Anxiety Ridden, Midnight Poetry Slam?

So I spent all of last night in an anxiety ridden state and eventually gave up on sleep all together between 2 and 3 AM. I decided to write out my thoughts and see if that would help. There was a modicum of improvement but I was still wired so, I stayed up the rest of the night re-reading and editing some of my old blog posts. Despite the physical discomfort of sleep deprivation, I actually got some shopping done today and managed not only to have a video chat with a couple good friends of mine, but we all put our masks on and went for a very short walk through Northwest Branch. My head was occasionally spinning so we sat down for a good 20 to 30 minutes. I'm prefacing this poem with all this so that you know I'm doing perfectly well now, I just had to de-clutter my mind through my writing.  And actually, to make the poem end on a more positive note, I just now put together the last stanza.

Every now and again,
I feel like all my flaws,
Real and perceived,
Are written in bold
Size 72 font
And my positive qualities
Are written in 9.5,
Making it really hard to
Accept the concept of
Self-love, let alone,
Accept love from others.
And although,
For the most part,
I’ve let go of and
Have forgiven as much as
Possible of the past,
It still creeps up on me,
From time to time causing
My heart to ache.
During these instances,
When my flaws seem too
Prominent and my past
Seems to rest
Heavily in my chest,
My ego poses
The nasty question:
Why would anyone love you?

And my soul answers:
Because of your heart.
Because of your humor.
Because of your empathy.
Because of your kindness.
Because of your love.
Because you are YOU.

Lakeside Meditation

Take 3 deep, cleansing breaths and if you feel comfortable doing so, close your eyes. Picture in your mind's eye a dense forest with towering coniferous trees. Notice how their massive trunks resemble the supporting pillars of a cathedral while their arching branches provide a comparable cavernous space. Even the leaves, with the sunlight pouring through them, look like tiny, scintillating, bright green pieces of stained glass. Take in this scene as fully as you can and breathe in the fresh, spring air. As you walk along the path, you come across a gushing, turbulent brook. You follow it a ways down stream until you reach a shining, rippling lake with cattails bordering its marshy shores. Pause for a moment here and breathe in deep. After marveling for a time at the view, you suddenly realize that there’s a rock protruding up over the water. Once you spot the vestiges of a path, you walk up onto the rock and sit down. It’s warm from the sun’s receding rays. As you sit beside the lake, you watch as the setting sun paints the clouds pink, purple, orange, and gold and admire how perfectly the water reflects the image hanging in the sky. Occasionally, a warm breeze fractures the mirrored sunset into mesmerizing, fractal patterns of light. Take another 3 deep breaths.  As the sun begins to sink below the horizon, a chorus of peepers makes their presence known along the shore.

Spring Dawn Meditation

Imagine waking to a cool, crisp dawn. You peek out the window and the sight makes you feel like a child on Christmas. As color begins to creep into the sky and its puffy clouds, the trees outside are dancing in the intermittent gusts of wind and the grass is glimmering with the morning dew. Caught up in the moment, you decide to dash outside to view the sunrise from the top of a grassy knoll. The dew drops are refreshingly cold against your bare-feet. Though the branches are still swaying mightily, the wind against your face feels like a gentle caress. When you reach the top of the knoll, you see that the whole sun is now floating orange above the horizon and its hue is added to everything; the leaves are a subtle orangey-green due to the rising sun and even the tree trunks seem to have a hint of blush. You close your eyes and feel the sun warm on your face and the invigorating wind. Imagine you're lifting your arms up as if hoping to fly. Imagine the sun's fire and the billowing wind are lending you healing energy. The wind is reminding you to view your hurdles and would be blockages to your greatest good as illusory and immaterial as the branches, for the wind never stops to consider that a branch, or tree, or house is in its way. The sunlight is reminding you of the light within and that if and when you let it, your inner light shines as a beacon of hope to others trapped in the darkness.

I See You, I Am You, and I Love You

If you spent much of your life yearning to feel seen, heard, and important,
I see you, I am you, and I love you.
If you struggled to get along with your peers and were often left out of group projects,
I see you, I am you, and I love you.
If you struggled on alone in school due to teachers who didn't know how to help you,
I see you, I am you, and I love you.
If you stumbled through reading passages while reading aloud in school,
I see you, I am you, and I love you.
If you spent too much of your time trying to prove your worth either through your grades or actions,
I see you, I am you, and I love you.
If you ever felt the need to tip-toe around people who disliked you because they made you feel inclined to apologize for your existence,
I see you, I am you, and I love you.
If you ever struggled on alone and in silence with a trigger word,
I see you, I am you, and I love you.
If you felt more comfortable reading during recess,
I see you, I am you, and I love you.
If you ever felt all alone in a dark and scary world,
I see you, I am you, and I love you.
If you've ever realized that you could give love freely yet couldn't send any to yourself,
I see you, I am you, and I love you.
If you ever doubted your reason for being here or ever believed you were here for no reason,
I see you, I am you, and I love you.
If you ever consciously stopped yourself from doing someone a favor because someone in your past showed you contempt for even offering,
I see you, I am you, and I love you.

I just want to assure you all on two fronts. Firstly, the trauma implied occurred pre-adoption so there is no memory of the event which allowed me to live in relatively comfortable denial by telling myself it was just a fear of a possible future event...until my biological mother told me about the event 10 years ago.
Secondly, don't assume the things in this poem have caused me to not feel blessed. The fact that I have experienced all of these things and am still capable of walking through the world as if nothing can touch me...there must be some form of magic coursing through my veins giving me courage.

