like Him, that’s all there is to it.

God cannot give us less than Himself.

It’s an interesting thought too, that He suffers when we do, meaning that whenever He allows a sorrowful experience in our lives, He is allowing it for Himself.

God isn’t afar off watching us, but He feels it with us,

God is like a surgeon who operates on Himself at the same time as the patient, feeling all the pain the patient does, or more, because God is also like the anesthetic.

God does not spare Himself pain, we tend to think He cheats somehow, that He suffers less because He knows when it will end… but I have never found that knowing when something will end makes it less painful, it only enables me to endure it more patiently…sometimes, but even that is a choice. It must be for God too.

I think if anything, God is just Perfectly able to have Joy even in Sorrow, and have all true feelings at the same time. Maybe it’s just us who cannot hold more than a few feelings at once in ourselves…and indeed, the older I get, the more I can feel multiple things at once (like the Inside Out movie showed.)

109 Inside Out HD Wallpapers | Background Images - Wallpaper Abyss

Anyway, I think that’s all I got for now, until next time, stay honest–Natasha.

As Good as it Gets (Aligning or Misalignment)

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

Well, I’ve had another eye opening week.

I didn’t mention this last time I posted, because I didn’t want to talk about it, but I was dealing with some contracted, tight and sore muscles in some hard to understand areas of my body.

Finally, after about 2 weeks of it, I was fed up, ready to give up, and I decided to get up and go to the Chiropractor. My first time ever, but my parents both went to him and liked him, so I went.

And boy was I sorry I didn’t go sooner.

Turns out I had a crooked tailbone, back, shoulders, and neck. My whole body was at a tilt, pushing my back bones up at an angle. Causing the lower back pain, leg pain, and rib pain I’ve had for years.

For extra fun my brain was getting constricted by the nerves, muscles, and bones at the base of my skull getting knocked off balance by walking for years with uneven legs and shoulders. A condition that can affect mood and the spinal cord…

Yeah, and I couldn’t point my feet out, but I’ve never been able to do that.

Since I was born I moved strangely, a lot of babies get spine injuries while being born. I never crawled right, and I used to walk crooked and bent over. I now stand straighter, but I couldn’t make my feet go straight. Made ballet class real fun. I never liked it.

I’ve never liked working out, and I never could run very far, or stand for very long without my back and legs starting to hurt a lot, and my feet.

People have blamed me for this in the past. My singing instructor thought I should stand still, but it was too physically uncomfortable. I was told I needed more stamina. But even when I was the most fit, it was never the same. When I ran I’d get a stitch must faster than most people usually do.

And I always leaned to one side. Turns out one of my legs was like an inch shorter than the other, just from muscles and bones being out of place.

I get frequent headaches and neck aches, that sometimes seem to cause gagging, and stress me out.

For ages I assumed all this was because I don’t take care of myself, or I’m not fit, or I have weak eyes…or I was just born that way ad couldn’t change it.

But turns out all of it is fixable, over a short period of time. After just two sessions, I can stand and walk in a straight line, I’ve never done that in my memory!

There are some drawbacks. Relieving the pressure and realigning my body has left me with soreness all over, and I got a headache from having my skull adjusted but my neck not enough. I feel better after the second visit, but it may take a few more to finish fixing it, and until then I am likely to still have pain and difficulty adjusting.

But it’s better to hurt because you are healing then because everything is staying the same.

I’m young enough to recover from all this before it created problems like bone loss, according to my chiropractor, but had I waited longer, these problems could have affected my ability to have sex and give birth. Maybe not fatally, but it would have increased the pain and difficulty. Perhaps even given me trouble getting pregnant.

It was scary to hear how narrow an escape I had from far worse consequences. But a blessing to have found a way to heal, far more than I ever thought I would.

I learned a lot from these visits. I am an inquisitive person so I ask questions, my doctors usually love me, an intelligent, informed patient is much easier to work with because they are trying to get better.

I freely admit though, I was terrified to go. I was afraid it wouldn’t work, and I’d just be in more pain and frustration.

