Earplugs

I'd like to share a little something with the world. 


The way I view the inside of my brain. 


I have personified little aspects of my personality. They all hang out around a table inside a room filled floor-to-ceiling with filing cabinets. Inside these cabinets exist my dreams, memories, hopes, fears. 


There's the ball-busting, badass feminist-she looks like a young Joan Jett. She has a temper and throws things. She has never gotten over her teen anger. 
There's the overly creative, overly sensitive artist. She looks like Anais Nin, but I haven't seen her in a long time. 
There's the domestic goddess. She looks like my Aunt Bernadette costumed like June Cleaver, crossed with Nigella Lawson.
There's the frightened, nerdy little girl. She looks like I did my sophomore year of high school. After I shaved my head. 




And so on. 


There's another being in there that I cannot personify. It is an amorphous glob of terrifying. This thing has tentacles that reach into my very soul and has the ability to shake the foundations of my sanity. It is my fears. It is my horror. And it lives in me. It makes my throat close with hot tears and tells me I am not good enough. That I never will be. 


Generally I can keep this thing quiet with scripture and faith. And other things. 
And sometimes this thing becomes so loud and so huge that it overtakes everything else. I question each tiny decision I make. 
I cannot ignore this thing-it is a part of me. Occasionally I am able to banish it to a cold dark corner of myself by convincing myself that it is Satan (as I imagine at least part of it is), and using the name of the Lord to make it BEGONE. 
But sometimes that does not work. And I must find a way to hold myself together because I don't want my son to think his mother is a basket case. 
Today is a new day.