Okay okay I'm still here! I'm still here.
My blogging (for all of my reader out there who have been worried, and no, I did not forget a pluralization) has stalled out the last week and a half for two reasons: 1.) Holy shit that three-week cold kicked my ass and drained my will to live (but not my sinuses), and 2.) Since I started feeling better over the weekend I have focused feverishly on my fiction.
Oh my god it feels amazing to write again. I find myself living in this story I'm crafting any time my mind has a free moment. I love my characters. (Meg would say it's because I love myself lol. She's not wrong.) I can't stop writing. And I have finally figured out how to work with my quick-shifting attention span as a writer and adapt it into a narrative style that allows me to keep writing without getting bored.
Meg and I were talking earlier today about writing and creativity. I told her some of what my therapist Frank and I have been talking about, regarding writing (I'll come back to Frank in a minute, he's seriously the best): How timing is everything, how this is the first time in my life I've been in a position to write something that could turn into a finished product (I'm actually writing this for publication -- first time I've ever written anything with a publication goal beyond hitting the "publish" button on a blog post): I have a stable life and career; I have finally started to write from healthiness and not from trauma; at thirty-six I now have a tiny bit more life experience than I did in my 20s so I have a little more that is worthwhile to say, at least in terms of resilience and thriving; and now that life has evened out and I'm a fully-fledged adult, I'm also realizing that this is life, and it will never get any less busy or any less complex, and if I'm ever going to do what I've always wanted to do, I have to figure out ways to work it in, right fucking now, because life is really, really short, and if I don't do this now, it might never happen. This is -- maturity, maybe? (Perish the thought.) Also, alongside the idea of having more life experience is having more self-knowledge, and figuring out how to write what I LIKE, not just what I know.
In short, it's all starting to come together, and I think I have a staying power now that I lacked when I was struggling under the crushing ocean-depth of depression. (Fuck you, depression. I don't live in you anymore.) I think this newest project can actually go somewhere.
All of which is en-joy-ing. (Enjoy. Literally, to fill with joy.)
Last night at therapy I was telling Frank how fucking heartbreaking and how fucking enraging and how fucking exhausting sexism is. Like many Hillary supporters, I hit a point after the very personal slap in the face that was the 2016 election where I was just fucking done. Just done. Sexism can kiss my ass. I have no time or patience for it when it rears its stupid misogynistic head, and I have stopped being nice about it.
But it's exhausting. Humans weren't built to be angry all the time. And I have been angry so much of the time.
So after I run out of rant and just sit on the couch looking tiredly at Frank, he asks, very simply, "When was the last time you went shooting?"
"Oh fuck, it's been years," I said.
"That's your assignment," he said.
And I perked up like a Sarah who has just smelled coffee in the morning. I asked him some questions about good ranges to visit around here, and where to buy ammo, and then said, "Awesome. I'll have to teach myself how to clean my gun" (thinking of YouTube, that bastion of self-help), when Frank said, "Bring it next week and I'll teach you."
So my therapy next week will consist of learning how to clean my gun. That's some pretty badass therapy.
Writing and shooting (I'm a pretty textbook liberal in so many respects, and I fervently support stringent gun control, but baby, I do like target shooting, and my girl Dirty Harriet is a bad. ass. bitch). Not a bad week so far.
Showing posts with label depression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label depression. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 17, 2017
Monday, August 07, 2017
doctor's orders
About a month ago, at a just-in-the-nick-of-time appointment to get my prescriptions refilled, I finally remembered to ask my doc about that weird mole on my upper thigh (nothing to worry about). As he confirmed my pharmacy for the scrip refills, I remembered the other thing I needed to ask him, and cleared my throat.
"So I've been having issues with anxiety," I said. "I've been medicated for it periodically. It doesn't require daily medication like depression, but every once in awhile it gets bad, and it's been bad lately." He nodded, following me; I'd already outlined for him what my last few months have entailed. "Do you think I need to be medicated for it for awhile?"
His shrewd, brisk eyes took me in for a moment. "Do you want to be medicated for it?"
"Well, I don't want to feel like this anymore," I said.
He assessed me again with that sharp face that I never know quite how to read.
"You drink?" he asked.
I just stared at him for a moment while my entire body clamped down on the impulse to howl with laughter and yell DO I? I had finally cut back on my alcohol intake, which, though never more than a couple of glasses at a time, had been worrying me with its frequency; after all, I had reasoned, I can only moan "the election" for so long as a preamble to a glass of wine. This being the only life I get, I had reasoned further, I would like to enjoy a long length of it without cirrhosis of the liver. I watched Dr. S's face, couldn't hear any reprimand in his tone, and, keeping my face neutral, answered,
"Well, I've cut back a lot. But yeah, I like to drink."
"What do you usually do, when you drink?"
"Well--I come home and pour myself a glass of something after work."
"Glass of what?"
"Oh, just about anything; I like it all. Usually it's wine though."
"Red or white?"
"Usually red. Sometimes white in the summer, like now, when it's hot out."
"Relax you?"
"Oh yes," I said fervently.
He smiled, a quick twinkle. "Can you keep it to one?"
"Sure, that's not a problem," I said.
He shrugged. "So do that."
"Uh -- really?" I resisted the impulse to clean out my ears on an assumed mis-hearing.
"Sure."
"Like -- every day?" This was not the medical advice I had been expecting.
"If you keep it to one it's fine."
"I was--" I cast about for a minute, completely unsure of my footing in these uncharted and unprecedented medical waters. "I, uh, was cutting back because I was worried about my liver."
He shrugged again and started organizing the papers on his clipboard. "Frankly anything I could prescribe you for anxiety would be harder on your liver than alcohol. Alcohol is more natural" [I successfully refrained from rolling my eyes] "and your body is used to it. If one glass of wine a day makes you feel calmer, just stick with what works."
"Oh -- well -- okay. A glass of wine a day. I think I can do that." (I mean, I'm gonna HATE it, but if it's for my health, I guess I can drink.)
I practically skipped out to the parking lot. (Meg, upon hearing the story that weekend, wanted to watch me slap a prescription for alcohol onto a bar counter.) I had never thought of taking anti-anxieties as pleasurable. But my doctor-recommended glass of dry red medicine that night carried me off into a land where I did nothing but smile.
"So I've been having issues with anxiety," I said. "I've been medicated for it periodically. It doesn't require daily medication like depression, but every once in awhile it gets bad, and it's been bad lately." He nodded, following me; I'd already outlined for him what my last few months have entailed. "Do you think I need to be medicated for it for awhile?"
His shrewd, brisk eyes took me in for a moment. "Do you want to be medicated for it?"
"Well, I don't want to feel like this anymore," I said.
He assessed me again with that sharp face that I never know quite how to read.
"You drink?" he asked.
I just stared at him for a moment while my entire body clamped down on the impulse to howl with laughter and yell DO I? I had finally cut back on my alcohol intake, which, though never more than a couple of glasses at a time, had been worrying me with its frequency; after all, I had reasoned, I can only moan "the election" for so long as a preamble to a glass of wine. This being the only life I get, I had reasoned further, I would like to enjoy a long length of it without cirrhosis of the liver. I watched Dr. S's face, couldn't hear any reprimand in his tone, and, keeping my face neutral, answered,
"Well, I've cut back a lot. But yeah, I like to drink."
"What do you usually do, when you drink?"
"Well--I come home and pour myself a glass of something after work."
"Glass of what?"
"Oh, just about anything; I like it all. Usually it's wine though."
"Red or white?"
"Usually red. Sometimes white in the summer, like now, when it's hot out."
"Relax you?"
"Oh yes," I said fervently.
He smiled, a quick twinkle. "Can you keep it to one?"
"Sure, that's not a problem," I said.
He shrugged. "So do that."
"Uh -- really?" I resisted the impulse to clean out my ears on an assumed mis-hearing.
"Sure."
"Like -- every day?" This was not the medical advice I had been expecting.
"If you keep it to one it's fine."
"I was--" I cast about for a minute, completely unsure of my footing in these uncharted and unprecedented medical waters. "I, uh, was cutting back because I was worried about my liver."
He shrugged again and started organizing the papers on his clipboard. "Frankly anything I could prescribe you for anxiety would be harder on your liver than alcohol. Alcohol is more natural" [I successfully refrained from rolling my eyes] "and your body is used to it. If one glass of wine a day makes you feel calmer, just stick with what works."
"Oh -- well -- okay. A glass of wine a day. I think I can do that." (I mean, I'm gonna HATE it, but if it's for my health, I guess I can drink.)
I practically skipped out to the parking lot. (Meg, upon hearing the story that weekend, wanted to watch me slap a prescription for alcohol onto a bar counter.) I had never thought of taking anti-anxieties as pleasurable. But my doctor-recommended glass of dry red medicine that night carried me off into a land where I did nothing but smile.
Thursday, January 22, 2015
weather adaptable
Man, it's hard to break five years of silence. The habit of idly contemplating writing something and then going nahhhhh has some roots.
My emotional state was kind of bad this week. I blame hormones, mostly, plus sleep deprivation. My body is still adjusting to the pill, perhaps, and I never do well when I'm tired. Whatever the reason, everything was all splintery in my head the last couple of days, my perspective like a slivered mirror, so that everything looked distorted and horrible, and I kept cutting myself on my thoughts. So I did what I usually do on Bad Head Days and holed up. The comfort rituals have changed a little over the years; this week it was sushi and Pride and Prejudice instead of [whatever comfort food I used to eat] and Aliens (although I still love to watch Aliens in any mood because oh my god can I be Sigourney Weaver when I grow up?). It helped; today was a little better than yesterday, and hopefully tomorrow will be better still.
I guess that's the thing with mood disorders. You never get rid of them, never "cure" them; you just learn how to live with them, manage them, cope. Which isn't as defeatist as perhaps it sounds; it's actually kind of empowering. I've been saddled with these things (depression and, less severely, anxiety); they're part of my genetic heritage and my learned experience, and not "curing" them is not failure, just like not "curing" my nearsightedness is not failure. It's not curable. But it's absolutely manageable. Wonderfully so. I've had a lot of therapy to learn better tools for relating to myself and to others; I take medication to maintain a more even baseline; and when the bad days come, as come they will, I know how to handle them. And I know that they'll go away, and everything will get better. Which leaves me free to be myself, and to accept my experiences. Hell yes, that's empowering. I can't control the weather, but I have tools to mitigate the weather's effects: umbrellas, coats, scarves, gloves, boots, etc. So with my mood disorders. The nasty days come, and I can't stop them from coming, and it's not my fault that they happen; but I have a good array of implements to buffer me against the worst parts of them. And mostly those tools are things I do to relax and make myself feel a little better, a little more comfortable.
So the week has felt pretty shitty, but having not had Bad Head Days like this in awhile, getting through them as well as I have averages out to a net positive, in my book. It's been crap, but I'm still okay. And that's pretty profoundly wonderful all by itself.
My emotional state was kind of bad this week. I blame hormones, mostly, plus sleep deprivation. My body is still adjusting to the pill, perhaps, and I never do well when I'm tired. Whatever the reason, everything was all splintery in my head the last couple of days, my perspective like a slivered mirror, so that everything looked distorted and horrible, and I kept cutting myself on my thoughts. So I did what I usually do on Bad Head Days and holed up. The comfort rituals have changed a little over the years; this week it was sushi and Pride and Prejudice instead of [whatever comfort food I used to eat] and Aliens (although I still love to watch Aliens in any mood because oh my god can I be Sigourney Weaver when I grow up?). It helped; today was a little better than yesterday, and hopefully tomorrow will be better still.
I guess that's the thing with mood disorders. You never get rid of them, never "cure" them; you just learn how to live with them, manage them, cope. Which isn't as defeatist as perhaps it sounds; it's actually kind of empowering. I've been saddled with these things (depression and, less severely, anxiety); they're part of my genetic heritage and my learned experience, and not "curing" them is not failure, just like not "curing" my nearsightedness is not failure. It's not curable. But it's absolutely manageable. Wonderfully so. I've had a lot of therapy to learn better tools for relating to myself and to others; I take medication to maintain a more even baseline; and when the bad days come, as come they will, I know how to handle them. And I know that they'll go away, and everything will get better. Which leaves me free to be myself, and to accept my experiences. Hell yes, that's empowering. I can't control the weather, but I have tools to mitigate the weather's effects: umbrellas, coats, scarves, gloves, boots, etc. So with my mood disorders. The nasty days come, and I can't stop them from coming, and it's not my fault that they happen; but I have a good array of implements to buffer me against the worst parts of them. And mostly those tools are things I do to relax and make myself feel a little better, a little more comfortable.
So the week has felt pretty shitty, but having not had Bad Head Days like this in awhile, getting through them as well as I have averages out to a net positive, in my book. It's been crap, but I'm still okay. And that's pretty profoundly wonderful all by itself.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
i'm wide awake, it's morning
Bad Head Day.
I'm not going to go on about it. They happen, they suck, they pass.
The relevant thing is that, desiring to channel the tired, boring grief to something more impassioned, I popped in I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning on the drive to work and skipped to “Poison Oak.” I’ve listened to that song hundreds of times, and as I tiredly absorbed the beauty of the Pennsylvania landscape I can’t quite appreciate I focused on a space of bare acoustic strumming toward the end of the song, anticipating the upcoming line delivered into the emptiness that precedes a particularly intense lyrical-musical climax: “You’re the yellow bird that I’ve been waiting for.”
I thought in impulse fragments about the yellow bird symbol that crops up a couple of times in that album, and its multilayered and not entirely differentiable meanings, and in the instant when the music cut to silence before Conor sang that line, a goldfinch flashed across the road in front of me, the morning sun behind me glancing off its breast.
And I felt better and worse all at the same time, and I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it meant something, and something important, because nothing is an accident, and I felt the suddenness of an undifferentiable presence, and I started to cry.
I'm not going to go on about it. They happen, they suck, they pass.
The relevant thing is that, desiring to channel the tired, boring grief to something more impassioned, I popped in I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning on the drive to work and skipped to “Poison Oak.” I’ve listened to that song hundreds of times, and as I tiredly absorbed the beauty of the Pennsylvania landscape I can’t quite appreciate I focused on a space of bare acoustic strumming toward the end of the song, anticipating the upcoming line delivered into the emptiness that precedes a particularly intense lyrical-musical climax: “You’re the yellow bird that I’ve been waiting for.”
I thought in impulse fragments about the yellow bird symbol that crops up a couple of times in that album, and its multilayered and not entirely differentiable meanings, and in the instant when the music cut to silence before Conor sang that line, a goldfinch flashed across the road in front of me, the morning sun behind me glancing off its breast.
And I felt better and worse all at the same time, and I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it meant something, and something important, because nothing is an accident, and I felt the suddenness of an undifferentiable presence, and I started to cry.
Sunday, August 09, 2009
a new redemption song
Lord, we need a new redemption song
Lord, we've tried; just seems to come out wrong
Won't You help us, please, help us just to sing along
A new redemption song -- a new redemption song
~Over the Rhine
So. Frelling. Tired.
