Invisible?

Sometimes the best decision is making no decision at all, he says, honest and too aware of my “finished” and “never” and “stupid.”

And he is right; I am trying to take on years of pain and confusion on one of the worst physical days I’ve had in a while. I wake up in the evening, afraid to go to bed and wake up with this weight, and we know the fight is not what I thought it was yesterday, and now we’re just breathing, and trying not to worry, because this is what it is, and I can’t do anything about it until I get through what I need to get through.

I feel invisible, and I can’t afford to be invisible – unless I choose it myself, and I nearly do, nearly erase all my accounts and run for cover for the next ten years, thinking that maybe everyone will forget what I fool I can be. But I’ll still be a fool in ten years.

This is the way of my depression, the reason I should shut everyone out and shut my mouth and guard my heart, guard yours too.

I suspect He uses me as me, not as someone I should be, not doing the things the strong and the wise do, because He gains more glory from His work in the weak and the fool. I hate it, hate being this low, hate being unable to hide myself and my struggle, hide the fact that I say the wrong things and do the wrong things and if I could just keep it all inside, maybe no one would know, because even a fool is thought wise if he keeps his mouth shut. But he is still a fool.

There was a point yesterday when I realized that I had to rest, regardless of my responsibilities. I exist in a thin place right now, and I can see the other side, the side where something snaps internally and I break for a while and go away. It is quieter there, simpler – but I cling to what I know and pray to stay conscious – for him, for my babies, for my family.

My life, it seems, is a constant humbling, a constant breaking, and I realize that there is no true humbling that can ever make me proud of myself, no matter how I wish it. I think it may always be terribly uncomfortable to my dust. I wonder why I asked it, but I asked grace, and He gives grace to the humble, and I should be as despised as He, because I am not greater.

I know I say things that others don’t say. I still can’t make sense out of why they don’t say them, because sometimes saying the hard things opens the door to redemption, breaks down walls in relationships. Sometimes it hurts, but sometimes you have to trust that the other is speaking from their heart, and you speak back from where you are, and if you each keep speaking, eventually, you start hearing, and seeing what you didn’t see.

I wonder why I can’t have the nice gifts, the ones that have others saying the sweet, excited things about me, why my gift is to speak and to say what is. I want the gifts that love easily, that share, that serve. But I have to THINK about doing those, and I never feel quite right in my own skin when I try to put those on and give them. I am too self-conscious. The gift that I have to give, the way I love, is to speak my heart, let people know me as me.

This is not a popular gift. *I* am not a popular gift. But I have no idea how to be anyone or anything else.

It is only about three weeks until I begin my treatment, the intensive treatment for my Lyme disease I’ve never undergone because I had to stay functional. Three months on this treatment, my doctor says, and it could be life-changing. I have no point of reference for “life-changing.” I don’t remember normal. This is my year of tired, of laid-out, of weakness.

I never thought about death before this year, about what it would be like to close my eyes and not be alive anymore. I fight the feeling of helplessness, the realization that no matter how I pretend time doesn’t affect me, it is marching grimly on, and it really is too late for some things to be.

I learn to be alive in the moment.

It hurts sometimes.

I won’t ask you to forgive my ramblings here. You’re on notice that anything goes in this space. Some things, I just have to write my way through, and if I don’t write them to be read, they don’t make sense to me. I’m so weird, but I’m going with it today. *grin*

Thanks for the love yesterday, and your prayers. I think they are helping.