I saved growing-up for later, as a great honor and nice mystery. I decided to spend no time thinking about it. That makes it a second childhood, because everything is new, quietly terrifying, and brashly beautiful.
Part of me hates poetry, like my child-self did. Things were better straightforward, once upon a time the end. Green tea is good for you. Coffee is a good thing at the right time. Poetry (cryptic words) is a bit of both. Mostly coffee.
A million changes have taken place in me this year, yet I know if I counted them up, the constants would be sure to equal them. Sometimes an ambiguity can be a constant. If you find yourself getting older and more narrowminded, it only requires a quick check in memory to bring back some simple truth, however ambiguous, you once understood perfectly. If it is not too selective a memory, it can only help and encourage you. How many things I let myself forget are things I think I haven't learned! (There I go with the poetry again.)
This year has been like waking up after two weeks of a bad cold and realizing you can breathe and smell food again. I was going to wait until New Year's to say that—probably I will say it again then—I like saying it now.
I still don't feel invincible. There is something else there is no English (or possibly any language) word for. That is me today. It is the kind of feeling you get when you look at the moon in the middle of the day, added to the nighttime phenomena that that great, white light shining out of space is something you and people far away are looking at during the same time, and if it were a mirror—!
No, that's not the feeling. It's a good feeling, but inaccurate as a description. I wish there were ways to explain it all, but as it is, we can't talk in mathematical summations. I can write monstrously long posts, like a person walking leisurely in a maze; it's still a maze.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I have never had more to be grateful for. Two years ago I had a nervous breakdown, the most painful experience I have ever been through. It was psychological pain. The moment it started, if you told me I was going to die, I would have believed you. I didn't know what was happening. Within seconds I felt nothing, complete detachment, the meaning of words stopped creating any reaction in me. Emotionally deaf. I prayed hard and felt nothing, since even words I had always found to be moving were just sounds. For a week I was depressed for no immediate reason at all; it was the result of a long, long buildup of reasons.
God gave me the strength to recuperate. He brought me tremendous hope through my family and the people around me. Since then, too, God has healed me of my anxiety problems. My longterm anxiety is gone—not in the background, not on hiatus, but truly gone! It was gradual, but it happened this year, like something that sneaks away from you and only shocks you with its absence when you finally understand it. It's a miracle to me. You can't explain involuntary mental unhappiness—you can't explain what it feels like to try every single day to think positive and be good and walk upright, yet be tripped up for five years by fear, senseless fear that disguises itself as reality and disables you when you don't expect it. I wish I could explain even that.
What I can and am doing now is speaking plainly. It's out of my comfort zone, for sure; it might make me uncomfortable just reading this, if I hadn't been there. But this isn't about me, no more than any moment of life is. This is about what God did, what He does. When the miraculous happens, you just can't sit still and quiet at home. You go walking, and leaping, and praising God.
He is with you always.
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