And since your pain can linger a while till you’re finished adjusting, I still have to choose to trust the process, to trust my chiropractor, and to believe God guided me to the next step. The idea to go came to me after I prayed to unlock a door to healing.

I know many people are like me, afraid of doctors, I know what it feels like to be afraid to even find out what’s wrong with you, and afraid to hear that they don’t know. (By the way, Urgent Care is crap for anything not a basic, common condition, they’ve helped me with infections, but anything else remotely complicated I’ve had to get other help, so don’t take their word for it if they don’t have a solution.)

I have a phobia about doctors. But I am working on overcoming it.

I was kind of upset that God would not just heal me, miraculously, and with a few lifestyle changes. Specialists are expensive.

But I think I see why God chose to do it this way. There are some people it doesn’t bother to seek help, and they get frustrated, and God heals them to show he is higher than Medicine.

But for me, the problem is not wanting to put enough value on my health to spend money and time on it, something that runs in my family. My father has all kinds of problems that he found got better with a few changes. My grandfather died of a myriad of conditions that could all probably have been prevented if 30 years prior he’d sought out help, he had the money for it.

I also have a grandmother who is a bit of a hypochondriac, and I’ve had that too, it’s much better now.

The point is, I had some very destructive attitudes about my body and health. I inherited the DNA to have the same problems as my family, but most of them could be fixed with a little effort.

And paying $100 a visit for 5-6 visits is still way better than a $30,000+ operation that I might need if I wait. Do the math. I don’t have health insurance, for me this is as good as it gets for pricing.

Let’s talk about that, actually. I watched the Jack Nicholson movie “As Good as it Gets” yesterday (also known as the only Jack Nicholson movie I will probably ever like him in, we’ll see.)

30 Minutes on: "As Good As it Gets" | MZS | Roger Ebert

About halfway through that movie, Melvin, the MC, asks a question that kind of sums up what the film is about “What if this is as good as it gets?”

He has obsessive compulsive disorder. He says and does things with little self control and offends everyone around him.

Also featured in the movie are two character who represent the other aspects of that questions.

Carol, a waitress with a sick son who she can’t afford to take to a specialist, and his constant emergency room visits and fever episodes are for her “as good as it gets.”

And then there’s… I think his name is Sean. Melvin’s neighbor, who’s art career is just not taking off, his parents are estranged form him, and he gets beaten up, robbed, and left in a cast by some addicts needing their fix. For him, it starts to look like his miserable life of failure is “as good as it gets.”

The movie’s solution to this question is to basically say your problems will not go away, but you can take steps to make them better, and in the end still be happy, because happiness doesn’t depend on having no problems, but on surmounting the ones you do have.

One later scene, Melvin bitterly says that it doesn’t bother you that you had it bad, but that other people had it good, and the other two disagree, basically saying it does bother them that they had it bad.

In the end, Melvin starts taking medication and trying to change because he learns he wants to be happier, Carol is able to move on from taking care of her son to letting someone take care of her, and Sean gains confidence that he can rely on friends and his life will eventually get back on track.

The answer being “as good as it gets” may mean “as good as you choose to aim for is what you will get.”

There are some people with chronic conditions that can’t do anything about it, though it’s rarely ever hopeless, and usually there are solutions we just can’t afford…

But the majority of us just give up. We do what my dad once said of his problem “you can just live with the pain.”

I’ve said that to myself. I’ve bargained with it, saying “if the pain could just decrease to this amount, I could live with it.”

But that’s never enough, what I really want is to be better. To be normal.

but the funny thing is about this and my emotional issues I sought help for, is that my normal was never normal.

Just like my body has been misaligned my whole life, my thoughts and feelings also were. It’s quite poetic… of course I believe our spiritual and mental reality affects our body. There’s too many coincidences for it not too.

For me, it’s a new normal, of being normal for the first time. I may finally be able to walk and run without being in pain, to bend my feet out, to crane my neck, for crying out loud.

Ironically, I’ve been told I have good movement in my body despite these problems, but I was never as flexible as my sisters, and I moved more stiffly. I walked more like my dad, who always had aches and soreness.

