I'm Tired of Glimmers
but you can sit here if you need to
A soup-sky day. A smudged cloud day. The forecast is calling for snow and the wind is gnawing at the bare bone branches of the winter trees. My body is tired, still recovering and sluggish from the flu/strep/sinus infection virus that invaded my chest like a dragon this month.
I’m trying, trying, trying to write. I just texted my husband to bring me home a chocolate muffin from the coffee shop near his work. I feel like I deserve a prize for getting through another February day. Are you getting through another February day too? I hope you get a chocolate muffin for it.
I took a planned break from Substack in December—you know, the holidays and all that. It quickly turned into a very much unplanned and debilitating extended break from Substack when a flare up of PMDD put me in bed for 10 days. A handful of days later, I was bedridden for over a week due to the aforementioned dragon-virus. 2024 hasn’t been kind so far.
My hyacinth bulbs have emerged.
My crocuses will be next. I think a few of my tulips and daffodils are trying to come up too. We’ll see. I’ve spent a lot of my life waiting in the dark for beauty to emerge. At this point it’s kind of my brand. I wish it wasn’t. I wish I didn’t have to stare bleak days down with a magnifying glass begging for some glimmer of goodness to flash across my vision. I’m tired of glimmers. I want to believe that God is good to me, but right now it just feels like I'm a theological lab experiment to see how long a person can yearn for good things, have them denied and choose not to walk away from God.
That’s not to say I don’t have good things. I do. But the deep aches of my heart (things I won’t mention here because saying them out loud would feel like stripping off my clothes on mainstreet) have gone unhealed for over a decade. At what point do you just let it go and accept that the pain you carry in secret is your life? Nothing is coming to fix it. Redemption isn’t happening on any earthly timeline. God promised His presence but He also told us we would suffer. And so you open your palms, let your dreams get carried off by another February wind and suffer in ways you barely know how to name.
Part of me doesn’t want to hit ‘publish’ on this post.
I wish it was a happier one. Do you know how deeply I don’t want to write about what hurts anymore? Desperately. But I haven’t yet figured out how to show up authentically while I’m also creatively withering from the stress of my actual life. Mark Twain once told us: “Write what you know.” What if what I know is unresolved pain and chronic illness? What if what I know is deep-seeded generational trauma that keeps springing up no matter how many times I’ve yanked it up by the roots?
It seems the expectation is to come back from an extended writing break with lessons learned and the depths of wisdom plumbed. But all I’ve got for you is me saying this is where I am. Will I always be here? I hope not. In my experience life changes, or rather, it doesn’t but I change around it. I’m not who I was at 25. I’m also not who I was in December. This is February Breanne. She’s a bit rugged and jaded. Summer Breanne will be softer. Just you wait and see.
Everyone loves to talk about the phoenix rising from the ashes.
No one wants to talk about how painful it was for her to burn alive, taste ash and die. Having mental and chronic illnesses means living with the scent of smoke on your clothes. You’re either about to burn or recovering from the last time everything was licked bare by tongues of hungry heat.
Sure, you have seasons of flight. There are days spent in the sky with the sun in your throat. And niggling in the back of your mind the whole time is the thought that all of this will end with gravity swallowing you back to earth when your wings inevitably go up in flames.
I’m currently recovering from a glorious crash and burn (let the reader know that ‘glorious’ in this context means excruciating). My brain feels numb and sloshy. My joints are aching from lying in bed for whole weeks. I do nothing in a day and have to lay down from extreme fatigue. My eyelids are droopy and my hands fumbling. I’m slowly getting better but the progress is so incremental that I actually think I’m just forcing myself to think I’m better because I’m so bored with being physically unwell. Who knows.
It’s February and this is my attempt.
Coming back from an unexpectedly long writing hiatus is hard. I wish I could return to Substack with lessons learned, a goal met, a tidy ‘moral of the story’ to grace your day. I don’t have any of that. I’m in full hunker down and bear it mode over here. Winter has (once again) robbed my stamina and I’m just clinging to driftwood until I eventually wash up bedraggled on the shore of spring in a few weeks.
I suspect (or more accurately I hope) that after I publish this messy, jumbled piece of random thoughts and confessions some of the hurdles I’m facing with creative block will fall behind me. One thing is for sure, I have to keep writing even when it’s not what I want to write about.
Sometimes I get to show up and give out my words; praying they meet another heart and help them in some small way. Sometimes I have to show up as a weary human just as I am.
I don’t really have much to say, but you can sit here in the quiet if you need to.
Suffering from chronic illness and pain for over thirty years, this deeply resonates. I’m so sorry. The glimmers of grace in the midst are His light! But writing out our lament is also His gift, a healing grace, a “turning to” Christ with our pain, as a deeply beloved daughter. I’m so glad you’re writing, as it encourages all of us who long-suffer and are so tired of it, for we know we aren’t alone in it. And that? It’s His overflow of grace to me today. Thank you.
Your raw vulnerability is so tender and strong, stunningly beautiful.
Thank you for sharing 🤍