A Short Love Letter

I love you, I don't say it lightly... I really do love you.  I find myself thinking about how you are doing every day, every night.  I find myself wanting to tell you all the good things that happened in a day.  I find myself wanting to talk to you about anything and everything.  And then I remember that you decided to not be part of that.  I remember that there are things you must work on.  I remember how you feel and it hurts.  It hurts because I know you are hurting, it hurts because all I want is for you to be truly happy and I know that you are not.  It hurts because I can still see us working through all the crap that life can throw at us and be successful.  It hurts because I wish you could see yourself through my eyes, then maybe you could see that you are not alone.  It hurts because you are in a place where you can't see it.  It hurts because I know that you hurt that you have not had the right people around you for a long time.  It hurts because I know that you know I wouldn't just leave, I would stay, but because of the things you have done in the past you feel you are not worthy of such love.
When I say I love you, I mean I am here for you.  I mean I am not going anywhere.  I mean that I don't really care how hard things get, I will stick it out.  I mean I won't abandon you, I mean I won't judge you.  I mean I will forgive you, do my best to understand you.  I mean I am not going anywhere.  I wish you would see that, I wish you would stop punishing yourself.  I wish you would realize that we all make mistakes and that we can all learn from them.  I wish you would care about you just as much as I care, then you would know that you don't need to self-punish.  Then you would know to not put yourself in situations that make you feel worse.  Then you would value yourself enough to go towards what you really want.
I love you and I wish you loved yourself just a tiny bit of what I love you.  I wish you would understand what love truly is and would start to cherish it more.  I have already forgiven you, I wish you would forgive yourself too and give yourself another chance.  I love you and I wish you loved yourself too.

The Broken Man

There was once a broken man,
he walked alone in the night sky,
full of fear and despair,
looking to be loved,
looking to be nurtured,
looking to be accepted,
thinking he was not worthy,
thinking he would never find the love he was seeking,
A day came when he asked God
to send him that love he didn't know existed,
shortly after she showed up,
with a sweet smile and the sweetest look,
with a patience he has never seen before,
she showed him that he could be loved,
she showed him that he could be nurtured,
she showed him that he could be accepted,
she showed him that there could be light,
she showed him that he didn't need to walk alone in the night,
he had finally found what he had desperately been seeking for,
God had finally answered!
but then that wretched fear kicked in,
the doubt started to fill his head,
looking for some clarity in the midst of chaos
he asked his lady: why do you love me?
and with a smile she answered: because I have no reason not to.
And then he knew that there was never going to be another night when he would walk alone.

The Night Sky

Out in the night sky

I look for you,

I wonder if you look for me too.

It does not matter who comes and goes

The only one I want is you.

Maybe one day you will have the courage

The courage to realize that this is where you belong

The courage to forgive yourself

The courage to start over

The courage to give our love another chance 

Until then, I will always look for you out in the night sky,

Hoping that you are looking for me too.

For you

I didn’t know I could open myself up to love again,
And then I met you,
I didn’t know I could find someone who I could call my partner,
Someone who would walk side by side with me,
Someone who would share the road with me,
And then I met you,
It all seemed like a dream come true,
And I never realized that most of your life
Dreams had turned to nightmares at the moment they seemed the happiest,
The fear of the dream becoming a nightmare made you want to run
Run before it hurt you,
Run because you couldn’t deal with that hurt again,
And in trying to run, you hurt me,
It was easier to blame yourself than to be hurt again,
It was easier to run than to confront your fears,
It was easier to make yourself believe I needed you more than you needed me,
The thing is my love that the dream only became a nightmare because you pushed it that way,
The thing is my love that I never allowed you in my life because I needed you,
I allowed you in my life because I loved you,
And it is that love that would have never allowed this dream to become a nightmare,
Too bad that you were unable to see it...

The stigma of mental illness, it needs to stop.