Just like I may become the happy, strong person I hope to be, and maybe deep down, I already am, but I got jacked up by having a messed up parent.

But in the future I may actually become flexible, it was just this problem holding me back.

The real challenge is not to accept that is has to be the way it is. And if anyone tells you it does, don’t listen to that person.

Really, the Bible itself would suggest we are our own biggest obstacle to healing, those who ask and seek receive.

Even if the woman with the issue of blood had it for 10 years, she got up out of her house and went looking for Jesus, and she got healed. She didn’t say to herself “I’ll just live with it…until I die.”

Commercials always say “Don’t wait for it to become a serious problem, get checked out now” and while it is to sell products, I admit it’s sound advice.

It may not be feasible to do that in every area of life, not all at once, but over time. The person keeping you from having an abundant life may really be you.

I know that many of us have other people who crate obstacles for us, and I acknowledge it’s more of a challenge, but I don’t believe it’s impossible, you can get out of that situation.

Anyone who can read this post and has internet access can reach out for help, where there’s a will there’s a way.

I think I’ll wrap this up now, until next time, stay honest–Natasha.

Where I’m at.

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

What a month last month was for me. Crazy.

It’s not usually a good idea to list the bad things that happen to you, but sometimes you have to in order to just appreciate that you got through it.

So, in the course of a month, I:

  1. Got rejected from at least 3 job applications after an interview.
  2. Got a mouth infection (not fun) and had to be on antibiotics that made me feel nauseous.
  3. Had a huge attack of intrusive thoughts.
  4. Had a huge attack of anxiety about all of the above
  5. Then got what we think was mild food poisoning, along with my sister, and had a 2nd period in one month, a weird phenomenon that happens sometimes and made me feel even sicker.

Still recovering from that last one, but I am feeling better. Still I felt so sick I barely ate anything for 3 days and just managed to eat a little better yesterday. Don’t know if it was hormones, allergies, bad food, or some unholy combination of all three.

Somehow, even after all that, I still have felt closer to God than before.

I don’t think God gave me all those problems directly, and with prayer, thankfully, some of them are going away, but God didn’t just lift them off immediately either.

It’s ironic that a lot of my problems are self-inflicted after the intial issue that wasn’t in my control.

I eat less when I’m stressed, so the more worried I get about feeling unwell, the less I want to eat, and the worse I feel as I get hungrier.

I worry so much about making it worse by eating, I forget that not eating makes it far worse.

My sister asked me why it bothers me so much to think of throwing up, and I didn’t really have an answer. It just always has. Even if arguably that’s not the worst thing ever ( I hate it), what I hate most is how ill I feel before and afterwards. It gets to where I’m more afraid of the idea than of the reality.

It goes back to when I was a kid and felt sick a lot because of anxiety. I would try to figure out what kind of sick I felt, and obsess over it, but I’d think “as long as I don’t throw up it’s not the worst.” I’d pray, begging for that. When I’d feel better a few hours later, it was relief.

The thing is, it’d ruin my time, whatever I was doing. All I wanted was to be at home, curled up with a book, or by the toilet, even if I knew nothing was going to happen.

I guess I never questioned if I could be any different. After I got older and my faith got stronger, this problem went away for the most part, but it rears up every now and then with my allergies, or stress, or PMS. I rarely ever actually get sick, even colds, but I freak out any time I think I might be.

So, getting sick twice in one month has me tripping, you can imagine.

At least, it would, if I let it.

But in another way, God used both these experiences to show me how deeply I worry about health. And let it steal my peace and joy any time I have a glimmer of sickness, real or false.

When I get worried, it’s hard for my body to heal anyway, or to even want to. I almost don’t want to try, for fear it won’t work, because then…then what? I guess I feel I couldn’t handle it.

The reality is that’s not true. As with most things, this fear is mostly just shadowy illusions, not based in what’s likely.

I can’t even say if having physical symptoms is worse than emotional. Some of you who have mental illnesses probably think you’d trade for a physical one in a heartbeat, or it might be the other way around. Every problem seems easier to deal with then our own.

