Black and white...

I usually hide for days on end after therapy, but I thought, since I did something that I liked tonight, that I would try not to hide.

It was just with my phone, but I took some black and white photos again.  When I was rather young and enjoyed photography, I started with black and white film in my beloved Minolta X-700.

This is one of my favorite.  All I ever shot was 100 speed film, so I loved how I caught the water as she played in her bath.

I sold this photo. I think it was the first one I ever sold.  I sold it to a psychiatrist in Waco, who wanted it for the office walls.

I sold this to a reading association and it turned it into their logo.

I took a lot of photos when I was a missionary, though most of them are in slides.  I've always wanted those to be scanned somehow.

Most of my photos in Africa were taking on the compound, where I taught school.  This was during a cockroach race.  Yep.  You read that right:  cockroach race.

I just loved this little guy.  He was from Norway.  A real crack-up.

The last work I ever sold was a permanent exhibit at a girls school.  I spent several weeks there photographing the students, and the school created a massive multi-story wall of my photos.

I also sold photos to several textbook authors, but I do not have those.  Mostly, all I ever did was dabble.  And, mostly, all I ever did was take photos of children.

Most of the buds are gone on these and I did not catch one closed, but these are called box flowers.  I think that I almost like them better in black and white than in color.

But in this photo you can see the box-shaped bud there in the bottom center.

The same is with my favorite stump.  To me, it is as if the black and white photo captures what I see in the stump better than the color one did.

Though ... I admit ... in both black and white and color, I do find this stump rather beautiful.

I did snap a photo of my beloved Fluffernutter.  I think he is a rather pensive dog.  It saddens me, though, when I see photos of him where his tail can be seen.  He is so afraid other than when we are in the safety of our home.  You can see his fear in how he keeps his tail plastered downward.

I also took a photo of one of my lions.  I just adore them.  Such a steal they were, but more the victory was not so much a shopping one as something that speaks to me each and every time I lay my eyes upon them.  I am glad that I refused to let the movers refuse to move them.  They were in my quote, which I pointed to a dozen or so times as I argued for their inclusion.  They were the very last items placed on the moving truck, and, fittingly, they were the first items moved into my new home.

If I could go back to this photo, though.  I think that it is beautiful and its beauty reminds me of something from my past that was good ... my love of black and white film and the years I spent with my beloved Minolta X-700.

It was a good thing on a hard day.

It struck me today that whilst I have learned so much about shame from Dr. Brené Brown's research in I Thought It Was Just Me [But It Isn't], the learning is ... not enough.  By that I mean, I have started to learn about building shame resilience to be able to move through shame as I encounter it going forward.  However, I do not know how to bear the shame of my past that fells me so.

The first couple of months with this therapist have been my pouring out how I am so very utterly overwhelmed with the ills of my body.  I am struggling to endure them and to endure how much it takes to manage the symptoms and my medications and my appointments and what it means to live with chronic illness.  But now we are starting anew, where we should have, and are doing the intake history.

Each question is hard to answer without tracing the lines between things, which means jumping around. The questions are hard to answer. Stark facts that oft are triggers.

Normally, afterwards, I try to talk with a dear friend of mine. I love the way she says my name. I love to hear her stories. I love the way she speaks the Gospel to me. I love the way that who I am, the whole of me, doesn't matter to her. But I couldn't reach her today. So, here I sit, drowning in shame from the answers I gave today.

I wouldn't go if I had the choice. Or rather I wouldn't go save for to discuss the seemingly impossibility of living with chronic illness ... wanting to live with chronic illness. This past week, I battled two pudendal neuralgia flares, one trigeminal neuralgia flares, three bad episodes of dysphagia, two blood sugar crashes, and one asthma attack, along with the daily nausea, low BP, dizziness, pre-syncope, neuropathic pain, and the like.

I get now why all of my favorite dysautonomia blogs start with frequent entries and then trail off, some into permanent silence.  Life get so very overwhelming.  It becomes too much to face and do near anything else.  I absolutely and utterly loathe that I have such gaps here in my online rememberer, but writing is so difficult, concentrating is to difficult, and slogging my way through the sadness and loneliness and despair chronic illness brings is so ... difficult.

And to that shame ... enormous shame ... that smothers and suffocates me.  Well, how do I even breathe, let alone write.  And what words can I find to explain that which binds me so?

I wrote about today on Facebook, though on the friends setting, so as to limit my ... exposure.  I wrote about it because I do not know how to handle the shame that arose from one particular answer I gave today.  I think of the answer and then I think: What Gospel is there for someone who did that?  

SIGH.