The Beginning...

I hate myself.  Not the kind of "I hate myself" you feel when you've accidentally locked your keys in your car again.  I really, really hate myself.  Healthy relationship, right?  When you can't escape yourself and  you spend every moment of your life carrying around the weight of things too terrible to talk about and have to hide from the world, the last thing on your mind is self-care.  You pretend you're okay.  Until you can't.  For the better part of a decade now I've been plagued by crushing depression and anxiety.  And every once in a while, they bring me to my knees.  I'm not talking about a bad day at work or feeling sad because it gets dark outside at 5:00 in the evening.  I mean primal sobs that last until you're so tired you can barely move.  I mean conversations with God where you beg Him to just let you die.  Those times are devoid of any hope.  It is real and it is terrifying.  My dear friend Bob Willis says that carrying around your pain is grief.  When you break and the tears come, that is mourning.  When I mourn, all I can think about are the mistakes I've made, the sins I've committed, the hurt I've caused.  I think of all the things I cannot fix.  I can only blame myself.  

If you do a little reading on having a healthy relationship with yourself, you'll find that most sources say to be kind to yourself.  Meditate.  Love and respect yourself.  They say that, the healthier the relationship with yourself, the healthier the relationships with others.  I don't disagree.  How you feel about yourself does have an impact on everything around you--your work environment, your family dynamic, your parenting.  I was born behind the eight ball.  When my mother had me, she knew her life was over at 20 years old.  I can't imagine how that must have felt.  I always thought that I should never have been born.  I'm such a perfectionist that, if I make one mistake while playing Sudoku, I immediately start over.  That's what I wish I could do with my life.  Just reset.  Self-esteem goes hand-in-hand with a healthy relationship with yourself and I never had that even as a child.  I was shy and the homeliest little creature in Attala County.  Oh yeah, throw in the fact that we were poor too.  Score.  I'm surprised Ole Miss didn't eat me alive.

 I have had times in my life when I sort of bloomed, I guess.  There's a certain innate hope that comes with being young.  I actually have a lot of happy times to look back on.  I think some of that happiness was due to certain people who have touched my life in a profound way.  My precious grandmother (Nannie) worked in a factory so that I wouldn't have to.  She showed me what unconditional love was.  My fabulous friend Keith made high school as fun as it can be.  My best friend Toy is the reason I stuck it out and graduated from college.  I couldn't have made it without her.  My ex-husband Mark always made me feel beautiful.  I just never believed him and he wasn't around much.  I loved the person I was with my baby girl Annelise.  I was more patient, less cynical, and loved more than I thought I was capable of.  My ex mother-in-law made it possible for me to work full-time and go to graduate school by making sure my little girl was loved and well taken care of.  I was proud when they called my name at graduation and my daddy, who grew up with nothing, watched his baby girl walk across the stage at the University of Alabama.  I still recall shenanigans with my best friends.  

My life started to unravel in 2007.  We had just moved to Laurel, MS so that my then-husband Mark could work for a struggling newspaper (which he eventually helped turn into one of the best newspapers in the state).  I think that's when I truly began to realize that he would always choose his job before me.  I was lonely.  I needed him but his job was so stressful I often found myself holding everything inside.  In the first three years we were there, I had a miscarriage, one of the owners of the newspaper decided to keep the money that was supposed to pay our health insurance--just about the time I found out I was pregnant (and now, uninsured).  Ava was prenatally diagnosed with Down Syndrome.  That news rocked my existence.  Then two weeks before her due date, I delivered our stillborn baby girl and we buried her on a hot Mississippi June morning in 2009.  Five months later, we were burying my grandfather.  The blows just kept coming and I began to wish for a different life.  In 2014, I left my marriage because I felt sorry for myself.  I thought I'd finally matter to someone.  I wouldn't be alone.  He would care. Guess what?  I never found that someone.  I would live every day for the rest of my life being lonely and unhappy if I could go back and give my child the family I stole from her.  I have to live with what I did for the rest of my life. I decided that, even though I couldn't change what I did, I'd never forgive myself.  I wanted the people I'd hurt to see that I was really sorry.  I had grown up with love that was conditional.  Be good.  Stay quiet.  Don't ever cause problems.  I thought that if I was good enough, I'd be loved and happy.  But God doesn't promise to make us happy.  He gives us the free will to tear our lives apart and I did just that.  I just got angrier at Him when I had two cancer scares, nearly lost Mark in a terrible motorcycle accident, and then did lose my daddy.  I've found out the hard way that some people are very quick to judge you from their church pews and then live their everyday lives in direct contradiction to what God does.  They cut you out of their lives.  He forgives.  He forgave me.  I'm still working on understanding why some good people suffer and some who do despicable things are prospering.  Why some people repeatedly get gut-punched by life...

I no longer even wish for happiness.  I've long forgotten what it feels like to not live in fear of the next catastrophic thing on the horizon.  But lately I've realized that hope can still find its way into a heart so covered in scar tissue that it seems impossible.  I finally have a relationship with the most amazing person I know--my child.  I have a job I love and I have people around me who really love me, like my beautiful niece Katie, who somehow knows when I need her to make me laugh.  I have a sister who would fight anybody who hurt me, a brother-in-law who graciously and selflessly is turning a shed into a little house for me.  I have a brother (a Marine, no less), who once drove non-stop from North Carolina to Mississippi to come to my hospital room so I could hold onto him and cry. I have a mother who encourages me and is there when I'm broke and hungry and falling apart.  I have a beautiful brown-eyed boy called James Easton who lights up my world when I see him.  His mama died in a car accident when he wasn't quite three months old.  I still miss her so much.  When I hear James Easton laugh or I get a text from my A that says, "I love my mama,"  I realize that I would never appreciate those things if I hadn't lost everything.  I wouldn't choose to go through the pain again, but I can honestly say to someone hurting, "I know how you feel."  The dreams I had when I was young (I'm 52) will most likely die with me.  I'll probably never write a book or grow old with my best friend, but I'm working on making peace with this mess of a person I call myself.  In the meantime, I'm forgiven and I know there's a reason I'm still here.  I want to be a friend to the broken-hearted because my heart is broken too.