I am feeling pretty tired. I spent.a few days fighting off hypo-mania, then an adjustment in medication and woke up feeling much clearer, but tired. I have so been enjoying my days walking and getting a last couple swims in the pond. The icy chill has taken me to a place where my mind can wander a bit, making clear to myself all that I have been visioning these last few months. Today the air was crisp, and as I headed out for my walk, cool air entered my lungs as I tied my hood about my face and clung to the sleeves of my sweatshirt.

I was listening to a podcast yesterday about how we need to put our phones down while I scrolled through instagram and listened to the hosts promote themselves on said social media platform. Life seems so full of paradoxes. The more I put down and step back from social media, the happier I am, for sure. The slow moments encourage me to open the healing vessel that my body is and channel creative light. Yet I am tired. The dog hair is collecting around the edges of my floor and the clean laundry is building in the baskets. I am reminded that we don’t need to do anything to tap into our creativity. Actually, doing nothing really helps me. I noticed today, however, that I just kept talking and that even while relaxing in the hot tub on my mother’s deck and watching the October sunset evolve from yellow to red and back to yellow again, as the color poured beneath a layer of clouds on the horizon, that I was calmer with the noise of the jets around me. It is odd how when we are stimulated, sometimes it is easier to relax. This can be so true, because if we stop, if we embrace the silence, we realize that we really are afraid and quite anxious. I ask myself, what am I afraid of right now? I suppose this state has followed me in from my exhaustion, and that it is telling me that I am more afraid of reality than I am of my delusions. I have arrived, I have returned, and the world is a scary fucking place. I spent moments in trauma memory, tears and grief as I journeyed backwards through my life to tie together the broken pieces from years suffering with mental illness, and yet when I find reality, though it is good and blessed, I find it much scarier than the happy places I hide during psychosis. Psychosis can of course become very frightening when unchallenged and unmedicated.

On the other hand, and I hesitate to say this honestly as I know how people can react, that in my final phase of bursting home to reality through one final veil of delusion, I felt a painful moment where I literally contemplated suicide. Now when I say “contemplated suicide”, I am being quite literal and I mean I was thinking and feeling very low, and the word crossed the path of thought in my mind. I did not and have never planned or considered killing myself. And yet, as I admitted this moment in time to my husband, we recollected and reflected that in the last twenty-one years, I have never even mentioned suicide while reflecting on my inner experience. It was a first and it was as low as I have ever dipped. I know others have been there before me and will go there after me and they should not feel shame. Some will actually carry out the act which is a very very sad thing. Returning to reality and passing through these veils, it seems that there are stages to finding reality. I went through several of these painful experiences in September as I resolved my summer visioning, that was disturbing and also filled with many gifts. And here I am, feeling completely like myself, grateful for life, and a little anxious. I suppose I am just afraid of being myself and truly realizing this, as I feel like a bit of a stranger right now.

But we are blessed. One thing about hitting bottom, (and mine was very much triggered by an experience where I was shut down by a stranger in a very vulnerable situation), is that when you survive, you see the truth of life in its beauty and simplicity. It is truly a gift. And all I have is the very easy job of living it and being alive. Ain sof Ain. Amen.