Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

                                       Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

              Walt Whitman

I came across this rock whilst walking my dog. It was sitting unassumingly next to a trash can I pass every day when it caught my eye. Just before my one year old pit lab could pee on it (And it was a close save, mind you. He had is leg lifted.) I bent down to pick it up.

It reads simply, ‘Don’t give up.’  With a semicolon on the top. 

;

I don’t know where it came from or who put it there, but I can honestly tell you that this little rock changed my life today. 

Routine. To do lists. Monotony. Tragically, these have become driving forces of society.

When I find myself tangled in the rat race, the animal inside my ribcage gets restless. Restlessness turns to panic. And panic turns to disease that poisons me from the inside out. 

Depression. Anxiety. Hysteria. Self-destruction. 

Someone once told me to never go anywhere without having an escape plan in place. For much of my life, suicidal inklings were a way of keeping a window unlocked when madness caught fire to my inner room. 

I’m confident that I’m not the only one who’s felt this way. I’m just one of the few who’s willing to admit that underneath the smiles, I sought sick solace in living with one foot out the door. 

We all want to feel that our lives are significant. 

That ‘the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.’ 

Society has led us to believe that unless our verse is in all capitals and dotted with an explanation point it isn’t worth contributing. 

This way of thinking is a trap. It will chain our hands behind our back in cuffs of existential anxiety and the irony is that we need free hands to live a life of contribution. 

Significance cannot be measured. 

We must see that each day, simple interactions present great opportunities to deeply impact each other’s lives. 

Your smile, compliment, or rock might be the courage that someone needs to choose a semicolon over a period. 

By underestimating the gravity of seemingly small actions, we are robbing ourselves and each other of true fulfillment. 

I want my legacy to be like this rock. 

For if generosity and optimism are heady tonic, we should all wake up every morning with the intention of drinking each other under the table in sunshine cocktails. 

Little Lost Girls

 

"The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply because they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings."

J.M Barrie

The window on the left corner of the group therapy room was the only one in the house that could be opened without setting off the alarm. 

That was the rumor we were banking on when we decided to escape through it. 

And we did. At roughly 5 a.m. on a thursday, my roommate Caitlin, and I crept downstairs in our pjs, slid open the window, and clambered out into the misty mountain air. 

We scurried over to the neighboring day program apartments to scribble a cheeky message on the kitchen white board before returning through our window. We tucked ourselves back into bed just in time for wake up call, satisfied with our humble flight. 

It wasn’t an act of rebellion. It was a metaphor. 

The irony of treatment was that even though we lived in this environment where our daily lives were structured around our meal plans, for many of us, we were more free than we had been in a long time.

For some of us, we were freer than we’d ever been. 

One day we were all brought gifts. Caitlin and I were given foam swords that immediately transformed us into pirates. We’d “Parry!” and “On guard!” all through the halls and up the stairs. 

I remember one day in particular we’d been squash-buckling through the upstairs hall when Caitlin dropped her sword and said, “I’ve never had fun before.”

I froze mid-lunge and cocked my head. “What do you mean?”

“Before I came here, I don’t think I ever had fun.”

In that moment, I saw in her doe brown eyes the child that had been prematurely slaughtered by a lifetime of starvation. 

Each one of us had grown up too fast. We’d been ten year olds who counted calories. We’d restricted our bodies through puberty, flirting with death before we’d ever fully tasted life. 

In treatment we were being reborn. Rediscovering our our bodies, our souls, and the wonder that is ice cream.

We ate picnics on the roof. We played baseball in the back yard with Ensure bottles.

We frolicked around barefoot like Lost Boys. We drank in sunsets from the tops of mountains, dipped our feet in waterfalls. 

We woke up singing, had sword fights in the hall, choreographed dances in the living room. We wrote, we painted, we danced, created, spoke up, sang, screamed, sobbed, broke plates. 

We lived. 

Vibrantly. Unapologetically.

Without our disorders, we had nothing left to hide behind so we collided with life in a way that transcends wordily description.

We kept photographs of ourselves as children by our dining room place matts. The children pictured reminded us that even if we couldn’t remember, there was a time in life where we weren’t afraid of ourselves. 

These photos also served as proof that underneath all our scarred years of self-inflicted suffering, our inner child still had a heart beat.

Note: This essay was published in the 2019 America's Emerging Writers Anthology