“I said to my soul be still, and wait without hope; for hope would be hope of the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith. But the faith, and the love, and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
One of my residents came to my office in a fit of desperation and basically demanded that I let him write the above quote on a piece of paper because he felt it's the only way to describe how he was feeling. This is a man who has lived in our facility for just over a year. He's an amazing writer but he keeps most of it to himself and only shows me tidbits here and there. He spent much of his adult life as one of the chaotic, a homeless person. Details are blurry and often hard for me to gather but he ended up marrying a woman and pulling his act together for 8 years. He talks about her every day and his eyes beg you to believe in the love that he has for her and it's actually heartbreaking. He doesn't know why he lost her or why he lives in this facility. What I know is that there is a restraining order that she put against him because apparently there was some domestic violence between them. He doesn't remember anything and I believe him 100% and you would too. His frustration these days is that he feels trapped in his own mind knowing that no matter what he does he will always have to deal with the anguish that can so rapidly take control and hurt the people that he cares for. He and I have a really great rapport but there have been moments that he will storm out of my office only to come back and tell me that he felt like he was going to lose control and I'm never quite sure what that would entail but the depth of his pain is always apparent and you can literally see it burning inside of him. There's nothing he can do and there's nothing I can do other than offer my ear and a few words of encouragement. I think he's spectacular and I always tell him so. I guess what prompted this blog is how beautiful that quote that he gave me is. It's by T.S. Eliot who I knew not much of until this point. Mental illness is one of the greatest tragedies of mankind because what do we have if we don't have our minds? I know! We have a life of cigarettes, coffee, and solitude.
Take care of your brain piece, people. It's literally all you've got.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNKpLL6laoA (type this into your browser and enjoy)
Ya know, the one thing that I'm beginning to realize as I go through this thing they call "growing up" is how everybody has something beautiful about them.
ReplyDeleteYour man is a perfect example. He's lived an (ugly) life, one of pain and sorrow yet when he thinks of her...
The world is truly a cruel place. But beauty is everywhere. Keep writing!