Author: madicowell

Sometimes we have to speak our redemption long before we feel it.

We reach out to the broken hearted not to fix them, but to show them how equally broken we truly are as well.

The rescued are actually the rescuers.

Reinforcing love and affection in one another is something that may not always be tangible, but it is there.

Creating an essence of acceptance.

To defy stereotypes, stigmas, and hate.

To experience one another in a way that cannot be simply explained.

To love people in ways we didn’t know existed.

A safe space of encouragement and admiration.

To be connected.

To be known.

I’m ready for my life to have color again, and it is happening.

I am constantly shocked by the idea of unconditional love.

How can it be possible?

How can someone pursue me no matter what my heart’s condition is?

How can You love me through it all?

There is so much freedom in that.

How much power would you feel if you truly felt the depths of unconditional love to its fullest degree?

It’s so deep.

His love touches every single crack of the earth, every crack of our heart.

How can You know my every detail and design and still be so proud?

You are fully proud of who I am even when I am not.

You hold Your head up high and claim me in a crowded room.

You go before me.

Your name holds power in the darkest of nights.

How is it that even when I don’t feel you, I know you are there?

I know the truths that you tell me, which I cling to when every thing else is crashing.

You calm every compulsion.

You ease all anxiety.

You bring my empty heart the deepest joy.

You are eternal peace.

You welcome emotions.

You love emotion.

You love when we openly express ourselves and show the world our true colors.

You are proud of every single thing.

That’s what keeps me coming back every time, Your unconditional, unfailing love.

Your love does not sway back-and-forth depending on the mood.

Your love does not leave when things do not make sense.

You are steadfast when emotions are swinging from end to end.

What could possibly be more calming then having the largest pendulum of emotions, and knowing that You acknowledge and feel each and every one of them?

How can Your love be so deep?

How can it constantly calm the sea?

How does it always know the exact answer needed for every single question?

Your beauty remains so vastly unknown, no one knows Your depths.

You are the most mysterious thing, the most hopeful source.

Every day you give me reasons to live.

Reasons to speak, breathe, laugh, and enjoy.

You always remind me of why it is worth it.

You make life so worth it.

Your unconditional love is the everlasting answer.

 

 

The mind, what a brutally beautiful thing.

What is your mind full of?

Do your thoughts elegantly meander their way into your presences, or do they rush in like an unceasing wave?

Spinning circles that seem to have no end.

Passion, what is your passion?

What makes you breathe?

Will you allow it to flow through your head into your soul?

What will be enough for you?

Who will be enough for you?

What brings on your worst fears?

What if the very thing that you believe wants to do away with your life is here to replenish it.

It is here to make you a new being.

A creature more magnificent than you could imagine.

It wants to take your spirit and dignify you when you feel like you have nothing left.

Your skin inhales potential.

Potential swarms our existence just waiting for us to reach out and capture it.

 

Spend your time loving immensely.

Love has no end.

It never begins with you nor will it end with you.

Do not allow yourself to become jaded and calloused over the foolish mistakes of the world.

Embrace your circumstances and make them your own.

Embrace your soul and everything that lies within you.

Satisfy your system with things that will last.

Exemplify your uniqueness.

Don’t be afraid to love.

Don’t be afraid to lose it.

 

Passion floods through my bones, through my whole body.

The desire to know every soul.

To know true love that is everlasting.

The kind of love that is there when every crack of your being is poured out and there is nothing else to hide, no where else to run, no where else to go.

I want to be known.

What do you do when your passion overflows into every portion of your life and you can hardly make sense of it?

Where do you turn when your heart is spilled into every square inch of your macrocosm?

 

It is time to embrace.

Allow yourself to be known through your own discovery.

Do not wait for someone to show you what you can show yourself.

Embrace your cracks.

Love your unique ability to feel in ways that seem unobtainable.

Let the screams from your heart overflow as you formulate its true beauty.

Focus on your soul.

Focus on the great depths of your being.

Breathe in smooth, uprooting affection.

Be vulnerable, let yourself love, let yourself feel the weight of reality, allow yourself to heal, appreciate your past.