The rest of the visit with the relatives went well. I really enjoy talking to Cousin John, and we covered a lot of intellectual ground, though not nearly enough (everything keeps enforcing my need to return to academia; anytime I have a really great conversation I realize how hungry I am for the stimulation). When he thanked me for spending so much time with the girls, he told me, "You're a great role model for them. I want them to realize what it means to grow up to be a strong, articulate woman who reads and is well-adjusted and normal." He added, when I thanked him, "I know you have a lot you're dealing with right now, but you really have a lot going for you. I think everyone knows how fantastic Sarah is except Sarah."
I almost cried.
The girls were fun; they both were in awe of my iPhone, so I played chess and a few rounds of Tic Tac Toe on it with Jenna, and showed them the "Simon's Cat" videos on YouTube. (The new one, "Fly Guy," had me in stitches. And my very own Simon is at this very minute embracing fully his current identity as Sleepy Sunday Simon, curled half on his back with his eyes closed and his fangs poking out in a smile. As soon as the company left yesterday he looked ten million shades of relieved, although he was really good with the kids, and I don't think he's ever been around children before. If a cat can look giddy, he has looked giddy. My house! No kids! No baying beagle! Just Mommy! So naturally he has done what a cat does best and spent the rest of the weekend lounging on the bed, the picture of indolent contentment.)
They were pretty demanding, and it was good exercise for me to tell them No every once in awhile, which I did pretty adamantly yesterday morning as I staggered around with a mug of coffee and they bugged me to play tag before they left.
"Sorry, girls," I said. "I'm tired, and I've been tired for weeks. But we'll see each other again."
That was when Anna, the youngest, really cracked me up.
"We'll never see you again," she said. "I really wanted to play tag with you." Then she looked up at me and widened her big blue eyes and quivered her bottom lip and said, in a low voice, "I've never played tag with you before."
I laughed. "Wow!" I said. "You're pulling out all the stops!" At which she slumped back and pouted, and Jenna asked, "What do you mean?"
Oh yes. So much my little sister and I at that age. Laura the manipulative, the strategizing and calculating; Sarah the straightforward and oblivious. Both earnest and loveable. But twenty-odd years of dealing with my sister's craft has served to develop an immunity in me, so I comfortably said, "Hopefully next time I see you I won't be as tired."
Before they left Cousin John extended an open invitation for me to visit them anytime; they live close to the DC Metro area, and I do enjoy that city.
But after they left I crashed. Not in a weepy devilfish kind of way -- talking with Cousin John has made me wonder if all the internal horror stuff I write on the blog makes me sound worse than I actually am; I did mention, a few posts ago, that I don't spend my time not-blogging draped over furniture like Dali's wilted clocks; there's more to me than meets the blog, but the blog is useful because these internal horror things I don't really discuss very often, and they may not be my only reality but they're still a part of my reality, and a significant part at that, although maybe not as significant as I've come to believe (I'll have to talk to Jeff about that) -- but in a tired, I-have-no-resources-and-I've-still-managed-to-dredge-a-little-bit-after-all way. I went directly to bed and didn't get up until 8:00 p.m., where I threw together a strange meal composed of what I could find in the fridge, watched an episode of Bones with my parents (I love I love I love I love I love that show), tackled writing a bit more of my story again (with the result that it's now messier than it was before; I've never done "short" with stories, but this one keeps wanting to be longer and more detailed when I try to curtail it, so now it looks kind of like a sweater that you can't tell if it's being unraveled or knitted) and passed out at 12:30.
The thought of going anywhere and running into anyone makes my mind go blank, so I exercised my freedom in Christ and staked a claim in the unconditionality of God's love and the nonnecessity of performance and skipped church (see, doesn't that sound defensive? It's defensive. All right, I skipped church because I felt like it but God isn't mad at me, so why should anyone else be? That's defensive too. I wasn't up for it so I didn't go). I've only left my room to let the dog out and get more coffee, and spent the entirety of today (all two hours of my consciousness) sitting on my big beautiful bed with my laptop and the lovely wooden lap desk Meg and Phillip bought me, working on my story, working on this blog post, reading Dragonhaven and starting to pre-order season 4 of Bones and season 5 of The Office. (My parents delete the DVR eps as we watch them, and anyway, the digital signal really, REALLY sucks in the airing of Bones, and only Bones. NCIS, which my parents love and which I tolerate the way you tolerate your senile great-aunt, always comes across perfectly. Is it FOX? Or just the sniggering cruelty of fate? So I can't wait for the DVD release.)
It's hottish today, and muggy, and we have no air conditioning, but the whole-house fan is running and my parents are out, which means I can minimize the layers of clothing and try to stay cool.
I did learn something interesting this weekend. I've been starting to rant more openly about how much I hate the culture of niceness that has infected Christian society in America. Suddenly being "nice" is this huge value, but it comes from society, and not the church, although the church has sucked it down like a dog devouring chocolate and now it wonders why it's sick. (If it wonders why it's sick.) It's bothered me for a long time, but it really bothered me and started to turn itself over in my mind over the 4th when I visited my sister, who doesn't adhere to any belief system but who has such an unshakeable integrity forming the bedrock of her character that I have long maintained that she has faith but doesn't call it that. She's banking on my being right.
In one of our conversations during the course of my visit, she expressed worry about herself and her condition as a person, because she likes ladling out punishment to people that have it coming to them (I call this righteous indignation and a strong sense of justice, but I've thought for years that Satan will take her out any way he can, and using language against us is one of the things he's best at). "I'm not a nice person," she said.
"But you're a good person," I said. "You're a kind person. The people who need help, you help. You give people what they need when they need it, and yeah, sometimes that isn't 'nice,' but the people who change the world, the people who make a difference, aren't 'nice.' Ghandi wasn't nice. Buddha wasn't nice. And Jesus especially wasn't nice. He gave the insufferable, the arrogant and the unloving what-for, He was actually really mean to them, but that was what they needed, so it was kind. And the downtrodden, the vulnerable and the hurting, he helped, but that wasn't nice either; that was kind. You do the same things."
"That makes me feel better," she said.
And then I went off on a month-long internal processing of rage that the concept of niceness as an important virtue has so infiltrated contemporary Christian practice of theology that it has some of the best people I know questioning their worth or abandoning the faith. (Yes, I need to learn to apply this to myself too, but that's a problem for another day.) In an email to a friend a couple of weeks ago, I wrote,
"It helps to recognize the critical difference between nice and kind. Real kindness is rare, and rarely expressed in the format dictated by politeness. (This is where I get really angry with the Christian trend toward 'niceness'; niceness isn't mentioned anywhere in the Bible, much less the New Testament. Kindness is a totally different animal, because it has substance, because it has its roots in love, because it's real. Niceness has its roots in social order, and while that has some merit, sometimes, it's a mistake to think that niceness comes from, or is commanded by, God. Kindness sees; niceness masks.)"
Niceness is all about not rocking the boat, not making ripples or waves, not causing people discomfort. Kindness is about what people really, truly need, and a lot of times that involves giving offense or going against the social grain. This doesn't mean that we get to be rampaging assholes; it's not the kind of "tough love" that goads Christian parents to shun their homosexual child and then pat themselves on the back for their obedience to God's law, for example. Kindness is about truth and love -- withholding judgment from the hurting, and not sparing the hypocrites from the reality of their hypocrisy. (The only people -- I repeat, the only people -- who received Christ's scorn and wrath and caustic addresses were the religious authorities of the day who made finding God more difficult for the suffering and seeking. Listen up, people: We have become those religious authorities. Jesus hung out with the prostitutes and the tax collectors, the dirty and downtrodden, the wrongdoers, the drunkards and sinners, the marginalized. And now we have become the marginalizers, and we think that in so doing we're doing God's work. How can we be proud that when we "comb the whole world for a convert, and when [we] find one, we make him twice the son of hell that [we] are"? How can we think that following God's law has more to do with righteousness than with love? We can't be righteous; that's why Christ became our sin, to become our righteousness. Righteousness is not a fruit of the Spirit -- as niceness is not a fruit of the Spirit. Righteousness is something we have been given, not something we grow into or achieve. If we seek to be righteous, we forget about love, just as if we seek to be nice, we forget about kindness. Yes, we're to be made holy -- but this means being made into the image of God, and if Christ is the image of God...Yes, we're supposed to be like Christ. But do we even know what that means anymore? Do we? Is it about checking off a list of sins we don't commit anymore, or is it about loving our neighbor -- really, really loving our neighbor -- as ourselves? Which means loving our neighbor in our neighbor's present reality, which is often ugly, and messy, and broken, and scared. But we're all messy, we're all broken, we're all scared. And there's so much beauty in that. We get to be in this discovery of love and redemption together. It's not a competition to see who has the most holiness; it's about linking arms and helping each other to the finish line, it's about one enormous spiritual tie, it's about stumbling across other people who are curled up and can't move and bringing them forward with us.)
I was telling Linnéa this week, when she said that people don't go to the Baptist church functions anymore, like prayer meetings or Bible studies, "But nobody wants to. And sure, maybe some of that's laziness and selfishness and that needs to be addressed; but honestly, if I wanted to tell someone something real, if I had a problem and didn't know how to fix it, the last place I'd go is church. Which is sad. Church is supposed to be the place where we can relax our guard and be real, whatever that means, and it isn't always pretty, because God's love is with us in the unprettiness; but instead, it's where people feel the most guarded. People don't go to church to find healing; they go to church to be judged. And who wants to go to that kind of environment on a Tuesday night when they're already tired from a long day at work pretending to be okay in front of people who have no reason to care about them?"
Maybe this isn't a problem in other churches, or other geographical areas. I hear about some exciting things in other places. But here in my hometown, it's a big problem. It's a tragic and sad problem.
So the thing I learned this weekend, as I discussed some of this with Cousin John (mostly the semantics of nice vs. kind, and how I posit that "nice" doesn't appear in the reliable translations of the Bible), happened when Jenna piped up and said, "Don't you have the Bible on your iPhone? Do a keyword search."
So I did. The Bible app that I have on my phone comes in like twenty different languages, with multiple translations per language, and there are ten to fifteen of those in English. A keyword search of "nice" turned up zero results in the NIV, TNIV, English Standard, Contemporary English, American Standard, Amplified, Holman Christian Standard, World English, KJV and NJKV translations; and in the NASB, New English, and New Century translations, "nice" only appeared in a pejorative context, in terms of flattery, deception and self-deception. (I discredit the New Living, the Message and GOD'S WORD translations as meritorious.)
Fascinating, isn't it? Nice is not a Christian concept.
I can't wait to tackle this in action.
Friday, August 07, 2009
breathe
A panic day? Come on now. What the hell.
Yesterday after work I drove to drop something off for my grandmother -- she's in an assisted living facility and hates it -- and I'm not a wonderful granddaughter, because I hardly ever visit. Old folks' homes depress me in general, however nice they are -- there's so much sadness and loneliness saturating the walls and the air that I can't breathe and it makes me want to run out the doors and drown myself in the lake. I don't know what our society is doing, but I don't see all these corrals for the elderly as a step in a positive direction. I know it's not a problem with an easy answer -- people are living longer and needing medical care that family members can't give them, nearly every adult works so there are fewer stay-at-home parents to help with their own aging parents, nuclear families (such as they exist) want their privacy and feel tired and worn out by the pointless demands and endless spiritual drains of modern living, etc. And I'm not letting myself off the hook for being a bad granddaughter, either. Most of the time lately I forget (maybe that's even worse than just not going on purpose, but in fairness I forget a lot of things right now), and it taxes a lot of my reserves to visit with my grandmother because she's a real downer, and has chosen to be unhappy, but I should see her anyway.
It wasn't easy, though, yesterday. She looked so longing and wistful and sad when I left that I hurried out to my car fighting tears.
When I arrived home our weekend company was settling in -- my cousins John and Linda from Virginia, and their two daughters, aged seven and twelve. I really like them a lot -- Linda is the daughter of my dad's oldest biological sister (who is fourteen or fifteen years older than my dad), and she married a brilliant man with a quiet, wicked sense of humor, and their girls are lovely. I hadn't seen them in years, not since their oldest daughter was three or four, and I'd never met the youngest.
I wasn't sure how I would react to the intrusion of lively guests; sometimes I'm fine, and other times I turn into a variation of Emily Dickinson and hide upstairs. It was nice, though. I like the girls. They're pretty intense, so I was exhausted by bedtime last night, and their similarities to my sister and me kept giving me weird emotional flashbacks, especially since they both compete for my attention and my heart gets wrung out for both of them -- not because John and Linda aren't good parents; quite the opposite; but because...well, just because. Jenna, the oldest, seeks out my attention in a non-intrusive, self-contained, quiet way (she's like me); Anna, the youngest, makes no bones about how much she likes me and demands to be around me (she's like my sister).
So last night I worked hard to divide the attention equally, because I remember how much I needed affection as a girl, and how seldom I asked for it, and how much it hurt me to feel passed over for my more vivacious little sister; and I remember how much my sister starved for some connection because it didn't come easily to her and she needed to know that adults liked her as much as they liked her hard-working, overachieving, well-behaved older sister.
I was tired enough that I slept straight through the night, but I woke up headachey and exhausted, and I could feel the shakiness coming on (effing anxiety). And again it's not like I'm in a terrible mood; my mood is pretty okay; but I feel generally like shit underneath the okay mood, and if the way my face muscles feel is any indicator, I have an expression that looks like I just walked into a wall. But I took a pill and it has started to sink in, so now I'm just pretty tired, and half-amused, half-frustrated at how this thing is dogging me. (And I'm not a dog person! Go away, anxiety! Shoo, depression! Sit! Lie down! Stay!) I am in a better place, though, because I can laugh at it, a little, though the tears are quivering in the wings. I want a nap.
I'm trying to keep a good outlook on the whole thing -- I'm speaking kindly to myself, and concentrating on not being angry with myself for what feels like extremely slow progress, and praying for Christ's love to soothe and sustain me (Jesus loves me, this I know...), because if God is with me in this, I have everything I need (yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me...), and I want to be at peace wherever I am in this cycle of chemical im/balance.
It can be so hard to breathe, sometimes. Air is something I have to fight for, and focus on; breathing is something I sometimes have to remember to do. (Application of Thich Nhat Hanh's conscious breathing technique is suddenly necessary.)
At least we're doing some family singing tonight, so I should be able to close my eyes and lose myself in harmonies (and take deep, well-regulated breaths). Everything is always better with music.
