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Text of the page (random words):
ew a tongue lashing awaited many memories were best kept behind bolted doors it took years for me to recognise that the harsh voice in those rooms was in fact my own and now i m discovering that there are other ways of remembering other ways of narrating the past there must be after all if truth insisted on being cold and hard is it really the whole truth stirred by this question i began the project of rewriting my past not with omissions and half truths but in pursuit of a fuller truth that expands the story this rewriting has thus far unfolded in three movements each one opening a new window i didn t know was there 1 rewrite with gentleness years of therapy taught me that i have two inner voices a condemning voice and a compassionate voice the condemning voice is loud brash and unrelenting and because i had given it authority for far too long it has no qualms about shouting over all other thoughts the compassionate voice on the other hand is quiet and unassuming it is easily overpowered and requires a lot more effort to discern from the noise my therapist helped bring this quiet voice into the light each time she responded to my tears by asking what are your tears trying to tell you these simple invitations taught me to pause and listen and when i did i saw that the regrettable choices of my younger self the ones i judged so harshly were often made in fear loneliness or simple ignorance sometimes i was wounded other times i was under resourced without the support i now know i needed and quite simply i was young doing the best with the little i knew this gentler way of seeing didn t erase the mistakes i made or the pain i caused but it allowed me to hold two truths that once felt incompatible and to meet pain not with censure but with care 2 rewrite with acceptance while gentleness softened the way i saw my past i still longed to show up immaculately in the present to offer a version of myself that is trimmed of anything fragile and inconvenient i worked hard to be someone easy to hold often hiding parts of myself to the point of burnout but then came the man who is now my husband having seen me come undone more times than i would have liked he could nonetheless say i love every version of you he recognised who i was in that moment who i had been and who i might become it was the first time someone saw both my essence and my potential without flinching at the gap he showed me that real love doesn t wait for the final draft his acceptance makes room for my ebbs and flows the safety to crumble when i need to and the faith to step into courage i never knew i had even to shine in ways i once dimmed slowly it s teaching me to honour my story with that same loving acceptance the memories that once hurt don t sting as sharply now looked at with tenderness they even offer quiet gifts for my own healing and sometimes for others who see threads of their own story in mine 3 rewrite with humility to keep rewriting my story i had to face a deeper reality that i could not rewrite it on my own i couldn t be fully receptive to therapy and neither could i accept unearned love when my soul was clenched tight not just with pain but with pride it s the quiet kind that insists i must be my own source of worth and strength that i alone must manage myself fix myself and earn every good thing i had to let go of the need to be a perfect manuscript and unlearn the instinct to scrap the whole draft each time shame resurfaced god taught me that the surest antidote to despair was humility to loosen my grip of the pen and allow my story to be co authored by him my task wasn t to edit every line but to trust that the story was still unfolding to stay even in the unfinished chapters and faithfully discover treasures hidden in the unexpected turns there is mercy in rewriting the past with gentleness acceptance and humility not that the events change but that we learn to see the story more honestly and in that deepening truth we are the ones who change we become people who can walk forward unafraid of the unwritten pages free to discover that the story can grow in ways our younger selves never imagined share this post share share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on threads opens in new window threads email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on whatsapp opens in new window whatsapp share on telegram opens in new window telegram like loading when life stops making sense the art of not knowing october 23 2025 le désespéré by gustave courbet 1843 there s nothing more horrifying than watching your life s blueprint go up in flames except perhaps realising there is truly nothing you can do to stop it the first time i felt that sickening rush i was a child forced to part with my beloved nanny of five years i couldn t fathom what life would look like in another country or without her and i spent many futile months trying to convince my parents to let me move back as if an seven year old s sulking campaign could overturn the machinery of adult decisions as a young adult it was heartbreak the kind that scorched not only the present but the imagined future tethered to it the lifetime of inside jokes the family we would grow the city we would call home in its aftermath i grasped at every loose thread deluding myself that lost love could be argued back into being but the most unravelling kind was not of losing another person but losing myself no matter the initial trigger a relapse into depression or as i now call it despair would leave me emptier more disillusioned and more ashamed that i d ever had the audacity to hope again evidently i used to believe that healing must mean a return to what once was i treated life like project management goals timelines deliverables but with life having gone beyond acceptable bounds one time too many i had to learn the truth that i was never really in charge of the drawing board however bitter that truth was medicine for my soul it freed me to lay down my predetermined blueprint and instead to see life as an unfolding work of art one whose meaning is still taking shape a wise priest had set me on this path when in the thickness of my despair he told me god is like an impressionist painter up close you have no idea what he s doing but when you finally take a step back you ll see a masterpiece i didn t quite understand his words then but when i started painting years later i began living them granted i never was skilled enough for true impressionism but abstract expressionism became my playground from the point of view of the artist i learnt to stay with the awkward beginnings those early layers that look nothing like what you intend yet become the foundation to what would come after innermost by karen z 2021 i began to notice how certain details might bewilder an observer a jarring colour a muddied hue a tension that feels unresolved yet in time each finds its place balancing the whole in ways only the artist could have foreseen river deliver by karen z 2022 even when i make mistakes sometimes those end up being my favourite parts they force me to respond to reimagine to make something i never would have planned accidents i realised were actually invitations the more i painted the more i discerned the quiet reversal at play that just as i was learning to trust my own process i was being invited to trust in god s if i an amateur artist can look at the messy beginnings