Messages from a Crow

on shame and being evil

Four months have curled around the same weather: fog under the skyline like pines taking a breath, rain, breaks from rain creating pails of blue, ice crystals curdling into clouds—white foam, whip cream on a sundae. Last week I took a walk in the hills and there were leaves covering the ground like animal origami. It could’ve been October. 

This week all I want to write about are things I shouldn’t write about. I’ve already written a newsletter about that line. I’ll paint the present instead. It’s warm outside. There’s meadowsweet clumped into a square next to me. I’m thinking about what it would look like in the middle of a road in Eastern Washington or under my bed. I play this game sometimes. I pretend I’m someone I know, often someone I love, and I try to imagine what they’re experiencing. Or sometimes I’m just me and in my mind my dad calls me to say someone I love died in a car accident and I’m yelling into the phone, NO no no. It’s not true! I wake up from my mind and I’m crying in the back of someone’s car over a made up story in my head that could happen but hasn’t happened.

I’ve almost died so many times recently and it’s all stemmed from anxiety. It’s made my immune system weak. I have dreams of natural disasters happening while I’m in a fish tank. The fish tank fills, I drown. I feel physical pain in my dream. Sleep paralysis. I wake up and my body is numb. I have to resuscitate my own body to breath again, to peel my limbs off the wet sleeping bag. There are other ways I die. My anxiety and a traumatic childhood gives me paranoid highs more often then not. I still chance it. Not with alcohol anymore, that makes my both physically and mentally ill. But weed is just the mind and sometimes I think I can play with it. 

This time I played with a thousand experiences all at once. Possibilities of experiences, realities of experiences. I stressed myself out and my body shook so much that the next morning I woke up with a pinched nerve that wrapped from my shoulder to my chest. I still can’t move my head in some directions. It seems that cannabis is both physical and mental now.

I keep dying and yet I stay where I am. Why is that? Why do we continue to suffer when the body tells us no? My friends are all leaving this city in August. The highest grass pollen count is here. Yet I stay. And I think about staying through the fall. I am scared of failing. Scared of not having enough money. Failed of doing a job and not being good at it or not being as good I want to be. I want to be good.

Sometimes when I have a bad trip it is because I believe I am evil or bad or whatever else. This time, when those thoughts started coming up, I decided to ask myself why I think I’m evil. The answer is that I was raised with so much shame. Shame of not loving god, shame of sex, shame of who I had not yet loved but longed to. 

My caretakers used to say, Shame on you. I can’t imagine telling Juni that, now that I’m in the role of a caretaker. Nothing she could ever do would make me say that. Nothing I did as a kid would sustain the pit in the stomach of shame on you. 

All this to say that I keep dying and the seasons linger. There’s a crow next to me, across the meadowsweet, and he’s calling. A kind man with an Italian accent noticed us and said, The crows come with messages. I asked him what the message was and the man said, Goodness. There is goodness in your life.

The thing is that after looking in the mirror and seeing myself as bad and shameful, I decided to try to see myself as good. There were heaps of things to see. Which is in itself difficult for me because oh yes there is shame for being too good. I try so hard to sit in the middle of everything, to never be too much. Whatever that means. 

I have to listen to myself no matter how much resistance is met. I have to see myself as good. I am not shameful. The crow is beautiful. The messages are there for you too, if you’d like to listen. 

Goodness! Like friends guarding wind from the flame on your very own $28 luxury cake that you bought from a bakery because you have no oven.

Love, jo