Yesterday after work I drove to drop something off for my grandmother -- she's in an assisted living facility and hates it -- and I'm not a wonderful granddaughter, because I hardly ever visit. Old folks' homes depress me in general, however nice they are -- there's so much sadness and loneliness saturating the walls and the air that I can't breathe and it makes me want to run out the doors and drown myself in the lake. I don't know what our society is doing, but I don't see all these corrals for the elderly as a step in a positive direction. I know it's not a problem with an easy answer -- people are living longer and needing medical care that family members can't give them, nearly every adult works so there are fewer stay-at-home parents to help with their own aging parents, nuclear families (such as they exist) want their privacy and feel tired and worn out by the pointless demands and endless spiritual drains of modern living, etc. And I'm not letting myself off the hook for being a bad granddaughter, either. Most of the time lately I forget (maybe that's even worse than just not going on purpose, but in fairness I forget a lot of things right now), and it taxes a lot of my reserves to visit with my grandmother because she's a real downer, and has chosen to be unhappy, but I should see her anyway.
It wasn't easy, though, yesterday. She looked so longing and wistful and sad when I left that I hurried out to my car fighting tears.
When I arrived home our weekend company was settling in -- my cousins John and Linda from Virginia, and their two daughters, aged seven and twelve. I really like them a lot -- Linda is the daughter of my dad's oldest biological sister (who is fourteen or fifteen years older than my dad), and she married a brilliant man with a quiet, wicked sense of humor, and their girls are lovely. I hadn't seen them in years, not since their oldest daughter was three or four, and I'd never met the youngest.
I wasn't sure how I would react to the intrusion of lively guests; sometimes I'm fine, and other times I turn into a variation of Emily Dickinson and hide upstairs. It was nice, though. I like the girls. They're pretty intense, so I was exhausted by bedtime last night, and their similarities to my sister and me kept giving me weird emotional flashbacks, especially since they both compete for my attention and my heart gets wrung out for both of them -- not because John and Linda aren't good parents; quite the opposite; but because...well, just because. Jenna, the oldest, seeks out my attention in a non-intrusive, self-contained, quiet way (she's like me); Anna, the youngest, makes no bones about how much she likes me and demands to be around me (she's like my sister).
So last night I worked hard to divide the attention equally, because I remember how much I needed affection as a girl, and how seldom I asked for it, and how much it hurt me to feel passed over for my more vivacious little sister; and I remember how much my sister starved for some connection because it didn't come easily to her and she needed to know that adults liked her as much as they liked her hard-working, overachieving, well-behaved older sister.
I was tired enough that I slept straight through the night, but I woke up headachey and exhausted, and I could feel the shakiness coming on (effing anxiety). And again it's not like I'm in a terrible mood; my mood is pretty okay; but I feel generally like shit underneath the okay mood, and if the way my face muscles feel is any indicator, I have an expression that looks like I just walked into a wall. But I took a pill and it has started to sink in, so now I'm just pretty tired, and half-amused, half-frustrated at how this thing is dogging me. (And I'm not a dog person! Go away, anxiety! Shoo, depression! Sit! Lie down! Stay!) I am in a better place, though, because I can laugh at it, a little, though the tears are quivering in the wings. I want a nap.
I'm trying to keep a good outlook on the whole thing -- I'm speaking kindly to myself, and concentrating on not being angry with myself for what feels like extremely slow progress, and praying for Christ's love to soothe and sustain me (Jesus loves me, this I know...), because if God is with me in this, I have everything I need (yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me...), and I want to be at peace wherever I am in this cycle of chemical im/balance.
It can be so hard to breathe, sometimes. Air is something I have to fight for, and focus on; breathing is something I sometimes have to remember to do. (Application of Thich Nhat Hanh's conscious breathing technique is suddenly necessary.)
At least we're doing some family singing tonight, so I should be able to close my eyes and lose myself in harmonies (and take deep, well-regulated breaths). Everything is always better with music.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
whatever my lot
Last night's sunset was incredible. I drove to Freeport Beach, rocky and cluttered (though mostly now with driftwood and dried algae instead of the trash I remember from my childhood -- the environmental 80s had an effect on the local sense of ecology), to wander the shoreline getting my skirt wet, because the last few times I've gone there it was to find some space in the existential sadness, and yesterday I wanted to go because I was happy and the house was too small to contain the happiness. I needed open sky and water.
So I stood in the waves up to my knees and stared at the sinking sun and the colors it streaked across the sky and smiled...and saw, off to one side of the sun, caught perfectly in one tiny shard of refracting cloud, a fragment of a rainbow. I've blogged before about how rainbows are a sign to me of God's love, vis a vis Isaiah 54:6-10. So I smiled even more broadly, and swallowed a few tears, and looked at the blue-beyond-blue of the mostly calm water and thought, Yes. Of course there's a slice of rainbow, a sign for me, today. Anything is possible, today.
Then of course I woke up sticky-eyed with poor sleep this morning (the teeny little gargoyle I bought at the Ren Faire -- I think his name is Nelo but I'm not sure -- seems to be doing his job of frightening away most of the nightmares, but a few slip past him anyway) and got lost in my head while putting on my makeup. Lost in my head usually involves intensive thinking about three or four or five things simultaneously but not in words while mentally replaying music, so it gets kind of crowded and noisy in there, and moves far, far away from language (I let myself go into the semiotic order and forget about the symbolic for a little while; I really need to read Black Sun), and when Mom came into my room to tell me something she started talking before I had a chance to turn down the internal volume, so to speak, and come back to the world of words, and I missed everything she said and had to ask her (had to remember how to ask her) to repeat it. This frustrates her, but she said it's because she forgets that it takes me a few moments to engage ("Especially now," I said), and I'm just like my dad that way but she doesn't always remember to apply it to me.
My folks are being great about this whole thing. I've never really let them see it before -- in high school (and man, was I a depressed kid. I was reading over my graduation portfolio which I took very seriously and very seriously overdid, and good grief my writing was all dark and sad. I started laughing as I flipped through pages of old poetry and said, "Someone go back in time and give Teenaged Sarah a Prozac") I never let anyone see how bad it was, except maybe Hillori; during my college years my parents and Laura and I were all angry with each other; and when I moved out to the Midwest I disappeared for days while I dealt with the depressive spells on my own, so my parents haven't really had to watch me deal with this before, and when this particular long stretch of life-in-death started they wanted so desperately to help, and they can't help; and even if they could, I wouldn't want them to.
The best thing they can do, which is what they're doing, now, is to talk to me when I emerge from my room, and otherwise to let me be. I have never asked anyone to take care of me; I enjoy companionship, sometimes, when I go under (Jeff doesn't believe that I'm all that introverted, and he's right; I lie pretty fifty-fifty on the Extrovert/Introvert scale, skewed slightly toward introvert like I'm skewed slightly toward being right-handed though I'm actually ambidextrous), but I don't ask or want anyone to fix it. I just want to be let to be, whatever that means in the moment, and, since my mood cycles tend to move pretty quickly, that changes a dozen times a day (upside: I'm never in a bad mood for long. Depression really isn't all that tightly linked to mood). In some moments I'm laughing and engaging, totally focused on others' company and conversation; in other moments I'm staring at the wall and lost in my head (though the shift from one to the other is hardly instantaneous; depressed isn't crazy).
Lest I sound bratty and ungrateful, I will add that it's a tremendous help that I don't have to care for an entire living space on my own.
I'm kind of worried about Simon. Last night he was angry with me and elected to sleep under my bed instead of on it, and this morning he was listless and curled up on my bed while I got ready for work and just lay there. He still has his appetite, and he purred when I kissed his fuzzy little forehead goodbye (I love his wrinkly fuzzy kitty forehead), but he seemed a little, well, depressed. I think I need to spend more time with my boy; I've been out of the house a lot, and distracted when I'm home, and I think he's in need of some Mommy time. (Needy keetie.)
Anyway, here's a sonnet I wrote my junior year in college, when I was going through my imitative-with-a-twist phase (which resurfaces from time to time), and credit for the first line of this one goes to John Donne. (I was much more depressed my junior year, having just been diagnosed as clinically depressed, and still not sure whether or not my sister would survive her own ordeal, and struggling to deal with a repressed backlash of really horrible stuff that I'd bottled for years. So the thoughts of death, this time around, are minimal, like little cirrus wisps, barely there and mostly idle, whereas then they were thunderheads; but the moments of determination still resonate.)
Life Be Not Proud
Life, be not proud, though some have called you
stark and spiteful. Yes, I know you are;
but you can only nick my skin with scars;
you have no power to slice my throat-veins through
or slick my wrists with blood. That power is mine,
but one that I won't wield. I will to live,
I will to take on all that you can give
and stagger with you on my twisted spine.
Your foot can grind my joints and knob my bones
till, crippled, I can barely smile or walk,
but I'll outlast you. Because in the end,
my praise will rise above the song of stones
and powder you beneath my heel to chalk.
So cram my mouth with dust and blood: I'll mend.
God has been flooding me with encouragement and reminders of His love, from many sources. So this? This isn't so bad. It's just something that is, and I'm learning, and it's not fun, but when He said, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness," He meant exactly that: sufficient. Not sufficient as in, "so much that you'll be full of happiness even though the sorrow is still there and will jump around for joy"; he meant sufficient. As in, Just Enough. Like Job. Job had faith, and Job was counted faithful (even though he got fed up with his circumstances himself), and he spent most of the book sitting in a heap of ashes with no clothes on, scraping his skin with broken pottery. No one can call that happy. But God's grace was sufficient. God's grace was Just Enough.
So God isn't mad at me, and I'm not doing anything wrong. This is just something that is, and God's grace is sufficient. I will survive it, and I have faith that it will come to good in the end, however much it sucks right now. And even in the more or less constant battle against the Nothing, I still have moments of joy and moments of happiness and moments of connection and peace and presence, and those moments can last awhile. Yesterday, for example, was marvelous. So this thing doesn't always keep me down. And when it does, cosmically, everything is still okay, even when it's horrible.
It is well with my soul.
Also I'm getting in the mood for fall. No matter how far removed from school I am, August brings this sense of delightful expectancy. I keep getting flashbacks of Grove City in the fall, the slow flare of leaves, bright shallowing sunshine, crisp dry-leaf-and-vinegar-smelling air, renewal and change and long afternoon walks with pockets full of apples, and long nighttime walks with leaves whirling like ghosts under the harvest moon, the gladness of reunited friends, the eagerness of learning, the joy of becoming.
This mood calls for Nickel Creek. I first listened to Why Should the Fire Die? on the long drive from South Bend to Grove City for a homecoming four or five years ago, and ever since, that album has quintessentialized fall.
So I stood in the waves up to my knees and stared at the sinking sun and the colors it streaked across the sky and smiled...and saw, off to one side of the sun, caught perfectly in one tiny shard of refracting cloud, a fragment of a rainbow. I've blogged before about how rainbows are a sign to me of God's love, vis a vis Isaiah 54:6-10. So I smiled even more broadly, and swallowed a few tears, and looked at the blue-beyond-blue of the mostly calm water and thought, Yes. Of course there's a slice of rainbow, a sign for me, today. Anything is possible, today.
Then of course I woke up sticky-eyed with poor sleep this morning (the teeny little gargoyle I bought at the Ren Faire -- I think his name is Nelo but I'm not sure -- seems to be doing his job of frightening away most of the nightmares, but a few slip past him anyway) and got lost in my head while putting on my makeup. Lost in my head usually involves intensive thinking about three or four or five things simultaneously but not in words while mentally replaying music, so it gets kind of crowded and noisy in there, and moves far, far away from language (I let myself go into the semiotic order and forget about the symbolic for a little while; I really need to read Black Sun), and when Mom came into my room to tell me something she started talking before I had a chance to turn down the internal volume, so to speak, and come back to the world of words, and I missed everything she said and had to ask her (had to remember how to ask her) to repeat it. This frustrates her, but she said it's because she forgets that it takes me a few moments to engage ("Especially now," I said), and I'm just like my dad that way but she doesn't always remember to apply it to me.
My folks are being great about this whole thing. I've never really let them see it before -- in high school (and man, was I a depressed kid. I was reading over my graduation portfolio which I took very seriously and very seriously overdid, and good grief my writing was all dark and sad. I started laughing as I flipped through pages of old poetry and said, "Someone go back in time and give Teenaged Sarah a Prozac") I never let anyone see how bad it was, except maybe Hillori; during my college years my parents and Laura and I were all angry with each other; and when I moved out to the Midwest I disappeared for days while I dealt with the depressive spells on my own, so my parents haven't really had to watch me deal with this before, and when this particular long stretch of life-in-death started they wanted so desperately to help, and they can't help; and even if they could, I wouldn't want them to.
The best thing they can do, which is what they're doing, now, is to talk to me when I emerge from my room, and otherwise to let me be. I have never asked anyone to take care of me; I enjoy companionship, sometimes, when I go under (Jeff doesn't believe that I'm all that introverted, and he's right; I lie pretty fifty-fifty on the Extrovert/Introvert scale, skewed slightly toward introvert like I'm skewed slightly toward being right-handed though I'm actually ambidextrous), but I don't ask or want anyone to fix it. I just want to be let to be, whatever that means in the moment, and, since my mood cycles tend to move pretty quickly, that changes a dozen times a day (upside: I'm never in a bad mood for long. Depression really isn't all that tightly linked to mood). In some moments I'm laughing and engaging, totally focused on others' company and conversation; in other moments I'm staring at the wall and lost in my head (though the shift from one to the other is hardly instantaneous; depressed isn't crazy).
Lest I sound bratty and ungrateful, I will add that it's a tremendous help that I don't have to care for an entire living space on my own.
I'm kind of worried about Simon. Last night he was angry with me and elected to sleep under my bed instead of on it, and this morning he was listless and curled up on my bed while I got ready for work and just lay there. He still has his appetite, and he purred when I kissed his fuzzy little forehead goodbye (I love his wrinkly fuzzy kitty forehead), but he seemed a little, well, depressed. I think I need to spend more time with my boy; I've been out of the house a lot, and distracted when I'm home, and I think he's in need of some Mommy time. (Needy keetie.)
Anyway, here's a sonnet I wrote my junior year in college, when I was going through my imitative-with-a-twist phase (which resurfaces from time to time), and credit for the first line of this one goes to John Donne. (I was much more depressed my junior year, having just been diagnosed as clinically depressed, and still not sure whether or not my sister would survive her own ordeal, and struggling to deal with a repressed backlash of really horrible stuff that I'd bottled for years. So the thoughts of death, this time around, are minimal, like little cirrus wisps, barely there and mostly idle, whereas then they were thunderheads; but the moments of determination still resonate.)
Life Be Not Proud
Life, be not proud, though some have called you
stark and spiteful. Yes, I know you are;
but you can only nick my skin with scars;
you have no power to slice my throat-veins through
or slick my wrists with blood. That power is mine,
but one that I won't wield. I will to live,
I will to take on all that you can give
and stagger with you on my twisted spine.
Your foot can grind my joints and knob my bones
till, crippled, I can barely smile or walk,
but I'll outlast you. Because in the end,
my praise will rise above the song of stones
and powder you beneath my heel to chalk.
So cram my mouth with dust and blood: I'll mend.
