Nobody Knows Where Rona Is Tonight

Dear Rona Barrett,

I was thinking about you tonight. Wondering if you are smelling your lilac bushes. Wondering if you are sitting under your shower. Remembering your bright smiling face on TV.

Remember that time I wrote you? I had read your autobiography, years after it had been written. You talked about how you became a writer. How you worked hard...and you talked about your pain. You spoke freely of your suffering, your depressions...you bravely shared it with the world. You left Hollywood.

You were much smarter than me Rona. You found out how to fit in with your writing. I fit in no niche, no genre. I fit nowhere. I might as well be moon dust.

I e-mailed you Rona. And wrote you a long letter. I thanked you for your advice-- to sit under a shower when things got so bad, when even the smell of the air, or a puppy kisses brought only sadness to a heart. Later I found out that wind and water have negative ions...

I always suggest this to anyone having a rough time, of course they never listen.

So that explains it. I'd like to take a shower now, I could sit for hours under the warmth and think...a blissful nothing...but it would wake up my husband, so I write.

I told you about an idea I had...how I had discovered through looking for the answer to this unexplained unbearable hatred I had for myself that I had suffered through all my life, (and brought so much pain to my family) that I found out that my ancestors...John Adams and John Quincy Adams..suffered from the very same thing.

They were prolific writers. Too late I found after so many years, that I, by some great mistake had that proclivity to "write" and I had been perhaps in the wrong business all my life. I had no idea I had any talent. I was just upset about the world, and no one to talk to about it.

I see politics so clearly it drives me mad. It killed my mother...she had a stroke watching Clinton on TV.

John and JQA managed to suffer through the bad hours of depression... Nevertheless, their children killed themselves. I knew it was in my genes...and the outlook was not good.

But you wrote me Rona...you told me I was too hard on myself. And you are right. Many a person has tried to save me from myself but no one has succeeded, but you gave me enough encouragement to just hang on....

This madness is overbearing when it comes, as you knew...and you sent me a little note...you said "You go girl!" so I wrote Rona. I wrote for three years straight because of you... I wrote every night for six hours...late into the night...after all my chores, I lost sleep. I even had a nice man help me out...get me a little noticed. I tried to be courageous like you, and I wanted so much to make him proud.

But tonight, I Don't care anymore. I wish you were here, and I don't even know you. When I think of all the poor souls on earth that suffer this terrible madness...

We=== the "too sensitives" The lonely ones, the ones in the middle of the ocean staring up at the stars....

Yeah Rona....I know when I'm in this state of mind, sooner or later, I will get up and clean the house again. And maybe...write again...even though it's for no one. For no one but me.

Like a crippled autistic, I grunt on...I think of you Rona. I think of the yellow leaves outside, I think of the dove, seeing Naples again. Feeling the warm breezes on the beach at night.

I know insanity when I see it.

Dear Rona...the answer is always just in front of me, and yet hidden like a mouse.

If there is a God, he loves to play with me. But I wish, for just a few seconds of this night, he would throw a soft pillow for my pain, send the moonlight down to stop the tears...and let me go to bed and sleep, stop this relentless hating of myself that never seems to stop. Never lets up. Never goes away.

Here's whats really sad Rona...after all the words I've written on this blog, enough to fill at least six books...only one man has left a comment. Only one. Just one.

It's my own fault.

Maybe I should just put up dog pictures and get some hits.

And I know this pity for myself is insanity. There are mothers who lost their babies, there are people dying of hunger and cancer...and here I am. Feeling sorry because I feel so worthless.

That's what other people think. Unless you have been there, you have NO idea. None. I once met a woman waiting in an office to get hormones once.

She said she had taken some hormones and just started crying, and getting depressed and it was so awful she just couldn't stand it. She wanted to Die...it was the worst thing that she had ever experienced and she was desperate to stop...

She had suffered these attacks for three days. When I told her that I had suffered what she had just gone through once a month since I was nineteen, she couldn't believe it....

She made me feel like i was a real warrior. All those years, and very proudly, I stood my ground against my best "inner" warrior, who was trying to cut my head off.

Okay, I'm rambling...that's what you do. At least there is one good thing about no one ever reading...I can erase this blog whenever I want, it's just my secret...

My letter to you Rona. I hope you have lilacs...and thanks for not listening.

Nobody Cares: Hey, this is the first post I've written about my sorry self...and for once the fact that no one reads you Joy is a great thing! They'd be men right outside your door in no time! There you go...being a nobody definitely has its' merits...(nice try)

You can erase it all tomorrow!