Memoirs From My Past

As I lay here at 1:00 in the morning, I know I should be sleeping, but tonight my body doesn’t feel inclined to follow the desires of my mind. Or maybe the mind refuses to listen to the direction of my body?

Either way, the two are not in cooperation with each other. I’ve found myself in the midst of depression. Unfortunately, this is a very familiar place for me. Too many hours, days, weeks, and months of my life have been spent enshrouded in the suffocating emptiness that depression breeds.

It’s a very strange way to navigate life — you are in life but you don’t feel as if you are a part of life. You’re not even an onlooker; it’s as if you are a ghost or an apparition and you know, somehow, that there is life — beautiful, glorious, extraordinary life — no more than a handspan away, and if you could just step out of the shroud, shed the weighted cloak you could experience it.

But you can’t and you don’t know why. You try, but the weight remains and the vibrancy of life continues without you. And somewhere where your heart lives, a vast emptiness threatens to engulf you, threatens to pull you under. But no, you won’t let it do that. You can’t. Because despite this shroud, despite the weight, the pain, and the fear, and despite the fact that there is a gaping chasm yawning open before you, a spark of hope still exists, burning just enough to light the way home.

And home?

Home is not what most believe it to be.

Home is not a place or people or an idea.

When you find your way home, you know that YOU are there waiting for you. Home is first the realization that the shrouded, scared, powerless person you believe yourself to be is not you at all. It is truly an apparition, a ghost masking the person that deep down you know yourself to be.

Who is that person?

Who are you?

Why do you fear you?

That person — you — the YOU you discover when you pass beyond the shroud, when you take off the mask and the chains…that person is home.

And you know what that person is?

That person is extraordinary.

That person is vibrant.

That person is who your heart beats for.

That person has more power in the depths of her soul than you can even fathom.

Why?

Because she has overcome. Because she has faced the darkness, has battled the fear, has gone into hell, and she has overcome.

She has found strength.

She has found beauty.

She has found power.

She has seen the woman God created her to be.

And by damn, she is incredible.

So when the shroud come upon you, when the darkness and the weight descends, you hold fast to that spark of hope, to that inner fire that God lit to guide your path.

And you remember, damn it, you remember who you are, what you have done, and you see the incredible soul that exists, waiting once more for the shroud to lift.

Because it will.

The shroud will always lift. The sun will shine again, and when it does, your light will mingle with it so bright you’ll never believe the lies sown in the darkness again.

**Excerpt from my personal writings, written on a quiet night years ago

Blonde woman sitting in the dark in her bedroom with her face in shadow. AI image