First, I want you to read the lyrics and listen to the song to see what I'm referencing and where I'm speaking from for this.
"8 Good Reasons"
Don't know if I should quite sing this song
Don't know if it maybe might be wrong
But then again it maybe might be right
To tell you 'bout the bullet and the red light
You know I'm not from this place
I'm from a different time, different space
And it's real uncomfortable
To be stuck somewhere you just don't belong
But I got 8 good reasons to stick around
8 good reasons, well maybe nine now
I had a dream one night
About a bullet and a red light
You know it felt alright
You know it actually felt quite nice
If I could have gone
Without it hurting anyone
Like a child, I would have found me mum
Like a bird I would have been flown
You know I don't much like life
I don't mind admitting that it ain't right
You know I love to make music
But my head got wrecked by the business
Everybody wanting something from me
They rarely ever wanna just know me
I became the stranger no one sees
Cut glass I've crawled upon my knees
But I got 8 good reasons to stick around
8 good reasons, well maybe nine now
I had a dream one night
About a bullet and a red light
You know it felt alright
You know it actually felt quite nice
But I got 8 good reasons to stick around
8 good reasons, well maybe nine now
8 good reasons to stick around
8 good reasons, well maybe nine now
Well maybe nine now
I think we've all got a bullet and a red light.
Clearly Sinead is talking about suicide, but that's not the only form it can take. These are the moments, the headspace where we decide that things might be better without us, that we want release, escape, and to stop feeling like a burden in our own lives. Misunderstood, unwanted, outright rejected, misrepresented, out of place, depressed, anxious, torn, lost, we don't quite feel like a part of the world we live in and we want to own those feelings as much as we want to reconnect. Personal identity, personal value, and the space we fill for the rest of the world both friend and foe, these places all have their own values, they all have their own cost to us, especially when that cost is more than we have the strength and the emotional state to pay for or feel that we do.
My own personal bullet and a red light came when I was pregnant with Sasha.
It started well before that with my fear of death after my son was born and I learned that I had a brush with death, that a narrow bit of chance led to my still being here, it got worse after we lost Lisa and then, not much later, Aurora. I had a sort of personal relationship with death, I spent a lot of my early life burying relatives and pets, seemingly in a constant process of loss and change even when I wasn't facing a literal death. I was never exactly the girl who fit into other people's lives the way I wanted to, I didn't have the right angles, the right heart, or way of communicating. I see what other people don't see, I can be more blunt than people are prepared for, I can say things when I am hurt or not thinking that can be hurtful even when I don't meant them to be, and I can be a bit of a dreamer and a little naive. I think a lot about things, spend a lot of time on fear and anxiety that other people don't face or see as being trivial, even tedious. Constantly questioning myself and things in my life, I often feel like a burden, not enough to pay for the weight of my being.That I want too much and therefore often put my own needs beneath the needs of others. I bottle up all of that angst and need, that lack of "enough" and then I get eaten up.
By the time I was pregnant with Sasha a lot of weight was taking me down, guilt, anxiety, inadequacies, and the fear of death. Every moment of my pregnancy with Aurora was centered around these things. I was treated as if I were an idiot, reckless, and irresponsible by the doctors I saw, Lisa's death still affected Todd and I's relationship, and we were dealing with a lot of unresolved stress with finances, unaddressed personal conflict, and blame over things that had happened in those last few years. When Aurora died I had failed, I was a crap mom, I didn't deserve to be happy, to have Todd. I was a wide sea of loss and rejection. A lot of that was addressed over the next couple of years, but a good deal of it was internalized and I didn't really see that until we learned I was pregnant with our third. I loved being pregnant in so many ways, I truly felt pregnant "like a normal person", things progressed more naturally, Sasha kicked more than Nikki even did, and I felt her life growing inside me in a way I hadn't with the other two. She gave me a gift with that pregnancy and I looked forward to her birth.
I also knew that death was a very real possibility and I was going to have to deal with that on some level. late at night, I couldn't sleep thinking about it and it only got worse when the doctors bickered over who would be responsible for the surgery and told me that they might have to make a vertical cut all the way up to my ribcage to be sure that no unnecessary risks were taken in the event that plancenta acreta had occurred again. Frantic to address it, desperate to enjoy the pregnancy that I had, I finally looked death in the eye and decided it was going to happen and I would be ready for it. I finished the quilt I had been planning to make for Nikki since he was a baby, I got all the time I could with him, and I tried to do everything I could to make everything ready for Sasha, even making her an owl with leftover bits from Nikki's quilt. Everything had to be ready for Todd to raise the kids, to offer them the best I could give them of the time I had left, I got frustrated and upset I did an overnight close to Nikki's 7th birthday because I was desperate to get that last birthday with him, I wanted a natural birth even if it killed me, and I was going to bring this baby into the world alive and well no matter what it took. I would sacrifice myself for her.
