Bandon, OR (with starfish)
REFLECTING BACK
by Debi Davis
September 6, 1998 — 9:00 p.m.
Tonight, I sat watching Touched By an Angel and saw pieces of my past blurred through the old, battered, 19 inch TV screen. Tears welled up in my eyes.
I saw the dim eyes and pained, pale face of a young woman in her 20’s, as she struggled, reaching for a connection to hope from the dark shroud surrounding her existence.
She lay withdrawing from crack in an abandoned building. On the rubbish-strewn floor, cockroaches scurried across her lifeless body. The ghost of my younger self floated beside her, on that TV screen. Instead of being lost to crack, my spirit was lost to mental illness.
As the woman reached toward the light and her spirit pleaded for a new beginning, I saw my begging hope in her eyes.
My spirit didn’t beg an angel. It beseeched psychiatrists, therapists, and mental health workers. Laden with mental illness, in my twenties, tears flowed from my eyes, pleading for help, begging for magic to free me from my dark, tortured existence and make me whole.
I imagine those who saw my tears and heard my cries were touched. It was easy for them to join battle because I looked so young and vulnerable. They were drawn into my desperation because I was young and to them, there was hope. A psychiatrist once said I was seductive, but not in a sexual way. What was seductive to him and others I met along my travels through the mental health system, was my youth and a life unfulfilled.
Now I am older. Professionals see gray hair, age spots on my arms and wrinkles, like a topographical map, lining my face. My tears are to them, not seductive, but a repugnant reminder of a spirit beyond reach and hope. No sense wasting time on old ones, there are young ones still to save. When they look at me, I imagine they see an old car battery, encrusted in battery acid, rotting from the inside out.
The pain that wells up from my gut and spills over my eyes, still hurts as much as it did in my twenties. Tears still hurt my eyes and remind me of the bleak, dank abyss between me and the world, as much as they did back in the 1970’s. Aging masks beauty as it does a young spirit crying out for relief.
