Living Proof

This time of year can be very hard for some of us. Many have lost loved ones, leaving them with only an empty chair to look at during the holidays. It grips your heart so tightly, that it feels like you can't breathe. We hold onto the grief tightly too. For whatever reason, most of us prefer that dark feeling -- the grievance that aches our heart. IT's a sense of being able to at least feel anything at all. But what if we changed our mindsets? What if we knew how present and "alive" our deceased loves one were? What if we knew for sure, that they were still around us during very important moments? Remember, the deceased do not miss us. They don't long for anything. There is no time there, so the "missing someone" part is taken out of the equation. Our human minds make us believe that maybe our deceased loved ones miss us, when actually, they already know that we'll be together -- the reassurance of uniting once again. Our lifetime is only but a min...

Ever see one of those posts people plop onto Facebook where it says someone you may know may have an invisible disability of some sort? Most of it is like, anxiety, depression, fibromyalgia or other chronic and sometimes debilitating ailments. As I've written many times before about my dysmenorrhea, I've gotten to the point where I can no longer live with it any longer. These days, it's not only the pain from dysmenorrhea, it triggers my sciatica pain as well. Double whammy. I am not willing to give up 2-3 days of my life per month (which is when the pain is excruciating) in order to nurse this condition or end up in the hospital with Dilaudid -- a medicine ten times stronger than morphine. The main side effect: death from respiratory depression. At that point of pain, you're begging for death. The other night, I watched the clock slip hour by hour as I screamed in pain. 10 o'clock...11 o'clock...1 o'clock...4 o'clock. Madelene finally said, "Let...

“Don’t cry!” my mother said, as she was consoling me last week. I’ve been hearing those words all of my life. To cry was to mean that you couldn’t handle it; you weren’t strong enough, or ‘the best will come along soon’. Some people have this misconception that I’m this hard-ass woman with no emotions whatsoever. I’m cold or unable to feel anything because I appear to be “strong”. I get all types of assumptions made about me all the time. How can I change peoples’ minds? I can’t. People leave lasting impressions---so this is mine: cold, heartless, uncaring and unable to feel. I handle things differently than most. If I get nervous or upset, I’ll sometimes throw in a joke or two, just to make the other person lighten up and laugh a little. To them, this means I’m not caring or that I’m just casting their feelings aside and goofing around. They really don’t know me. It’s hard for me to let go of tears in front of somebody else, but do they know the amount that’s released behind closed d...