It’s Nature Karen

Category: Recovery

  • Dear Body

    Dear Body

    Dear Body, Can we be friends? I know I’m talking to myself and it sounds kind of silly but if I talk to you like a friend maybe you’ll listen. I need to make amends. I’ve thought things about you that if I knew anyone else was thinking I’d be crushed. I’ve said things to…

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  • Holding On

    Holding On

    “Holding on, Why is everything so heavy?” – Linkin Park, “Heavy” I read back through my posts lately and thought why is everything so heavy? This is where I come to wrestle with my demons and reconcile the past with the present. Sometimes it’s heavy stuff but I have entire weeks and months of uneventful…

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  • Back to 17

      I always go back to 17, most often when I’m driving and listening to music. A song will remind me of how much I hated myself that year and I’m back there, looking at 1987 like a white cross on the roadside. It’s the year I told. It’s the year I lost control of…

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  • Through the Roof

    I cried in the shower this morning, which is my favorite place to break down. There’s something about hot water mixing with hot tears that’s comforting and cleansing. And I don’t have to care about messing up my make-up. I’m just really tired. Some of it is sick and tired but most of it is…

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  • What I Pray For You

    When my friend Marie Pechet died in December, she sent me a spiritual gift. That may sound strange to some of you but anyone who has read her blog or who knew her knows what I’m talking about. Marie was all about spirits, serendipities and God connections. So I wasn’t at all surprised when I…

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  • Final post

    Final post

    Originally posted on Adventures in Spiritual Living: For any who have not yet heard, I am saddened to share the news that Marie Colantoni Pechet passed away on December 7. She died at home, with her family, after breaking all kinds of standards by living not just eighteen months, as her doctors predicted, but nine…

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  • Removing My (Breast) Armor

    I purposely keep walking by mirrors so that I can see myself. When I’m sure no one is looking, I lift my shirt to make sure they’re real. I feel like a teenage girl whose boobies sprouted overnight; amazed, grateful, relieved. And to think that all it took was a little surgery to make me…

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  • Finally Clean

    I had a two-day meltdown last month, which seems to happen every July. I don’t know what the trigger is exactly, other than that most of the abuse I can remember happened during the summer months. It used to bother me, not knowing why it was always July, and now I think that maybe it’s a…

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  • I Love You More

    May 18, 2016 My 92-year-old grandma went into the hospital a couple of weeks ago with a broken hip. She was moved to a rehab facility and then contracted pneumonia. When I visited her today, she was remarkably lucid, even more so than a couple of days ago. Still, I sense that she’s not really…

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  • A Small, Safe Room With a View

      When I was young, we lived off and on in a small adobe house with four rooms. It had water running to the sink in the kitchen but no bathroom. We used an outhouse in the backyard and kept a coffee can under the bed for nights when it was too cold to go…

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