Through the Rain

My Journey Towards Queer Spirituality I attended part of a church service yesterday. My own spiritual journey has been one that others have mostly inwardly, if not outwardly, scoffed at and judged. Maybe I’m making up the whole judgment thing with my autistic assumptions. But being raised in the Bible Belt, daily life was steeped in religion. Steeped isn’t strong enough of a word. Everything about our lives was about church. Even to this day, you ask my dad something, and he brings it around to God, or prison ministry, or something he did at work, and then a few sentences later how he didn’t have time because he was doing something church related.  There’s nothing wrong with having religion being a part of your daily life. But we were spiritually abused. I hesitate to throw the term around because as the victim, it’s still hard for me to not normalize the abuse, but most times I see it. I see it in the way I can’t make decisions for myself. Either my dad or my sister had to make th...

Just Let It Go No, it’s not the Frozen song, and I’m sorry if it brings it to mind. I was reminded recently of the heavy traumatic load I still carry, and that I just need to let it slide off my shoulders. That’s it. We spend every second of every day fighting our battles that sometimes, just sometimes, we forget the battles that we’ve already won. We carry the weight of the past that we don’t need to with us. This is our reminder to just breathe a deep breath. Sigh. And with that sigh, let the weight of all that is in the past be the past so that the present can have its moment and the future can have its hope! I almost cried when I realized how much baggage I had been holding onto. And no, what I am suggesting is not as easy as a 1, 2, 3, breathe in, breathe out, done. At least, it wasn’t for me. I wish it was. Back a few blog posts ago, I decided to turn this blog post around for good and not focus on the past anymore. This is not a relapse of that! This is a re-commitment to that b...

The Top Five I spent probably close to an hour this morning listening to a famous public speaker that I had never heard of but who threw out names of people I had heard of and was a great communicator talk about how to better your communication skills. He began by saying he spent all his time focusing on technical skills, knowledge, and expertise in his subject area but wasn’t getting jobs, promotions, or anything like that and didn’t know why until he read a book about how you have to pair communication skills with expertise to go anywhere in life. This coupled with the YouTube video someone posted about how people who don’t fit in societal norms typically also get passed over for jobs and promotions made me listen to this guy’s three videos. I know I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to in-person communication, though sometimes I nail it! I’m much better in writing, which is why I have a blog and not a podcast or video blog. In his second video, the presenter mentione...

A Job?!?! Today I had an interview for a Housing Assistant job. The job was to be a part-time social worker and document guru for people needing more permanent housing, whether it be from no housing to temporary housing or temporary housing to more permanent housing—at least if I understood the job correctly. It was exciting pay, and an exciting opportunity to work in my field of choice: helping people directly! I met with my job coach beforehand and gave her the list of questions that I looked up and pondered yesterday while doing a bit of research about the company, and she said it looked great! We talked a bit, and while talking, she decided to look up other jobs at the same company to see if I would qualify for any of them with my no driver’s license and no social work license. Lo and behold, there was one other job, this one full-time, that I qualified for. She emailed me a link to it minutes before the interview was about to start. My “job coach” is a supported employment special...

Not Everything Has to Be a Fight Dear Lord, this is a struggle for me. When I find something I’m passionate about, and I find very few things I am passionate about—good people and really narcissistic people, injustices, safety—those are the ones I can think of right now. I’ve been having more and more fights over those few things as politics enters the picture over those few things. Boundaries is another one that I am working on. My therapist asked me how I feel about cutting people off and how I decide the point is for cutting them off. To be honest, the more I do it, the freer I feel, but the more of an echo chamber I create, and I don’t want that in my life. Enough people have an echo chamber telling them everything they believe is the truth so they close their minds off to new ideas, and I want to always be learning the right things.  I’ve learned the wrong things in the past, and I don’t want to repeat the same mistakes, so I’m a little hesitant to take on new ideas. It’s like...

Gratitude for Health This one is almost ridiculous after all I’ve been through. I have a lot of mental health issues. I have worsening physical issues. Why would I be grateful for my health? I am grateful because it’s not worse. I am part of a couple support groups on Facebook that have members who have very nasty symptoms. One group chooses specifically only to focus on the positives. Sure, there’s a post every day for those who want to vent in the comments section, but if you don’t want to engage, you don’t have to! I have Functional Neurological Disorder. I was diagnosed first with essential tremors and dystonia. Dystonia is basically a combination of muscle spasms that are neurological in nature as well as a host of other neurological problems—loss of balance, chronic pain, non-epileptic seizures, etc. If you have mental health issues or have been through trauma, or if the neurologist misdiagnoses you or doesn’t feel like it, they can diagnose you with Functional Neurological Disor...