Life is to short to not love with a passion that runs deeper than any human could ever imagine.

This may sound strange, but I have never known God was more real then when I started to question Him.

To be frank, in the past year there have been moments when I have thought I despised God, creation, the fall, and so many other stories from the Bible.

I started to question this strange thing that I had worshiped and felt so passionately for.

Why was I praising something that did not care for me?

Why have I invested and devoted 20 years to something that I felt nothing from?

A million thoughts have run wild in my brain in times of doubt, but that is when I know Jesus is there the most.

I feel my heart desiring to be deeper with this “God.”

I feel myself wanting to be known.

I feel my mind waiting for Him to fill it with peace that supersedes all things.

Why would I long for any of these things if I did not know He was real from the very beginning?

If God truly was not there and has not ever existed, my heart would not long so intensely for something bigger than humanity.

God’s quietness, and what has felt like His abandonment has never been more eye opening to me then it is right now.

Yet to anyone, including myself, this all sounds disgusting.

Why would I even want to worship something that does not comfort me in my greatest times of despair?

 

But right now even in my time of need I know He is here because I would not have the boldness to write this if I was not sure.

So that brings me back to this statement, “did He ever really leave, or has He always remained?”

My deep love, longing, and strength would not come from a relationship that was just handed to me.

I have realized people don’t want to hear a powerful story from someone who almost went through something…and then God saved them from it.

People want to speak to people that God has worked with through their struggles.

This is why in my times of complete doubt, I know God has never been more relevant.

Since December 2015 I have been battling this anger, but I realized my relationship with God has never been more raw and real than it has been this past year of pain and sorrow.

I realized that even if my relationship with God has lately been full of anger, doubt, and insecurity…it is still a relationship and that is something to be acknowledged.

If my relationship with Christ was truly severed, I would not be full of questions and concerns.

I would have been full of complete complacency and unbiased opinions.

This anger is fuel to knowing there is more.

Even painful character traits can be used for complete beauty.

Ashes rise up time and time again into a creature that is far greater than ever before.

Self-awareness, relaxation, self-reflection, humanity, self-realization, existence.

All these words spin circles in my head.

Do I have a healthy image of others and myself?

Am I choosing to live for every single day or just existing?

It is hard for me to look back at my past and see how much time was wasted resenting my own life.

Too many days slipped by filled with endless sorrow and self-pity.

So much time taken for granted.

We can take life for granted so easily.

We can take a single breath for granted.

We can take our moments within a day for granted.

We can take people’s words for granted.

I look back at times in my life when I had no earthly idea how beautiful the moments were that I was enduring because I was too caught up in myself.

Now I spend every day trying to make up for lost time.

I try to take every breath as a sign of elegant existence.

I try to look at my surroundings no matter what they might be and be thankful that I am even able to reach out my hand and tangibly feel the very things that may be causing me pain.

Sensing yourself and your feelings means you are living.

Getting your head and heart on the same level helps reconnect you with yourself.

Too many life-changing experiences are missed just by our own apathy.

My own apathy and discouragement was beginning to take my life away.

And now I want it back.

It has been an entire year since I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder as well as OCD, and every once and a while it still feels surreal to me.

Sometimes I struggle with coming to terms with it, and other times I am fully comfortable with accepting it.

But the longer I go on through life not accepting myself and instead accepting isolation, the farther I grow from humanity and the more I seep into my own secluded existence.

I want to reach out and identify with the rest of humankind.

I want to walk beside others and share moments of pain but replace them with hope.

I feel certain that my past is my past.

I will never have to go through this past year again.

It was by far the most emotional year of my life and I do not ever want to turn back.

I don’t want to be an innocent infant stuck in nothing but her own skin ever again.

I never want to be a confused and lost child again.

I do not want to be a hated middle-schooler again.

I never want to be a depressed and suicidal teen again.

I don’t want to be a resentful, angry, vacant freshman in college again.

I want to be in the here and now and go from there.

Both apathy and passion can kill us.

When passion is placed in the wrong places and people it can kill us.

