The Bucket Digest

  https://unsplash.com/photos/5YU0uZh43Bk The Burden of Having a Voice By Andrea Geones from Words Between Coasts. When I was in third grade, my mom came to my class one day to help out with a project. I had a deeply-rooted fear of people from a very young age. My greatest desire was to be invisible, but since efforts to achieve that goal proved fruitless, I spent much of my focus on surrounding myself with a repellant energy. As you can imagine, I maintained very few friends, but that was OK. My fear of people overrode my desire to belong. I stayed very attached to my mom for many years. So, when she came to class that one day, I experienced something I’d never felt before while at school, which was some semblance of confidence. I was able to keep my gaze up past the toes of my shoes and actually held some conversations with people here and there. Buoyed and bolstered by the presence of my mother, I was actually able to relax, even if it was just a little bit. At the end of the day,

  Living in the Art of Discernment By Andrea Geones at Words Between Coasts. We are drowning. Swept up in a deluge of information: good, bad, honesty, dishonesty, people, places, things, words, melodies, judgment, dreadful negativity, marvelous positivity…. We struggle to breathe under the suffocating pressure of everything all-at-once, but we keep struggling towards the finish line, our breaths labored, our muscles aching, our dry, chapped mouths gulping for air because of the human gift -or is it a human flaw- that is called hope. We struggle going who-knows-where day by day; most days the weight on our backs feeling heavier and heavier, thinking we know the answer, fooling ourselves that we know where we’re going, when, in reality, we are completely lost. We are drowning, struggling, under the load of everything all-at-once. We must ask ourselves how to disentangle ourselves from everything all-at-once: we can’t keep going on this way. Not with the everything all-at-once that we kno

  Previously Published on Words Between Coasts . Are You My Mother, Karen? by Andrea Geones Throughout my life, there’s been this recurring theme of people to whom I’m completely and totally unrelated thinking that I am their daughter. Not in the way where they may feel that they are a maternal or paternal figure in our relationship; I am their actual daughter, but through some sort of divine intervention or spiritual act of defiance, I was birthed by someone else. I used to be intrigued by this idea- that you could physically and biologically belong to one couple, but your soul belongs to someone else. I don’t know that I necessarily believed it, but it was a fun notion to entertain - until I met this woman. At the time, I was working at a kids' party place. You know, the kind that’s filled with dress-up clothes and pirate swords, where we do face painting and freeze dance. The type of place where kids get to meet real-life princesses and princes- us, dressed up in cheaply made go

   * Today I'm sharing a very personal narrative, but one I know many women have struggled through. Please be considerate, comments are welcomed* (Image credit: Getty Images/EyeEm) November 28th, 2020                Today could be considered my worst day, and I’ve had many bad days. Today is still the worst; today, I lost a child and gained an angel. I’m not the most practiced religious, but it gives me some kind of closure believing the line “all children go to heaven,” to be true. It gives me closure believing that now just wasn’t your time... and then I think that perhaps your soul is still waiting to be mine, that you're floating around waiting for the opportunity to be housed within the body of my future child. You're waiting very patiently, my rainbow child.  It feels very surreal that I ever experienced such pain as this miscarriage has caused. It’s worse when I remember how excited I was. When I looked at Jacob, my eyes and my tone were as serious as they could be t

  Previously published on Words Between Coasts. Happiness Is What Happens When You Make Room by Andrea Geones When people ask you if you’re happy, how do you answer them? When I was a child, I would have said “yes”, without a second thought. Somewhere along the line, I forgot happiness. I forgot what it really was and what it felt like; how to feel it. I started drowning in a whirlpool of thoughts; mind patterns attached themselves to me like heavyweights and pulled me down to the bottom of an ocean of panic. I would struggle and fight to bring myself back above the waterline, to breathe, but I could never get there. I kept going down, down, down, hindered by my aching muscles and waterlogged mind. The more I fought, the faster I sank. I spent all of my energy trying so hard to pretend. I did not acknowledge my fears, worries, or anxieties. I stopped eating because of the sickening knot in my stomach. Silently, I consented to the dark shadows under my eyes because I was afraid to sl