help – Dr. Kiara Shanay Lee

Pills

PILLS

Your heart beats strong

God let it be

You are blessed and you

You

You Are loved

But to you, love is

how much of life you can miss

sleeping it all away

Sleeping on your youth

And the dawn and

The day

I pray:

Lord, may your hands put the pills

Up in a place far far away

I hate the sound they make in her purse

I hate it in the worst

Way

It’s the worse way to waste

borrowed time you can not make stay

I can not just say STOP TAKING THEM

I know God I know I know

it doesn’t work that

Way

But God, just listen

I know it may sound

twisted when

I say I’m so conflicted with

My emotions

Do you know what I mean when I say I’m

Stuck somewhere in between

being optimistic and

being realistic

about her disease and

about her need

I need answers

Please.

How did she get this?

Addicted.

Sometimes I know exactly what I want to tell you, sometimes the words to describe how I feel about you are hard to find. I’m sitting here drawing a blank, at a loss for words, but at the same time I can feel every word I have yet to write. I can feel. But you can’t feel.

Feelings are among the many things you do not possess. You don’t feel the sadness I feel when you forget about me. You don’t feel the anger I feel when I see you manipulate your way through your life…or should I say what’s left of your life. You don’t know how happy I feel on the days when remnants of your old self manage to surface from time to time, and how let down I feel when I come to terms with the fact that they are as authentic as your pseudo-emotions.

Addiction

I said that I was drawing a blank, but truth is, you’re the one with the empty space. No dreams, no goals, no ambitions and no passions will ever fill it. Your drug of choice is the only void that can fill that void. Its everything and its nothing.

Time goes by, yet you stop time. You stop life. Your victims are frozen in a moment – because in exchange for the high, they lose a lifetime.

But I’m a victim too. Thank the Lord above, no drug has led me down your path. But as I watch as people I care about are dragged down your dark corridors, winding roads and uphill excursions, I too have been riding along in the backseat, feeling every bump, every wrong turn.

Addiction

You are one of the most selfish people I know. You take everything and you give nothing. You think the world revolves around you. You think you have it all figured out. You think you have everyone around you fooled, but the joke is on you.

You sleep all day. You’re up all night. You itch all over. You can’t hold a job. Your nose bleeds. You’ve gained weight. You’ve lost weight. You can’t hold a relationship. You’re depressed. You’re anxious. You lie. You cheat. You steal. You think you’re better than everyone else. You think you’re the smallest person on this earth.

Addiction

Get the hell out and take your bottles, your pills, your joints, your rocks, your needles and everything else you brought here with you. And on your way out, give us back our loved ones you’ve been holding for hostage for so long.

Wait a minute…why am I writing this letter? Why am I expecting anything in return from you? I’m sitting here pouring my heart out, but why?

Because I can feel, but you can’t.

Feel.

Weekly Wisdom: The Shoulders We Lean on Need Love, Too

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?”

Martin Luther King, Jr. posed a great question – a question that we often look outward for the answer. We want to do for others in a poverty-stricken neighborhood, a disaster-stricken state or in an entirely different country that’s still developing. But what about the people close to us? The friends right around you? The family in your own house even? What about the people that are always there when you need them?

I had to do a family history project a few weeks ago for a class. I asked my mom some questions for the assignment, and a lot of things came up. She’s been through a lot (and has been through most of it on her own) and I felt overwhelmed – partly because of what all she’s had to overcome – but mainly because I felt that for a long time, she’s been there and then some for everybody else, but in the grand scheme of it all, she hasn’t had her own shoulder to lean on.

I have 2 sisters and between the 3 of us, you can imagine the ups and downs we’ve had, and the brunt of it all has been on our mother. It takes a special kind of woman to even fathom dealing with the stuff we’ve brought our mother’s way over the years. And on top of that, my mom is a therapist and a substance abuse counselor, so she helps people fix their lives both on and off the clock.

When I ask my mom about dealing with the bumps in the road she’s encountered in life, she said “I dealt with it, you know, I got over all of that stuff on my own eventually.” But it shouldn’t have to be that way. If the people we love can be there for us, we can surely be there for them.

I see it all like this. As we grow older, we learn that the amount of people that we can really trust and that truly care for us tends to get smaller and smaller. And once we’ve figured that out, we hold on to the people that are truly on our team really tight. And we lean on them. We lean on them so much, we may forget about their well-being. They may have stumbled and fallen themselves. But for many of them, virtually no one is there to catch them.

It may be your parents, a best friend, your long time mentor or your wise older cousin – whoever the people are you lean on, make a conscious effort to think about them. Be there for them. Let them know that they’re loved. Just because they are our relatives, our friends and our familiars doesn’t mean they don’t need looking after. And just because they support us through our rough patches doesn’t mean they’re immune to rough patches of their own.

Next time you call up your best friend to complain about your dead end job, next time you ask your sibling to get you out of one of your numerous stints with the law and next time you whine about the partner your momma been tellin’ you was no good, think about that “urgent” question Martin Luther King Jr. asked of us all.

The shoulders we lean on are just as good as we treat them.

Peace, Love & Consciousness

Kiara