Copyright 4/10/2020

Brief Uplifting Insight

After a powerful healing experience last night the following realization came to me:

I no longer resent the fact that my smallness has led me to feel unsafe and I don't resent the fact that I have so often felt all alone in the world for these feelings of powerlessness led me to pursue experiences of travel and to test my endurance on the Appalachian Trail. I was seeking to reclaim my power and therefore my deepest wounds became the catalyst for my greatest adventures. As I believe I have mentioned before: if it wasn't for other people's moments of weakness, I would not have sought my inner strength.

Meditative Imagery

Imagine walking through a dense forest and that the path you are on has a thick layer of leaf-litter allowing you to amble barefoot between the massive trees. Imagine thick, luscious moss blanketing the roots, trunks, and branches of the trees as you might expect from a temperate rain-forest. See if you can hear a light, pattering rain on the bright green leaves above you. Now as you walk gently down the path, picture yourself surrounded by an ethereal light. It surrounds your aura. Now invite the healing light into your energy field by placing your hands over your heart center. While doing this, actively send your grief out through the soles of your feet as you allow the healing energy to flow into your heart chakra. If you feel inclined, send the light to any and all chakras that have been imbalanced due to the grief that has been brought to the surface these last few weeks. And remember to breathe. With each inhale the light pours in, with every exhale, the grief moves out through the soles of your feet to be transmuted by the earth. Imagine the spring green that surrounds you is also filling, healing, and replenishing your heart chakra. Mother Nature is on your side, she is here to heal us if we let her. Breathe in the aroma of the spring rain and notice how the refreshing breeze caresses your face. Can you feel her love for you? Do you hear her say “I Love You” whenever you see a breathtaking view? For whenever she shares her beauty with you, you may hear, through the level of your soul, a silent yet unmistakable, “I Love You”.

Autism Awareness Post

As someone who has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome I want to share my experiences of what it is like to be on the spectrum.

Our biggest challenge isn't that we lack social skills, our biggest challenge is that people rarely take the time to teach us these skills and instead mock and ostracize us for not innately knowing the rules of social interaction, thereby enforcing a continuation of our problematic ignorance. So we remain ignorant of what everyone else perceives to be common-sense etiquette. Not only this but then we sometimes make even more errors. And some for berate ourselves endlessly over these errors.

Let me explain. There have been times in my life where I refrained from doing someone a favor because there had been a time in my past when people seemed to get upset by the idea of accepting help from the likes of me. The way my peers had treated me made me afraid to do the right thing as well as the wrong thing. When someone with Autism acts selfish, it's often because he/she has been taught (through mistreatment by their peers) that they are an island unto him/herself. And when one has so often felt alone, the propensity to mistakenly act selfish increases.

I, to this day, struggle with being part of a group because in most cases during my time at school, I was made to do all of the work or none of the work. They made it clear that I was only in their group because the teacher placed me there but in all other ways, I was just extra. In fourth grade, I had studied endlessly this list of factoids about a specific county in Maryland and had successfully memorized all of them in order to prepare for a Maryland themed Jeopardy game. My team refused to pick my category throughout the whole game and the nail in the coffin was that the last question fell under my county and they still refused to allow me to provide the answer. I had done everything right, but since I hadn't yet been able to prove my intellect, they dismissed me for the umpteenth time and I was devastated.

Now earlier on, I still had a pretty good connection to this part of me that said, "Don't worry. Your worth can't be diminished by others' actions. You're smart, you're worthy of love and you're extraordinary." Now I don't mean this in an egoic manner, I simply mean that I felt I had grit, determination, and resilience that outsiders couldn't see and that as sensitive as I am, I've been strong in my own way and in my own right. But after years of mediocre, chilly, and sometimes outright cruel treatment from others, these words of comfort were no longer comforting for they began to sound like lies. How can these positive things be true when almost no one else is capable of seeing it? How can these comforting words hold any truth when it feels as though 90% of the people I meet dismiss me, underestimate me, allow me to struggle on alone? One of the only positive beliefs that I was able to hold onto was that I was smart whether or not I could find a way to prove it. My issues with dyslexia and ADD caused me to make mistakes when reading single spaced directions and to stumble through text when reading aloud. That said, my parents knew I was smart which might be one of the reasons I never let anyone else convince me otherwise.

My over-reaction to various events in my life were often due to the fact that I saw ill will and bad intent behind the actions and seemingly harmless words. If the people in my group were to tell me that I could get the ingredients for the science experiment and they would do all the rest of the work I heard, "We don't trust you to do anything but gather the ingredients for us." When someone in middle school asked me if I had IM, I responded "What's that?" and then she immediately said, "Well then you don't have it" and dropped the conversation and what I heard was "I wasn't invested in this attempt to connect anyway."

And the reason I over-reacted to receiving a C on anything is because I truly felt that I had yet again failed to prove to people that I could be above average. I went from failing a math quiz in 4th grade to going up a math level part way through 5th grade. I even got a math award at the end of Middle School. I went from struggling elementary student to a high school member of the National Honors Society. I aced high school chemistry, got a full scholarship to Montgomery College, succeeded in college level physics. I've gotten 2 poems and a short story published. Now imagine, innately knowing that you had great intellectual potential but being the only person in the classroom who knew that. Wouldn't you find a C to be surprisingly discouraging?