Typically the words mess and beautiful are not associated. For me, they are. You are entering one of the most private places in my life. The inner room. My sanctuary. My retreat from the noisy world. My transport to creativity.
Here it is…
Doesn’t look much like an inner sanctum, does it?
The chair that holds the mountain of laundry is my writing chair. It’s where I sit and let my mind breathe. It’s where I go for my decompression session of one. As you have already guessed it’s impossible to write in this space when it looks like this. It’s also completely overwhelming to think about where even to start.
I’ve been doing it for years. Washing clothes and piling them in a place that is out of visitor’s view, where I can return later to sort, fold and put away. With five people in the house it’s not that easy and the bigger the pile, the more the stress grows.
It reminds me of my inner turmoil. I can hide it from the outside world for a while. I can close the door to that room so you can’t see inside. But eventually it spills over into other areas and it’s not as easy to hide anymore.
This mess begins to affect my morning routine when I’m getting ready for work. My evening when I come home from a long day. Intimacy with my man as it is an eyesore in our bedroom. I can only step over it, dig through it and make excuses for so long until I’m forced to look directly at it, admit the toll it is taking on my mental, spiritual and emotional health and commit to cleaning it up. It’s the wreckage of my present and it’s ugly.
I have discovered a system for seeing it through from start to finish. It’s called the “circle of serenity.”
I have to get right in the middle of it, hunker down and start sorting. If I stick to it, soon I have neat piles, assigned by owner. Before attempting to put anything away, everything must be sorted and folded. Sounds simple right?
It really isn’t very different from my mind. I have to do the same thing with thoughts and emotions. They pile up as well. Often times requiring sitting down and committing to sorting things out.
There are many other things I would rather be doing, but when I reach the end result I am always grateful for the process.
Ah, that’s the chair I know and love. The one that envelopes me and summons the artist within. My little corner of the world where I can process, meditate and be restored to a healthy place.
What about you? Can you relate to my sabotaging one of the few places I find peace?
But I have been in that place. More than once. Spiritual desolation where God is nowhere to be found. That corner of hell with gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair.
The nurses murmured to each other under fluorescent lighting as I lay shivering on the metal hospital bed, cold. Later, I would learn that they had marveled at my hypothermic, sixty-pound sack of bones, reasoning, “She should be dead.” I was a breach of science; a modern-day miracle. Yet in that profound moment, all I
could think was: “Why can’t I lose any more weight?”
It’s a scary place to be in, this place where you have no one, so you have to become bigger than life itself, in order to carry yourself through the pain. A nine-year-old isn’t very big. And all I wanted was to be small. Because the world told me that thin was beauty. And maybe if I was beautiful, Dad would want to spend time with me.
At night, I dreamt of food. Mum would find me, hunting for imaginary chocolates in my bed. I wanted her to hug me and make the fear go away, but was worried that if I did, my guard would be let down and I’d eat real chocolates, so I stopped hugging her for two years.
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Even A Girl Like Me 