Epitaph

Hello everyone. I know it has been a very long time since I have been on the blog. I hope you are all well. I have been out of the loop for a while and I need to start getting back into the real world. I had a miscarriage in January that caused me to shut down and I forgot all the things that I had started that were important to me. While I am still not dealing the best, I am ready to get back to who I was and who I started to be. I updated my Facebook. I also wanted to post my "epitaph"  that I wrote. It is the first time I have written about the miscarriage and I know that I will not heal unless I start to share and think. So, if you could please read this as a gift to me I would appreciate it. Love, Mags

                It’s amazing to love someone that will never actually be. That’s how I felt about you. I loved you before I knew you were there, I loved you for the short time you were there and I continue to love you long after you were gone.

                When does a person have a soul? It’s a question that has been asked over and over by politicians, religions, activist, feminists and scientists. But I know. It’s the second someone loves you, and it’s all the time before that and all the time after that.  You never have to breathe, or think or feel to have a soul. The person who loves you gives you the soul. And I loved you. I wanted to you. And I still want you.

I only held you in my womb for a short time and only knew you were there for four days before you were gone. Yet I knew you. I’ll never know if you have blues as deep as the sea or brown eyes like me that are like the covers of long epic books that hold hundreds of stories. I’ll never know the curves of your lips and the possibility that would have been spoken upon them. Or if your hair would have been luscious and thick or light and baby fine. But I know you. I know you loved me, I know you wanted to live and you wanted to breathe the same I air I breathe. You wanted to be held, safely and tightly in warm arms. And you would have been. You would have known pain in this life but I would have held you through it. Wherever you walked, I would have been there beside you until my last breath and beyond.

I don’t know why you couldn’t stay but I don’t blame you. My body was not prepared to be your vessel and my body had to let you go. My heart and my mind will always hold you, even though my body slowly, traumatically bled you out. I pray it was peaceful for you and that you are wrapped in some warm place now. That you didn’t exist to be just because I failed to let you live.  I cannot imagine that you would be created, so beautiful even though unseen to fade away like the sun on a warm day never to rise again on some other horizon.

There’s no ceremony to say good-bye to you. There’s stone that says “here lies a beautiful soul.” There’s no black dress and tear sodden tissues left over. You are nothing to the rest of the world, but me. To me you are still everything.

I have prayed for a lot of things in my life, but I never knew the meaning of prayer until I curled my body tight around you, and begged for you stay. I pleaded with whatever god wanted to listen. I prayed to you as if you could hear, promising anything as long as you would stay with me. I promised you knowledge, all that I know and all that I would learn for you. I promised you art and color since that’s what you would have given me. I promised you travel to anywhere your fancy would take you, because I know the taste of culture in the air. I promised you music; that you would know the sweet simple notes that could move you to tears or to smiles or to dancing. I promised you love. The love to keep you and hold you, the love to protect you, the love to kiss you, the love to teach you and the love to one day let you go, readied into the world.

But you’re gone. Perhaps there will be another, but you will be my first love. You will always be the hole in my heart. I will always miss you so much that longing will not be an emotion but a physical pain. I will always feel you and will dream of you. I know someday I will have to let you go, to take away the black veil of mourning from my eyes and see the world as full again. You died in the dead of winter, but I will plant you into the early spring so that the seasons will carry you on the wind instead of stirring and stuck into my nightmares. You need to know that you are always loved and are always wanted. My empty womb is your epitaph and my empty heart is your sepulcher.     

Hi Friends, I need help

This is Megan. I know that it's been a really long time but I am going through a very tough time. My mental health is going down and I'm going to check into the hospital on Monday.

But I do not want this time wasted. We need to get the sticky note project up and going. I just need a lot of help and maybe you guys meeting independently of me and get things going. I am really sorry.

Thank you,
mags

Amazing Speech by an Amazing Friend

Hi all,
So, I have this amazing friend named Brandalyn. She's been a constant support and is an amazing mentor. I admire her with everything I have. Well, today she shared a speech with me that she gave to the rotary club. I share it here, with her permission of course. Please let me know what you think. I think we can use parts of it for the SNP CC mission statement.