Except it didn't happen that way. Instead of dying I had a c-section that was as close to the ideal as it could be, I felt them take her out of my body, I heard her cry, and then they stitched me closed. I went shivering to recovery and there we both were a little while later. I spent the next few days feeling lost, as if maybe the perfect serenity I found myself experiencing was some illusion, the death's bed imagination of a corpse about to cool on the table, slit open and abandoned as life went on without her. I wept when we got home, terrified that we would never leave the hospital, a strange sort of purgatory, and then I threw myself into caring for her.
So what was my bullet with the red light? After years of being afraid to die, so much so that I often failed to live life as I should, I was mourning the fact that I did not die. I was trying to make peace with not having met my end, found release from the burden of not being enough. All the while living my life as if it was bonus time in a video game and bound to end at any moment. It all had to be as good as I could manage, I had to make it all right and be ready if it ended. Except you can't live like that, you don't see the things you're missing, no one can live up to the expectations you set out for every day and there are so many things we all want to attain before we die that its impossible to really get them all lined up as I wanted to do. Again and again I was removed from things, facing losses and changes that I had not prepared for, that I had not seen coming until, finally, I had to face what it was that was eating at me.
How do you do that? Very, very gradually and with a lot of thought. It helps if you also see a lot of proof that there is more in your life than you saw before. You heal the harm in yourself as much as you can every day. You make peace with the things you know about you versus the perceptions that other you sees and that other people see no matter how hard you fight to make yourself understood from the day to day people that hardly know you, to those you have close intimate relationships with. You start seeing you, defining who that person is, and feeding her when you can with the right things. You start asking for the things you need to feel content in your relationships, and making sure the balance is square between you. Most of all, you take your list of reasons for being here and you commit them to memory so that you can say just how many there are and remember when the days aren't always so good. I deserve to be here, I earned the right to my life, and I am only what I answer to even in my own head.
Don't know if I should quite sing this song
Don't know if it maybe might be wrong
But then again it maybe might be right
To tell you 'bout the bullet and the red light
You know I'm not from this place
I'm from a different time, different space
And it's real uncomfortable
To be stuck somewhere you just don't belong
But I got 8 good reasons to stick around
8 good reasons, well maybe nine now
I had a dream one night
About a bullet and a red light
You know it felt alright
You know it actually felt quite nice
If I could have gone
Without it hurting anyone
Like a child, I would have found me mum
Like a bird I would have been flown
You know I don't much like life
I don't mind admitting that it ain't right
You know I love to make music
But my head got wrecked by the business
Everybody wanting something from me
They rarely ever wanna just know me
I became the stranger no one sees
Cut glass I've crawled upon my knees
But I got 8 good reasons to stick around
8 good reasons, well maybe nine now
I had a dream one night
About a bullet and a red light
You know it felt alright
You know it actually felt quite nice
But I got 8 good reasons to stick around
8 good reasons, well maybe nine now
8 good reasons to stick around
8 good reasons, well maybe nine now
Well maybe nine now
I think we've all got a bullet and a red light.
Clearly Sinead is talking about suicide, but that's not the only form it can take. These are the moments, the headspace where we decide that things might be better without us, that we want release, escape, and to stop feeling like a burden in our own lives. Misunderstood, unwanted, outright rejected, misrepresented, out of place, depressed, anxious, torn, lost, we don't quite feel like a part of the world we live in and we want to own those feelings as much as we want to reconnect. Personal identity, personal value, and the space we fill for the rest of the world both friend and foe, these places all have their own values, they all have their own cost to us, especially when that cost is more than we have the strength and the emotional state to pay for or feel that we do.
My own personal bullet and a red light came when I was pregnant with Sasha.
