Advice from Friends

"Don't think about things that sap your confidence. If I had your qualities and talents my confidence would be sky high!!!"

This is a comment from one of my good friends Jane, who has qualities and talents of her own in abundance.

But she is right. I tend to dwell on certain things, on areas that relate to my area of greatest woundedness. Dwell on them over and over, as if thinking obsessively about them will give me control, or something.

It is such a difficulty to tear myself away from them, to look at the fabric where golden threads have shot through and changed everything, somehow, and to believe that one day I shall say the same about this area. Even though I know it is true. Even though I don't have a fucking clue.

All I know is when I live loved, it changes something about the way I see things. This comes easy to me in some ways. In others, I'm just a fucking mess, really. And my problem with this isn't because I want to be perfect, it's because I want to be whole, without the gaping hole. I do not want to live in the darkness because the light's beauty makes me cry.

I don't know how God does his stuff, his changing of people. Sometimes I doubt that she does it at all. Sometimes I even doubt that God is there at all, but it's all part of the mix. The times when I do believe God does her stuff, that he is in the midst of people, working from the inside out, this belief has accompanying it such a strong gut feel that somehow, even though I can't see it or touch it, I can't help but believe that this is how things are, underneath it all.

My most beloved friend of all, my cousin Andrea, with whom I have 30 years of impacted and compacted sharing and dreaming and creativity, messaged me last night about a comedian we both know of (and who I had a gigantic crush on, heh) who unfortunately has cancer. Saying she'd like to go to the benefit concert being held for him but didn't have the dosh at the moment. This message came on the tail end of a day where my mum had rung me in the morning to tell me that my great auntie Rene had died the day before, and in the evening to tell me that one of my other cousins was in hospital having an operation for bowel cancer and chemotherapy for liver cancer.

So it was one of those days, you know. And my response to my dear cousin Andrea was just full of all my own petty little concerns, my stupid illusory thoughts that I lack something when I don't, my inner questioning, my sadness that oases proved just that.

And in her kindness and gentleness she did not berate me for being a self-absorbed twit but came alongside me and gave me a cyber hug and shared out of her own experiences, and I honestly don't know what I would do without my friends. My lovely loving friends.

I flail myself around the house, impaled on my own shit, and in the midst of the flailing God creeps and it surprises me, sometimes. And other times I look across the chasm of laying down my flailing to begin to see, and I don't even believe there is anything to see.

These days really turned out nothing like I had planned. How long, dammit, does it take to stop reeling in some sense from that? Get over yourself, Susie Q, and get a giddy-up. The future is doing its beckoning. It's time to move out and move on and move forward, to find myself some community. To believe, somehow, as Julian said herself, that despite appearances all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.