I love Kim Rhodes. Like REALLY love her. Part 2

Stolen from Kim Rhodes, cuz she’s brilliant.

For one child who is considering suicide:

Sweetheart, I am so sorry you hurt. I would so like to hold you and rock you and kiss the top of your head and tell you there are voices so much stronger than theirs that you can choose to hear. That the world is so much bigger than their tiny minds. That you will be okay. Don’t go.

I am forty-four years old today. I am a rape victim, a sufferer of bullying, the adult child of an alcoholic, an orphan thanks to one parent who blew his brains out last year and one who died due to his drunken idiocy, a chronic pain sufferer, an addict as a result, the mother of an autistic child, unemployed with zero opportunities on the horizon, I’ve lost my home, my waistline and my ego. And ya know what? I am happy as hell.

I was playing cards with one of my best friends on the planet the other night. We have held each other’s hands through life and death, laughing through tears and making inopportune masturbation or Tarot card references for over twenty-five years. We were both not okay last year, as we walk remarkably similar paths. The other night we were discussing how actually okay we were, in light of everything we had gone through. We weren’t sure how we GOT to “okay”, but we were there and could appreciate it.

In the past, I have not been able to take care of myself. I either waited for someone to do it for me, or I waited until I was so damaged and enraged that I could explode in a ball of fury, annihilating everything in my path, so that I would feel safe again. This, for the record, was not okay. I didn’t really get that, in any moment, I had the power to affect my own life and, well, not to quote at you, but to “change what I can.” I was a victim, a martyr, a rager, a stoic, an actor…. any one of which I thought could make people do what I thought I needed them to do to make me feel okay. Unfortunately, this meant that any cruelty, intended or not, cut me to the core. If someone didn’t react the way I thought I needed, I was destroyed. I was pretty fucking miserable.

My people walk twelve steps, over and over. The first one is admitting I am powerless over alcohol. The work of this step expands and teaches me I’m actually powerless over pretty much everything, which is shocking when you’ve been raised to believe you are God. (If everything is my fault, it must all be my doing. If only God does everything, I must be God. That’s some solid logic, I tell ya!) When I confronted the fact that I might not be the Highest Power, it felt like I was giving something up. My machinations and manipulations I believed made the world dance on strings were hard to cut, as imaginary as they were. I lost my identity. Who was I if not the person trying desperately to make the reflection in your eyes something I could stand?

However the transition into being Me… I have no clue how it happened. I just know I quit worrying about who I was to everyone else. I quit trying to read your mind to find out who you wanted me to be and then molding myself into that shape to receive the approval that would make me feel loved but somehow never really did, since it wasn’t really me being loved. My friend and I agreed that a year ago even, we were sitting in the tunnel, PRAYING for a train so at least we could see some light. Now we’re breathing air and wishing on stars.

The only thing we knew for sure is that we didn’t quit. Now we are here.

It’s not the perfect I thought perfect was. But it’s perfect and I’m IN it. And because I came out of that place, I know it and I know I can come out again. So….

Whatever your pain, whatever you see in the mirror, whatever heartache you know, whatever name you’ve been called, whatever anger is eating you, I’m telling you, you can take power away from it and give it back to yourself again. It will happen if you don’t quit. There is no other option.

I wish my father hadn’t killed himself. I am so grateful I did not make the same choice.

Please stay here. It’s worth it. YOU are worth it.