God has been flooding me with encouragement and reminders of His love, from many sources. So this? This isn't so bad. It's just something that is, and I'm learning, and it's not fun, but when He said, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness," He meant exactly that: sufficient. Not sufficient as in, "so much that you'll be full of happiness even though the sorrow is still there and will jump around for joy"; he meant sufficient. As in, Just Enough. Like Job. Job had faith, and Job was counted faithful (even though he got fed up with his circumstances himself), and he spent most of the book sitting in a heap of ashes with no clothes on, scraping his skin with broken pottery. No one can call that happy. But God's grace was sufficient. God's grace was Just Enough.
So God isn't mad at me, and I'm not doing anything wrong. This is just something that is, and God's grace is sufficient. I will survive it, and I have faith that it will come to good in the end, however much it sucks right now. And even in the more or less constant battle against the Nothing, I still have moments of joy and moments of happiness and moments of connection and peace and presence, and those moments can last awhile. Yesterday, for example, was marvelous. So this thing doesn't always keep me down. And when it does, cosmically, everything is still okay, even when it's horrible.
It is well with my soul.
Also I'm getting in the mood for fall. No matter how far removed from school I am, August brings this sense of delightful expectancy. I keep getting flashbacks of Grove City in the fall, the slow flare of leaves, bright shallowing sunshine, crisp dry-leaf-and-vinegar-smelling air, renewal and change and long afternoon walks with pockets full of apples, and long nighttime walks with leaves whirling like ghosts under the harvest moon, the gladness of reunited friends, the eagerness of learning, the joy of becoming.
This mood calls for Nickel Creek. I first listened to Why Should the Fire Die? on the long drive from South Bend to Grove City for a homecoming four or five years ago, and ever since, that album has quintessentialized fall.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
but joy cometh in the afternoon
I'm so glad I had therapy this afternoon.
It's really going to be okay. I feel a peace that I haven't felt in weeks. Maybe I'm in a more fragile state than I would like, but I don't have to try so hard to be "better," because I need to take my time, I can take my time (there are worlds enough, and time), and if I want to learn to manage the depression rightly, I can't do a slapdash job with it. There's stuff to work on, sure, and things to figure out, but that gets to be exciting and good, not angsty and horrible.
I think the depression gets bad when I feel trapped. So I need to work on getting, and figure out how to get, unstuck. My job right now is to do that, and to come to peace. It's pretty bad right now, but it won't always be that way, and Jeff (my therapist) said a lot of things today that put me in a place of good perspective on myself. He says I'm extremely unique, that I can't be put into a box or fit into a glove, and that that's both wonderful and horrible -- horrible, I said, because I will be so seldom understood and will always feel lonely, however liked; horrible, he said (after nodding in agreement with my statement), because a lot of the conventional techniques for depression management won't work for me.
He noted that I know how to allow myself to let myself go completely into the sadness (because sometimes I revel in the sadness), and he said it with a positive tone in his voice, so I knew he was noting a strength and not voicing a concern. "The million dollar question," he said, "is, How good are you at getting yourself back out of it?"
I thought for a minute. "Pretty good, I think," I said. "I mean, I've done it alone for years -- since I was a teenager -- and I've always pulled myself out of it okay."
"Good," he said.
So yeah -- I don't feel as if everything is sunshine and buttercups and bunny rabbits and cheeping songbirds. It's not okay in that regard. But it's okay in that my perspective got snapped back into place. I'm not a horrible person, I'm not crazy, and I generally handle these things pretty well. So I got knocked back on my ass; so I'm really, really different from almost everybody else (this makes me appreciate all the more the people that do understand me; there are so few of them); so I'm really self-aware and articulate and clever about managing how other people see the things I want them to see because of how carefully and precisely I word the things I say, which can make it easy for me to layer my communication with horseshit that other people believe if I'm not careful in that regard; so I'm tired and lonely and unique and have to come up with equally unique ways to handle this affliction I've been saddled with since childhood. I've made it this far; I've swum against the current well out of reach of the waterfall, and it's okay for a little while if I just kick back onto my back and float with the current and catch my breath. That's not the same thing as giving up, and it's not the same thing as drowning. And if I'm going to be here, like it or not, I may as well find things to enjoy about the scenery (I've always been good at that, too).
I haven't arrived, or anything; I'm not likely to for a long, long time, if ever. But this is still a good place to be. (And much better than yesterday.)
pulling through
It's not even a day-to-day thing. It's a moment-by-moment thing. Or maybe something in between days and moments.
I wake up in a certain mood, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and I settle into the day and write my blog post, and then an hour later my mood has completely changed, gotten worse or gotten better, and the post I constructed earlier has become a stone tablet scratching out a piece of long-gone history. But I cycle back to it eventually, whether it takes moments, days, weeks, months.
Sometimes I hesitate to record my experience of depression in the moments of experiencing it, because I might only write one post per day but it reflects only one of a hundred different moods, and meanwhile I'm not draped over a piece of office furniture like one of Dali's deflated clocks; my personality, my personhood, are more than the slices of one dimension set down in writing here. I joke, I laugh, I tell stories, I listen to stories, I give comfort, I think happy thoughts, I function, and not terribly.
Yesterday was bad, though, legitimately bad, for most of the day, one of those where I lost my sense of humor altogether until I popped in Bright Eyes' Digital Ash in a Digital Urn on the way home and fell in love all over again with Conor Oberst's work. Digital Ash is one that's taken me a little longer to enjoy, but as I listened yesterday I drove smiling. Conor gets it. He gets it. Under worse conditions, in bleaker circumstances, and with fewer reasons, he too has made, and continues to make, every day, the same choice: to live.
I've heard him called whiny, self-indulgent and hopeless, but I don't see it. Depression is difficult to express -- by its very nature depression robs a sufferer of expression. And there are many, many ways in which to describe it, but none of them quite touch on the thing itself, on what it is, on what it feels like, on what it means to live in and with and through it. Every day it's a little different. So yes, Conor has written a lot of songs about it, and a lot of them sound similar to one another -- it's looping around a center of nothingness, trying to pin down that nothingness, trying to name the nameless. As Eliot says, "Each attempt is a raid on the inarticulate"; and, as Eliot also observes, words crack and break under the strain of their impossible task. But "for us, there is only the trying," and I resonate deeply with how Conor tries.
He's also something of a writer's songwriter -- his mode of expression, the brilliance of his metaphors, always pierce my soul a little bit. And he's so violently hopeful. His songs contain a great deal of darkness, but in that darkness he's always groping for a way out of it, and his work indicates that there is a way out of it, some bedrock of hope that bears up under the despair and the anguish (which are all the more frustrating because they seem to have no source).
So anyway. Part of the difficulty with this thing is feeling utterly unreachable by humanity and God, and Conor's work is the socket that cradles the plug and allows for the jolt and current of some kind of connection, based in a sort of anonymous and therefore universal understanding. There are no words to describe the relief I feel when I realize that I'm not alone in what I'm undergoing, that someone out there gets it, has gone through it too. We the Depressed don't get together much -- what's there to talk about, when you can't articulate it? So even though you know there are others out there like you, it's hard to wrap your mind around someone understanding.
(And I get that there are consequences when the waves rise up again and I'm reduced to treading water and other responsibilities fall by the wayside. I understand consequences very well. It's grace that takes me by surprise. But that's another post for another day.)
Listening to "Gold Mine Gutted" had me smiling all the more because it reminded me of John and all of our late-night arm-linked walks all over Grove City's campus, sharing cigarettes and talking endlessly about life and literature. I hadn't heard from him in a couple of weeks, since he's been spending most of the summer in Mexico City, and I've missed him; but I didn't realize how much time had passed until last night when I turned on my old phone for no reason and got a call from an unavailable number. Warily ("Unavailable" isn't usually someone I want to talk to) I picked up the call.
"Hello?"
"Sarah. Peters." That familiar and beloved voice yanked a grin out from where it had been hiding all day as John continued, "Where. Have you been. I was getting Very Concerned."
"Oh! I...changed my phone number a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't give it to you yet because I thought we'd just be Skyping till you got back..."
"But you're never on Skype!"
"I'm on Skype all the time! I'm on Skype right now!"
"Well, it says you're offline."
"Um...huh, it says you're offline. I thought you were just busy."
"Well, I've been worried. Didn't you get any of my frantic voicemails?"
"No..."
"Yeah. The last one I left said that if I didn't hear back from you soon, I was going to call your parents to find out how you were. But when I sat down today and looked online, I could only find your mailing address."
As I laughed and apologized, I thought how the years like to throw circumstances back on themselves, because five years ago this conversation (minus Skype) bore the exact same substance, but with the speakers switched. He would change his phone number every other month without telling me, and every other month I would call his parents to get his new number.
Love and friendship are many-splendored things. Odd things, too. So often human relationships seem fragile, subject to change without cause or warning, and I've undergone enough of those to learn to look for and expect them; and then there are the people who come through, like the clear light cutting through Erie's omnipresent cloud cover. I like watching and experiencing the give-and-take that occurs between good friends, the various ways we take turns carrying each other, the strengths complementing the weaknesses, the mutuality.
As I've gone through my twenties, I have found love in ways I never knew to expect. My idealist dreamer soul has yearned for that two-become-one love all my life; but as I raced around looking for it, and it failed me again and again, I ended up gathering other kinds of love, and sustenance from surprising places. Love isn't a post, or a mast; love is a tree. God is the roots, Christ is the trunk, and the Holy Spirit is the leaves. The branches? They're many, and various, but they share a source, and they bear sustaining fruit. Conor's music is one. John is another. I thank God gladly and fervently for both.
I wake up in a certain mood, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and I settle into the day and write my blog post, and then an hour later my mood has completely changed, gotten worse or gotten better, and the post I constructed earlier has become a stone tablet scratching out a piece of long-gone history. But I cycle back to it eventually, whether it takes moments, days, weeks, months.
Sometimes I hesitate to record my experience of depression in the moments of experiencing it, because I might only write one post per day but it reflects only one of a hundred different moods, and meanwhile I'm not draped over a piece of office furniture like one of Dali's deflated clocks; my personality, my personhood, are more than the slices of one dimension set down in writing here. I joke, I laugh, I tell stories, I listen to stories, I give comfort, I think happy thoughts, I function, and not terribly.
Yesterday was bad, though, legitimately bad, for most of the day, one of those where I lost my sense of humor altogether until I popped in Bright Eyes' Digital Ash in a Digital Urn on the way home and fell in love all over again with Conor Oberst's work. Digital Ash is one that's taken me a little longer to enjoy, but as I listened yesterday I drove smiling. Conor gets it. He gets it. Under worse conditions, in bleaker circumstances, and with fewer reasons, he too has made, and continues to make, every day, the same choice: to live.
I've heard him called whiny, self-indulgent and hopeless, but I don't see it. Depression is difficult to express -- by its very nature depression robs a sufferer of expression. And there are many, many ways in which to describe it, but none of them quite touch on the thing itself, on what it is, on what it feels like, on what it means to live in and with and through it. Every day it's a little different. So yes, Conor has written a lot of songs about it, and a lot of them sound similar to one another -- it's looping around a center of nothingness, trying to pin down that nothingness, trying to name the nameless. As Eliot says, "Each attempt is a raid on the inarticulate"; and, as Eliot also observes, words crack and break under the strain of their impossible task. But "for us, there is only the trying," and I resonate deeply with how Conor tries.
He's also something of a writer's songwriter -- his mode of expression, the brilliance of his metaphors, always pierce my soul a little bit. And he's so violently hopeful. His songs contain a great deal of darkness, but in that darkness he's always groping for a way out of it, and his work indicates that there is a way out of it, some bedrock of hope that bears up under the despair and the anguish (which are all the more frustrating because they seem to have no source).
So anyway. Part of the difficulty with this thing is feeling utterly unreachable by humanity and God, and Conor's work is the socket that cradles the plug and allows for the jolt and current of some kind of connection, based in a sort of anonymous and therefore universal understanding. There are no words to describe the relief I feel when I realize that I'm not alone in what I'm undergoing, that someone out there gets it, has gone through it too. We the Depressed don't get together much -- what's there to talk about, when you can't articulate it? So even though you know there are others out there like you, it's hard to wrap your mind around someone understanding.
(And I get that there are consequences when the waves rise up again and I'm reduced to treading water and other responsibilities fall by the wayside. I understand consequences very well. It's grace that takes me by surprise. But that's another post for another day.)
Listening to "Gold Mine Gutted" had me smiling all the more because it reminded me of John and all of our late-night arm-linked walks all over Grove City's campus, sharing cigarettes and talking endlessly about life and literature. I hadn't heard from him in a couple of weeks, since he's been spending most of the summer in Mexico City, and I've missed him; but I didn't realize how much time had passed until last night when I turned on my old phone for no reason and got a call from an unavailable number. Warily ("Unavailable" isn't usually someone I want to talk to) I picked up the call.
"Hello?"
"Sarah. Peters." That familiar and beloved voice yanked a grin out from where it had been hiding all day as John continued, "Where. Have you been. I was getting Very Concerned."
"Oh! I...changed my phone number a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't give it to you yet because I thought we'd just be Skyping till you got back..."
"But you're never on Skype!"
"I'm on Skype all the time! I'm on Skype right now!"
"Well, it says you're offline."
"Um...huh, it says you're offline. I thought you were just busy."
"Well, I've been worried. Didn't you get any of my frantic voicemails?"
"No..."
"Yeah. The last one I left said that if I didn't hear back from you soon, I was going to call your parents to find out how you were. But when I sat down today and looked online, I could only find your mailing address."
As I laughed and apologized, I thought how the years like to throw circumstances back on themselves, because five years ago this conversation (minus Skype) bore the exact same substance, but with the speakers switched. He would change his phone number every other month without telling me, and every other month I would call his parents to get his new number.
Love and friendship are many-splendored things. Odd things, too. So often human relationships seem fragile, subject to change without cause or warning, and I've undergone enough of those to learn to look for and expect them; and then there are the people who come through, like the clear light cutting through Erie's omnipresent cloud cover. I like watching and experiencing the give-and-take that occurs between good friends, the various ways we take turns carrying each other, the strengths complementing the weaknesses, the mutuality.
As I've gone through my twenties, I have found love in ways I never knew to expect. My idealist dreamer soul has yearned for that two-become-one love all my life; but as I raced around looking for it, and it failed me again and again, I ended up gathering other kinds of love, and sustenance from surprising places. Love isn't a post, or a mast; love is a tree. God is the roots, Christ is the trunk, and the Holy Spirit is the leaves. The branches? They're many, and various, but they share a source, and they bear sustaining fruit. Conor's music is one. John is another. I thank God gladly and fervently for both.
Monday, August 03, 2009
keepin' on keeping on
I keep looking for a blindfold faith
lighting candles to a cynical saint
who wants the last laugh
at the fly trapped
in the windowsill tape.
You can go right out your mind trying to escape
from the panicked paradox of day-to-day
~Conor Oberst
I am tired.
