Sunday, February 26, 2012

sunday night reflection.

It's one of those times when all is right with my spirit and my emotions and I am just filled with the overwhelming warmth. There was a lot of  instances earlier when I was cranky surrounding by a little chaos and I didn't attach to it. I moved through it and on with my life without setting roots down in the unpleasantness of strong willed people trying to have a meeting and none of us were any more right than the other. I got a call from a dear friend in the middle of it having a very very bad day. The fact that someone on or near the end of there rope and would reach out to me to feel better is overwhelming. Not that I could fix anything for them but I listened and tried to reorient my friend from the lies that fear was telling to the fact that he was in fact not cut of from spirit. Good stuff for me to remember, that just because the sky is dark, doesn't mean the sun isn't the sun isn't shining and when you can't FEEL you connection to spirit doesn't mean it isn't there. If you have a breath in your body you are connected. There is no possible disconnect unless you leave your body then you just rejoin spirit. We just have to keep making decisions based on love and fight hard not to let fear get a foothold and completely derail  us.  I'm so grateful for all the chances I squandered in getting here, everyone of them told me how "IT DOESN"T WORK",.

I booked myself into a show on April 14th. It will be the first time I have sun with a band on a stage in gosh, nearly 11 years. Not that I was ever a big deal as a singer but I did it for 15 years and was really really good for a while. I was just crippled with mental illness, non-existent self esteem and I was trying so hard to be what I thought everyone wanted me to be that the act of performance wasn't fun anymore.

When I take the stage on April 14th, it will be two years exactly, nearly to the hour that I took a ride to Lousisanna in a taxi cab to the mental hospital.  In less than two years I have really began putting a nice life together for myself. I want to sing because I have some unfinished business. I am singing a song that I learned over 20 years ago but never sang it. I have many friends from recovery who been so constantly supportive about me growing as a spirit in human form that I can't wait to show them a little of what one part of my life, or one of my man LIVES was like. They have pulled the creativity back out in me. I'll post a video of the show here when I get one.

I would have never guessed I would have this much life going on and this much spirit spilling out.

Friday, February 24, 2012

A very quick rundown of some of the psych meds I have tried and failed to locate one that fixed everything that needs fixing. Sadly there are more I simply don't recall the name to. It wasn't until my Pdoc looked at me after years and years of working with him and told me "Clinton , there isn't a pill on the planet that is going to do for you what you want one to do. The best I can help you with is getting to to a stable place where you are on even footing. After that if you want to get better it's up to you to do the hard work. It's completely up to you." It was the last medication I change I had in four years or more. Most days I am doing the hard work, but the message I picked up that I believe with everything fiber I can believe anything is , that there isn't a pill with the power on the planet to fix it.
(Xanax)
(Klonopin,
(Valium)
(Ativan)
(Serax)
(Celexa, C
(Lexapro,
(Prozac,
(Luvox)
(Paxil,
(Zoloft)
(Clozaril) -
(Zyprexa) -
(Risperdal)
(Seroquel) -
(Geodon) -

Abilify
senequan
remeron
thorzine
lithium
depakote
tegretal

All of which were taken in multiple combinations and alone. One I left the East Texas Behavioral Clinic on 6 at once. I couldn't even stand upright for long stretches without just falling over in slow motion like a giant red oak. lol

Thursday, February 23, 2012

I look to you.................

I've been sort of consumed in my thoughts by Whitney Houston. Yes, her most popular times were during my late teens and early twenties and I loved that music and the times they underscore to my life. I mostly have been thinking about the struggle she had. The world fell in love with this beautiful beautiful well spun image and towering vocals but behind the face paint and sparkle was a woman who couldn't live up to the hype that surrounded her.
In my own smaller version, I sort of tried to create a faux self that I sold to everyone including my family as being the real me. The first time I felt the relief of even for a short time admitting I didn't know what I was doing and didn't know how to make it look like I did any longer was when I was 27 and had drank a lethal amount of alcohol and took the only pills in my apartment, which were cold tablets I had to pop out of the plastic safety bubbles and his ginseng capsules. The combo is funny in hindsight, but what I was trying to say wasn't that I wanted to die necessarily but I just wanted help.

In the emergency room at Parkland, in a cotton gown, I drank the charcoal and enjoyed the warm air circulating like a tiny fan of warm was pointed just at me. The blue cotton gown was the softest I had ever felt against my skin. Mostly, and I know this now was it was my first taste of surrender. There is such a peace in the process of surrender that it is indescribable.  It didn't last long, as the alcohol was neutralized by the gunky charcoal I had swallowed, I began taking all my stress and frustration back and immediately began to swallow to fill my soul back up with fear.

When I saw the headline that Whitney Houston Is Dead at 48, I was stunned ,I felt like I lost a  friend or family member. I'd seen her struggle with drugs and obsessive love and while I may have commented on it without much compassion I never wrote her off.

