A Haunted House

Sometimes I feel like my life, my past, is like a haunted house. Deep inside of me live stories in hidden rooms up dusty and broken staircases. The Moon card in the tarot, a name I have taken on since 2017, represents the deep unconscious and the uniting with and bringing light to the movements of our deep subconscious. I have had many experiences in life that have taught me to be increasingly at peace, as I survived and lived through horror and struggle due to my mental illness. There have been traumas both psychological and physical that I have lived through, and that I left behind me. It is in getting in touch with how these traumas still live inside of me in the present, hidden deep in my subconscious and psychosomatically in my body, that helps me truly move forward with my life and to practice healing. I attend a lot of recovery meetings, and sometimes I tell my story. Occasionally, it may seem off topic, but it is real for me and a part of my recovery to unite with and heal these haunted rooms that live inside of me.

Writing helps me considerably. My poetry often describes scenes and psychosis that I have lived through. Writing on this blog helps me put meaning to my struggles, and helps purge my spirit of any sad, anxious or psychotic tendencies and/or stories that I need to express. Expressing myself is vital, as I have always been a creative person. For a decade and a half in my twenties and thirties, I was a painter. I have always painted in the abstract, and my style changed significantly after my psychotic break and recovery in 2007. I began painting the female form, though heads and limbs were often missing. I would paint torsos in bright and vivd colors, depicting naked breasts. The colors in my art helped me heal. Painting bodies with missing body parts, however, is a result of a split psyche. After painting dozens of torsos and many other colorful paintings, I gave up painting and started blogging and writing poetry again. I have been writing and contributing to this blog, WelcomeToTheGrit, for eleven years this last January.

I published my early blogs and poetry in a manuscript, and have shared that writing at my “Book Party” at the local library. I also received a standing ovation at the local annual Women’s Coffee House, where I have also read my poetry over the years. Publishing this manuscript, (Glass Slippers: A Journey of Mental Illness), and reading at these events, has contributed to a feeling of accomplishment. It also lent to a valuable life passage. I needed to feel these things. I was an early childhood educator and worked many other jobs throughout the years, including volunteer work teaching middle school music, writing music and performing music circles for young children, volunteering at the library and doing the children’s story time, and singing and running the powerpoint at church. But I never accrued a degree in my three years of college, or had any substantial career. My painting and writing became my passions, and I have sold both my art and my book for supplemental income. Really, I am more successful than I ever thought possible living with severe mental illness. But I have always dreamed big. Occasionally, I hear success stories from fellow mental health consumers that surpass my simple success. However, the norm looks very different. Amongst traumas unique and prevalent amongst disabled folks, many struggle with finding the right cocktail of meds, which is necessary to achieve any semblance of a stable and successful life. One must be stable to get to the point in their recovery where they can begin to explore visiting their haunted rooms and bringing awareness and healing to all that life has dealt.

I sit with myself out at the spit and down at the ancient willow tree every morning. These small moments of meditation and silence, while communing with nature, help me check in with my haunted house. Speaking at recovery meetings and wiring on my blog helps too. I am so lucky to have stable housing, medications and a doctor, a supportive family, disability assistance, a great sponsor and therapist, as well as a few friends, that help hold me in a healing web so that I have the privilege and time to check in with my subconscious and entertain visiting all these rooms within my psyche. Ultimately, as I shed a little light on the pain in my past, I learn to let it go. Letting go and learning to live and heal in the present is the ultimate goal. I am blessed to be able to do this; by creating, by listening, by speaking, and by expressing myself in any and every way that I can. I must speak my truth. My whole, wounded, spooky, devastating, and ultimately hopeful truth.