crisis Archives | The ManifestStation

Hair Ties

November 28, 2016

By Mare Biddle

“Don’t touch him,” the ER doctor barked at me. “You can’t touch him because you conduct current. We can’t tell exactly what his heart is doing.”

“My hair? Can he hold my hair?” I took out my hair tie and wrapped my three year-old son’s frightened little paw around a thick bunch.

My hair was long that year. I had worn it short most of my adult life. I don’t particularly like long hair: handfuls to wash, tangles to blowout, layers and layers to straighten. Repeat. I don’t recall making a decision to grow it long. I must have skipped a few appointments, and then soon enough it had passed my shoulders. The perfect length to braid, or pile up, or as it turned out, to hold.

“This kid’s not crashing on me. Let’s get this done, people.” The emergency room doctor ordered Adenosine and explained that it would re-set my son’s heart; take it from 266 beats per minute back down to a normal 100. He did not explain how that would happen. Continue Reading…

Family, Guest Posts

The Art of Waiting

June 23, 2015

By Amie Newman

I am not a fan of patience. It doesn’t matter if I’m standing in line at the grocery store or figuring out my next career move. It borders on skin-crawlingly-uncomfortable to wait. I live with anxiety, though it’s treated with medication. Still, to breathe deeply and be with myself, in the tumultuous times, in all my uncertainty and confusion can almost cause a riot in my brain. I know I’m not alone in this but it’s a solitary feeling.

The last three years have been filled with the fight of my life, as my husband, two teenage children, and I lived in deep trauma. It was and is a trauma we must keep private and so there are very few who know or understand what we’ve been through. Last year, we climbed out of the trenches, after a long war, dazed and dirty. Like a less funny (though sometimes equally as weird) “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” I am a part of a new and unfamiliar world, post-crisis, that I am scared of and fascinated by. I’m wondering what the hell to do next. I have no idea. I hate the waiting. But I am raw enough and maybe finally wise enough to know that waiting may be the best thing I can do right now. Continue Reading…

Uncategorized

Now Leaving Childhood. By Amy Ferris.

July 23, 2014

By Amy Ferris

He was a spiritual advisor/therapist of sorts. More like a healer/shaman. I had known him for years. I told him that I felt empty, lost… completely depleted. “I think I need to re-connect with a spiritual path,” I said. “It finds you,” he told me. “One day you’ll be doing something, standing somewhere, driving in the car… and you’ll just feel it, get it… know it. You’ll know it. It’ll wash over you.”

“Oh,” I said, “you mean like an Aha moment.”

“More like an Ah-yes moment. Aha is a light bulb, Ah-yes is the whole wiring system. It’s not a fall-to-my-knees moment, it’s pure clarity.”

It was sort of like an impulse buy.