Seven years, little ones, seven years. What does seven years mean in the mystery that lies after death? Or even before it: in the far-flung eons of space and time, in a universe so vast and so old the human mind cannot comprehend it, what is a life? My thirty-one years are the fragment of …
Category: Trauma
Jesus and John Wayne
When I started reading Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, by Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, I expected to find the book deeply interesting. What I did not expect was that I would devour the book in three days, that every reading would be undergirded by a …
PMDD Is A Bitch.
PMDD is a bitch. Two good weeks a month then those tell-tale cramps in the side another seed of life launched by a hopeful ovary but to me it signals the opposite and I start to look for the creep the slither the grey fog, red-rimmed like the pollution of a distant battle those firing …
Rage
It's like breaking a poorly set bone so it can reset. And it's going to hurt like hell for a while. And your job is to sit with it and feel the anger. Stop worrying about what's holy. – Brett the chaplain Driving away from my counseling session. I'm not an angry music person. Insistent percussion …
Love Thy Self
"No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church."- Ephesians 5:29 "Breathe in slowly, hold the breath for one second, then exhale slowly," says the psychologist. It is my fourth appointment with her. Up till now our sessions have been intellectual, verbal– honed in on …
The Monster, the Bully, and the Darkness
It's almost like a fairy tale. Once upon a time, there was a princess with a terrible curse upon her. Three weeks out of every month the princess lived an ordinary life. But the fourth week the princess turned into a terrible monster. I can remember when I was in college, engaged to Nate, and …
Broken Brains, Bait-and-Switch Jesus
Last week, my brain broke. It happened in the midst of an ordinary weekend, with my family around me. It wasn't a permanent break, nothing that cannot be mended (hopefully). But when it's your brain, even the tiniest fracture has the feeling of shattering. you are a failure you are failing your children your husband they …