Holistic Surrendering

I am usually never awake for the sunrise. By the time the morning is underway, I am struggling to catch up. The mornings always take my breath away. 

As this year draws to a close, I find myself once again reflecting on the spirit of the holiday season – and my impending birthday. 

Next month will be five years since I tried to kill myself. I never had a plan, but ever since I was a child, I’d always had passive thoughts of death. I once feared death, as many do. Even now, likely because I still do not understand it, I find myself inexplicably drawn to the concept. No, not of suicide. But of the happenings after. 

They say the impulsivity of a schizophrenic, coupled with the irrationality of bipolar, could be enough to send someone flying over the edge if one wrong move is made. That year, so many of them were made. I hated myself at the time. Up until then, I’d always hated myself. 

He tells me not to use the word ‘hate.’ For someone who refuses to acknowledge her own emotions, I find the word off-brand for me. Something about the severity, the weight, of that one word has always pulled me in like a moth to a flame. At least with hatred, particularly toward oneself, there is no denying the fact. It’s a simple, holistic word, albeit a harsh one. 

Today is an in-between. How do I know? I sit, awaiting the rise of the sun, on a day I do not have to be at work. And today, the words don’t come to a screeching halt at the tip of my tongue. Today, the words flow from my mind like honey. Today, I choose to be as lightweight as a honeybee. 

As I sit, awaiting the rise of the sun, I contemplate the last time I could pull myself out of bed by choice. The last time…it was probably years ago. When I was writing the first love letter to my younger self. The start of a grand shift in perspective. 

Not only does healing choose not to be linear, it must also be holistic. For people like me who try to do everything but fall short from the weight of expectations, “holistic” is often buried under thousands of little things. 

For people like me, whose waterfall of words never stops cascading in the mind, it is hard to pluck out the right words for every occasion. I can only do so much to keep up. Perhaps today, I was called to pick up the pen because for once, I am happy today and even if it’s for the briefest flicker of an instant, I won’t question why. I will enjoy it while it lasts. 

For people like me, I weed through a garden to pluck out the right words for every occasion. Today, the flowers bloom. On other days, the garden is rotting and threatens to consume my entire being in decay. 

This year, I have radically accepted. 

My friend, Jordan, passed away earlier this year. I still think about him everyday. I wish I could say I thought about him everyday when he was still in this world, but I carry his legacy with me, as does everyone his light touched. 

When I was meditating in Japan, I brought my ancestors and the souls surrounding me along for the ride. I can’t say I’ve ever been a religious person, nor do I plan to be. But this year, I realized the strength of faith. 

To place belief in something greater than the self, that kind of faith is unshakable. It is unmoving, and it is the anchor to hold us over when the high tide swoops us out to sea. 

Jordan came to me in a dream the night I was stranded alone in Japan. Believe it or not, the conscience thins the boundaries between the world of the breathing and the world thereafter. Whether you believe it or not is a different matter altogether. I believe in what I saw. 

He shared with me his pain, and his reason for leaving. He told me it was his choice to go, even if none of us were ready for him to. I was there once. Sometimes, I go back there, and I feel the emptiness as viscerally as I did locked away in that old house back north. That would’ve been me, and it breaks my heart to think that it could still be me someday. 

But alas, there is only so much we can do to hold the tide. I’ll find you again soon. I just have some matters to take care of in the present before I can join you in the next adventure called the afterlife. 

I heard you, Jordan. I miss you everyday, and you will be with me always. I live for you and I live for me, but on the days I cannot, I live for those before me, for those to come after me, and for those surrounding me now in the present. I will keep doing that, again and again, cycle after cycle, until I live again. 

xxx

This year, I have had to surrender. 

The bipolar swings took me to the highest highs and to the lowest lows. After spending well over a decade in the lowest of lows, the chariot taking me to the highs felt like a welcome surprise. They don’t tell you that mania is just a band-aid of security until the illusion dies. 

Psychosis has become my best friend. A hitchhiking guest that knocks on the door at the most inconvenient time, but we spend hours, days, just chatting back and forth. The chattering turns to clamoring turns to stupor as we sit and stare at each other because neither will budge. 

The voices are different every year. They’ve become a signature part of my wardrobe. They change with every outfit draped over my body, and they envelop me like skin. These voices are as bright as the colors I pick out from the rack. They ebb and flow like patterns, adorning my mind with colorful complaints and tasteful words. Unlike clothes, I do not pick the voices. Rather, they claim me and I have to choose how to accessorize them on my body. Will I embody my psychosis today? Stare at the wall for hours? Can I push through and triumph instead and wear the voices like a victor’s crown?

For someone with eyesight as terrible as mine, I see quite a lot. Often, it is a trick of the light. But other times, the undulating shadows catch my peripheral vision and spike my heart rate. Someone is following me home. Someone is trying to break in. Someone…always someone…is out there trying to kill me. 

Now, if I truly didn’t fear death, why does the paranoia tear me apart so?

Maybe a small part of me doesn’t want to die as badly as I think I do. Maybe this Pandora’s box of a body that I was blessed with does contain the tiniest sliver of hope inside somewhere. Maybe I just haven’t found it quite yet. 

I was always one for sunsets. I love how magnificent the colors are; the seamless transition of the day into the night and the idea that light travels so far just to reach us in this vast expanse of time. Sunrises, I was told, are boring. Anti-climactic if you will. 

I have been told so many things in my life. It is time…

Time I found out such things for myself first. 

xxx 

I sit now with my morning tea, and I await the rising of the sun. It is Monday and I fucking hate Mondays. 

Even so, there is so much time ahead of me. Today, tomorrow, next year. Even if the world ended right now, for this briefest flicker of an instant, I know I died happy. 

These in-betweens don’t come to me often. This indelible state of euthymia maybe only lasts for a week at a time, when I am neither up nor down, neither sideways nor backwards. I always skated by these moments, worrying over when the next episode would destroy me. Waiting, biding, riddled with anxiety. 

I was always told to stop at some point and smell the flowers. I didn’t realize that could mean exploring the garden of words in my mind on the days when the flowers blossom rather than die. 

I know I’m probably not going to feel this way for long, but I haven’t ever relished the excitement of a new year to come. I was always just waiting for the last one to end. 

xxx 

Whether it’s real or not, whether I’m just making up the sickness in my mind, whether you think I have it or not, there are certain things that you can’t lie about. 

You can’t lie about dreaming about your dead friend. 

You can’t lie about mania, about being so wired and euphoric that your body doesn’t need sleep for days. 

You can’t lie about the shapeshifting patterns in the walls when you’ve been staring at the same walls for days. 

You can’t lie about happiness when you’ve spent your whole life searching for the feeling that never existed in you.

This year, I met myself again. A holistic re-introduction to the self, if you will. 

This year, four years after I tried to walk in front of a car because I decided on a whim I wanted to kill myself, I finally stood up again. 

And this year, I realized. 

I am ready to choose life again. 

Namu shinnyo. Amen.