Changing Minds Changing Lives

Brandalyn

In our society, we do not punish people with cancer. We do not tell paraplegics that they could walk if they really wanted to. We don’t humiliate people with heart disease or disparage those who suffer from other types physical maladies. We have laws to protect people from being discriminated against on the basis of race, creed, religion,  sexual orientation, physical disability, age, and gender yet in our society there remains a pervasive form of discrimination; the stigmatization of mental illness.

            Popular culture depicts those who live with mental illness as: ignorant, lazy, immoral, or dangerous individuals. In our colloquial language we use disparaging terms such as psycho, nut case, whack job and many other inappropriate labels. The black heart of any form of discrimination is fear and ignorance. These assumptions overlook an important reality.  According the American Psychiatric Associate, in any one year period, as many as one in four or 50 million Americans have a clearly diagnosable mental illness.  With appropriate treatment, as many as 8 in 10 psychiatric patients recover and enjoy the return of  mental health.

            Why is mental illness so prevalent?  Certain individuals are born with a chemical or biological predisposition to certain types of psychiatric disorders. However, a biological predisposition alone does not guarantee that the individual will develop a psychiatric illness.  Intervening environmental factors may preclude the development.  Other individuals are born with no innate predisposition will develop a mental illness regardless of biological factors. Why?

            We live in a world where one in every four girls are sexually abused before the age of fourteen and one in six boys are abused before the age of sixteen. One in every six women are the victims of attempted or completed rape.  Domestic abuse exists in 30% of American households and 5.2 million people a year suffer or witness a trauma so severe that they experience symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. (APA)   These events may be the impetus for mental illness in individuals where no chemical or biological predisposition exists. The greatest tragedy brought on by the stigma of mental illness is that only one in five of these individuals seek treatment. 

            I have been a consumer of mental health services at GLCMH for two years now and I am, with the support of my therapist, my psychiatrist, and the various educational opportunities I have been involved with, working toward my recovery.

            I was diagnosed in 2000 with mental illness and it has drastically changed my life. At that time,  I was employed by a local engineering firm, where I held a position of responsibility. I was recently married and my husband, my two sons and I enjoyed a rather privileged lifestyle. My husband, although he was not employed, came from a propionate local family and we enjoyed many advantages.  All of that changed when I fell ill.

            I found very little support even less compassion. The people who I loved and those I called friends attempted to shame and humiliate me out of my illness.  They considered the symptoms inappropriate behavior rather than an illness.

            I have endured what I never could have imagined myself surviving, but I have.  I have also come to believe that my mental illness itself is a gift. It has taught me to identify the people who truly love and support me.  It has taught me to prioritize what is  valuable and throughout this journey of self discovery I have learned that I am not alone, even when I feel lonely.  There are many people with whom share the experience of living with mental illness and we are doing so with dignity and pride.

            People who live with mental illness are extraordinary people with extraordinary challenges and yet, we are so much more than that.  I am amazed by the many intelligent, articulate, talented individuals I have met, who share similar stories.  As I mentioned, I consider my illness, itself, a gift because of the insight I have gained through the intense, extreme and sometimes painful introspection that comes with living with a psychological disability.

   

               

    For now I’m just being told to embrace the paradox… What makes sense is embracing what doesn’t make sense. I hate to love what I do to myself and yet I love it, anyway. Part of why I cut is because I don’t have the words to give it a voice. If I had the right words or thoughts, I wouldn’t have the need. I don’t cut because I want to-- but because I have to….  My scars are never going to get any better and they’re never going to go away. I just wear my scars on the outside. And I’ve made peace with that. People will either accept me or they won’t… My mettle has been tested by one of the most difficult challenges of the human experience.  It has shown me, as Hemingway says, how to grow strong at the broken places.

The Storm

I got to see him, the son I lost in the storm and the son I never had in the  morning dew. His eyes were still serious dark brown, with a unyielding sparkle of humor. His porcelain skin was still sprinkled with summer freckles. And he embraced me in the rays of the sunshine as if we had never been separated. It was as if he was never violently whipped from my arms by the winds of a hurricane and made invisible by side way sheets of rain and opaque clouds. Our short reunion brought out the sun and restored power to a devastated town because for a moment we were in the calm eye of the storm. We were safe for a moment from flying debris threatening to knock us off our feet. I knew he couldn't stay stay with me so I could protect him from the dangers the winds swept our way but it was still a lightening shock to separate from him again as the eye of the storm passed us by. As the hurricane returned I had rain in my eyes.

