{By Glennon of Momastery}

Last week I read A Million Little Pieces and this week I’m re-reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and The Bell Jar. All three are about mental illness . . . and so it’s been a theme for me, these past two weeks…insanity. In truth, it’s been a theme for me these past few decades.

I spent some time in a mental hospital during my senior year of high school. I’d been a horrible bulimic for eight years and therapy wasn’t helping, especially since I spent most of my therapy sessions discussing how fine I was and how lovely the weather was. And one day during my Senior Year, I ate too much at lunch, and I thought I was going to die. Because to me . . . full = death. But I couldn’t find a place to throw up. And so finally, right then and there, in the middle of the Senior Hallway, I decided I was not fine - not at all. And I walked into my guidance counselor’s office and I said: “Call my parents. I need to be hospitalized. I can’t handle anything. Someone needs to help me.”

{by Alyson of New England Living}

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Alyson is a mother of four and former California girl living in New Hampshire. She shares gorgeous pictures and words on her blog, New England Living. Alyson is newenglandliving on Instagram.

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Color Bleed features images captured on mobile devices (phones, iPods, iPads) and shared via social networks (Instagram, twitter, twitpic, Facebook, etc.). Story Bleed consistently insists that art is made and shared online every day. Often casually. Phone photography consistently reveals itself to be breathtaking and insightful.

{by Thomas Hawk}

“The Best Years of Our Life” by Thomas Hawk / thomashawk.com / @thomashawk
Shared via Google+

Featured by Story Editor Shannon | @mrlady

{by Jenica McKenzie}

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{by Ms. Picket To You of Post Picket Fence}

(photo source)

Kids at a pool: it’s the epitome of fantastic wretchedness.

They swim and dunk and dive and flop unattended and fully entertained and working up to an excellent exhaustion. The sunscreen melts off the minute it’s applied, but their bodies are submerged, so: only shoulders get burnt, maybe noses. They paddle and flop and hunt quarters at depths taller than they are. They coordinate games named “Baby Dolphins.” They get drenched and pickled and giddy all at once.

But the goggles are too tight or too loose or worse than her brother’s. The towel is too soggy but worthy of a battle, a whippingatyou, smackingatyou battle. The sister’s belly flop is half-assed and “mine will be better and hurt more than hers” and WATCH ME WATCH ME WATCH ME will echo across the chlorine, over the deck chairs, past my magazine, and straight into my face. Straight into my face over and over and over: WATCH MEEEEEEE!

{by Lotus Carroll}

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Lotus Carroll (aka as Sarcastic Mom) writes with her heart on her website, i am lotus.
Give her any camera and she can make magic, another version of this photo can be seen on Flickr.
More of her photography can be found on her portfolio.

{by Jennifer Schmitt from A Road With a View and originally featured here on September 17, 2009}

I was in the middle of nowhere, but I felt as though I had arrived at someplace important and pivotal. A place that should show on some map of my life with the words Go here.

Heavy and golden, the moonlight sank to earth on a parachute of stars and brought everything around me out of the shadows – the hulking shapes of mountains, open space, a black ribbon of road. Far away, the light of one house.

I stood in the middle of a road in northwestern Montana, shivering with the wind that ran through me like a hundred ghosts. I had stopped to get out, to look. No other car would pass by while I stood there. The night was big. The world was big. How many times had the wind that filled my lungs traveled along the curve of the earth? I breathed in, sure it told me secrets of what my life could be, how big it could be, now that it was all mine again.

Back home in Connecticut, my job waited for me and my husband did not. Our separation was new, no older than a month. With less fuss than it took to plan our wedding, we decided to break apart the marriage, each of us taking uneven halves of the whole, pieces that had never quite fit together and always left a space between two people who tried.

I settled into a new place and then took every vacation day and every bit of cash I could, and I drove – this time, from Connecticut to the western side of Montana, 5000 miles in 12 days. It was the middle of September – now, almost to the date. This time every year, I give myself over to nostalgia for that trip and for the person I was then. Brave. Unafraid to go as far as that, alone, to see something beautiful, to be changed.

And despite the disappointment of a marriage that ended, I still thought I could see ahead and predict the future, or shape it.

The joke was on me, of course. On her, on the person I was that night, eight months before I would learn that I was pregnant with my first child. Whatever I thought was brave or scary before hitched a ride to somewhere far away.

But she learned. You want scary? I told her. Having a baby is scary. Cobbling together a life with another person, with a new life between you, takes guts. Believing that it will all work out? Harder still.

At times, it’s hard for me to look at the photos from that trip. In them, I see how formed she thinks she is, how much she cushions the ache of her want, how tender she is with her hopes. How she still believes that there are answers to be found in a kiss, or on the curve of the moon.

I want to tell her what’s coming, and that she will get through it. That what is scary just might save her. That having children, though she didn’t plan it, will root her to her place in the world, no matter where or how far she goes. That she won’t want to go alone, always, and that she won’t lose herself completely, even when she is sure that she has. That one, I would tell her over and over and over. Or, I will. I do.

