Life is Reality and Reality Sucks

What is reality? It always smacks you in the face, can take your breath away, leave you feeling helpless and lost, or completely amazed. Reality is having a baby, reality is being twenty three years old and walking into my father’s house one afternoon to find him dead in his living room chair, and reality is seeing a woman who is a foundation of life dieing in a hospital bed.

Reality. Reality can hurt and when it does you never want to believe it, you never want to see it, never want to feel it. The joy that I had been feeling from the reality of having a three month old son died when I found my father. My son was sleeping in his car seat on the living room floor beside me. My three month old son with me in this crazy, painful reality that had struck. My first instinct was to turn my back and say, “I don’t want to deal with this.” I had always dreamed of finding him dead, and it was a fear that I had woken up with many mornings while growing up. To have it actually happen… it was the scariest and worst type of reality that I have ever dealt with. One of my worst fears had actually come true, and within an instant my entire being had turned inside out. I have yet to recover, and I have never lived with the extent of fear that I now live with. I look in the mirror and I see someone scarred, someone afraid to face everyday- someone so afraid of loosing that she can’t find herself able to grasp onto anything. This is my reality. Everyday I live, by the day, with one foot in front of the other, and no place to go. I fear reality so much that it takes everything within me to face the realities that are most important to me- my son, my Randy, my brother’s family. Reality crushed my heart- and it is so hard to face it.

But, I do. I face it day by day, hour by hour, and when I sleep I dream of it. I tell myself that I am pathetic and weak and to just deal with it. What else is there to do but live your life? “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming…” I tell myself that reality factors in with the fact that whatever happens happens for a reason, I tell myself that reality is what gives me life, no matter how harsh it might be. I have recently realized that in our own ways we create our own realities, and it is ours to choose how we live by them. I tell myself that I have let reality turn me inside out. And I push with all my might, everything- not to fear tomorrow. I tell myself that I can make it. That someday, all the pieces of the puzzle that is me will again fit. That there is no reason why I should not know happiness. I am well loved and have a good heart- and am doing my best to defeat my habitual demons. I try to use the love of others to crush the pain that I deal with.