Resolve

It’s been a year since I started this blog. 

At the time I was trying to figure out how to start over once again, after I realized the country I tried to build a life in was so racist towards me that I feared for my physical safety. 

I didn’t know if I could do it, the prior year, 2018, a year without a joy after so many years of crises and relapses- I didn’t have it in me to keep trying. 

But around this time last year, I met people, people who surprised me with their care, generosity, and big hearts.  And it gave me a renewed strength to keep trying, or to “just be.”  

I’m here once again.  I not only feel like I’ve had no joy in months, for practically this whole year, I also have no purpose.  I’m displaced in a place where I don’t know a soul, where I’m not connected to any communities, where my shaky physical health and my lack of ties, lack of orientation, makes it hard to participate in this moment for racial justice in the U.S. despite over 20 years of working on these issues. 

I’m even more isolated and in danger, and I’m biting my tongue, I don’t dare hijack the national conversation for my own personal struggle when people are reckoning with things so much bigger, a moment I never thought was possible, a hope that seemed elusive.  I am so so so small in this moment, I know that. 

I surround myself with nature’s beauty, ashamed that my body wracked with my autoimmune disorder still makes my energy levels, stamina, body, useless …. But nature’s beauty with my mind as my only company, tells me over and over, your time has come.  You tried, you failed.  You failed not because you didn’t try hard enough, but for factors out of your control, but that’s always how it’s been.  And it’s not going to change. 

There’s nothing that lies ahead.  There’s no joy, no purpose, no community, nothing I can see that even seems remotely in grasp. I am not a part of anything and have no inroads to be either.  My family forsaken me, won’t let me near the magical children that have the ability to restore my resolve.  I left a suffocating bad energy hopeful, but its easier to fight the external bad, to fight to break free. Fighting the internal bad, my own despair- I don’t want to, I don’t know how anymore, it’s easier to drown in it.  The only strategy I have is to defeat myself… there’s no formula for me to be victorious. I’ve done everything I can in the strange world and strange times to make myself better, to feel better, to be better, and it’s not enough. 

I haven’t wanted to be in on this earth for a long time anyhow. Yet I have stayed.

And when you manage to survive time and time again, and there are big, huge things of concern for each and everyone in their own lives, and in society and in the world, no one is going to worry for you.  It’s okay.  I understand. I do not resent anyone anymore. 

What’s there left to say anyways? Few have ever said anything —- I know this drill, if I reach out, I’ll just feel worse.  Being suicidal all the time is selfish and self-absorbed. Even the crisis hotline folks quickly end up yelling at me, “bite the bullet” – everyone’s got it bad. 

I can have impulses to die and then I can have a resolve to die…I think of it is my bipolar poles at play….     

With impulse, action either comes quickly or the impulse passes. 
With resolve, the planning begins…