Well, our struggles are tailor made for us, I think, in more ways than one. I inherited this struggle with my health from my Grandparents, like with so many other fun things I deal with. I had two who were obsessed with their health constantly.

My dad also constantly felt bad, and just lived with it, never feeling he deserved any better.

Now, me, I’m trying to kick all this. Not that I beleive I will never get sick, but that the same constnat problems I’ve had my whole life can go away.

I know that not every problem goes away, but so many of mine are stress related, and being stressed isn’t a state of mind I want to stay in.

I doubt most people think of me as a stressed person, who know me. I don’t come off that way, because external things rarely upset me as much as other people, my battle is always inward with my own issues. It’s hard to explain that to people.

God showed me how much I think of this stuff. And I am getting a glimmer too of how often I pity myself.

My dad always pitied himself, but he wasn’t compassionate to himself, and I can act the same way. I will feel sorry for myself for going through all this, and beg sympathy of people, but I will be hard on myself at the same time, with a frustration toward my body for not cooperating with what I want and not letting me do what I want.

As if what I want is always best. It seems better than doing what I used to and embracing it as an excuse to hide, but perhaps the pride of thinking I know best is not really better, just different.

Yet, after the first day of feeling really sick, to the point where I dry heaved and gagged, but nothing came up, my sisters and I prayed, and then I got up and danced around my living room, feeling better, but not completely, and I did manage to eat a little after that.

I didn’t get that bad the other days.

But I thought, I would have never done that in the past. Somehow, I felt fine, even though I didn’t feel fine. How is that possible?

God is weird sometimes.

I don’t know how all this will end, I’m learning as I go. I don’t even know how applicable it is for anyone but me, the reasons people struggle are so different.

But my thought it, maybe all this is happening now so I don’t spend decades of my life with the same problems as my dad had. Always thinking I couldn’t do anything about them.

Maybe it’s necessary to learn this now, to prepare for my calling. Certainly it’s interesting how much God can teach you just from living everyday life. Some of us go on big soul searching journerys, some of us stay home and live ordinary lives for 20 years till one day God tells us to move, like Abraham.

Whichever it is, I guess I’m learning, like Paul, to be content with where I am at, to believe it’s where I need to be, and God is growing me through this. Even if it seems painfully small at times.

Though, G. K. Chesterton thought that the ordinary things in life were the most enchanted.

I guess I’ll end with that thought, until next time, stay honest–Natasha.

More than Normal

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I don’t love the many days of Recovery that aren’t exactly good, aren’t exactly bad, just… repetitive.

But on days where you don’t always expect it, you can learn things.

I find the harder my mental, emotional, and physical symptoms push at me, the harder I push back, like that one Skillet Song puts it (Not Gonna Die.)

Why shouldn’t I do what I want? Even if I have issues.

And you know, I’m finding there’s a lot of people like me out there.

Before starting Therpay and ending an abusive situation, I never heard people talk about struggling with mental health problems all that much, I knew one or two people maybe, but I didn’t talk to them at length about it.

Since coming out about all this, I keep discovering people who seem otherwise happy are secretly hiding tormenting anxiety, depression, and mood swings.

Then again, people might have thought my Dad seemed happy too.

See, I’m not like that. When I’m going through something, it’s pretty obvious I don’t smile or talk as much, I’ve always been frustrated with myself for this, but now I am wondering if it’s a good thing. I wear my heart on my sleeve in many ways. When I’m happy I show it, when I’m down I show it. But people notice and can help me.

I’m surprised by how many people who seem cheerful are covering up pain. It kind of makes sense, you have to overcompensate for how you feel. I’m noticing there is a fragility to it, and those people tend to make dark jokes. They joke about their negative feelings too.

I guess it’s a way to ask for help, but knowing that others may not really be able to help you, it’s hard.

Sometimes there’s a solace in knowing others are going through it, but for me, it’s actually discouraging to know they haven’t conquoered it either, I was hoping there was just something I’m missing.

