expert at exit

When I am happy, I miss the fire in my soul. I miss the passion and the grasping for answers. I think depression is of the deepest routes to my soul. There is nothing so intimate as suffering. There is nothing so near to the center of my being as suffering. Nothing seems so natural as feeling the genuine pangs of my fallen nature. Pain is where I feel the most comfortable. Ruin is a sort of home to me. Pain makes the most sense to me- it is always cut and dry- I know it's there because it hurts.

But happiness... Happiness is a fragile, flighty thing. Depression is heavy and weighted- and all the more easier to feel it when it's in my hands. But happiness- happiness is a small bird trembling and twitching to escape through my clenched fists. Happiness is a clever bird, an expert at escape, an expert at exit. And when it is gone, I know it. Not as plainly as I know when pain arrives, however.

Pain is a strange driving rain- where there is a sensation of heat and breath and life without even a word being spoken to prove it. Pain is a thick blanket weighted with lead; happiness is a light breeze playing with the hairs on my head and the smile on my face. Who could build a house on happiness? Who could make their home in the drafty fibers of happiness- always stretching and bending and disintegrating with every attempt to domesticate it? No, pain is domestic and stable and faithful. Happiness is a wild, cruel animal. He may pretend to be my pet for a short while, but he is always a stray- I can never keep him. Pain is more kind than any happiness. Pain is always waiting for me to come back, while happiness forgetfully goes on without me. Pain has a strange love for me, while happiness could care less whether or not I exist.

fight

I've been thinking about change today. Not pocket change. Well, not only pocket change. I waste a lot of time thinking I can fix myself. That my current broken state is livable and tolerable and fine. I guess that's denial. I'm not good at moving on, or moving at all. My life isn't going to change if I don't learn how to do things differently, how to become differently. I can continue to erroneously believe that I can provide the help I need, or I can be more honest with myself than is comfortable and admit that I can't change me by myself. There is a lot of darkness in me that I don't know how to dispel.

And I'm scared.

Processes are not easy for me. I don't transition well. Asking for help, and accepting that help, are not easy for me. But if I don't do something about this, I'm going to just stay the same. And ultimately, I don't really want that. I mean, that WOULD be the easier route- and I've been taking that route for some time now. But I can fight even when I think I can't. I have been incredibly worn out lately- in a very deep, speechless place, but I have no other choice but to fight if I want it to ever get better. I can't NOT fight. The other choice is no choice at all.

I'm real scared.

But I have to go out on a limb here. I've got to get out of here- I need to let my need for rest drive me out of my isolation and into the light where there is warmth and restoration. I'm so tired that I have no other option but to fight as hard as I can back to a place of safety and health and forgiveness. It's going to absolutely suck. But. So what? I can deal with that. Just don't let me do it alone.

[No weeping, no hurt or pain, no suffering- You hold me now, You hold me now. No darkness, no sick or lame, no hiding- You hold me now, You hold me now]

red and white flags

Oh if things could be what there were then. I know it's never a good thing to look back in longing, but sometimes I do. I miss who I was then. I have not become more innocent with time. I think of my friends and of the way I was vulnerable, and I feel a sense of loss. Vulnerability has never been my strong suit, but now it's even less so. I forget how to trust people, forget how to just let go and have fun. Community has become a foreign thing to me, being more than a year out of school, and I have forgotten what it means to be in fellowship. Now, attempts at those things give me massive headaches and a general disappointment in myself- that I cannot easily talk to people, even if they are well-meaning and friendly. I was freer once.

I feel like it's very cruel that I am so painfully self-aware. What a shame that the safest place I feel like I have to say what I need to say is on some stupid website. What little courage I have. What, speak up, you say? I don't think I can, in so many words. What a strange thing that I both struggle with and am comforted by my sense of aloneness. I long to tell you what I think so badly, and yet that longing suffocates me- because at the end of the day I am so glad that it's just me in here and you don't get to see it.

I struggle so much feeling like there has to be a meaning. I have to mean something. My life has to mean something. My talent, my imperfections...they have to MEAN something. Even if that meaning isn't necessarily good or beneficial. I hate this in-between, where there are no solid answers- where the people who have solid answers are just arrogant and make themselves believe something just so they can believe it- so there isn't a strange, nebulous kind of unknowing. You know that nebulous unknowing? The kind that keeps you up at night? Makes the darkness seem like a warm mirror, seem like a breathing room that is listening because your soul is speaking? That's when truth waves a red flag and I wave a white one.