A few days ago I found out that one of the people I love suffers from a serious mental illness.  It was amazing to me that until I learned some of their history from family members I would have never really known that they were suffering from this.
Everything they described to me points to bipolar disorder, so off I went and did research, looked back at past behavior I had observed.  Times when I said: "you have way too much energy today" or thought to myself: "they were so happy yesterday and today they won't get out of bed."  I was ignorant of it, just like many other people, so I didn't think much of it other than that maybe they were just going through a little funk.
It was not until the behavior started to seem more out of control than usual that I realized something was wrong but I didn't know what it was.  You see, people with bipolar disorder will seem pretty normal to you when they are manic and all you have ever seen is their mania.  They tend to hide away when they are depressed so that no one will see their low.  They can get irritable when something does not go how they planned it.
By the time I found out, the only people who knew about it were close family and that close family had gotten frustrated and tired because they didn't know how to help anymore.  What was sad though is how many people on my support system pretty much said that this was this person's problem and not mine.  I understand that they all love me, that they all want me to be ok, and that they all know how much this is affecting me.  But I found it cruel that people would just say "turn your back and walk away."
That is the problem we unfortunately face with mental illness these days... and then I wondered if they would have done the same if the person suffering from it was me.  Would they have said that it is my problem and I had to get out of it on my own?  Would they have just walked away and not help?
How bad does it have to get before someone actually takes the time to help out?  Why do we have to wait so long to figure it out?  Right now I am wondering myself why it is that I didn't see it before, I am wondering what I could have done differently because maybe a lot of what has happened could have been avoided.  I am now aware of how bad this is and I am scared to death that something worse could happen.
I am aware of how many people have committed suicide due to this illness, I am aware of how many people have committed suicide due to any mental illness out there, and now that it has been something close to me I wonder how much pain they must have felt.  I wonder how hopeless they were that they couldn't reach out.  I wonder how many of their families tried to help but because they were not aware of what was happening they couldn't get them the treatment necessary and felt like there was no other choice but to give up and so their loved one felt the same way.
I have read several articles so far, posts from people dealing with the disorder.  Most of them tried to keep it hidden, they hid their lows and only showed their highs.   They went through several different medications before they found the one that would work.  They went off their medication when they felt better, only to end up feeling worse.  They all had different ways in which the disease showed in their life, but they all agreed on one thing:  None of them would have been able to do it without people supporting them and that they would have gotten help sooner had they not felt so embarrassed about it, had there not had been stigma over it.
I wonder if they all would have suffered less if we were all more compassionate about this.  Trust me, I know that you cannot help someone who does not want to be helped, that is the first step, they need to want it.  But they also need to know that asking for help is not a bad thing.  That they are going to have people on their corner who know how frustrating and tiresome it can be to deal with the illness but that will have the patience to go through their recovery process.  If they don't have that, chances are they will never get help.
We need to back up just a little and stop this "it's their problem" crap.  The whole "until they are diagnosed, I am not going to excuse the behavior," it is not about excusing a behavior, it is about finding out how to help so that the behavior is not repeated.  It is about finding out what can be done because somewhere in there there's a person who is suffering and who is unable to cope with their disease, who has grown tired of their loved ones turning their backs on them because they don't know how to help anymore.  Who thinks that they are all alone in the world and no one will ever accept them the way they are, but who would fly so high if only they had a good support group.
I have always said that we should work not on preventing suicide but preventing depression, the world would be a much better place if we did that.  If we took the time to say: "hey, it is ok to ask for help, if there is something you are struggling with, please come and talk to me, I am here." or "if you are getting too overwhelmed please don't hesitate to call, I am a phone call away."  But we don't, instead we wait until they are so overwhelmed that they already have the suicidal thoughts.  Instead we wait until they are already hurting themselves before we open our eyes.  And yes, I do know that not all suicides could be prevented, some people go through life hiding their mental illness so well that it is hard to know they ever need help, but if we see it, if we find out that there is something wrong and that maybe there is something, maybe just one more thing we could do about it... Why not do it? Why judge them?  Why not come to them from a place of love and compassion?  Imagine how many more people would come out and ask for help if we didn't have that stigma, how many lives would be saved and how many less people would suffer.
My prayers are with all those who have or have had a loved one go through the battle that mental illness is.  I now understand a little of what you go through.  I understand the stress and the frustration.  I understand the hopelessness that can arise from it.  I say hang in there, make sure you have a good support group of your own and until you feel like you have done everything you can to help, don't give up on them.  I can tell you that they often feel more like a burden to those around them, so in a way they are also feeling your pain.  Talk to them from a place of love and compassion, communicate in that manner and let them always know that they matter, that you always want them around.  Sometimes it might not help, but at the end of the day it is all about you being able to say: I tried and I am glad I did, regardless of the outcome.

Love is not enough.