When apathy surpasses all things because we have lost hope in all people and places, it can kill us.

The key to life is balance.

How are you balancing your life style right now?

Do you love yourself?

Are you taking care of yourself everyday?

Self-care and self-awareness can save us.

Self-awareness has changed my life.

It has made me feel like the most disgusting yet satisfied person I can be.

An unhealthy view of self can ruin you and your relationships.

Unhealthy views and standards for ourselves can isolate and kill.

One of my best friends is always reminding me that we MUST appreciate the small steps we take in life, because those advancements eventually help us obtain our ultimate goal.

We are all in transit. We are endlessly evolving. And we are forever progressing if we so choose to.

As I turned from page to page through my journal dated in 2010 my eyes welled up with tears.

I promised myself I would never look at any of my journal entries from throughout the past six years unless I was totally ready, and finally, I felt like I truly was.

I was so astonished; I laid in bed and cried all night long.

I have thought about publishing this blog post for the last month, but I guess I felt a little ashamed.

This is because about a month and a half ago my dad asked me , “who are you truly doing all this for? All the counseling, reading, and medication. Yourself or others?”

I felt my throat begin to swell up and my eyes shifted towards the floor because there was no doubt in my mind what the answer was.

I know I had been doing things for others instead of myself.

I had been doing things because I wanted people to accept me.

Maybe I am the only one to admit it…even though we all do.

I have a fear of being left, boring, aggravating, and forgotten.

I have loved being diagnosed this past year because it has given me so many answers, but it has also given me so many insecurities.

In order to get anywhere with the issues that actually hurt our inner being…there will always be an uphill battle.

As I have talked about in my previous blog posts, this past year has been very hard on my pride and me.

If I had any pride what so ever it has definitely been stripped of me.

I have heard criticism and I have applied it.

I have read books about my issues and I have absorbed them.

I have been given medication, and I have cooperated.

I go to counseling weekly and I am given life skills to better myself, consistently.

And I have decided I am tired of being judged by others, myself, and society.

I could not be more ready to move on to the accepting stage of my diagnosis.

I am ready to own who I am.

To no longer hate the face in the mirror, the heart that I hold, and the mind that is stuck within my far too small brain.

That’s exactly how it feels. Like I have a mind the size of Texas with only enough space for something as small as Rhode Island.

There is no where for my mind to go.

Its trapped within my brain which is trapped within my skull.

Which is trapped within my skin.

It is never ending. I will never get away from whom I am.

That night of reading my journals from middle school up until the end of my senior year of high school was full of tears of regret, but also of victory.

I have come so far.

I am proud of myself.

To anybody else this night may have sounded extremely sad and strange, but to me it was such a statement to myself.

With every single page turn I read about how deep and dark my depression was even in the seventh grade.

How it boiled within my soul until it finally erupted and left me as nothing but what I believed to be useless trash.

But these journal entries brought me comfort.

People will always throw labels, stereotypes, and whatever other hateful things they can at you, but I do not care about trying to make every single person like me any longer.

Because when I read those journals, I saw how far I have come, and that is all that matters.

I want to be in the “acceptance stage” of my grieving process from my diagnosis and I am going to be.

I am done feeling angry.

I am going to use my mental health issues which can be debilitating and actually show people they CAN be the exact opposite.

I am going to use my excessive amounts of energy to converse with as many people as possible everyday and remind them how beautiful they are.

I want to be going 100 miles an hour and then sink down to o, and instead of being so embarrassed and upset with myself, acknowledge it.

I cannot suffocate who I am, and I will not.

I have spent too much time trying to figure out how I can still be normal and how I can still keep everything perfect all the time and that is impossible.

All I can do is take care of me, and that is what I am going to do.

I am putting up this blog post because sometimes you just need to recognize yourself and your achievements.

Everyone needs recognition, and sometimes that is the thing that keeps us pushing.

So if you have not recognized and appreciated yourself lately, go take yourself out for coffee, sit outside and enjoy the fresh air, and congratulate yourself for still being here and pushing every day, because everyday is another uphill battle, and you are winning.