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Primitive religion is not believed, it is danced!

Arthur Darby Nock

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
And only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Elizabeth Browning



Sunday, May 28, 2017

Praying for the night

“Like a lot of people with mental illness, I spend a lot of time fronting. It’s really important to me to not appear crazy, to fit in, to seem normal, to do the things “normal people” do, to blend in.
As a defense mechanism, fronting makes a lot of sense, and you hone that mechanism after years of being crazy. Fronting is what allows you to hold down a job and maintain relationships with people, it’s the thing that sometimes keeps you from falling apart. It’s the thing that allows you to have a burst of tears in the shower or behind the front seat of your car and then coolly collect yourself and stroll into a social engagement…

We are rewarded for hiding ourselves. We become the poster children for “productive” mentally ill people, because we are so organized and together. The fact that we can function, at great cost to ourselves, is used to beat up the people who cannot function.

Because unlike the people who cannot front, or who fronted too hard and fell off the cliff, we are able to “keep it together,” whatever it takes.”
                                                                                       S. E. Smith
_______________________________

we are everywhere
the people with flaws

or so the world judges us

the sad people
the anxious ones
the dysregulated ones

we are everywhere
those “crazy” people,
hearing things that aren’t there
believing things that are true (or so we are told0

we cannot be who we are
it is not allowed
at any level

we cannot be needy
we cannot be impulsive
we cannot share those perceptions we know cannot be shared

so we live in our quiet torment,
we are the artful dodgers,
never letting others know of the chaos within

sadly it sneaks out once in a while
that insecurity, that fear, that impulsiveness
and we behave in ways that give us away
we are revealed
and judged
and shamed

there are (of course) those who cannot front
or who hold up the shields until one day they break
crumble
beam me up Scotty

they cannot hide
and are cast out
pushed to the fringe of society
disposable people

judged for the severity of their illness
offered little mercy
by a society that rejects them

as for the rest of us
we keep up the front

each day we use way more energy than most people
for we must live two lives
the one out there, that everyone sees
and the one inside

and so we put one weary foot in front of the other
sometimes dreading the dawn

sometimes praying for the night

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