I came up with this pyramid a very long time ago.  I believe I was 18 years old and I needed to put together a presentation for one of my classes.  When I came up with it and did my presentation the other people in the room looked at me like I had completely lost it.  I was talking about relationships and why I believed people had successful relationships.  I focused more on romantic relationships than anything else, however with the passing of the years I have realized that this pyramid can be applied to any relationship you will ever encounter.

I have not written a post in a while, but this one came to me yesterday as I was speaking to a new client.  In my spiritual line of business I come across many different questions, people want to always make sure they are doing the right thing, but the questions that most frequently get asked are relationship ones.  I have yet to have a relationship question that wouldn't be answered or solved with this one pyramid.  I think someone was trying to point this out to me when I was 18 years young and until a few years ago I thought of it just as a thing I had come up with for a Speech class where no one else really got what I was trying to say (maybe it was that back then I didn't speak English as well as I do know... Who knows?).

Anyhow, my client yesterday reminded me of this very important pyramid and I felt I needed to write and express myself about it again.  You see, with every single relationship you will ever encounter, whether it is a romantic relationship, a friendship, or a business relationship; the basis for each of them is COMMUNICATION.  Yes, I put that word in CAPS because it is the most important part of any relationship.  Without it, you have nothing! Absolutely nothing!  Most of my clients have all these relationship issues and the more I help them, the more I realize none of them are communicating with the person they are having issues with.  It is either because the other person is not listening, or because they are not finding the right words to express themselves and so they end up arguing.

However, most of the people I have spoken to focus on one thing and one thing only: LOVE.  The feeling that you love that person more than anything else and therefore everything else does not matter.  Here is the thing though: Love is not enough, it never is, it never will be.  The reason why love is not enough is because (from a spiritual perspective) we live in a plane of existence that is guided and controlled by logic and love has very little logic attached to it.  In this plane of existence we need trust and respect to build a relationship and those two things do not come without communication.  If someone is not communicating with you, the first thing you are going to logically do is wonder why, the next thing you will logically do is try to find out if they are hiding something.  That is the plane we exist in now.

Look at the pyramid just for a little bit and think about how you came to trust and respect each of the people in your life, no matter who they are.  The first thing was that you were able to communicate with them.  When it comes to your parents, you trusted them because they were able to communicate with you from the time you were a baby and that trust led to the respect you have for them.  Those people with parents who never did that, have very little respect and very little trust for their parents.  Think about your friendships, business and romantic relationships; they all started by talking, by communicating somehow.  Everything else gets build on top of that.

When two people don't communicate and they love each other deeply; the top of that pyramid is too big and too heavy that once that base is gone, when it starts to crack or fall apart everything else crumbles with it.  You lose respect and trust almost immediately.  Think about this as the foundation of a house, the house being love and the rest of the pyramid being the foundation of the house.  Once that foundation starts to crumble (when we stop communicating) what happens to the house? And what happens if the house is a huge house? It crumbles down and gets destroyed.  The pieces will still be there, but the house is no longer useful, it is no longer livable.

So why does this happen? Why do we stop communicating with the people we love? Why do relationships tend to fail at this so often?  In my line of work I have realized that when people are in a romantic relationship they tend to get comfortable with the person they are with.  The level of being comfortable is so big that they forget to take care of the foundation of that relationship.  By the time they realize that something is wrong, usually this is the time when there is one argument after the next, their foundation is so broken that they need to start to rebuild it.  Unfortunately, most people aren't willing to do that.  For many, the easiest thing to do is to build a new house with someone else.  For others, they think the house should still be standing because of the love they have for each other, but at the end of the day they are left leaving in a broken house and with a lot of pain.

Love is not enough, relationships take constant work.  We cannot let ourselves be immersed into our own worlds and forget about the other person.  It does not have to be something where two people come together and become one.  Each person can be their own being, that's actually healthy.  However, we must always acknowledge that the other person wants to share who we are and what we do with us and we should be willing to reciprocate that just a little.  If we could do that, then the foundation of that wonderful house will always be strong and no matter what happens, it will never allow the house to crumble.

PS:  I tried to match the colors which spiritually represent each of the things that are on the pyramid.  If you notice communication and trust share the color blue, while respect and trust share the color gray.  Isn't it interesting that they are all in some way tied together?  You cannot build one without the other and you cannot build any of them without the bottom one.  Blessed Be!