When she released her "come back" album in 2009 I had so much hope that "Whitney Houston" was back. She didn't look like 20 year old Whitney but she was sophisticated and beautiful. I saw her make the promotion appearances to push the record sales up and her voice was like tumbling rocks and glass. She couldn't cancel because her her past behaviors without starting "OLD WHITNEY Canceling shows again" and she HAD to make the money back to the record company.

I sang for years and on a very very small scale I know when u wait for your name to be called for you turn to take the stage and you have an issue that makes you sound not the best it's soul killing. To know you are going to sound like a bad bad version of yourself or worse like someone else who has no voice. I never had million dollar deals breathing down my neck. I didn't have the specter of the glaring images of my 20 year self or memories of myself at the peak of my vocal ability to haunt me. She must of felt like the worst Whitney Houston imitator on the planet. IMPOSTER!!!!!!!  I always felt like a bad Clinton Gandy imitator and always was waiting to be found out and exposed as an fake/imposter.

The fact that she died , alone. In a rented tub. sickens me a bit.  She died on prescription drugs that I abused the hell out of but evidently never taking them in the exact combo that she did, connects me to her. It touches the part of me the still hurts from my separation from the the civilians of earth.

Whether it was bad taste or not, I saw the photo of her lying in state in Newark. I was really comforted by the fact she looked beautiful. She finally had  the look of real peace about her. Her struggle with am a the daughter of Sissy, am I the daughter of New Hop Baptist Church, am i a mother her has repeated make disastrous decisions that my only child has witness all her life? Her struggle with self and ego are just like mine. The image verses the quiet truths.

In my life, in/around  recovery for 20 years I have seen many many people over shoot the mark and die, i have seen the ones  purposely do it and accidentally do it. It is my solemn and firmest belief that the universe is most kind and loving and when someone has tried and tried but cannot find their way out of the dark and into the light, that sometimes, the light reaches out for them. I think she struggled as much as she could and a universal kindness was bestowed to stop her pain. Sometimes we don't get the lesson in human form.

She survived, crack , coke and Bobbie Brown, only to be done in by some meds she took because she couldn't face going to Clive Davis' party and singing without help. Clive Davis' party for his Grammy people was going on 4 floors beneath the body of Whitney Houston, zipped up and on a gurney until 9:30 pm about the time she would have taken the stage.  All the pressure she put on herself to be "good" for the music people and they didn't even stop the party in the same hotel she died in.

Today, I choose the people in my life, well, like my life depended on it. On some days my friends do save me, from my best thinking.  The best I can be has to be enough and this little gem "All I can do is All I can do" continually saves my ass and my sanity.

I haven't turned to chemicals to ease my mind and calm my pains in a while, and as I watched the glorious exit and flame out of the creature named Whitney, I'm thankful that I lived to know better. I lived to learn how to learn and I wasn't extended an exit by the universe because evidently I am teachable even  through the ball busting pain I created by living a life first as a drunk and then an all around drug addict and substance abuser. The miracle for me is not only that I am sill here, it is the fact I am GRATEFUL to be here.




Tuesday, February 21, 2012

I had a bad night, the kind I haven't had in nearly two years. I tried to go to sleep at midnight , and shortly after I felt like I had an uncomfortable electric current running me. I got up hoping it would stop, then I slept in 5 minute intervals until 4 or so, then I fell asleep just in time for my regular get up Clinton time at 6. I cleared my schedule and went back to bed because I just felt crazy in the head and confused. I slept til 11. The moment my eyes opened up eye heard "It's starting again" and "you shouldn't have said the other day how well you psych issues were going". I do not want to return to not sleeping. It makes living impossible. The night before was off too but nothing like last night and the dreams have been so vivid and horrifying. I got up and worked my ass of cleaning and washing clothes, changed up my bed just trying to go something that makes me feel centered and more like myself. I do not want to return to the misery of not sleeping.  Dammit. I've made it a productive day and it is only 4pm. I hit the ground running, shit I hope this isn't some strange form of mania. I'll keep you posted.

Monday, February 20, 2012

I don't think we are as important as we think we are

If we were the "superior" species, it looks like if we wanted to quit doing something we just would. Quit smoking no problem, quit over eating no problem. Learn to speak French, done. If the part of our brains that wanted to stop or start a behavior was all that was in charge it would be simpler. The remainder of our brains and thoughts are the parts that drag us miserably down to the level of animal. Desires and feeling fixes fuck us up always. There isn't a person on the planet that can turn things on and off permanently at will so I am just not going to beat myself up that I am terribly terribly human. I'm also talking to the folks that think behaviors that can simply be "PRAYED AWAY". Just doesn't happen.

Friday, February 17, 2012

I wonder if I'm ever going to have someone to show up to love me that is going to stick around a while. The plight of the gay man is we have a lot of close friends until they get married and then they are gone. I've made friends with a straight man and over the last 4 months I've really gotten to care about him, but it's just a matter of time before he falls in love and moves away too. Now if this is sort of some fucked up karmic position I hold where I love people until they feel good enough to find mates and partners then forgetting about me, then I a pissed I signed up for this crappy cruise. lol  I do wonder if there is anyone on the planet that could love me and stay.