I miss the days when life was simple. I miss college. I miss Grove City in the fall, I miss my professors and my classes and my friends, I miss knowing exactly what each day would hold and yet knowing nothing about what each day would hold. I miss the expectation of new and wonderful truths to learn, the interaction with ideas, the walk from my dorm to class, the slightly different smell of the stony Western Pennsylvania air every morning. I miss days with plenty of gaps in them, time to wander the wooded spots of campus. I miss cutting class just because I felt like it, to take a nap or plunge down the shallow gorge of Wolf Creek to disappear among the trees and listen to the pines talking to each other in a language I could almost understand. I miss the delight of discovery.
I hate the dull humdrum unchanging pointless routine of my life now. I hate feeling like nothing I do matters.
And I'm tired of the force of will I exert every single morning just to get out of bed and face the day. Every single day I choose, again, to persist. Most of the time it seems that there is no reason to do so, except that I've done it so many times before, and the alternative holds no more pleasure than the present choice to keep moving. So I keep moving.
I'm tired. I feel dull and stupid and close to tears, I don't know where my sense of humor went, I can't concentrate on anything for longer than a minute or two (at best). Probably today's little crash came because of the enormous amount of energy I put forth yesterday.
Right. Here was yesterday:
I cantored for the first time in my hometown parish (in the Catholic church -- I can't speak for other liturgical churches, perhaps it's the same there too -- a cantor is the person who leads the singing, which is woven throughout the Mass. I would stake a lot of money on the assertion that "cantor" comes from the Latin "to chant," since before Vatican II chanting is basically all that was done in church. Chanting still holds supreme in the psalmody -- the response psalm -- which is also my favorite part of the Mass to sing). And naturally, because it was my first time cantoring and I had basically no idea what I was doing in specific to that parish, the little procedures being different from parish to parish, the regular music director wasn't there, and a substitute filled in instead. To further complicate matters, the priest was gone too and we had a visiting priest subbing for him. I took comfort in the fact that no one knew what the bleep was going on, so any mistakes I made wouldn't stick out.
It went really well, all things considered -- things like my not having practiced until half an hour before I arrived at the church; my ungodly awful cramps; the worsening of the depression over the weekend; the hideous adrenaline surge (which my body still isn't processing well, or something) from singing in front of the church, particularly the psalm, so that my hands were visibly shaking when I left the lecturn. The little old nun who was subbing in for the music director asked me if I were a music student at one of the schools in Erie (gratifying); when I told her, "Oh...no, I've never been trained," she said, "You can't mean it" (even more gratifying). She also told me that I did a "lovely" job with the ad lib chanting that the psalmody requires. A very helpful young man who apparently also cantors, and who gave me hastily whispered This Is How Things Go If You Have Questions tips, told me after the Mass that an older gentleman leaned over and asked him, "Who is that pretty young lady up there with the beautiful voice?" And as I was gathering up my things after the service, an elderly gent approached me and told me, "You have the voice of an angel."
So all in all, it went pretty well. Music is one of the few things in which I take pleasure when I'm under the dark like this, and I'm glad I was able to go through with it. There's a strong streak of the performer in me which feels really genuine when I sing in front of people, and church music is a good vehicle for my voice.
At the same time, it cost me a lot of effort. I'm not physically managing stress as well as I normally do, and little efforts require enormous exertions of energy, from internal cisterns which have gone all but dry. And after Mass, tired and wired though I was from getting through the service, I jumped into a car and met up with one of my former coworkers from the bookstore and headed to Ohio for the local Renaissance Faire, and didn't return home until 10:30. I really like Steph (who, it turns out, is an NT on the Kiersey temperament scale -- a Rational -- which pretty much automatically means we get along), and she's an easy person to hang out with, so I didn't feel uncomfortable when halfway through the afternoon my brain shut down and I had to grab something caffeinated just to organize cohesive sentences.
I was puzzled by it at the time, but after this morning, when all I felt like doing was dissolving into a little heap of weeping bones, looking back I realize that that was when I dredged up almost the very last of my social reserves to get through the remainder of the day. I had a good time, I enjoyed myself, and now that I'm learning to look for patterns of communication as I interact with others, I recognized with gladness that the easy exchange in conversing with Steph came from the abstractness of our thinking and speaking; but still, I was absolutely worn out.
It's a strange conundrum. On the one hand, I don’t particularly care to be alone, because it’s easier to sense The Nothing devouring at the edges of my consciousness; on the other hand, it’s difficult being with people because I’m not quite up to the demands of interacting with them on what I consider a normal level (in other words, I’m not up to keeping up the shield of Smile and Everything’s Fine; but even more than that, it’s honestly hard to pay attention to the conversation and respond in complete thoughts). Scylla and Charybdis. Which to choose?
Probably sleep.
But I did do one thing this weekend of which I’m proud: I transferred all the photographs from my old phone to my computer. It took six hours on Saturday afternoon, but it did completely absorb my attention, and the completion of that project now allows me to close my old cell service account (having switched, of course, when I bought my new phone). It may not be the most important thing on my list, but it was something that needed doing, and I did it of my own volition. I am proud of myself for that.
I keep telling myself that everything’s going to be okay. I want to be okay. I want to believe that everything’s going to be okay.
I’m just really, really tired. And yet, that I keep making the choice to persist, that any other choice really isn't a question, means that underneath all of this blahness and bleakness the core of my being is holding to a core of hope that goes beyond feeling merely hopeful (which I don't) and really believes something -- "being sure of what I hope for and certain of what I do not see." And it doesn't feel comforting, exactly, but it does comfort. My soul waits for the Lord. Which means that I hope. Which means that everything's going to be okay, even though it isn't okay, right now -- and so, in a paradoxical, block-time kind of way, everything is okay, right now, even when it isn't, because it's going to be okay, which means that in some way it's already okay.
Again, it doesn't feel comforting. But it does kind of steady me a little. Which is nice, because I can't hold on to any objective sense of time, and everything feels weird and blurry, and I'll blink and the clock says an hour has gone by and I look at my hands and wonder if I went into some kind of time warp, or if I'm really that zoned, and is it really noticeable?
I want Simon. And my big comfy bed. And my nice cool sheets. And the blinds drawn. And either birdsong or thunderstorms.
Well. At least the few hours that need to pass until I get those things should disappear before I know it.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
learning to see
I hesitate to write about some of the specifics of my internal journey because they might sound a little silly. At the same time, however, they're true, and one of the reasons I keep notes about anxiety and depression -- aside from sharing a little of my reality with friends and curious or sympathetic (or voyeuristic) strangers -- is the hope that it will resonate with some people who live under the same black sun, and give others who don't a glimpse of what these maladies are like to the people who suffer from them (and give me plenty of raw material for a memoir).
In therapy this week as I related the start of my latest breakdown and the events surrounding it, I told Jeff, "I drove out to visit my sister -- I really like road trips, I like being alone in the car to think and sort things through without anything else distracting me, just some time to get away from everything, like a mini-retreat," and Jeff held up his hand and said, "That's the most real thing you've said so far: 'I like to be alone.' Let's talk about that."
("Let's talk about that," by the way, is sometimes one of the scariest phrases a psychologist can utter. I usually freeze into the oh-shit-I-was-treading-carefully-but-I'm-on-thin-ice-after-all posture because I know that means there's a problem but I don't know what it is and I don't want to keep talking at all because I feel like a criminal being read her rights: "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.")
So while I sat there and answered his questions carefully and worried while I did that maybe I'm some kind of sociopath if I like to be alone because human beings are social and maybe I'm not social, we dug a few layers deeper into a complex web of language, communication, self-expression and self-image.
I say "self-image" for lack of a better one-word term. What I mean by that is "my view of how others see me." Which is different in important ways from my view of myself. It came out that I like being alone partly because I don't think anyone will like me, and so a lot of my communication to others is tailored with incredible observancy to their actual and anticipated reactions (rendering said communication, in Jeff's word, "horseshit").
"Did you notice that?" Jeff asked at one point, interrupting me mid-sentence. "You started to say something, and the corner of my mouth turned down...and your eyes went right to the corner of my mouth and you instantly qualified what you were saying. When you're talking at me your eyes are constantly scanning my entire face. You're extremely observant. Why?"
I don't recall my exact answer. I learned early on that my performance counted in others' estimation more than my actual personhood. It didn't help that I was always a weird kid who could spend hours staring into a tree but lacked the social graces to flirt, and who preferred losing herself in books to playing sports or (especially) dancing. People have always made me nervous, and any kind of vulnerability is a big deal for me; I don't believe that people will like me if they really know me. That's the bottom line, really: I assume people won't like me. Every way in which I interact with people is, evidently, structured around that assumption.
But when I'm alone I like myself just fine. I like myself a lot. I love that I love indie music and quirky films and world cuisines and yerba mate; I like my writing, my singing voice, my cooking, my decorating style, my thoughts, my books, my company. I don't have to pretend much when I'm alone, and I can dance really badly and drift from room to room (when I think of being alone I mostly think of myself as I was alone in my apartment in South Bend; I still miss the Ivory Tower) singing mid-range harmonies to my indie music and burn candles and wear whatever (translate: very little) I want and be outrageously crazy about Simon and feel generally happy and carefree.
But somehow it all gets lost in translation when the language of being becomes the language of interacting with other human beings. Mostly I feel like nobody gets me, and I want to be understood. But I also confuse understanding and liking as synonymous when really they're not. People don't have to "get" me to like me, and the truth is that almost everybody likes me. I think one of my tasks is to accept that, and to discover why (because when someone likes me I'm always puzzled and surprised), so that I can actually appreciate myself whether I'm alone or with others.
Jeff has assigned me the task of expressing disagreement with people, which, in certain contexts, I meticulously avoid. He's teaching me to disagree firmly and yet calmly and cheerfully. In this way I'll learn to say things that are all-the-way real, and not in compromise.
Meanwhile, as if in affirmation of this astonishing notion that I'm likeable (really, every time someone expresses some kind of liking or concern for me, I'm always surprised and puzzled, wondering why), I've been getting a flood of communication over the last week from friends old and friends new, friends near and friends far away. And my life is blooming into plans for adventure and fun with some of these -- I may be more comfortable alone, but I really love being around people -- and taking on some shades of color instead of a long black stretch of grey. I'm consciously walking into social situations, and approaching conversations, with the assumption that people will like me. (It's a discipline, but it's much less worrisome than my habitual approach.)
Jeff told me, "You think no one likes you, kiddo, but let me tell you, after one session with you I care about you just as much as when you walked out my door after our last session all those years ago, and someone who has that kind of capacity to make someone care about her that much in so short a time..."
I don't remember what he said to close off that sentence; I was battling my instinctive internal response, which was, "I don't believe you." But as I cautiously absorbed that information, and started to reevaluate my interactions with a lot of different people, I realized that I, who am so intensely focused on always being right, am wrong in this area. (And the world didn't end.)
Actually it's really freeing. There's something about the me-ness of me that is likeable. Even my supervisor for my grading job -- a Christian who also understands my struggles with anxiety and depression, and let me tell you, folks, that is a rare and priceless gem -- whom I have kept updated, when I remembered, about this latest, and long, bad stretch, to explain to her my inactivity, has expressed huge amounts of encouragement and understanding, and I've never met the woman; we've had a few online training sessions and she and I have emailed back and forth with student exams.
So maybe I find all this confusing as hell, and kind of a lot to absorb; I know it's going to take a lot of time as I untangle this great big snarl of wrong assumptions and follow the main thread to its source; but it's confusing as hell and a lot to absorb in a nice way. It's funny, usually in therapy you discover all these bad things you've been suppressing and have to deal with, but in this case I'm discovering a really good thing I've been suppressing and now need to learn to live in.
It'll all be better. I don't know if I'll ever be really free of this thing (what was that thorn in Paul's side which he pleaded three times for God to take away from him, and God said, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness"?), but, as Carol, my fellow suffering believer, wrote to me, "Don’t worry about 'beating this thing.' Instead of fighting against it to do the 'normal' things, just be with God in the midst of it. He isn’t punishing you with depression, though He is allowing you to be in that state. Let Him take care of the doing and wait on Him with whatever curiosity you can muster."
Extraordinarily wise advice. And, as God has been reminding me repeatedly lately, the people who served Him most powerfully, from Genesis to Revelation, weren't usually the people who had it all together. A lot of times they were wrecks, drunkards, crazies, murderers, adulterers, depressives (I love you, Jeremiah), liars, tricksters, cowards, idiots, grudge-bearers, idolators, womanizers, prostitutes, doubters and deniers. And sometimes these people were in the midst of their imperfections when God called them. Not everyone was Daniel or Joshua or John. They were nearly always stunningly human, and that didn't matter to God ("for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust").
So I keep remembering that "my times are in your hands," and that God has said, "I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten," and that however He does that will probably surprise me. And most importantly, I don't have to be perfect to be loved by, or useful to, God. Perhaps this affliction is the thing that keeps me remembering my humanity, and makes me dependent on God -- and on people -- where I would fight against that dependency. Perhaps this is the thing that keeps me connected to those who suffer where I might not understand. Or maybe I will be healed of it completely one day after all. But wherever I am with depression and anxiety, whether in the depths of the ocean or resting on high ground, I'm with God.
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,"
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
Psalm 139:7-12
Which, really, is all that matters.
In therapy this week as I related the start of my latest breakdown and the events surrounding it, I told Jeff, "I drove out to visit my sister -- I really like road trips, I like being alone in the car to think and sort things through without anything else distracting me, just some time to get away from everything, like a mini-retreat," and Jeff held up his hand and said, "That's the most real thing you've said so far: 'I like to be alone.' Let's talk about that."
("Let's talk about that," by the way, is sometimes one of the scariest phrases a psychologist can utter. I usually freeze into the oh-shit-I-was-treading-carefully-but-I'm-on-thin-ice-after-all posture because I know that means there's a problem but I don't know what it is and I don't want to keep talking at all because I feel like a criminal being read her rights: "Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.")
So while I sat there and answered his questions carefully and worried while I did that maybe I'm some kind of sociopath if I like to be alone because human beings are social and maybe I'm not social, we dug a few layers deeper into a complex web of language, communication, self-expression and self-image.
I say "self-image" for lack of a better one-word term. What I mean by that is "my view of how others see me." Which is different in important ways from my view of myself. It came out that I like being alone partly because I don't think anyone will like me, and so a lot of my communication to others is tailored with incredible observancy to their actual and anticipated reactions (rendering said communication, in Jeff's word, "horseshit").
"Did you notice that?" Jeff asked at one point, interrupting me mid-sentence. "You started to say something, and the corner of my mouth turned down...and your eyes went right to the corner of my mouth and you instantly qualified what you were saying. When you're talking at me your eyes are constantly scanning my entire face. You're extremely observant. Why?"
I don't recall my exact answer. I learned early on that my performance counted in others' estimation more than my actual personhood. It didn't help that I was always a weird kid who could spend hours staring into a tree but lacked the social graces to flirt, and who preferred losing herself in books to playing sports or (especially) dancing. People have always made me nervous, and any kind of vulnerability is a big deal for me; I don't believe that people will like me if they really know me. That's the bottom line, really: I assume people won't like me. Every way in which I interact with people is, evidently, structured around that assumption.