I'm never going to figure it all out. I guess that's okay. Just let it MEAN something, okay? Please.

paralysis

What a crazy long week.

I've stopped reaching out, stopped looking around me. I've just been sitting through my day, standing still through my thoughts and my interactions. Do you know what I mean? I feel like I am breaking a little more every day, taking up less and less involvement in my own life, breathing in less and less air despite my silent gasping.

Is the suffering real? Is there something concrete behind these inklings? Do you hear me at all? Do I even know how to be me?

secret

I try to convince myself that I'm not desolate. I am unhappy. I am unhappy with myself. I didn't expect this kind of hurting- this mute kind of terrorizing hurt. My personality according to Myers-Briggs is only 1% of the population, and I have always felt this...I have always intrinsically felt so different from my friends and from the world, and I have hated myself for it. I don't often realize that my rare personality is good. It doesn't feel good. I don't like the way that I interpret the world or the way I interact with it. I don't like the way that I am always pulling back, always holding back, always mistrusting, always intending to avoid calamity in any possible way. I don't like the way I hide from everything. The secrets give me only a false sense of security, in that keeping them causes me to feel even more isolated.

I'm sitting here, feeling so much deep down in there, but I can't seem to draw it out. The music just sounds like noise to me, and isn't calling me out of myself like it normally does. Pain adds weight to my feelings, and they consequently sink in deep and writhe in their dark namelessness. The writhing is the restlessness I feel. Nothing makes it better.

I want to pick up my pen and write down hope. But there is only the date at the top of the page, and nothing more. There is so much more than I can write down here or there- so many things inside me that I can't write down in words, in letters, in spaces and breaths and cursor blinks. I cannot bear my soul to anyone. I'm afraid I will be alone all my life, just trying to make life work- trying to make myself work the way I wish I worked. I'm beyond being salvaged by a group of my peers. They are imperfect too. They are broken too. I need Jesus, despite how often I try to hide myself from Him.

Please...please...

i can't-

At the end of the day, I am just a girl. A girl with tousled hair and no makeup, in sweats and fleece, a tired soul in a tired body. And that's enough. There is beauty in that, in the plain me devoid of decorations and trends, when I am not clothed in attempted style, attempted perfection, attempted self-redemption. There is beauty in being just what I am and nothing more. There is beauty in just being me. There is beauty in not pretending.

There is freedom in trying to be the best human I can be, and no more.

I cannot be reconciled to the world through any means. I am not meant to be redeemed by it. Every part of my life holds some sense of dissatisfaction or disappointment- in every avenue I am imperfect somehow, with branches of cracks and splinters rooted deep into who I am. Somehow it is beautiful to me tonight, even though it still hurts.

Right now I miss a place I have never been.

At the end of the day, I am a wreck. No amount of hiding or secrets or acting changes that. And even though I hate it, there is some peace in admitting it. There is peace in knowing that the answer to me is bigger than me, beyond me, beyond you, beyond whatever you think or say or do in relation to me. There is peace because in being honest with myself, I see that I need Him. There can never be another- there is no one like Him.

God, I am so tired. So tired I'm about to give up. I'm quietly suffering in here, silently bleeding in here, but I am still Yours. Will always be Yours. Please don't let me quit. Please don't let me give up hope, please don't let me forfeit the faith I had. So many things get in the way, including the things that are supposed to help me talk to You. Those things don't matter if they don't bring me in closer to You.

Promise me Jesus, that You'll be the first one to usher me in? I can't even imagine.

believer

I feel a bit wobbly. Knees not working right. I feel tired. I feel eaten-away at. What's happening? My spirit feels wounded and disappointed. My life should not be led on my own. I should not be in control of my life, ever. I only end up slipping and barrel-rolling down the side of a hill, eventually becoming nauseous and sick and disoriented from the uncontrollable spinning. I don't want to be sunk. I don't want to feel like I am losing myself like this. I feel like my home is slowly being taken from me, slowly getting a step or two further from me, slowly losing its detail and its warmth. I don't want to wake up one day and realize that I traded my home for a cardboard box.

But I can always go home. It will always be MY home.

Oh, rest- come to me.

My name is Katie, and I am a ruiner, a wreckage of misplaced intentions, a submitter to pain and fear and dismay, a perceiver of intuitions and impressions, a deep feeler with little restraint. I am a worn-down lover, a peace-needing negligent prayer, a sensitive receiver of constant information and feedback, a daughter looking for the sunset through the cornfield, a soul both tortured and redeemed, a believer always struggling to believe.

My name is Katie, and I am a human.