A Long Time Coming Sorry it’s been a while since I last wrote. I’ve been through a lot the past few… days. I had an eye exam and was told my right eye wasn’t seeing correctly, and it definitely wasn’t! My dad wrote back after months of silence and used a different email address so I opened it not knowing it was him writing me back. I know this is supposed to be a place of vulnerability and openness where I share what’s been going on with me, but that’s exactly why I’ve been so closed off lately. I don’t want the world to have access to me. I was raised that nothing was private, and I’ve lived my life where nothing was private except for the deeply shameful things… the things I regretted, the things I have hidden, the things that held me back. Recently it strained my relationships with everyone. Both being too open and not being open enough. I set the wrong boundaries. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s time to get this right. I know in the past I said I needed to focus on myself, b...

Personal Victories I had a couple personal victories today that I felt proud of myself for, but I didn’t feel like writing tonight, so I guess that’s three victories for me! I don’t know why writing has become more difficult lately, but I think it’s because I’m less desperate for needing to trauma process and more hiding that part of myself for now. Perhaps I have worked on it for too long that I have exhausted myself out. I think it’s a combination that I have handled the easier trauma and that I am now at the questions that I don’t want to ask myself, so I am avoiding them. My mind is even mostly hiding the questions from me. I know they are there. I just don’t want to dig deep into questions that hold myself accountable just yet. Today I built a desk by myself! With the encouragement of my husband, I purchased a desk and chair so I can have a space for myself to do my blogging, perhaps reading, and letter writing besides on the kitchen table. The table can hopefully now be used for ...

Hard Questions As I’m shopping for eyeglasses online to get ready to head downtown sometime in the next few days to finally get my eyes checked after years of them getting worse and worse, I’m rewatching The Minimalists on Netflix for probably the third time. I don’t know why, but the first guy is talking about getting rid of his stuff and jettisoning over 90% of his stuff, and then he starts asking himself the deeper questions. I pause. The deeper questions are what I came up against. They are what’s stopping me.  You know, I’m about 80-90% finished with going through my stuff and the household stuff, leaving my husband’s stuff for whenever he wants to go through it if he ever wants to go through it. Just because it’s my obsession doesn’t mean it has to be his obsession as well! But I stopped, and I didn’t know what was stopping me until now. I think it’s the bigger questions: the questions I’m afraid to ask myself. What now? What does my life truly mean without possessions to fal...

Nobody Voted for This I don’t think anybody voted for this. Even watching the news, which is bad for my mental health, is something that I am drawn to more and more. It’s like watching a plane crash, except we watched two planes crash in a week over and over and over again not believing what happened and yet it happened. And he’s still in office. And his lackeys are taking over our data. And I don’t know what I can do about it except write about what little I know, and educate myself on as much as I can take at one time. I was on the wrong side of gay marriage. I will admit it. I was born and raised conservative and thought I was “progressive” to believe that “the gays” should have “equal rights, but it should be called something else”. I was so deep in an echo chamber that I didn’t know any other voices existed. Once I got out of that echo chamber, I felt ashamed for feeling that way, and I strived to bring other voices to my family who were still stuck in that chamber. But they wante...

Just Being Grateful I have had a lot of ups and downs the past few days. From seeing friends I haven’t seen in a few years to being sick to finding out I can find a job to political climates shifting from bad to worse. All of it has affected every part of my life, and I have forgotten to be grateful for what I have. My husband and I just came back from a shopping trip where we were able to afford groceries for one (maybe two) weeks, and on top of that invest in a thermos for his work. You’re thinking “a thermos that costs $20 and you use the word “invest” why??? I’ve been listening a lot about why we shop for things to make us happy and what we should actually bring into our homes. I forget exactly what the five questions are that The Minimalists ask themselves before every purchase to see if it’s worth bringing into their homes other than “does it spark joy” which is what my husband seems to rely on (and no, that’s no judgement on him, he uses joy and if we can afford it as his two st...

Let’s Be Honest I’ve been struggling to write the past few days because I’ve been struggling to engage with life the past few days. We just got back from visiting friends this weekend, and I don’t know if they noticed, but my husband has noticed for a while that I have been disengaged from life. I don’t know if it’s my meds or my depression, my pain coming back, the fear of getting a job that may be traumatizing again, or everything else going on in my mind, but I haven’t been myself. I’m going to try to unwind it here. I think my depression is back. I went from Partial Hospitalization to blogging to decluttering and organizing the house to cooking to being overwhelmed by politics and now am stuck in this waiting game while I shop to find any joy anymore, and nothing is bringing me joy. Everything feels like a chore. Holding hands and cuddling with my husband are the only things that feel right, but even then I feel ashamed. I feel ashamed because there are so many things I want to buy...