There are so many potential beginnings to my story that I will only attend to one at this moment--the creation of this blog. It was advertised to take only 5 minutes to create; I have been sitting here on this couch for at least an hour (and I really have to go to the bathroom!)
You see, I was promised by my therapist, one of the behavioral sorts, that this could be an anonymous, comment free venture, yet he wasn't quite sure how to go about it so the complete creation has landed in my lap. To do this, I have to have it be completely anonymous, otherwise my words will never make it "out there" at all; I have too many fears of being completely abandoned and ostracized by family and friends and even an entire hospital staff should my true thoughts be known. This has been what has kept me drowning in thirty years of handwritten journals and file after file on my computer of journals and some fictions and scads of polished memories I call "moments." You see, a lot of this stuff is incinderary. Angry. Critical. Even hateful. Often hateful.
So here comes one beginning. As I was sitting in an aqua pleather reclininer one late afternoon in the admitting unit of my local psychiatric hospital a couple months ago, it struck me "I have had a rich life." Rich? Rich? What word choice to have come bubbling up from the netherlands of my soul. I've identified with "horrible," "lonely," "devestated," "full of suffering," "lost," and the list goes on. But "rich?" How wonderful! And really, how true.
But how to write about it. How to shove the needle of my emotional compass so very slightly to the East where the sun rises. How to get the whole picture. I just can't seem to do it on paper that will just end up stuck in a Whole Foods bag with all my other journals (aside from the cases in storage miles away) under my decreptit bed. This has to go somewhere. To someone. To you who is reading this. A chronicle of my life as it truely is. Down's. Up's. Days when it takes me four tries to park my car at my psyhiatrists office because each space seems a really dangerous place to leave my car. Moments when I feel strong and proud. My morning walks that are filled, in my minds eye, with police bearing down on my, questioning me hard, arresting me, because I stepped off the curb a moment before the white man appeared in the traffic light. The sadness and isolation of living in a mind that is almost completely deluded as to the intentions and meaning of other peoples words or gestures or silences. Living a life that is bent on protecting myself from all these dangers, whether real or imagined. The frustration of understanding it all but not being able to escape it. And so on.
Each day, I've said lately, is a work of art. I will be sharing my art with you.
And so I have begun. The intention is set. The blog is anonymous ( I really hope.) And you are welcomed on board.