I wanna thank my friend Sarah for being with him through that wonderful bittersweet ten minutes and to my husband for making it happen.

Raw

Hi friends,
If any of you have been following the Mags Sharp art page on facebook you'll know that I'm experimenting with raw art journals. Check out the page to see it. But I was sitting here thinking about the way I feel right now, trying to come up with a term for it and I guess that "raw" is really the best word for it. I feel raw, as if I've been rubbed down to nothing. I am not very good at being busy and having a lot of things on  my mind. I like to be productive but I'm being weighed down by a lot of things. First of all is my stepson. I got to see him on Friday and it was a very beautiful thing. He is still a little angel, and he's as gorgeous as ever. But I only had ten minutes with him and saying goodbye was rather painful. And many of you know that my husband and I have been trying to have a baby for years. But it doesn't look like it will happen so we decided to adopt. We are saving the money and waiting, but the waiting seems interminable and the unknowns of what I am going to be in three years or so are driving me crazy.
And with my mental health record, will I be able to adopt? And if I can't, where will I go from there?
It's just the usual things, but with winter coming and not feeling good they are hitting me hard. But we have the sticky note project coming up, and I  need to put myself into that.
My anniversary is next week, four years! Four amazing wonderful years and my stepdaughter helped me pick out a dress for it. She actually is not a bad shopper. She talked me out of this particularly heinous dress into one of that was actually quite nice. Not bad for a six year old.
Well, Going back to feeling raw, after this I am going to post the words to an art piece I did after seeing my stepson. It was an experiment for the raw art and the pictures are posted on facebook but you can't read it fully.

Thanks friends for listening. It's 2am so I hope you're all sleeping, safe and sound.
 

Me against the world

Okay, so I know that the world is not against me but sometimes it feels like it. I am not going to go into detail but most of you know what happened with my stepson. Well, I am still dealing with that and with my in-laws over the same issue. I have tried to do everything right and it turns out wrong.


And then someone in my own family used this very blog against me. All the things I post on here are the truth and most of it is of an artistic nature. I put my papers from my writing class on her, as a sharing tool. But someone found one of the papers and turned it around to make me seem like an uppity judgmental bitch. Which, I haven't judged anyone. The paper was the one about my grandmother, Sydney who was a woman who loved art and was liberal, someone like me. But my search to find out more about her, since she died when my dad was six was turned into something foul, and into untrue rumors.

I am saying this now. This blog is for those who are passionate about art as a healing tool. It is so I can document the journey I am on and share it with people who want to learn. I want it to open up a community like the Sticky Note project is doing. I want it to set an example to those interested in the sticky note project so they can see what it's all about, and what I am all about. If you do not want to use my blog in this way than don't read it. It isn't for you if that's what you want from it.  It's not weapon against me. This person who I am sure is reading this, took something personal and turned it into something shallow.

I am angry, and I feel like I am all alone. I know I am not. I have some wonderful friends out there, amazing ones. And my husband and stepdaughter. And my wonderful mother, who knows me better than anyone in the world and believes in me no matter what I say. I know she won't read this blog but she deserves recognition of being a great listener and a wonderful supporter, along with her twin sister. Thank you to all those who believe in what I am trying to do. Please share this blog sight with your friends and family and link it to your facebook. That way we can all share what needs to be shared.

Loves,
Mags

UPDATES-Please Read

Hey Friends,
I have been out for awhile but one of the reasons is my writing class. It has been very therapeutic and good for me to write some of this stuff, in a different way than before. Please read these and comment as you see fit.

I have changed names, including mine in some of these papers, to protect people and myself.

These papers do have some poetic license. They are true but may be up for discussion. They are my perceptions of the truth. I don't want anyone to feel offended by these papers or what is said. Nothing is aimed at anyone. Some of them may be triggering so please be careful.

Thanks and loves,
Mags