The Hand of God.

Before I get into commentary concerning a few other matters of concern to the country, I wanted to share a personal anecdote from this past summer, when I was unfortunately admitted to the hospital due to a life-threatening medical emergency for two weeks.

I say "unfortunately," but there is some good that came out of this.
I get to share a miraculous intervention in my life with the public at large.

I was taking a relatively decent dose of Lithium at that time, I believe it was June.
I was not drinking enough water and staying as hydrated as I should have been.
Also, it was, you know, just plain old hot.

As a result, for a few days leading up to the ambulance ride, my Lithium levels had begun to spike without me knowing it. I had started to become weak. I was vomiting, and couldn't hold food down. Not even fruit.

In that same time, I had also began to experience psychosis, including visual hallucinations (seeing that I was somewhere else while I was just in my bed, and seeing swirling colors on my ceiling), as well as delusions (thinking something totally different was going on in the apartment and neighborhood that I was in).

When I came out of these states, I would hardly remember what happened, or just chalk it up to a dream (It wasn't). Unfortunately, I was never able to connect all of the above dots to Lithium toxicity and act promptly to address the situation in time.

One day, the levels and dehydration caught up to me.

That afternoon, I was at the apartment with my grandmother.
There was a local power outage, and the box fan in my room was out of commission.
To make matters worse, my room, believe it or not, had no windows in it. It just had a door that opened up to the rest of the apartment, and windows toward the ceiling that opened up to the neighboring kitchen area.

All you need to know right now is that I was sprawled out on my mattress in scorching summer heat.

Meanwhile, on the stoop downstairs, my grandmother, whom I love dearly, was having one of her usual hours-long chats with her lady friends. Anyone who knows her knows that she loves to talk, and will talk ad nauseam with her friends and family for hours on end, be it on the phone, with company on the couch, or, as was the case this time, with friends on the front stoop in the summertime. One might jokingly say that it might take an act of God to get her to give herself a rest, as she just really, really loves to talk.

As stated above, she was on the porch, in the middle of one of her conversations with her friends, while she heard a small, childlike voice calling to her, "Grandma, grandma!"

She asked her friends, "Did y'all hear that?"

The replied, "No, Amanda. We didn't hear anything..."

The conversation continues for another few minutes, and the voice intrudes again.
Again, only my grandmother hearing it.

"Are y'all sure you didn't hear that?

"Yeah, Amanda! We don't know what you're talking about!"

The conversation continued one last time, with the voice intruding once more.
Again, my grandmother being the only one able to hear it.

She says, "Hold on for just one minute. I'm going upstairs."

(There were no other grandparents with grandchildren around within earshot at the tiny, quiet end of the block.)

Lo and behold, my grandmother finds me unconscious, unresponsive, sprawled out on my bed in the heat, heartbeat and and breathing totally out of control. My shirt was soaked in sweat, and my eyes bulging like a cartoon character.

The paramedics arrived, stabilized me, and quickly had me admitted to the hospital.
As the Lithium levels dropped in my system, I continued to experience hallucinations for a few days, until I was Lithium-free.

I had a few complications from the incident, such as my own body attacking my right calf (which rehabbed without help a week to two later), and another complication too messed up to mention here.

All things considered, I believe the following points to be fact:

1) My grandmother heard and listened to the voice of the Lord.

2) If not, she would have stayed outside for an indefinite period of time, enjoying the late afternoon/evening swapping stories with her friends on the stoop.

3) Point blank: Had she not listened,  judging by the condition that they found me in, I wasn't going to last much longer, and I would be dead right now.

I thank God each and every day.

"Cultivating Gratitude and Joy"

Been reading from a book called The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are.

An excerpt was fitting.



Scarcity And Fear Of The Dark

The very first time I tried to write about what gets in the way of gratitude and joy,  I was sitting on the couch in my living room with my laptop next to me and my research memo journal in my hands. I was tired and rather than writing,  I spent an hour staring at the twinkle lights  hanging over the entryway into my dining room. I'm a huge fan of those little clear, sparkly lights. I think they make the world look prettier, so I keep them in my house year-round.

As I sat there flipping through the stories and gazing at the twinkle lights, I took out a pen  and wrote this down:

Twinkle lights are the perfect metaphor  for joy. Joy is not a constant. It comes to us in moments- often ordinary moments. Sometimes we miss out  on the bursts  of joy because we're too busy chasing down extraordinary moments. Other times  we're so afraid of the dark that we don't  dare let ourselves enjoy the light.

A joyful life is not a floodlight of joy. That would eventually become unbearable.

I believe a joyful life is made up of joyful moments gracefully strung together by trust, gratitude, inspiration, and faith.

For those of you who follow my blog, you'll recognize this as the mantra for my gratitude posts on Fridays that I call TGIF. I turned this quote into a small badge, and and part of my gratitude practice is a weekly post about what I'm Trusting, what I'm Grateful for, what Inspires me, and how I'm practicing my Faith. It's incredibly powerful to read everyone's comments.

Joy and gratitude can be very vulnerable and intense experiences. We are an anxious people and many of us have very little tolerance for vulnerability. Our anxiety and fear can manifest as scarcity. We think to ourselves:

-I'm not going to allow myself to feel this joy because I know it won't last.
-Acknowledging how grateful I am is an invitation for disaster.
-I'd rather not be joyful than  have to wait for the other shoe to drop.

Fear of the Dark

I've always been prone to worry and anxiety, but after I became a mother, negotiating joy, gratitude, and scarcity felt like a full-time job. For years, my fear of something terrible happening to my children actually prevented me from fully embracing joy and gratitude. Every time I came too close to softening into sheer joyfulness about my children and how much I love them, I'd picture losing everything in a flash.

At first I thought I was crazy. Was I the only person in the world who did this? As my therapist and I started working on it, I realized that my "too good to be true" was totally related to fear, scarcity, and vulnerability.

Knowing that those are pretty universal emotions, I gathered up the courage  to talk about my experiences with a group of five hundred parents who had come  to one of my parenting lectures. I gave an example of standing over my daughter watching her sleep, feeling totally engulfed in gratitude, then being ripped out of that joy and gratitude by images of something bad happening to her.

You could have heard a pin drop. I thought, Oh, God. I'm crazy and now they're all sitting there like, "She's a nut. How do we get out of here?" Then all of a sudden I heard the sound of a woman toward the back starting to cry. Not sniffle cry, but sob cry. That sound was followed by someone from the front shouting out, "Oh my God! Why do we do that? What does it mean?" The auditorium erupted in some kind of crazy parent revival. As I had suspected, I was not alone.

Most of us have experienced  being on the edge of joy only to be overcome by vulnerability and thrown into fear. Until we can tolerate vulnerability and transform it into gratitude, intense feelings of  of love  will often bring up  the fear of loss. If I had to sum up what  I've learned  about fear and joy, this is what I would say:

The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It's our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows.


This one's for my battle buddies out there.