An end to the radio silence

It is Saturday morning and I am in bed. 

The husband is leading a men’s breakfast.  

The children are watching Annie, the real version.

The dogs are play fighting.

I know there has been “radio silence” for a while. 

For a while I have been low.

Let me lay it out for you, if I may, because laying it out for you helps me, which might help you. 

Break in thought so I can give you some context to the statement.  At 18 I started seeing a psychologist. It was while drinking my way through my first and only year of a BA in International Studies.  At 19 or 20 I saw someone else.  At another time I did Beth Moore’s Breaking Free.  And at another time I spent hours talking and crying with mentor-ish persons (I had two at different times).  And Leila, my trauma counselor, who was also my children’s play therapist. Then there have been years of church and teaching.  You pick up things and as you get to know yourself better, you learn to identify the potholes.  I am not a qualified mental health practitioner, but I don’t have to be in evaluating where I am at.

My mother sold her house. 

Even now I am find it so hard to find the words. It is not the searing pain of loss which is scary, it is the dull numbness of “I can’t breathe.”

 It wasn’t a particularly pretty house.  It was big and cold in Winter and hot in summer.  

But we had lived in it, really lived in it for 12 years or so, I don’t know.  We had so many birthdays and Christmases and lunches.  We laughed and cried and fought, oh the fights.  And we lived.  In that house, that house, that home, my home, not my home. 

I know it is just a house, but my memories are so broken and I am scared I will forget all the good and all the bad that happened in that house.

The house where I last spent time with my father.   

Oh man, people, grief is crappy and excruciatingly beautiful. 

Suicide is a thief that comes into your home at night and robs you of what is precious. 

None of that is what I really wanted to say, but I so needed to say it, ok?

So here I am, content and moving forward and something happens or doesn’t and the tap of the tank of my existence is opened. Now I don’t notice it or I do, I can’t remember, because I am so busy.  

I am still moving forward, I am not even limping and then something else, happens or doesn’t, and the tap is opened wider. 

And then it happens again.  And again.  And again.  

Actually, it’s more like a slow leak and I am not being Philippa-wise (insert wink, you get what I mean, it’s a play on water wise, ok, it not’s funny, never mind).

Before I know it, the dregs of the tank, the sludge is coming out.  

When I am at sludge stage, I am low. 

Low, for me, looks like this:

hopelessness, mess, disorganization, extreme loneliness, no desire to do anything, more extreme sensory overload, less patience, greater anxiety, exhaustion, suicidal thoughts, feeling like a failure, extremely unfulfilled, inferiority, neediness, feeling unloved, unappreciated.

I know it is all in my head, I know that it’s all emotion.  I even know the way out of it, but that doesn’t change that I have been feeling it.

 And then yesterday, I spoke with my sister and God poured a life-giving elixir down deep into my emptiness.   It was that “I see you” and I needed it so badly.  

Psalm 121 (ESV)

My Help Comes from the Lord

A Song of Ascents.

121 I lift up my eyes to the hills.
    From where does my help come?
² My help comes from the Lord,
    who made heaven and earth.

³ He will not let your foot be moved;
    he who keeps you will not slumber.
⁴ Behold, he who keeps Israel
    will neither slumber nor sleep.

⁵ The Lord is your keeper;
    the Lord is your shade on your right hand.
⁶ The sun shall not strike you by day,
    nor the moon by night.

⁷ The Lord will keep you from all evil;
    he will keep your life.
⁸ The Lord will keep
    your going out and your coming in
    from this time forth and forevermore.

Thanks, thanks for listening. 

Blessings people, precious people.  

Philippa

The picture has nothing to do with the post, but it makes me happy.