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Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything.
I’m sort of saddened by the loss of my belief in religion. It’s like leaving forever the comfort
of your childhood home, suffused with the warm glows and fond memories. But I do believe we all have to grow up.
ikoi in Japanese means “rest, relax, and relief.”
“We all fall, and it matters. But when the fall is all you have left, it matters a great deal.”
“I was wrong, and I wanted to apologize for that. I never understood you as a child. I didn’t get you at all, and I tried to project onto you my life and my route, and I expected you to take that exact same route. And I’m realizing that it’s not the child’s responsibility to teach the parent who they are. It’s the parent’s responsibility to learn who the child is, and I didn’t do that, and I’m sorry.”
In the deepest, blackest night of despair, if you can get just one pinhole of light…all of grace rushes in.
And I’m thinking what a roller coaster mental illness is. Not just for the patient, but for everyone else involved. It’s a sentence that you’re given, and it’s a life sentence. And there’s all the things that you have to go through: the doctors, the drugs, the violent outbursts, the destruction (literally and emotionally), the police coming to your house, the shame that you live with. It just goes on and on. It’s not like those movies like A Beautiful Mind where someone reaches out and says, “All you need is love.” You know? Love is a given, but it’s a war of attrition. It really is. It’s a
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unbelievable patience and emotional fortitude to survive. That’s what wears you out.
She is currently working on a collection of essays about falling apart, tentatively titled, We Always Knew You Would Be OK,
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That she was not our daughter by any claim of birth, but she was our daughter by every claim of love.
