leaks

I have a leaky heart. When I was born it had a hole in it. The hole eventually closed by the time I was nine, but now a damaged valve allows blood to leak back into the chamber from whence it came.

It's a broken heart. I ain't trying to be a martyr or nothin', but some of us were born sensitive. I care what other people think. I care what happens in the world. Cruelties hurt. Discord and disunion and people treating each other, themselves, and animals like shit bruise and stain. And I learned cruelty from a master, and can wield it with precision and have stabbed at that sensitive red muscle many times, slashing, poking. Y'all that share this sensitivity, like me, have been told, "You're too sensitive," or "you're too thin skinned." But it's not a choice.

I've tried to grow scabs, to heal them, to wear masks, to be someone else, haven't you? But it all comes back, like backed up sewage, the more I try to stuff it down. And now it's busted a leak.

Don't think that the psychic illnesses don't manifest themselves in the physical. I actually consider myself lucky to have had them manifest so physically in mid-life so that I could know I have to work on them, have time to work on them, or at least admit them to the air where they will hopefully shrivel and die instead of killing me before my time, killing what is real for me and in me.

We have to live our truths, even if we don't yet know what they are. It's so funny to me that an enlarged heart is a sign of illness, that my heart is having to work harder because of some condition or another because it needs to be big to hold all of you and all of everything I care about. Which is just about every freakin' thing.

I'm never, ever going to give up. Ever. I might take a rest now and then, but even a minute of truth is worth all the struggle.

So tomorrow morning, at the butt crack of dawn, I'm gonna find out how leaky the old pump is and what, if anything, should be done about it. Then one of you dear one's is going to bring me home and then I'm going to take a nap with Dolce cat and then one of you dear one's is going to fetch me so we can go sing to our own beat--bump-da-bump swishy swishy.

xo