Friday, July 6, 2018
Thursday, July 5, 2018
Explaining my depression to my mother: A conversation
Mom, my depression is a shape shifter.
One day it is as small as a firefly in the palm of a bear,
The next, it’s the bear.
On those days I play dead until the bear leaves me alone.
I call the bad days: “the Dark Days.”
Mom says, “Try lighting candles.”
When I see a candle, I see the flesh of a church, the flicker of a flame,
Sparks of a memory younger than noon.
I am standing beside her open casket.
It is the moment I learn every person I ever come to know will someday die.
Besides Mom, I’m not afraid of the dark.
Perhaps, that’s part of the problem.
Mom says, “I thought the problem was that you can’t get out of bed.”
I can’t.
Anxiety holds me a hostage inside of my house, inside of my head.
Mom says, “Where did anxiety come from?”
Anxiety is the cousin visiting from out-of-town depression felt obligated to bring to the party.
Mom, I am the party.
Only I am a party I don’t want to be at.
Mom says, “Why don’t you try going to actual parties, see your friends?”
Sure, I make plans. I make plans but I don’t want to go.
I make plans because I know I should want to go. I know sometimes I would have wanted to go.
It’s just not that fun having fun when you don’t want to have fun, Mom.
You see, Mom, each night insomnia sweeps me up in his arms dips me in the kitchen in the small glow of the stove-light.
Insomnia has this romantic way of making the moon feel like perfect company.
Mom says, “Try counting sheep.”
But my mind can only count reasons to stay awake;
So I go for walks; but my stuttering kneecaps clank like silver spoons held in strong arms with loose wrists.
They ring in my ears like clumsy church bells reminding me I am sleepwalking on an ocean of happiness I cannot baptize myself in.
Mom says, “Happy is a decision.”
But my happy is as hollow as a pin pricked egg.
My happy is a high fever that will break.
Mom says I am so good at making something out of nothing and then flat-out asks me if I am afraid of dying.
No.
I am afraid of living.
Mom, I am lonely.
I think I learned that when Dad left how to turn the anger into lonely —
The lonely into busy;
So when I tell you, “I’ve been super busy lately,” I mean I’ve been falling asleep watching Sports Center on the couch
To avoid confronting the empty side of my bed.
But my depression always drags me back to my bed
Until my bones are the forgotten fossils of a skeleton sunken city,
My mouth a bone yard of teeth broken from biting down on themselves.
The hollow auditorium of my chest swoons with echoes of a heartbeat,
But I am a careless tourist here.
I will never truly know everywhere I have been.
Mom still doesn’t understand.
Mom! Can’t you see that neither can I?
— © Sabrina Benaim
One day it is as small as a firefly in the palm of a bear,
The next, it’s the bear.
On those days I play dead until the bear leaves me alone.
I call the bad days: “the Dark Days.”
Mom says, “Try lighting candles.”
When I see a candle, I see the flesh of a church, the flicker of a flame,
Sparks of a memory younger than noon.
I am standing beside her open casket.
It is the moment I learn every person I ever come to know will someday die.
Besides Mom, I’m not afraid of the dark.
Perhaps, that’s part of the problem.
Mom says, “I thought the problem was that you can’t get out of bed.”
I can’t.
Anxiety holds me a hostage inside of my house, inside of my head.
Mom says, “Where did anxiety come from?”
Anxiety is the cousin visiting from out-of-town depression felt obligated to bring to the party.
Mom, I am the party.
Only I am a party I don’t want to be at.
Mom says, “Why don’t you try going to actual parties, see your friends?”
Sure, I make plans. I make plans but I don’t want to go.
I make plans because I know I should want to go. I know sometimes I would have wanted to go.
It’s just not that fun having fun when you don’t want to have fun, Mom.
You see, Mom, each night insomnia sweeps me up in his arms dips me in the kitchen in the small glow of the stove-light.
Insomnia has this romantic way of making the moon feel like perfect company.
Mom says, “Try counting sheep.”
But my mind can only count reasons to stay awake;
So I go for walks; but my stuttering kneecaps clank like silver spoons held in strong arms with loose wrists.
They ring in my ears like clumsy church bells reminding me I am sleepwalking on an ocean of happiness I cannot baptize myself in.
Mom says, “Happy is a decision.”
But my happy is as hollow as a pin pricked egg.
My happy is a high fever that will break.
Mom says I am so good at making something out of nothing and then flat-out asks me if I am afraid of dying.
No.