But when I'm alone I like myself just fine. I like myself a lot. I love that I love indie music and quirky films and world cuisines and yerba mate; I like my writing, my singing voice, my cooking, my decorating style, my thoughts, my books, my company. I don't have to pretend much when I'm alone, and I can dance really badly and drift from room to room (when I think of being alone I mostly think of myself as I was alone in my apartment in South Bend; I still miss the Ivory Tower) singing mid-range harmonies to my indie music and burn candles and wear whatever (translate: very little) I want and be outrageously crazy about Simon and feel generally happy and carefree.
But somehow it all gets lost in translation when the language of being becomes the language of interacting with other human beings. Mostly I feel like nobody gets me, and I want to be understood. But I also confuse understanding and liking as synonymous when really they're not. People don't have to "get" me to like me, and the truth is that almost everybody likes me. I think one of my tasks is to accept that, and to discover why (because when someone likes me I'm always puzzled and surprised), so that I can actually appreciate myself whether I'm alone or with others.
Jeff has assigned me the task of expressing disagreement with people, which, in certain contexts, I meticulously avoid. He's teaching me to disagree firmly and yet calmly and cheerfully. In this way I'll learn to say things that are all-the-way real, and not in compromise.
Meanwhile, as if in affirmation of this astonishing notion that I'm likeable (really, every time someone expresses some kind of liking or concern for me, I'm always surprised and puzzled, wondering why), I've been getting a flood of communication over the last week from friends old and friends new, friends near and friends far away. And my life is blooming into plans for adventure and fun with some of these -- I may be more comfortable alone, but I really love being around people -- and taking on some shades of color instead of a long black stretch of grey. I'm consciously walking into social situations, and approaching conversations, with the assumption that people will like me. (It's a discipline, but it's much less worrisome than my habitual approach.)
Jeff told me, "You think no one likes you, kiddo, but let me tell you, after one session with you I care about you just as much as when you walked out my door after our last session all those years ago, and someone who has that kind of capacity to make someone care about her that much in so short a time..."
I don't remember what he said to close off that sentence; I was battling my instinctive internal response, which was, "I don't believe you." But as I cautiously absorbed that information, and started to reevaluate my interactions with a lot of different people, I realized that I, who am so intensely focused on always being right, am wrong in this area. (And the world didn't end.)
Actually it's really freeing. There's something about the me-ness of me that is likeable. Even my supervisor for my grading job -- a Christian who also understands my struggles with anxiety and depression, and let me tell you, folks, that is a rare and priceless gem -- whom I have kept updated, when I remembered, about this latest, and long, bad stretch, to explain to her my inactivity, has expressed huge amounts of encouragement and understanding, and I've never met the woman; we've had a few online training sessions and she and I have emailed back and forth with student exams.
So maybe I find all this confusing as hell, and kind of a lot to absorb; I know it's going to take a lot of time as I untangle this great big snarl of wrong assumptions and follow the main thread to its source; but it's confusing as hell and a lot to absorb in a nice way. It's funny, usually in therapy you discover all these bad things you've been suppressing and have to deal with, but in this case I'm discovering a really good thing I've been suppressing and now need to learn to live in.
It'll all be better. I don't know if I'll ever be really free of this thing (what was that thorn in Paul's side which he pleaded three times for God to take away from him, and God said, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness"?), but, as Carol, my fellow suffering believer, wrote to me, "Don’t worry about 'beating this thing.' Instead of fighting against it to do the 'normal' things, just be with God in the midst of it. He isn’t punishing you with depression, though He is allowing you to be in that state. Let Him take care of the doing and wait on Him with whatever curiosity you can muster."
Extraordinarily wise advice. And, as God has been reminding me repeatedly lately, the people who served Him most powerfully, from Genesis to Revelation, weren't usually the people who had it all together. A lot of times they were wrecks, drunkards, crazies, murderers, adulterers, depressives (I love you, Jeremiah), liars, tricksters, cowards, idiots, grudge-bearers, idolators, womanizers, prostitutes, doubters and deniers. And sometimes these people were in the midst of their imperfections when God called them. Not everyone was Daniel or Joshua or John. They were nearly always stunningly human, and that didn't matter to God ("for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust").
So I keep remembering that "my times are in your hands," and that God has said, "I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten," and that however He does that will probably surprise me. And most importantly, I don't have to be perfect to be loved by, or useful to, God. Perhaps this affliction is the thing that keeps me remembering my humanity, and makes me dependent on God -- and on people -- where I would fight against that dependency. Perhaps this is the thing that keeps me connected to those who suffer where I might not understand. Or maybe I will be healed of it completely one day after all. But wherever I am with depression and anxiety, whether in the depths of the ocean or resting on high ground, I'm with God.
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,"
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
Psalm 139:7-12
Which, really, is all that matters.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
seek I'll find it all
Seems fine though it ain't, no no no no
Seems fine though it ain't, no
I've gotta find me a way to flow
Deep in the heart I'll seek I'll find it all
~The Concretes
This is a delightful little song I discovered upon popping in a mix at work (rainy days seem to demand some kind of mix, though I haven't made any for myself in years -- I really wanted the Garden State soundtrack but I left it in another CD wallet) created long ago by the boy who, metaphorically, taught me to see music in color.
This particular piece is just weird enough to escape being truly pop, and cheerful enough to escape being depressing. Bouncy and full of a lighthearted not-quite-cynicism, it expresses that weird hope that won't be swallowed but fights its way to the surface of the soul. Even when the waters try to keep it down, it slips out of the depression's grasp and bursts to the top again. Have you ever tried to keep one of those floatie noodles underwater in a swimming pool? You can't do it for long. I hate to be trite and say, "Hope floats," but it does. Not in a limp, feathery way either; in a fierce, muscular, determined way. It's the thing that yanks against the depression's dragging grasp, that by its very nature will not be swamped, and can carry the weight of a struggling swimmer and still remain buoyant.
On some of my very worst days I will find myself, for no reason, smiling and glad and cheerful, and I know that the clouds are pressing all around, but they don’t, in that moment, matter. In that moment, I am, though nothing has changed, transcendent -- free.
And in that moment, and in the others surrounding it, I’ll play happy little sad-sweet songs like these, because I know, and my job is, and I’m glad that, “Deep in the heart I’ll seek I’ll find it all.”
I'm going to win.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
table scraps
I don't really want to write today, but the yawning emptiness on my blog bothers me too, so I'm in something of a dilemma.
What can I tell you? I want to tell you that everything is great, and everything probably is, but everything doesn't feel great, except in small momentary flashes that buoy me up enough to catch my breath and grin at the sun before I "slide back down to the bottom" and look at a world where "all the color drains out of the frame."
I'm at the easily-moved-to-tears stage of whatever this cycle is -- it's been a few years since anxiety compounded the depression (wheeee), so I'm remembering hazily how the last time went and trying to compare my own notes. Hard to do, really, when I'm tipping my head back to dam in the tears a lot of the time. I'm generally pretty self-controlled about crying -- the only places I really allow myself the luxury are church and the car -- but the dam is leaky and I only have so many fingers. So this weekend I cried through the trailer of Where the Wild Things Are (I am ecstatic that they're making this wonderful book into a movie. I knew I loved the movie before I even knew what it was, when I saw the sad, luminous eyes of the lonely, imaginative, neglected and ostracized little boy staring at his parents from around a doorjamb, watching them absorbed in their own conversation without noticing him; and then the screen flashed to him running, and then everything went to silhouette and that costume appeared -- the tail, and the claws, and the crown, and the sceptre -- and I gripped Leigh Ann's arm and whisper-shouted, "It's Where the Wild Things Are!" and burst into tears). I cried through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. And Sunday in church I cried all through the Mass, because six rows ahead of me the cutest baby boy I have ever seen, bar none, was bouncing in his father's arms and staring around him and smiling at everyone and everything, and he was obviously deeply loved, and beautiful, and I'm not perfect but I'm going to be a great mom.
Sometimes I think part of the depression is akin to the infection surrounding an ingrown hair. There's no outlet for all this love that I'm not only capable of giving, but have, and it turns in on itself and goes sour. So I have to figure out how to put it to other uses; and to do that I have to figure out how to view myself properly, with love, and hopefully how to trust, because I don't.
Good lessons. But difficult ones, too, and my head aches, and I'm tired.
At least my room is really clean. And my toenails have never been so carefully maintained. (One of these days I'm going to compile a Tips for Coping list.)
On a tangential aside, I was thinking the other day about something Leigh Ann pointed out about our generation -- that we're pretty pluralist, even a lot of the evangelicals -- and I thought that it's not as naive and silly a position as others might think. We live in a globalized culture now, where many different perspectives must learn to coexist, or destroy everything. In the Cold War only a few countries had nuclear weapons; now dozens have them, from many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds (whereas in the Cold War it was mostly the West vs. the West), and misunderstandings can lead to a lot of death. I'm not saying that we shouldn't take a stand for what we believe in most deeply -- au contraire -- but I think people our age understand the tenuous nature of peace, and in emphasizing the necessity of accepting difference, we're doing what we can to add a little mortar between the bricks.
At the same time I don't think we have any faith that the peace will hold, and we're waiting for all hell to break loose. Oddly -- or not oddly at all -- I think that moment when everything falls apart is what our generation is looking to, to give our lives, and the world, some kind of meaning.
What can I tell you? I want to tell you that everything is great, and everything probably is, but everything doesn't feel great, except in small momentary flashes that buoy me up enough to catch my breath and grin at the sun before I "slide back down to the bottom" and look at a world where "all the color drains out of the frame."
I'm at the easily-moved-to-tears stage of whatever this cycle is -- it's been a few years since anxiety compounded the depression (wheeee), so I'm remembering hazily how the last time went and trying to compare my own notes. Hard to do, really, when I'm tipping my head back to dam in the tears a lot of the time. I'm generally pretty self-controlled about crying -- the only places I really allow myself the luxury are church and the car -- but the dam is leaky and I only have so many fingers. So this weekend I cried through the trailer of Where the Wild Things Are (I am ecstatic that they're making this wonderful book into a movie. I knew I loved the movie before I even knew what it was, when I saw the sad, luminous eyes of the lonely, imaginative, neglected and ostracized little boy staring at his parents from around a doorjamb, watching them absorbed in their own conversation without noticing him; and then the screen flashed to him running, and then everything went to silhouette and that costume appeared -- the tail, and the claws, and the crown, and the sceptre -- and I gripped Leigh Ann's arm and whisper-shouted, "It's Where the Wild Things Are!" and burst into tears). I cried through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. And Sunday in church I cried all through the Mass, because six rows ahead of me the cutest baby boy I have ever seen, bar none, was bouncing in his father's arms and staring around him and smiling at everyone and everything, and he was obviously deeply loved, and beautiful, and I'm not perfect but I'm going to be a great mom.
Sometimes I think part of the depression is akin to the infection surrounding an ingrown hair. There's no outlet for all this love that I'm not only capable of giving, but have, and it turns in on itself and goes sour. So I have to figure out how to put it to other uses; and to do that I have to figure out how to view myself properly, with love, and hopefully how to trust, because I don't.
Good lessons. But difficult ones, too, and my head aches, and I'm tired.
At least my room is really clean. And my toenails have never been so carefully maintained. (One of these days I'm going to compile a Tips for Coping list.)
On a tangential aside, I was thinking the other day about something Leigh Ann pointed out about our generation -- that we're pretty pluralist, even a lot of the evangelicals -- and I thought that it's not as naive and silly a position as others might think. We live in a globalized culture now, where many different perspectives must learn to coexist, or destroy everything. In the Cold War only a few countries had nuclear weapons; now dozens have them, from many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds (whereas in the Cold War it was mostly the West vs. the West), and misunderstandings can lead to a lot of death. I'm not saying that we shouldn't take a stand for what we believe in most deeply -- au contraire -- but I think people our age understand the tenuous nature of peace, and in emphasizing the necessity of accepting difference, we're doing what we can to add a little mortar between the bricks.
At the same time I don't think we have any faith that the peace will hold, and we're waiting for all hell to break loose. Oddly -- or not oddly at all -- I think that moment when everything falls apart is what our generation is looking to, to give our lives, and the world, some kind of meaning.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
silver lining
Well, I'll say this for a prolonged period of heightened anxiety (the really ugly side of depression): It makes road rage a lot more fun.
I come from a family of highway hotheads -- Dad's a cop and Mom's Scots-Irish, so my sister and I didn't have a prayer. So while we take care not to drive recklessly, we certainly can all be classified as aggressive. (I maintain that the aggressive drivers aren't the ones that cause the accidents; the stupid drivers do. I have no statistics to back this up, but I staunchly stick to my position.)
On an ordinary day I do a pretty good dance. I know all the tricks on my route to work -- the places where two lanes turn to one after a stoplight, giving me extra manuevering room to get around slow drivers; the speed traps; the timing of the traffic lights. All of these are important strategic tools, like chess pieces, which I keep in the wings for the moments when they can augment my skillful lane changing, positive/negative acceleration, intimate knowledge of my car's capabilities and instinct for spacial relationships and relative speeds.
I like to drive fast. I like to outmaneuver and outstrategize the other drivers on the road -- particularly because most of the drivers on the road are really, really bad. It's not road rage so much as road competition. I have places to go, and I want to get there first. When another driver's antics summon a flare-up of temper, I seldom yell; more often I narrow my eyes, mutter something obscene and bide my time, waiting for the moment to blaze around them, demonstrate my superiority and clear the road ahead of me. I'm not confrontational by nature, so these moments of executing driving maneuvers with skill and temper give me huge rushes of adrenaline, which I also enjoy.
(It's a good thing I'm bound by law and morality, though. I said to Meg the other week, as I finally was able to pass someone who'd been boxing me in at ridiculously slow speeds for miles, "Do you ever have the really strong urge to clip someone's rear axle as you pass them, just because they're stupid?" At which point she laughed and said, "Sarah, if it were legal, you'd have grenade launchers mounted on your car and a PA system to insult them before you blew them up." "Well...I'd probably settle for a machine gun," I said.)
The trouble with the adrenaline is that when I'm under a long stretch of anxiety, as I have been these last two and a half weeks, it's pretty much coursing through me at all times. With my fight-or-flight response thrumming in high gear all day, the extra surges that come from successful acts of daring on the highway burn through my blood vessels like acid.
But at least it's productive. The rest of the day I spend fidgeting at my desk, keyed up and unable to concentrate while my eyes dart all over the place instinctively looking for danger, when the danger is all in my head and I can't do anything about it. At least while I'm driving I'm entirely focused on what I'm doing, and what I'm doing carries tangible significance, even if it's only cutting five minutes out of my drive time or getting around that cigar-chewing asshole who wouldn't let me pass him for three miles.
