Rambling thoughts

I just need to write.  I need to create somehow.  I want to play music, but there's no piano.  I want to paint, but while no paints may seem my problem, lack of skill tops that one.  So without any other artistic mediums and not feeling like keeping my thoughts to myself, I turn to my old friend, the blog.

Just the thoughts tumbling forth from my mind.  Such deep thought of late, and I don't even know what it's all saying.  Such profound changes in my life around me, yet a grounding more solid than ever in the created me.  Not the masked me, but the me with a life worth living.  I only really re-found that mask a year ago.  Oh as a teenager I felt it, it crept all over my skin, and, the question-asker that I am, I asked all the questions, and I thought I had all the answers.

Those answers didn't all satisfy, and they led me down some dangerous pathways.  But here I am.  Re-peeling back the sickly covering over my soul.  It's a painful process, that pruning, that stripping away of the safety nets, shields, and walls of steel we place around ourselves.  Those walls that are supposed to keep the bad stuff out?  They end up just hurting.  They don't let the good things in, and they don't let the things inside shine.

I don't do well with stress.  It eats me up on the inside, and it makes it so much easier to act out.  It makes it easier to not take my meds.  It makes it easier to just hide.  But even that, I'm learning.  I'm learning how to deal with it.  I'm learning to open up.  To actually open up, not just with the safe things.  I'm learning who's truly safe.  I'm learning what it means to be listened to, completely, and I'm learning what it means to really listen.

Oh I don't know.  I'm trying.  I'm trying to be positive.  I'm trying to thrive.  There are moments when I'm totally thriving.  I'm succeeding, I'm fighting hard, I'm doing well.  In those moments it's easy to praise God.  It's easy to rejoice in the Lord!  Yet in the moments when I just can't bear it anymore, it's hard.  Finding voice to say "Oh Jesus, help!"  takes so much more effort than I ever knew possible.

But we're surviving, and there are such great things ahead!  I'm counting on that.  On the promises.