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!

Victim/Survivor's Strength

When having been a victim/survivor of domestic abuse/violence there are too many times when you don't feel you're strong enough.  There are way too many times when the abuser will tell you how weak you are, how you are nothing without them, how you are insane and everything is your fault.  There are times when the abuser will have gained enough power to make you believe everything they say it's true.

If you are lucky enough to leave or think about leaving and ask for help, the majority of people will not believe what you have gone through.  There will be times when people, other than the abuser, will tell you that you are crazy.  There will be times when the abuse you have endured will be belittled because he didn't leave a physical mark but just a psychological one.  There will be times when the abuser will have a new victim or other victims and those victims will take his side.

There will be times when even the people you love will not understand why you have changed so much, why you are afraid to go out, why if it was so bad you didn't leave before or why if it was so bad you went back many times.  If you are so scared for your life then why go anywhere near them? 

All of it will make you feel like you don't matter, that you don't have the strength to keep going.  I'm here to tell you that you're stronger than you think and than anyone else thinks.  You don't have to hurt others to make yourself feel better, that alone shows amazing strength.  You don't blame anyone else for your actions and mistakes, you take responsibility for them.  

Because you have learned that the majority of the time the system is not on your side, that most people do not understand unless they have gone through it themselves and that those who have gone through it like to keep it hidden because there is still so much stigma and victim blaming about it, you go through it on your own.  You deal with the ups and downs and the fear mostly on your own.  

 

I'm here to tell you that you're still here warrior, you are somehow making it on your own.  You keep going somehow, you keep going without having to victimize another person in order to make your case stronger.  You keep going without manipulating others with lies.  You keep going without blaming others for what have happened even when you have all the right to do so.  You are not just a survivor, you are a warrior because you keep fighting and that makes you stronger than you think you are. 

What If...

What if tomorrow every piece of technology would cease to work, every piece of paper would cease to exist, everything created by man to identify each of us would go away and our memories of its existence would go with them?  How would we then know who we are and who our family is? 

What about if we all were to wake up tomorrow and no longer have knowledge of societal rules?  What if we were to wake up and all the rules were gone and we the rights and wrongs of the world no longer had a meaning? 

We would wake up in a world where family is the people you know and love, the people who have been there for you every day supporting you and caring about you.  There wouldn't be a piece of paper tying you to someone you don't identify with but only your memories of the ones you love would dictate who you decide to tie yourself to. 

If we got a clean slate from the definitions of right and wrong as we know them now, maybe we would then stay out of each other's way.  Maybe we would be more tolerant of each other and possibly even love each other.  Maybe it is not human nature that is jealous or hateful, but society coming together like it has.  Maybe it is society as a whole the one that has divided people throughout the years with these pre-conceptions it has formed that take generations to change. 

Maybe if we were to erase the memory of what society is, of what society has told us right and wrong are, of all the records showing us whatever history supposedly says is right and wrong.  If we are only left with the memory of the ones we love, maybe we can have a happier humanity.  One where there is less violence, more tolerance, joy, and love. 

I saw a mouse

I saw a mouse,

It was a brown mouse

And scrutiny was used

Had it been a black mouse

Violence would have been used

Had it been a white mouse

No questions would have been asked 

And the little white mouse would have been let go

I saw a mouse...