Every night finds me exhausted from all the chemicals going haywire in my system (the temporary medications as well as the biochemical horrors); but I can't relax enough to sleep; my nights are more like a succession of really worthless two- or three-hour naps, since my dreams are so bizarre and disturbing it's almost better to stay awake. This anxiety crap is hell on the restfulness of life, and coffee is not my friend, though I still drink it by the pot (faithful to the last). And for some reason I'm thirsty like the Sahara Desert all the time.
But at least driving is more fun.
I come from a family of highway hotheads -- Dad's a cop and Mom's Scots-Irish, so my sister and I didn't have a prayer. So while we take care not to drive recklessly, we certainly can all be classified as aggressive. (I maintain that the aggressive drivers aren't the ones that cause the accidents; the stupid drivers do. I have no statistics to back this up, but I staunchly stick to my position.)
On an ordinary day I do a pretty good dance. I know all the tricks on my route to work -- the places where two lanes turn to one after a stoplight, giving me extra manuevering room to get around slow drivers; the speed traps; the timing of the traffic lights. All of these are important strategic tools, like chess pieces, which I keep in the wings for the moments when they can augment my skillful lane changing, positive/negative acceleration, intimate knowledge of my car's capabilities and instinct for spacial relationships and relative speeds.
I like to drive fast. I like to outmaneuver and outstrategize the other drivers on the road -- particularly because most of the drivers on the road are really, really bad. It's not road rage so much as road competition. I have places to go, and I want to get there first. When another driver's antics summon a flare-up of temper, I seldom yell; more often I narrow my eyes, mutter something obscene and bide my time, waiting for the moment to blaze around them, demonstrate my superiority and clear the road ahead of me. I'm not confrontational by nature, so these moments of executing driving maneuvers with skill and temper give me huge rushes of adrenaline, which I also enjoy.
(It's a good thing I'm bound by law and morality, though. I said to Meg the other week, as I finally was able to pass someone who'd been boxing me in at ridiculously slow speeds for miles, "Do you ever have the really strong urge to clip someone's rear axle as you pass them, just because they're stupid?" At which point she laughed and said, "Sarah, if it were legal, you'd have grenade launchers mounted on your car and a PA system to insult them before you blew them up." "Well...I'd probably settle for a machine gun," I said.)
The trouble with the adrenaline is that when I'm under a long stretch of anxiety, as I have been these last two and a half weeks, it's pretty much coursing through me at all times. With my fight-or-flight response thrumming in high gear all day, the extra surges that come from successful acts of daring on the highway burn through my blood vessels like acid.
But at least it's productive. The rest of the day I spend fidgeting at my desk, keyed up and unable to concentrate while my eyes dart all over the place instinctively looking for danger, when the danger is all in my head and I can't do anything about it. At least while I'm driving I'm entirely focused on what I'm doing, and what I'm doing carries tangible significance, even if it's only cutting five minutes out of my drive time or getting around that cigar-chewing asshole who wouldn't let me pass him for three miles.
Every night finds me exhausted from all the chemicals going haywire in my system (the temporary medications as well as the biochemical horrors); but I can't relax enough to sleep; my nights are more like a succession of really worthless two- or three-hour naps, since my dreams are so bizarre and disturbing it's almost better to stay awake. This anxiety crap is hell on the restfulness of life, and coffee is not my friend, though I still drink it by the pot (faithful to the last). And for some reason I'm thirsty like the Sahara Desert all the time.
But at least driving is more fun.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
on living not alone
A little melancholy today. Church lifted my spirits for awhile, but now I'm back home and I have work to do and I'd rather take a long, long nap.
I think I've identified the problem, though. It was a hypothesis I hadn't thought to test out last year; I was in my stubborn I-do-it-mySELF mode (I think I've been in that mode since I was about nine) and had determined to see things through MY way. Until impending psychological annihilation forced my hand, I planned never, ever to live with another human being until I married.
Impending psychological annihilation did force my hand -- I believe in free will; I could certainly have chosen to stay, and I definitely chose to return home; but God most certainly stacks the deck to guide us when we're too hardheaded to listen -- and I returned home consumed with the bitterness of resumed dependence. I meant always to live alone. I meant to be fine alone. I failed.
But instead of drudgery I found freedom, and the hypothesis I had found interesting -- that depression is worst when a person is alone -- proved itself true. Since I took up residence once again with my parents, the void has retreated considerably. Now, lest you, dear readers, think that because of this I plan to live with Mommy and Daddy forever, I will qualify by saying that I don't think it's just my parents that have helped; it's the companionship, period. And not even constant being in each other's presence; it helps simply knowing there's someone else in the house, even if I'm up in my room grading essays.
I read a study once a few years back that showed that married people who suffer from clinical depression, even if the marriage is a bad one, suffer less than single people with clinical depression. The rates of alcoholism, substance abuse and suicide were much higher among depressives who lived alone. Since I firmly believe that depression is fundamentally centered around disconnect and isolation, it stands to reason, to me, that not only marriage, but any kind of living arrangement that involves more than one person under the same roof is helpful.
Which means that, when I leave my parents' place, I'd better have a roommate wherever I'm going. Because company is such a relief. Looking back, I notice that my depression became completely unmanageable only in The State of Denmark, where, for the first time in my life, I lived utterly and totally alone. Granted, in the Ivory Tower I had no actual roommate, but I saw a good deal of my neighbors, several times a day, and I knew that every day I would talk to someone who wasn't me (another reason for smoking, back then; I always saw my neighbors on the porch). And even when I wasn't interacting with them, their presences filled the house, sometimes irritatingly so; all the same, life and vitality and otherness was at work all around me, and the void was much, much less potent, almost nonexistant.
Meg said last weekend that she wished she and Phillip had an extra room in their house, so that I could have gone to live with them for awhile after everything became too much. And I would have loved that. Memorial Day weekend was such a wonderful time because I was somewhere where I completely belonged. Whether dressed to the nines, bleary-eyed and bed-headed and jammified, or taking forever to cross over from the latter to the former, I was perfectly at home. Helping out around the house, doing a little bit with the cooking, participating in watching Josie (who's so BIG and CUTE -- I'm going to be the Cool Aunt who always gives her awesome and annoying toys, I've decided, starting with my next visit) was all just as satisfying as lounging around in the backyard tanning and talking with Meg. I remember thinking, as I scrubbed the dishes, This must be what extended family used to be, with multiple generations living in the same house. And in some ways it was a lot more peaceful, in all its crowdedness and differing temperaments, than it ever was in The State of Denmark, alone.
All of this stems from my parents' absence on a camping trip this weekend. Yesterday was wonderful, even luxuriant, as I rose in an empty house and prepared my coffee and drifted around from room to room doing exactly as I pleased. Working alone in the garage, journaling, talking to myself -- everything was peaceful and delightful, because I love my solitude. Until about five o'clock, when I thought of the long evening stretching ahead of me and felt a roll of dread twist in my stomach.
Evenings are the worst. They always were. I will happily go the day without conversing with a single soul, but come eventide, I want company. Nothing really makes it better, and I didn't feel like going anywhere (and I received a last-minute party invite which I declined, so in stark honesty I did have options; but it wasn't the kind of crowd I wanted, and I would have had a hard time focusing on the present and on the people), so I did last night what I have done for a year and a half, and switched on the television while I graded essays.
And I don't think it was a coincidence that yesterday afternoon was the first time in a long, long while that I suddenly wanted a cigarette. It was only a fleeting thought, easily dismissed; but it was there. (I haven't attempted or desired to attempt to smoke in well over a month. I officially quit in October when I moved back to PA, though I had about one every month until the night I QUIT quit several months ago. I am delighted to say that I believe this habit is kicked. The last one I attempted tasted so horrible that I only made it through a couple of drags before the nausea hit and I put it out. I quit reluctantly, but baby, I quit.) Isolation fosters a whole slew of bad habits in a depressive person.
I'm glad my folks are coming back sometime this afternoon. I plan to listen to my music loudly while I arrange bookshelves until they return, and to enjoy my daytime alone. But I'm glad I won't be by myself in the evening. The time wasn't torturous or anything, and I didn't find myself slipping suddenly back into a bad state; it couldn't even qualify as a rough patch. It was more like the little ripples of water in the cup on the dashboard from Jurassic Park: a little signifier of worse things to come, given time and an unchanged state of affairs.
A good part of me is resentful: Isn't there some way to beat this thing on my own? Another part of me is laughing at my resentful self and saying, Of course not, silly; what did you expect? God designed us to live in community. The practical part of me is shrugging and saying, This is how it goes. Run with it. No point in resisting what's true, even if it does strike a blow to your pride. Life, and life to the fullest, is more important than keeping your pride intact. And anyway, it's not like you're depending on other people to make you better; just having them around gives you the buffer you need to deal with the devilfish on your own. They don't even need to do anything. So you're not being needy and you don't need to be ashamed of needing companionship. That's how you're built, after all.
And I have to say, it's nice not to have the void yawning at my heels all the time. Living with other people is the way life is supposed to be, and since I'm single, I must -- and get to -- be a little more creative in how I achieve that communal living. We'll see what the future has in store.
Still, a little melancholy today.
I think I've identified the problem, though. It was a hypothesis I hadn't thought to test out last year; I was in my stubborn I-do-it-mySELF mode (I think I've been in that mode since I was about nine) and had determined to see things through MY way. Until impending psychological annihilation forced my hand, I planned never, ever to live with another human being until I married.
Impending psychological annihilation did force my hand -- I believe in free will; I could certainly have chosen to stay, and I definitely chose to return home; but God most certainly stacks the deck to guide us when we're too hardheaded to listen -- and I returned home consumed with the bitterness of resumed dependence. I meant always to live alone. I meant to be fine alone. I failed.
But instead of drudgery I found freedom, and the hypothesis I had found interesting -- that depression is worst when a person is alone -- proved itself true. Since I took up residence once again with my parents, the void has retreated considerably. Now, lest you, dear readers, think that because of this I plan to live with Mommy and Daddy forever, I will qualify by saying that I don't think it's just my parents that have helped; it's the companionship, period. And not even constant being in each other's presence; it helps simply knowing there's someone else in the house, even if I'm up in my room grading essays.
I read a study once a few years back that showed that married people who suffer from clinical depression, even if the marriage is a bad one, suffer less than single people with clinical depression. The rates of alcoholism, substance abuse and suicide were much higher among depressives who lived alone. Since I firmly believe that depression is fundamentally centered around disconnect and isolation, it stands to reason, to me, that not only marriage, but any kind of living arrangement that involves more than one person under the same roof is helpful.
Which means that, when I leave my parents' place, I'd better have a roommate wherever I'm going. Because company is such a relief. Looking back, I notice that my depression became completely unmanageable only in The State of Denmark, where, for the first time in my life, I lived utterly and totally alone. Granted, in the Ivory Tower I had no actual roommate, but I saw a good deal of my neighbors, several times a day, and I knew that every day I would talk to someone who wasn't me (another reason for smoking, back then; I always saw my neighbors on the porch). And even when I wasn't interacting with them, their presences filled the house, sometimes irritatingly so; all the same, life and vitality and otherness was at work all around me, and the void was much, much less potent, almost nonexistant.
Meg said last weekend that she wished she and Phillip had an extra room in their house, so that I could have gone to live with them for awhile after everything became too much. And I would have loved that. Memorial Day weekend was such a wonderful time because I was somewhere where I completely belonged. Whether dressed to the nines, bleary-eyed and bed-headed and jammified, or taking forever to cross over from the latter to the former, I was perfectly at home. Helping out around the house, doing a little bit with the cooking, participating in watching Josie (who's so BIG and CUTE -- I'm going to be the Cool Aunt who always gives her awesome and annoying toys, I've decided, starting with my next visit) was all just as satisfying as lounging around in the backyard tanning and talking with Meg. I remember thinking, as I scrubbed the dishes, This must be what extended family used to be, with multiple generations living in the same house. And in some ways it was a lot more peaceful, in all its crowdedness and differing temperaments, than it ever was in The State of Denmark, alone.
All of this stems from my parents' absence on a camping trip this weekend. Yesterday was wonderful, even luxuriant, as I rose in an empty house and prepared my coffee and drifted around from room to room doing exactly as I pleased. Working alone in the garage, journaling, talking to myself -- everything was peaceful and delightful, because I love my solitude. Until about five o'clock, when I thought of the long evening stretching ahead of me and felt a roll of dread twist in my stomach.
Evenings are the worst. They always were. I will happily go the day without conversing with a single soul, but come eventide, I want company. Nothing really makes it better, and I didn't feel like going anywhere (and I received a last-minute party invite which I declined, so in stark honesty I did have options; but it wasn't the kind of crowd I wanted, and I would have had a hard time focusing on the present and on the people), so I did last night what I have done for a year and a half, and switched on the television while I graded essays.
And I don't think it was a coincidence that yesterday afternoon was the first time in a long, long while that I suddenly wanted a cigarette. It was only a fleeting thought, easily dismissed; but it was there. (I haven't attempted or desired to attempt to smoke in well over a month. I officially quit in October when I moved back to PA, though I had about one every month until the night I QUIT quit several months ago. I am delighted to say that I believe this habit is kicked. The last one I attempted tasted so horrible that I only made it through a couple of drags before the nausea hit and I put it out. I quit reluctantly, but baby, I quit.) Isolation fosters a whole slew of bad habits in a depressive person.
I'm glad my folks are coming back sometime this afternoon. I plan to listen to my music loudly while I arrange bookshelves until they return, and to enjoy my daytime alone. But I'm glad I won't be by myself in the evening. The time wasn't torturous or anything, and I didn't find myself slipping suddenly back into a bad state; it couldn't even qualify as a rough patch. It was more like the little ripples of water in the cup on the dashboard from Jurassic Park: a little signifier of worse things to come, given time and an unchanged state of affairs.
A good part of me is resentful: Isn't there some way to beat this thing on my own? Another part of me is laughing at my resentful self and saying, Of course not, silly; what did you expect? God designed us to live in community. The practical part of me is shrugging and saying, This is how it goes. Run with it. No point in resisting what's true, even if it does strike a blow to your pride. Life, and life to the fullest, is more important than keeping your pride intact. And anyway, it's not like you're depending on other people to make you better; just having them around gives you the buffer you need to deal with the devilfish on your own. They don't even need to do anything. So you're not being needy and you don't need to be ashamed of needing companionship. That's how you're built, after all.
And I have to say, it's nice not to have the void yawning at my heels all the time. Living with other people is the way life is supposed to be, and since I'm single, I must -- and get to -- be a little more creative in how I achieve that communal living. We'll see what the future has in store.
Still, a little melancholy today.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Shawn Mullins was right.
Remember that wonderful 90s pop song, "Lullabye"? I don't consider myself any kind of objective when it comes to judging 90s pop songs; saturated in a glowing nostalgia -- weird because it wasn't like I was a happy teenager -- they always seem amazing to me, the power chords, the scratchy grunge voices, and I can't be convinced that they're crap.