on my canvas with patience and see its potential how much more must he see something worthwhile in his unfinished masterpiece and i think of all the times i ve refused to abandon a work that seemed beyond repair choosing instead to stay to wait to have faith that something worthwhile could still emerge how much more could a sovereign and loving god do with my false starts messes even the turns i never chose love moves slow by karen z 2022 in these realisations i found my rest there is no need to constantly make sense of things comfort and strength flow from knowing the heart of the one who ultimately wields the brush he is not a provocateur delighting in chaos for chaos sake nor a deconstructionist dismantling meaning to prove that none exists mysterious though his workings may be he is the true artist whose every move is ordered towards truth goodness and beauty the artist in his studio by rembrandt 1628 as i continue on a journey of learning to co create with him rather than resist his direction i see how his timing has rewritten my own impossibilities in family life work healing love and marriage things i once calculated as unattainable through my human reasoning have unfolded in ways only divine providence could have arranged perhaps we won t see the full masterpiece until the end of time until then may our clamouring souls learn to rest even when life doesn t make sense and our hands move in nimble tandem with grace share this post share share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on threads opens in new window threads email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on whatsapp opens in new window whatsapp share on telegram opens in new window telegram like loading an antidote to despair october 6 2025 the soup by pablo picasso 1902 03 i have now lived through eight distinct seasons of despair these are usually called depressive episodes but i prefer to see them as despair a uniquely human crisis that psychiatry can begin to treat but not fully heal because it reaches beyond the mind and body into the very depths of the soul each season lasted between five to eight months but as i retrace my steps i see that the way out has never twice looked the same i sometimes joke that my twenties and early thirties have been a project in beta testing four recovery methods if that s the case the changelog might read like this iteration a passive survival the greatest hurdle to recovery in the earliest seasons was my own dogged conviction that there was nothing to recover from day and night i was assailed by revelation after revelation of my own wretchedness and the terribleness of existence each one fortified by what seemed like irrefutable proof the more people told me your brain is lying to you the more convinced i became that they were the ones with a positive cognitive bias while i simply saw the cold hard truth i believed i deserved to suffer and that to do anything to ease my pain would be to live in denial when the grey veil eventually lifted and the spring in my step returned as suddenly as it had left i was genuinely surprised i could only credit the passage of time and perhaps sheer luck that i had stuck around long enough for the twist it was as if god had finally intervened to save me from the fate of ophelia iteration b reluctant surrender if the early recoveries were like group projects i somehow got credit for without doing anything then the next few were the ones where i at least showed up these rounds saw me becoming more receptive to psychological psychiatric and spiritual help i agreed to go for appointments eventually even making my own mostly to appease my loved ones and because i accepted that i had nothing to lose looking back that faint willingness however performative was already a crack in my hardened veneer i initially argued with every therapist and psychiatrist i met determined to defend my despair as the reasonable response to life but slowly as i wore myself out i began to welcome the strange relief of not needing to be right all the time i eventually hobbled out of the fog limping forward on the crutches of borrowed hope iteration c outwit and outlast iteration b had taught me to be wary of the trappings of cognitive distortions and emotional reasoning so i concluded that if i could not trust even my own thoughts i would have to outwit them instead of languishing under the tyranny of my negative thoughts i learnt to fight back the old post hope is not an emotion written in 2016 offers glimpses of this cognitive sparring it became a psychological discipline to bat away negative thoughts especially about myself it doesn t mean all of a sudden knowing what s true and what s false instead the inner dialogue sounded a lot more like this i know i know i m useless and stupid but i m gonna be radically okay with it and see how far i can go and so i go about my day having shelved that particular thought i read a book i go for the job interview i enter into a conversation i would typically have avoided oh yes and i m a cruel heartless wretched human being undeserving of love but you know what people seem okay with it let s see how long i can go before i m exposed and again i go about my day agreeing to meet a friend or attending a get together instead of making excuses to stay home oh wait how about the fact that i m doomed to a lifetime of lonely misery and will never find happiness soon enough i started being able to say oh just shut up already my defiance allowed me to practice what psychologists call behavioural activation to force myself into motion to do the things i least wanted to do in an attempt to break the cycles of avoidance and self fulfilling prophecy this brute force combat strategy served me well until it didn t the trouble with attempting to outwit despair is that the nemesis keeps mutating too cycle after cycle of cognitive manoeuvres could only take me so far until my armour became battered and brittle and i found myself lying naked and more depleted than ever i was left asking what more god what more do you want from me iteration c the gentle way through when i finally stopped thrashing long enough to listen my heart received god s quiet invitation there is one thing you have not given me you have not given me your despair instead of clinging to despair i was to offer it up and as i peeled back the layers of despair i began to see its core pride pride deafened me to every voice but my own pride convinced me that my appraisal of reality and of my own worth was truer than god s and surely it was my pride that declared life meaningless whenever it refused to bend to my will as it turns out even as medicine and therapy tended to my mind and body my soul desperately needed a physician too so began the gentler way of humility the first tangible change i made was to stop talking about wanting to die i began to stay present to what was before me the taste of a meal the voice of a loved one the safety of home the comfort of watching a predictable show i tried to see in each moment not an invitation to despair but an invitation to small acts of love for others and even gasp for myself instead of abusing myself with habitual insults i chose the gentler way to rest when weary to do less without guilt to welcome my tears as the voice of my inner child to acknowledge the smallest progress and to recognise beauty in leaning on others little by little i experienced how peace was reclaimed not through conquering but through yield...