My Mental Health, Poetry, and Coming Clean
Lines written in celebration of broken bodies, baths, and healing
1.
Today is a big day for me. I am officially six months post-op from my fourth—and hopefully last—surgery. Last night, I walked a mile without stopping for the first time in four years. The wheelchair in my humid Florida garage is beginning to rust. I have been planning a huge retreat with TWBTO community for next month. In so many ways, life looks a lot like healing.
But…
In many ways that healing is a new kind of painful. As I heal, I find myself mourning new layers I can only fully feel now, as the emergencies that were my life begin to fade for the first time in nearly a half-decade. I rejoice over my writing career, you beautiful readers, and the holy community that is The Way Back to Ourselves. THIS is the work God carved out for me do with all of myself, and I do it willingly.
But I am also lamenting the dreams that were snuffed out in the wake of illness and loss— like my fertility, like my teaching job, like a community I once called home, like the people who I thought cared for me and my family, like the betrayals, and so much more.
Can I be really honest here?
It is hard as hell living in the BOTH/AND, isn’t it? But you know what? It’s also so damn beautiful to be alive.
You can’t know—truly know—what redemption is until you taste destruction or failure. You can’t really know how beautiful rebirth is until you’ve kissed Death on his mouth. You can’t really know what you’re made of until everything is ripped away, and you learn how to keep on living—someway, somehow. And you can’t really know who God is to you, until he’s the only one you have left to cling to.
These are the gifts I now live with every day. They are divine gifts I will prize over most everything else for the rest of my life.
But, I also cry.
I cry. I ache. I lament. I am not who I was, which is so sad and so beautiful.
It’s both.
Living in the NOW and NOT YET is complicated. I thank God for how far I’ve come—how far he’s carried me. But I also beg God for more healing and peace.
I have a feeling you might be nodding your head—you might know exactly what I am trying so hard to articulate to you, dear reader.
So, I promise I am about to land on something here...
It’s coming…
2.
This month is Mental Health Awareness, a cause very dear to me (and many) as a survivor and public servant who is earning my doctorate in community care and counseling as I type this.
So, I want to share two poems with you that show my evolution from where I was a few years ago—nearly suicidal—as I battled sepsis and other illnesses and surgeries, to where I am now: a woman who is healing, safe, and growing… but also struggling, mourning, and not yet healed.
I am learning more and more that this is okay.
Healing comes in shades and stages.
“Bath” is a poem I wrote in my darkest hours, and it appears in my debut poetry collection, Of Wings and Dirt. “Bath 2” is my work-in-progress I wrote just a few weeks ago as a follow-up in my healing journey. It’s an intimate snapshot of how far I’ve come and how far I have to go. “Bath 2” is my secret poem for you. It will be in my next poetry collection, Exalted Ground, so please do not share it around. I trust you won’t.
B A T H by Kimberly Phinney Bleary eyes, sinews, joints, all afloat and submerged— I wash away the day’s remains. And I think: I want to di(v)e. I plunge a foot below (a cross at 20,000 leagues)— where spine and porcelain touch in forever pose. I blink and gaze through murky grays and think how warm this hazy nothingness might be (without me). And I hold my breath until the burning fire builds and buoys, parting my bodies of water (a little Red Sea). I emerge and gasp in this broken flesh He bought— joints, sinews, and bleary eyes— all bone-soaked (and baptized). And I think: I want to live.
And here is how far I’ve come over the past few years…
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