It started well before that with my fear of death after my son was born and I learned that I had a brush with death, that a narrow bit of chance led to my still being here, it got worse after we lost Lisa and then, not much later, Aurora. I had a sort of personal relationship with death, I spent a lot of my early life burying relatives and pets, seemingly in a constant process of loss and change even when I wasn't facing a literal death. I was never exactly the girl who fit into other people's lives the way I wanted to, I didn't have the right angles, the right heart, or way of communicating. I see what other people don't see, I can be more blunt than people are prepared for, I can say things when I am hurt or not thinking that can be hurtful even when I don't meant them to be, and I can be a bit of a dreamer and a little naive. I think a lot about things, spend a lot of time on fear and anxiety that other people don't face or see as being trivial, even tedious. Constantly questioning myself and things in my life, I often feel like a burden, not enough to pay for the weight of my being.That I want too much and therefore often put my own needs beneath the needs of others. I bottle up all of that angst and need, that lack of "enough" and then I get eaten up.
By the time I was pregnant with Sasha a lot of weight was taking me down, guilt, anxiety, inadequacies, and the fear of death. Every moment of my pregnancy with Aurora was centered around these things. I was treated as if I were an idiot, reckless, and irresponsible by the doctors I saw, Lisa's death still affected Todd and I's relationship, and we were dealing with a lot of unresolved stress with finances, unaddressed personal conflict, and blame over things that had happened in those last few years. When Aurora died I had failed, I was a crap mom, I didn't deserve to be happy, to have Todd. I was a wide sea of loss and rejection. A lot of that was addressed over the next couple of years, but a good deal of it was internalized and I didn't really see that until we learned I was pregnant with our third. I loved being pregnant in so many ways, I truly felt pregnant "like a normal person", things progressed more naturally, Sasha kicked more than Nikki even did, and I felt her life growing inside me in a way I hadn't with the other two. She gave me a gift with that pregnancy and I looked forward to her birth.
I also knew that death was a very real possibility and I was going to have to deal with that on some level. late at night, I couldn't sleep thinking about it and it only got worse when the doctors bickered over who would be responsible for the surgery and told me that they might have to make a vertical cut all the way up to my ribcage to be sure that no unnecessary risks were taken in the event that plancenta acreta had occurred again. Frantic to address it, desperate to enjoy the pregnancy that I had, I finally looked death in the eye and decided it was going to happen and I would be ready for it. I finished the quilt I had been planning to make for Nikki since he was a baby, I got all the time I could with him, and I tried to do everything I could to make everything ready for Sasha, even making her an owl with leftover bits from Nikki's quilt. Everything had to be ready for Todd to raise the kids, to offer them the best I could give them of the time I had left, I got frustrated and upset I did an overnight close to Nikki's 7th birthday because I was desperate to get that last birthday with him, I wanted a natural birth even if it killed me, and I was going to bring this baby into the world alive and well no matter what it took. I would sacrifice myself for her.
Except it didn't happen that way. Instead of dying I had a c-section that was as close to the ideal as it could be, I felt them take her out of my body, I heard her cry, and then they stitched me closed. I went shivering to recovery and there we both were a little while later. I spent the next few days feeling lost, as if maybe the perfect serenity I found myself experiencing was some illusion, the death's bed imagination of a corpse about to cool on the table, slit open and abandoned as life went on without her. I wept when we got home, terrified that we would never leave the hospital, a strange sort of purgatory, and then I threw myself into caring for her.
So what was my bullet with the red light? After years of being afraid to die, so much so that I often failed to live life as I should, I was mourning the fact that I did not die. I was trying to make peace with not having met my end, found release from the burden of not being enough. All the while living my life as if it was bonus time in a video game and bound to end at any moment. It all had to be as good as I could manage, I had to make it all right and be ready if it ended. Except you can't live like that, you don't see the things you're missing, no one can live up to the expectations you set out for every day and there are so many things we all want to attain before we die that its impossible to really get them all lined up as I wanted to do. Again and again I was removed from things, facing losses and changes that I had not prepared for, that I had not seen coming until, finally, I had to face what it was that was eating at me.
How do you do that? Very, very gradually and with a lot of thought. It helps if you also see a lot of proof that there is more in your life than you saw before. You heal the harm in yourself as much as you can every day. You make peace with the things you know about you versus the perceptions that other you sees and that other people see no matter how hard you fight to make yourself understood from the day to day people that hardly know you, to those you have close intimate relationships with. You start seeing you, defining who that person is, and feeding her when you can with the right things. You start asking for the things you need to feel content in your relationships, and making sure the balance is square between you. Most of all, you take your list of reasons for being here and you commit them to memory so that you can say just how many there are and remember when the days aren't always so good. I deserve to be here, I earned the right to my life, and I am only what I answer to even in my own head.
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