Breathing Blood

There is a lot about myself I can't quite understand. My inability to communicate well or often is just a tiny part of the mystery that I am working on discovering in Christ. More than that, I pray every day I can do something about it. But leave it to Donald Miller to solve just a bit of it for me.

I often chalk some of my isolation up to depression because that is what so many people tell me, or assume. But I have always felt there was something deeper than the broad diagnosis of depression, and Don has helped me continue to believe it is more complicated.

He answered why there are some people that I am drawn to and why there are others I slowly yet quickly pull away from.

"Sometimes I think the reason we don't like certain people is because we feel insecure around them. We like to chalk it up to political or philisophical differences, maybe, but the truth is, if we are honest, we are drawn to those who validate us and affirm us, and we resist those who don't." (To Own A Dragon page 86)

Since having a rare systemic auto-immune disease and consequencially dropping my dream job, then dropping out of college, then barely physically being able to do much of anything I feel like I am endlessly needing to defend myself. Part of that is me jumping to high conclusions, part of it is true. I can give you less than a handful of people who validate me and my disease, my life with my disease, and an infinite seeming number of people who just don't get it.

I don't know what I am really saying yet, other than Don is right, and sometimes in my life that is why I pull away, why we all pull away (if we are smart, believing we are people who need told who we are and we believe too quickly who people tell us we are). But I think that is all I got for now. It is late and I am exhausted. And my brain needs to breath even more blood over this one (Lair, by Robert Pinsky).