{Original post by Kelly of Ordinary Art}

In pre-school, my daughter is learning about opposites. Up. Down. Right. Wrong. Full. Empty. Everything neat and tidy. The teacher sends home a note. Practice. Teaching the concept of opposites is a great way for your child to understand his or her world.

Bullshit.

My mother has a friend who is wheel chair bound and dying of brain cancer. This sick woman has a 10-year-old daughter. The daughter does not understand why God is robbing her mother of her legs and her life. All she wants is for her mother to rise from that chair and go for a walk. What is the direct opposite of wanting?

Is life the direct opposite of death? We have to be grateful for what we have. My own mother moralizes. Her idea of happiness is not having brain cancer. I’m not sure it takes fully into account the grief of a 10-year old girl.

A former student of mine once wrote a beautiful poem. It went,

We are a matched set, you and I. A fork in the road. A knife in my heart.

She read the poem aloud to the class. She tossed her hair and laughed when someone in the back of the room raised their hand and asked about the spoon. I counted her poet teeth and hoped that someday, someone would come along and fall in love with the religion of her mouth. She was 13 and beautiful. I cannot remember her name. Forgetting is not the same thing as letting go.

I practice with my daughter. Hot. Cold. Big. Small. Love. Hate. Sad. Happy. These words never tell the entire story. Sometimes mothers die and leave their daughters to go for walks alone. Sometimes mothers live but their daughters still feel lonely.

(By D. Smith Kaich Jones)

the ever-wonderful michael was telling me about this thing that happened, and that’s because, well, remember? he said, that she is married to that guy? and this happened?, and then a while back when that was going on, there was this kid who . . . and his grandfather bought him this toy airplane, and he was friends with another kid, and did i ever mention that they moved across the street from these people who . . . ? and all those stories were separate from one another, but not really, they just looked that way on the surface, they were really all tied together, because that’s how stories work, at least stories in conversations, stories told by real people.

that’s what i think i do. at least that’s what i try to do. i start out telling you the story of painting the front room at work, and that reminds me of what i felt when i was buying the paint, the paint was yellow, honey colored, and that reminded me of autumn, and i remembered what i felt when i was standing in the paint store, waiting while the paint was mixed, lots of time for thinking and looking out the windows at the leaves falling away from trees, at the different blue of the sky, lots of time for remembering last autumn and where i would have been on a saturday morning, lots of time for wondering if my need to paint a few walls was a working out the grief i still feel for maggie-the-cat, remembering that’s what i did when my father died, not comparing the two deaths, just thinking about how people deal with grief and moving on, which is not the same thing as “getting over it”, it’s just moving to a different place in the grief. and i move from that thought back to autumn, which always gives me the blues, just not outside the window, and really it is late autumn that makes me feel this way; early autumn is just a phrase here in east texas, just a mellowing of summer, and i think about the leaves leaving, the turning away from the world that we all do; we go inside, even here where it doesn’t get all that cold ~ it gets cold enough ~ and i remember that that night is turn-back-the-clocks-night, an earlier darkness now, and i move from that thought back to maggie, back to my father, and i am filled with missing.

{By Kori of See Kori Rant}

The weather was terrible last night, with wind and snow, and several times I heard the ambulance, the police, and I worried; this is what New Year’s Eve was for me, one filled with edginess and restlessness and, yes, fear. My oldest son went to a party with his friends, a party hosted by responsible adults who don’t drink, a party filled with kids and fun and midnight four wheeler rides, and I still did not rest well until I got them all safely home. People who drink like I used to drink are out, you see, and I know how quickly everything can change. I hope, this morning, that no one I know and love was hurt, that none of my friends’ lives were changed irrevocably by careless actions of people who are like I used to be. I am grateful, too, that my own irresponsibility was never punished by causing irreparable damage to someone else’s life.

This is not a holiday of rebirth for me, a chance to look at the year past and make new resolutions. I don’t do resolutions, because if I am doing what I am supposed to be doing, in recovery and in life, I should be taking stock daily and working on what needs to be worked on. I don’t sit down and write out a list of grand plans for the year, with these self-imposed rules that I need to follow, sweeping changes that I need to make. I am not critical of those who DO this, please understand me. It is just that for me, making a decision to change myself, my life, is a daily project. So-no dramatic declarations of losing weight! Eating healthy! making more money! for me, but instead a quiet determination to keep doing what I have been doing. I suppose the resolve, if that is what you want to call it, is to simply keep getting up in the morning, putting one foot in front of the other, and moving forward.

There have been a lot of changes this last year, these last months and weeks and days. I can’t sit back and examine them all, because I would either be filled with an inflated sense of self importance or would be plunged into the depths of despair. I know this: that I have made friends and lost them this year, that I have been both hurt and healed by people I love, that I have found reserves of strength that I didn’t know existed. I have learned that real life is dramatic enough without needing to stir the pot, and that self-care sometimes involves distancing myself from those who still need to create drama-even when it hurts. I have learned that those who love me simply love me, and that even when I make mistakes, there is no mental tally being made, no past transgressions being stored up for future use. I have learned through these long months that I need not apologize for who I am-as long as I make an honest effort to let go of those character defects which are detrimental to myself and others (which god knows is easier some days than others), as long as I love with all I have, I can look into the mirror at the end of the day and like what I see.