At the end of the rope
Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 10:30PM 
I’m falling apart again. Nothing I do is good enough. I can’t tell if this has something to do with my brain, or if my short term memory is failing when I try to remember things, or whether I really do have ADD and need to get back on the meds, or if what I’m doing is simply not something I’m good at, or if the people I’m working with are not satisfied with my work, or if I have it all made up in my head – and it has nothing to do with reality. It took me today 2 hours to tie a knot at the end of the rope, the rope I was slipping from, to hang on to it, to not slide down into depression, to put one hand up, then another, then climb up with my feet, then pull myself up - to look around. Once I did, I saw that I’m good at doing things, many things – actually, anything at all. What I’m good at is making things beautiful.
I can listen to a person and see where her heart lies – I can break through layers of her defense, of her pain, or her mask – to the real her, and I can see the beauty in her, then I can point her to that beauty – so that the person can see it too. I can clean up any chaos – be it physical, theoretical, or conceptual – I can make it all into a pristine order, beautifully lined up and organized to the dot. I can look at anything creative and see if it is done well – be it art, photography, graphic design, writing – I see patterns, and I see them when they are not aligned – and I know how to align them properly. I can pick up broken mismatching pieces and create a new whole out of them – no matter how impossible it might seem – be it pieces of broken glass or of a broken person. I can see a pattern where others can’t – I can discover things that others have not seen – and I like doing it. I can see beauty in a muddy puddle, in an old wrinkled woman’s face, in a bare tree, in the cold rain. I’ve survived because my mother has shown me that things are beautiful – she has shown me hope that was worth living for, as someone has shown it to her when she grew up – so that she could survive her own violent childhood.
She would knit beautiful things; she started teaching me how to knit when I was 5. In those rare times when she was home. There was one beautiful thing that my father has shown me as well – when he was the happy father – not the angry rapist and abuser. When he was happy and content, he’d pick up a book and read me poems, outloud. They were always strikingly beautiful, with a liquid rhythm, or staccato sounds, with sprinkles of humor here and there, with striking imagery, composed from short and concise words. I loved him when he did that – he was that other father then, my papa. I still love reading books and making beautiful things, or making things beautiful. Even this rope I am hanging on – I look at it now and I think – maybe I should make it very knotty, like a braid, with equal intervals in between, so that it is not a rope anymore, but a ladder, and so that I don’t slip down, but rather climb up. And I would make nice red ribbons on each knot, for marking them off, so that I can see it clearly, see how much more till the next knot, to keep climbing up, to never give up. To hold on to the rope, when I’m tired, and watch the red ribbons flutter in the wind, restless butterflies of my heart.
Maybe I’m not at the end of the rope at all, maybe I’m at its very beginning.
Photo of Allie Cooper - a still from a film by Fabio Flecha.
Reader Comments (1)
take a look at this reading list....there is a paper on the Hippocampus, and others on PTSD.... *hugs*
http://www.chickswithscars.com/p/reading-list.html