Me. That’s who. And perhaps everyone who knew me during the last “writing phase” of my life.

I have words stirring around inside me all the time. And I often feel the immense power of words and have trouble selecting the correct one to speak, knowing that each one has a different, sometimes subtle meaning. For me writing is different. I don’t feel the same pressures when I write. The weights come off and I just become a pathway for the words. I have a few hundred pages tucked away in a closet to show for it… but that was when I had all the time in the world and absolutely no desire to experience a moment of it.

Writing went by the wayside for a while, mostly because I decided to live. Oh I took it out and dusted it off on a few “special occasions” but the last 15 years of my life my have been rather barren in this dept. I feel like i’ve just greeted an old friend at the airport. It’s a little awkward, a little rusty, but i have no doubt the laughter and tears are just a few old memories away.

The proverbial “straw” this go round was reading a book narrated by “Death”. Now, that may be a turn off for some people, but for me it felt like home. I spent a considerable amount of time courting that fellow in my teen angst years. To read a narrative voice so rich with word pictures and parenthetical excerpts felt like reading something from my own heart that I couldn’t remember writing. It resonated in a truly deep bone shaking heart defining sort of way. Not that I think I’m a Pulitzer candidate or anything, but I felt a connection to the writing that I haven’t been able to shake. And beyond that, I don’t want to shake it. I want to own it.

This current life I live is surprising and beautiful. And I have so much joy in it. I’ve said it before, but I truly do believe, the depression I fought all those years is the biggest blessing of my life. I never did any of that “imagining my wedding day” or “daydreaming about my future children” stuff. I didn’t hope. Therefore, the amount of expectations accrued for this portion of my life are considerably low. I am not trying to hold to some story I wrote in my head when I was 12. I have the blessing of watching each day unfold simply as it does. And I catch myself reveling in the details of it. The “moments”.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not so delusional as to believe that there is no plain old excruciating or that each and every moment is pure joy. I know excruciating.

Behold below, the never before seen picture from the Bonn family. They are rare, to be sure, but worth so much more than the usual thousand words.

Excruciating has no adequate words. It’s the can’t breathe death grip of pain. (Yes, if you look closely here you can see that my daughter’s heart is just beyond that flimsy looking piece of plastic.) 7-ish years ((EEKS!!)) removed from this moment, there are still no words to describe the experience.

And I know that there are your run of the mill GOOD days. Things go right, the food is good, there’s some laughter and everyone is smiling as they drift off to sleep… ah. All pieces of the puzzle. And I know that there are many facets to each piece.

All that to say: I don’t know what i’m going to write about. (it’s a BLOG ABOUT NOTHING!)

But what I want to constantly CELEBRATE is those moments where I am completely present. Where I am wholly invested in what is happening right then and it feels like my chest is ripping from it’s seams because I am just so full of that moment. A second perhaps, but that’s all it takes. It’s the tiny things that make the hard ones worth the fight.

That, my friends, is excruciating joy.