I AM THUNDER. I AM SIRENS.

If only I could bellow like the thunder roaring and the the sirens shrieking outside my old cat scratched screens.

If only I could shout to the heavens and ask them for relief from the dark cloud hanging on the rusty hinges of my heart.

If only...

So, really things have not been all that bad. Zoloft has given me a lift and I have become chatty cathy queen. Oh, yes, dear readers, I have been popping a pharmaceutical. I take it daily and I think it makes my tits hurt and it makes me pee a lot and I was hazy for the first three weeks and I wanted to scream that I had caved to what I had called the lies of western medicine.

But after losing the pregnancy--oh yes I was fucking pregnant which sometimes sounds so weird as it rolls off my tongue or saunters over the soft gray matter of my thoughts--all the chemistry in my brain went back to the high-anxiety state of precoming out of the closet. All late winter and spring I had panic attacks and sleeplessness and even night sweats.

Finally, more than six weeks ago, my therapist was like, "you need something to break the chemical cycle that you cannot control." And so I started the drug. Well, I got the script and then it took me two weeks to start it but I did it. And now I am kind of "normal" again. Kind of.

But work is slowly giving me the kind of anxiety that feels like 3000 bricks piled high on my chest, and I just want to say-SHUT UP WORK. I AM THUNDER. I AM SIRENS. I AM SCREAMING AT ALL THE BULLSHIT.

I love my work--the actual work--the working with people in prison and their loved ones and trying with all of our might, together, to make us all look at crime and suffering and victimization and mental illness and hurt differently. And exposing through the direct stories and testimonies of the people living behind the caged walls what prison really is like--guess what folks it hurts people and communities more than any of us will ever realize.

But, without going into too much detail--my organization is having financial trouble right now and I am tired, tired, tired of the fall out of years of dysfunction--the dysfunction before the financial dysfunction that is exacerbated by the financial woes--cascading mountains of ash all around me.

So, lovely, nearly mid June Michigan thunderstorm, I am bellowing with your voice; I am calling out to the winds to bring more rain to cover the ash of the dysfunction and the wounds within our own hearts and histories.

Stopping the melodramatic writing: I really am just screaming and hollering like crazy, loud in my head and waiting with more and more anticipation for my sabbatical which will arrive soon and very soon (more on all that later).