I am afraid of living.
Mom, I am lonely.
I think I learned that when Dad left how to turn the anger into lonely —
The lonely into busy;
So when I tell you, “I’ve been super busy lately,” I mean I’ve been falling asleep watching Sports Center on the couch
To avoid confronting the empty side of my bed.
But my depression always drags me back to my bed
Until my bones are the forgotten fossils of a skeleton sunken city,
My mouth a bone yard of teeth broken from biting down on themselves.
The hollow auditorium of my chest swoons with echoes of a heartbeat,
But I am a careless tourist here.
I will never truly know everywhere I have been.
Mom still doesn’t understand.
Mom! Can’t you see that neither can I?
— © Sabrina Benaim
What Anxiety Feels Like...
From the outside it’s easy to think that
somebody has got it all figured out. Because my hair is curled and my
cheeks are intentionally flushed – I must not have a care in the world.
As if it were expected from my demons to be worn like a scarlet letter
pinned to my chest – and they assume if you cannot see it, then it’s not
really there. As if pain does not exist unless you’re bleeding or slung
in a cast or staggering with a limp. But sometimes, the most painful
demons are the ones they can’t even see.
So we learn how to smile, how to grin, and
bear it. Because, nobody likes to talk about the tough stuff… Hell, I
don’t like to talk about the tough stuff.
I have anxiety.
It feels like every cell in my body is
moving so fast that my veins are blurry, that despite the constant
rhythm of my heart-beat – inside my ears, it’s like listening to spastic
drum line, it feels like bees in my ears, it’s like a broken white
noise machine playing all of the sounds at once … and I don’t even
realize I’m grinding my teeth or cracking my knuckles or rubbing my
forefinger against my pinky or twisting the gold band on my middle
finger – holding onto myself like I’M the only lifeline
bridge in the gap between reality on my own two feet and the atomic
loud of bliss and noises and sounds and feelings of fleeting rushing
through my veins.
…
… and I’m avoiding eye contact. Not
because I’m not listening to what you’re saying but because I’m
listening to the sound of my own voice – hoping that through your voice
you can’t hear that it’s two octaves too high and on the verge of
breaking because my palms are sweaty, and I somehow forgot to speak with
anything behind my words other than insecurity.
My anxiety feels like fire.
Unexplainably hot and rash and
frustrating. As I gnaw the inside of my cheek as if a solution to this
feeling is varied between my teeth and gums. It feels like drowning but
it feels like burning and it feels like f*cking forever …
I imagine my feet moving with trails of
dust behind them like in those cartoons because somehow I’m moving
faster than the 60 seconds they’ve allowed in a minute – all the while
I’m just playing catch-up on the stopwatch. It doesn’t add up like it
did in high school mathematics – I can’t carry the one and find the
square root of the problem, because most of the time, THERE IS NO PROBLEM.
There is no life or death situation – there is no rhyme or reason, there are just FEELINGS and I’m feeling all of them at once.
…
Some days are better than others.
Some days are worse. But they’re just days … and I’ve got more where they came from.
~ Meghan Rienks
Man kidnaps one-year-old daughter, then kills daughter and himself
Sheriff: Man kidnaps one-year-old daughter, then kills daughter and himself
Holmes County Sheriff Willie March tells local media that deputies were told 23-year-old Lavonte Lloyd kidnapped the child Thursday morning from her mother’s home in Cruger and fled in a pickup truck. He was chased across Leflore County and into Sunflower County before his truck ran into a ditch near Moorhead. March says that’s when the man shot and killed the girl and himself.
March says the girl was about a year old.
Charlie Luckett of the Holmes County Chancery Clerk’s office says a woman named Kimberly Outlaw filed a domestic violence petition Monday against Lloyd. She says the case wasn’t heard before Lloyd’s death.
Wednesday, July 4, 2018
Hungarian Dresses
This is a Photo, of a Traditional Dress, Hungarian Ladies wore. Deborah's ancestry is Hungarian. I am very proud to be Hungarian. I am even more thankful to be part of the family of God. I have many porcelain ornamental dishes, and hand embroidered pillowcases and table cloths that are fully Magyar. My only great regret is not having passed on the language to my children. Some of the reasons for this failure is that I worked for a number of years while the children were young, and my husband is not Hungarian. Also sadly, the relative base did not exist here, which could have enforced the language. One of my daughters had a speech impediment, so I was glad that she even learned the one language common to us, English. I truly tried, but I have been unsuccessful.
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