That’s why I was blessed, quite literally, to talk to a lady at my church who’s actually been through the whole intrusive thoughts/depression ordeal, and been free for 10 years now. Which was very encouraging to hear.

My struggle isn’t over, but it is better. I got some good prayer.

It’s got to sound so weird, treating my issues with prayer and worship. Not the most accepted method.

Still, it’s Biblical.

Not that I’m saying professional help is bad, I did seek it out, but it just doesn’t work as well as the other things did.

There’s a song by Rachael Lampa “My Remedy” that I have a new apprecaition for since all this started.

I know where to go, to heal my heart to soothe my soul…

Every time I cry, and I want to hide, feeling like I’m damaged on the inside, I come running to You..

(You know what I need, you’re the Remedy, that’s why I’m keeping you close.

You know what’s bad for me, my only therapy, Jesus your love is my hope.)

On point, off track, one step forward, two steps back. Some days are gonna be just like that.

You’re my medicine, relieve my pain again and again, you always take me back no matter where I’ve been.

Every time I’m hurt, and it doesn’t work, feeling like it never could get any worse, you know just what to do.

It can feel like everyday is simply the struggle to feel normal again. Whatever normal is. I don’t even remember, what I am at now may actually have been my normal beofre, I just didn’t notice what was lacking from it.

If I were to have been really honest, even before the emotional backlash to my Dad moving out started to surface, my life didn’t feel complete.

I spent years in that abusive cycle, feeling afraid, rejected, used. All of which I was. Of course I didn’t feel normal.

Like those stupid pot commercials that played after it got legalized. “Helps me feel normal.” If being high is normal, all I can say is you need a new normal.

And so did I. If that situation was normal, normal is overrated.

Of course for many people, a bad situation is normal. It’s all they’ve ever been in, they’re used to it, they know how to “handle” it, so to speak. Some people are addicted to constantly being hurt, and riding on the Drama high.

One reason I was able to break the abuse was because I had slowly stopped needing the drama. There was a time I fought with my dad on purpose, but after awhile, God showed me how stupid it was to keep doing that when it never worked and only made us both upset. My dad himself had to have drama, if we had a good day, he’d start a fight or give me a verbally scarring lecture in order to restore balance. It was horrid. But he was addicted to the chaos.

My normal was still not perfect though, my normal was not a thriving family dynamic, but simply “coping” until I could get out of it. And I’ve come to see that’s how I treat every problem in my life. I try to cope until an escape presents itself.

It usualy works, gritting your teeth and clenching your hands, up till a certain point. Most painful events only last a few days at most.

But when it goes on for months, and you start to wonder if an end is in sight, then coping becomes a death trap. It leaves you feeling hopeless.

It’s okay to cope, if you have no choice, but in many cases what we are coping with may be something imaginary. Our real problem may be we can’t let go of our perception of ourselves as the victim, or the only one who’s suffering, or worse, we can’t stop seeing ourselves as a failure, a worthless piece of crap, lazy or difficult, or impossible to love.

You can cope with being told that over and over again, like Cinderella in that old story does… but what happens if that situation ends, and you still only see those things around you.

The fairy tales have it right, you do need to be rescued from it by someone else, no one can get out of that place themselves. If they thought they had, that would actually be a terrible sign.

My mom said this to me yesterday, that I don’t need to get back to “normal”. I want to get “better“, to move on into a better situation.

Normal is the status quo, but Jesus promised us an abundant life. Not a normal life.

Normal really is overrated.

Now, if better becomes the new normal, then that’s good. But my mom reminded me of something I already believed, that state of being that is permanent is not possible for a Christian, not a healthy one. The Word says we go from glory to glory.

Stagnation is death, in the Spiritual. God never changes because He is a complete entity, and needs no growth, He already has it all. But all created things, at least in this world, have to grow to be alive.

Anyway, so my new attitude needs to become that at the end of this, I will not have my old state of mind back, but a better one. I will not be as happy as I was, but happier. More joyful.

Until next time, stay honest–Natasha.

Not Gonna Die https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njJ7NZMH70M

My Remedy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXgcwHvsqTc