The First Step
Once, there was a girl who lived in a house at the edge of the forest.
Well, it was really an old dead-end street with some trees, but it looked forest-y and in the summer the dusk sparkled with fireflies. And she wasn’t a girl anymore; she’d given up that title earlier than she should have, many years before. But she loved that house because it glowed with childlike wonder and it was her sanctuary from the storm.
The world should have hardened her heart, but most of the time she still believed in magic. Her front porch had a mat on it that said, “Love Grows Here,” which was true, but her house was also the birthplace of anxiety, a ten-year-old’s tantrums (and a 37-year-old’s tantrums), giggles about a dog who eats cat poop, imaginary adventures filled with dragons and sword fights, and memories from a life very messily lived.
Why is this blog called “marisa rises?” Because the girl had been knocked down too many times in life to count. Sometimes the only thing that made her pick herself back up was the heartbreaking fact that even when her world had fallen apart, the days kept tumbling forward with a cruel and beautiful momentum. You know those moments when it seems like everything should stop and reflect how unbelievably awful life is, and you can’t see how anything could continue to be like it was before? The moments that divide our timelines in two: Before and After?
But instead the people around you keep driving to work and laughing at the park, and the sun keeps setting and rising, and the bills keep needing to be paid, and your children keep needing you to show up and love them. It doesn’t feel fair in those moments that you have to keep making a charade of the life you led before you fell down. But it’s also a strange kind of grace. It’s the universe’s way of saying that no matter how you’ve messed up or how broken your heart is, life goes on and new good things (and bad things) are barreling down at you with the speed of life, whether you want them to or not. So you might as well keep staggering along.
Other times, the only thing that kept her going was the knowledge that her son needed her.
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The first step is the hardest. In writing, putting fingers to keyboard and starting to type something—anything—is strangely daunting. If you haven’t worked out in a while, you put off going to that first exercise class. If you haven’t been on a first date since you were sixteen, the thought of even picking out what to wear on a first date post-divorce is mind-boggling.
This blog has been brewing in my head for many years, but I couldn’t decide what to write about. Finally, I decided it could be about everything. Specifically, everything that helps me rise. I’ve had to do it enough times. Sometimes I feel bitter about that, but in the past few years I’ve also felt grateful, because it meant I already knew how to get through and get up again, each time I needed to. I’d already been through enough shitstorms (and by shitstorms I mean abuse, trauma, PTSD, grief, depression & anxiety, divorce, abandonment, heartbreak, a global pandemic as a single mom . . . ) to be able to remind myself of what I was capable of as I fell headlong into the next one. It’s been part of how I’m learning resilience.
(Then again, there are plenty of times when I’m in the thick of it that I think I can’t get through it. Sometimes I think that’s because I don’t have enough faith in myself and my get-through-itness. Sometimes I think it’s because life is just heartbreaking and leaves you with more and more grief to carry around the older you get. So don’t walk away from this thinking I have it all together or anything.)
My goal with this blog is to tell you the little stories that add up to the big ones. We all have them. If you’re reading this, you also know how to rise, or you wouldn’t still be here. But sometimes it’s nice to be reminded that we’re all staggering through life. We might as well offer to walk with each other for a bit. So come sit on my front porch a while, and let’s talk about life under the glow of the twinkle lights.