this is how i am

There's an awful lot to say, but pictures speak louder than words.







And there's a lot of people whose words are better than mine today.

“I guess I’m writing this here to help myself heal. I feel better writing about it, despite the risk of having people send me judgmental email telling me what a pathetic and selfish person I am. As needlessly dramatic as it sounds, my husband can only hold my head as I cry for so many hours before I have to get up and force myself to breathe again. I can’t look at the backyard or the place next to the bed where she slept without wanting to crawl into a hole in the ground. Is that dramatic? It probably is, but when you’re depressed, everything is dramatic. Breathing is dramatic. Perhaps I’m writing this to reach out to others who have suffered depression and have overcome it without the aid of medication. How do you get the drama to end?”

It was this kind of failure that overwhelmed residents of Al Rashad Psychiatric Hospital as Baghdad fell to US forces. Terrified, all 1,015 residents fled as looters stole medicine and equipment, then stripped the hospital of doors, windows and light fixtures. On April 25, aid worker Steve Weaver... visited Al Rashad. Amid the destruction, he saw decades worth of patient records scattered about. A lone member of staff was painstakingly sorting through the piles of papers, trying to re-file them... Weaver was told that some 700 patients were still missing from Al Rashad. Staff were concerned that they might have been wandering Baghdad's lethal streets.

So many of us have lost our sense of home over the years. Others never had a home to speak of. And that is why I say that we have journeyed long and far to be here together tonight. For those of us who are Christians, the bread and wine are symbols of something old and rich and meaningful. The bread nourishes more than our bodies, and the wine loosens more than our tongues. This meal is a celebration of the redemption we have always hoped for, always sought, and desperately needed to find. We consider ourselves to be a family in this faith.

If you wanted to know where I am - this is where I am. All this stuff, this is me today. Listening to Hindi Sad Diamonds from Moulin Rouge. I don't know much about truth. I feel rather a lot about beauty. Freedom and love...




...are interesting things.

The more days that pass, the more certain I am that I've made the right decision. The quieter it gets round here, the more suspicious I am of what's previously been said. The less I believe in God, the more beautiful the world appears to me, the more free I feel, the less I understand what I believed before. The further I get from faith, the closer I get to figuring out who I am and what I'm doing.

That should be sad, but it's not. Truth, beauty, freedom and love. Life in abundance. These things don't work out the way you expect them to; you don't find those things where you once thought you would.