"Lullabye" is no exception. I loved the chorus; it became a mantra I used for myself, and then later for my sister: Everything's gonna be all right...Rockabye... I kept the words close, sang them silently to myself at night. Everything's gonna be all right. Mostly I clung to them, to the idea, so desperately because I only believed it in a blind zeal for wish fulfillment, a last starveling hope.
Well, I forgot all about it in the last few years. I'm doing the usual year-end review in my head, and weighing 2008 in terms of its pleasantness and unpleasantness, and, as always, I give thanks for the sometimes severe, sometimes tender mercies that made themselves new throughout the past twelve months, and bid a nonregretful farewell to another year. New Year's always comes to me with a sense of relief: one down, x to go. The future once again becomes an unbroken, snowy field, a tabula rasa where the wind blows cold and clean and the naked trees hold promises and the untouched ground begs me for snow angels and the things I left behind me, the lostness, the scraped knees, the grief, fall to powerless memory like the substance of Echo, and there is nothing but now, and nothing but what's to come, and the cold scorches in tongues of wind stirring my blood like flame.
Over the past week I've been completely engaged in a momentous internal struggle. Christmas was thought provoking in its singular misery. For three years now I have thought that my growing disenchantment with Christmas had to do with long hours driving, with always being a guest among the members of my family; yes, being single is no fun around the holidays, but I figured that the real root was distance from my parents and my sister.
Wrong. Or rather, only partially right. I had a nice time this Christmas with my parents, waking up early and exchanging simple gifts and eating Mom's fabulous coffee cake and drinking Dad's fabulous lattes; but I preferred to sleep. Holiday retail exhaustion did no favors for my perspective, but I found myself unutterably depressed, and unwilling to express it for fear of hurting Mom and Dad's feelings. Because the trouble wasn't with their company, and also wasn't quite with Laura's absence. I didn't identify the problem until the next day, and it was a relief finally to recognize it, to hold it up to the light and examine it and decide what to do.
The trouble is that the magic of Christmas that I loved in my childhood is gone, and I didn't get to trade it for anything. I don't get to spend Christmas in the cozy intimacy of my sister and her husband, or the passionate and deep knowledge, forged from long commitment, of my parents, or in vicarious joy watching children of my own tear into presents. In its spiritual aspect, by far, of course, the most important, Christmas keeps growing in beauty, in joy, in profundity. Midnight Mass was incredible. But in its other cultural observances, Christmas sucks.
Yep, I said it. Christmas sucks. But all that means is that I could be doing different things to observe it better, to eliminate suckage. In that light, I'm embarking on another experiment. Living far away and driving home isn't the answer; living near enough to be present all the time doesn't work either. The most enjoyable Christmas of my adult experience was the one I spent with the Sommervilles four years ago, and from that I draw the hypothesis that spending Christmas away and doing something new might be the answer.
To test that hypothesis, I decided to take a page from the book of a certain Traveler I know, and save up enough money, by scrapes and pennies, to be somewhere else next Christmas. Right now I'm thinking somewhere tropical. Beaches, hammocks, sunshine, margaritas. Somewhere I've never seen, someplace where no memories exist that could hurt me with the longing for unfulfilled dreams. If I can't have everything I want, I'll do other things to make my life as amazing as possible. I'll make my own traditions. I'm not settling for a half-life anymore; I'm going to make it new, and love the process. No more Christmases of bitter nostalgia; what a pointless way to exist. I want life. I want joy. And the beauty of joy is that you get to make it in your own way; there's no script.
While that happy little flame glimmered under the bushel basket, other thoughts began flickering. Extensions of that decision. Looking honestly at why I hate Christmas spurred me to looking honestly at other things. The issue with the deepest impact, of course, is my struggle with depression. Naming it the devilfish was one way for me to identify it as something foreign to me, something alien, something essentially not me. Because, having lived with it since my adolescence, sometimes I can't tell where its tentacles stop and my limbs begin. It got all intertwined, and I fell into that mindset I've always despised -- the love of the desert-exiled Hebrew for the old slavery, the fear of the unimaginable Promised Land.
But the way I've been living sucks. This is no life. No matter that I barely remember a time before the depression; no matter that I am, in hateable but undeniable ways, afraid of life without it. The questions crop up: Will I still feel things as deeply? Still see people as clearly? Still be me? But I know the answer on all counts: Yes. Yes, and then some. So maybe I can't exactly wrap my head around the concept of living free of this thing that drags me under. But I believe it will be better than what I have. Bring on the unknown -- bring on the storm. I'm declaring war.
There are a lot of front lines in this war, already amassed against me. There are the basic four, of course: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. Social and financial also factor in. I have my work cut out for me here...but I know I can do it. Guerilla style. I wrote in my journal this morning, "From here on out I am no captive, no inert prisoner twisting blind on the torture table. I am a soldier. [...] I have no mercy. My body is covered in wicked scars, but they don't hinder me -- they testify to my determination, they strengthen my knowledge of my enemy, they mark me a survivor. [...] I will emerge victorious. I know this because this war has already been won. My Captain has overcome the world."
I'm a little afraid that some of this sounds insane itself, that crazy Christian fanaticism I so deeply despise. But overall I don't care. In more normal terms, my new mantra (for which my sister would undoubtedly yell at me; something about unhealthy self-classifications) is "What Would Normal People Do?" Part of my task is to name things properly, to sort what is me from what is the devilfish. For example, I'm a procrastinator. That's part of who I am. I don't need to attribute my procrastination to depression; depression can make it worse, but the procrastination is itself not a manifestation of the devilfish. Which makes it easier to do things like putting away the dishes and cleaning out the catbox -- putting those things off is of the devilfish. But putting other things off, like preparing to teach Sunday School this week, is just my ordinary procrastination. Not a great habit, to be sure, but not part of psychological disorderedness. Just an ordinary bad habit. (Ah, you beautiful, ordinary bad habit.)
Because I want to be normal. I have a couple models that I didn't have before (thank you, 2008), of what life without depression can actually be like, and let me tell you, it looks pretty damn good. I'm not satisfied with coping anymore; I don't want to live with this. I want to live without it. I don't want to cope; I want to eradicate.
I read Ephesians 6 yesterday, and savored it all over again this morning, letting the ancient words fuel this growing heat smoldering in my blood (a smoldering wick he will not snuff out...), sharpen me to my purpose:
Finally, draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power. Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil. For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens. Therefore, put on the armor of God, that you may be able to resist on the evil day and, having done everything, to hold your ground. So stand fast with your loins girded in truth, clothed with righteousness as a breastplate, and your feet shod in readiness for the gospel of peace. In all circumstances, hold faith as a shield, to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. (vv. 10-17, New American Bible)
So, with all the gains and losses of the past years decorating my skin, all the hard and bitter, and light and sweet, lessons I have learned, while one part of me is frolicking in the snow (I'm so excited! I can live without this thing! Maybe it will require more concentration for me than for people who aren't afflicted with depression, but I can be okay. I can be normal in the ways I should be normal. Everything is going to be all right. And -- best of all -- I can love people more. This thing won't be suffocating my responses to others. I can love), another part of me is standing on a ribbon bridge of stone in a dark chasm facing an ancient evil, a sword of flame. That part of me, legs braced, sword gleaming, still, ready, sweaty, dirty, determined, is glaring up at the thing, welling up with four words, four simple words that say everything that can be said:
You shall not pass.
"Lullabye" is no exception. I loved the chorus; it became a mantra I used for myself, and then later for my sister: Everything's gonna be all right...Rockabye... I kept the words close, sang them silently to myself at night. Everything's gonna be all right. Mostly I clung to them, to the idea, so desperately because I only believed it in a blind zeal for wish fulfillment, a last starveling hope.
Well, I forgot all about it in the last few years. I'm doing the usual year-end review in my head, and weighing 2008 in terms of its pleasantness and unpleasantness, and, as always, I give thanks for the sometimes severe, sometimes tender mercies that made themselves new throughout the past twelve months, and bid a nonregretful farewell to another year. New Year's always comes to me with a sense of relief: one down, x to go. The future once again becomes an unbroken, snowy field, a tabula rasa where the wind blows cold and clean and the naked trees hold promises and the untouched ground begs me for snow angels and the things I left behind me, the lostness, the scraped knees, the grief, fall to powerless memory like the substance of Echo, and there is nothing but now, and nothing but what's to come, and the cold scorches in tongues of wind stirring my blood like flame.
Over the past week I've been completely engaged in a momentous internal struggle. Christmas was thought provoking in its singular misery. For three years now I have thought that my growing disenchantment with Christmas had to do with long hours driving, with always being a guest among the members of my family; yes, being single is no fun around the holidays, but I figured that the real root was distance from my parents and my sister.
Wrong. Or rather, only partially right. I had a nice time this Christmas with my parents, waking up early and exchanging simple gifts and eating Mom's fabulous coffee cake and drinking Dad's fabulous lattes; but I preferred to sleep. Holiday retail exhaustion did no favors for my perspective, but I found myself unutterably depressed, and unwilling to express it for fear of hurting Mom and Dad's feelings. Because the trouble wasn't with their company, and also wasn't quite with Laura's absence. I didn't identify the problem until the next day, and it was a relief finally to recognize it, to hold it up to the light and examine it and decide what to do.
The trouble is that the magic of Christmas that I loved in my childhood is gone, and I didn't get to trade it for anything. I don't get to spend Christmas in the cozy intimacy of my sister and her husband, or the passionate and deep knowledge, forged from long commitment, of my parents, or in vicarious joy watching children of my own tear into presents. In its spiritual aspect, by far, of course, the most important, Christmas keeps growing in beauty, in joy, in profundity. Midnight Mass was incredible. But in its other cultural observances, Christmas sucks.
Yep, I said it. Christmas sucks. But all that means is that I could be doing different things to observe it better, to eliminate suckage. In that light, I'm embarking on another experiment. Living far away and driving home isn't the answer; living near enough to be present all the time doesn't work either. The most enjoyable Christmas of my adult experience was the one I spent with the Sommervilles four years ago, and from that I draw the hypothesis that spending Christmas away and doing something new might be the answer.
To test that hypothesis, I decided to take a page from the book of a certain Traveler I know, and save up enough money, by scrapes and pennies, to be somewhere else next Christmas. Right now I'm thinking somewhere tropical. Beaches, hammocks, sunshine, margaritas. Somewhere I've never seen, someplace where no memories exist that could hurt me with the longing for unfulfilled dreams. If I can't have everything I want, I'll do other things to make my life as amazing as possible. I'll make my own traditions. I'm not settling for a half-life anymore; I'm going to make it new, and love the process. No more Christmases of bitter nostalgia; what a pointless way to exist. I want life. I want joy. And the beauty of joy is that you get to make it in your own way; there's no script.
While that happy little flame glimmered under the bushel basket, other thoughts began flickering. Extensions of that decision. Looking honestly at why I hate Christmas spurred me to looking honestly at other things. The issue with the deepest impact, of course, is my struggle with depression. Naming it the devilfish was one way for me to identify it as something foreign to me, something alien, something essentially not me. Because, having lived with it since my adolescence, sometimes I can't tell where its tentacles stop and my limbs begin. It got all intertwined, and I fell into that mindset I've always despised -- the love of the desert-exiled Hebrew for the old slavery, the fear of the unimaginable Promised Land.
But the way I've been living sucks. This is no life. No matter that I barely remember a time before the depression; no matter that I am, in hateable but undeniable ways, afraid of life without it. The questions crop up: Will I still feel things as deeply? Still see people as clearly? Still be me? But I know the answer on all counts: Yes. Yes, and then some. So maybe I can't exactly wrap my head around the concept of living free of this thing that drags me under. But I believe it will be better than what I have. Bring on the unknown -- bring on the storm. I'm declaring war.
There are a lot of front lines in this war, already amassed against me. There are the basic four, of course: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. Social and financial also factor in. I have my work cut out for me here...but I know I can do it. Guerilla style. I wrote in my journal this morning, "From here on out I am no captive, no inert prisoner twisting blind on the torture table. I am a soldier. [...] I have no mercy. My body is covered in wicked scars, but they don't hinder me -- they testify to my determination, they strengthen my knowledge of my enemy, they mark me a survivor. [...] I will emerge victorious. I know this because this war has already been won. My Captain has overcome the world."
I'm a little afraid that some of this sounds insane itself, that crazy Christian fanaticism I so deeply despise. But overall I don't care. In more normal terms, my new mantra (for which my sister would undoubtedly yell at me; something about unhealthy self-classifications) is "What Would Normal People Do?" Part of my task is to name things properly, to sort what is me from what is the devilfish. For example, I'm a procrastinator. That's part of who I am. I don't need to attribute my procrastination to depression; depression can make it worse, but the procrastination is itself not a manifestation of the devilfish. Which makes it easier to do things like putting away the dishes and cleaning out the catbox -- putting those things off is of the devilfish. But putting other things off, like preparing to teach Sunday School this week, is just my ordinary procrastination. Not a great habit, to be sure, but not part of psychological disorderedness. Just an ordinary bad habit. (Ah, you beautiful, ordinary bad habit.)
Because I want to be normal. I have a couple models that I didn't have before (thank you, 2008), of what life without depression can actually be like, and let me tell you, it looks pretty damn good. I'm not satisfied with coping anymore; I don't want to live with this. I want to live without it. I don't want to cope; I want to eradicate.
I read Ephesians 6 yesterday, and savored it all over again this morning, letting the ancient words fuel this growing heat smoldering in my blood (a smoldering wick he will not snuff out...), sharpen me to my purpose:
Finally, draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power. Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil. For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens. Therefore, put on the armor of God, that you may be able to resist on the evil day and, having done everything, to hold your ground. So stand fast with your loins girded in truth, clothed with righteousness as a breastplate, and your feet shod in readiness for the gospel of peace. In all circumstances, hold faith as a shield, to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. (vv. 10-17, New American Bible)
So, with all the gains and losses of the past years decorating my skin, all the hard and bitter, and light and sweet, lessons I have learned, while one part of me is frolicking in the snow (I'm so excited! I can live without this thing! Maybe it will require more concentration for me than for people who aren't afflicted with depression, but I can be okay. I can be normal in the ways I should be normal. Everything is going to be all right. And -- best of all -- I can love people more. This thing won't be suffocating my responses to others. I can love), another part of me is standing on a ribbon bridge of stone in a dark chasm facing an ancient evil, a sword of flame. That part of me, legs braced, sword gleaming, still, ready, sweaty, dirty, determined, is glaring up at the thing, welling up with four words, four simple words that say everything that can be said:
You shall not pass.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
driving in a winter horrorland
To the ladies and gentlemen of Erie: I'm sorry. This weather is my fault. I wanted a white Christmas. I didn't expect the weather, in the holiday spirit, to be so giving.
So the past five days have been ridiculous, and, despite the life-hazarding conditions of the roads, I'm kind of loving it. Every road is now paved with a broken sheet of ice that wants to throw the wheels in four different directions at once. The wind has blown so hard that occasionally one must aim one's car through three-foot drifts. Sunday night I got out of work at 12:15 a.m. (technically Monday morning) and the five of us braced ourselves and walked out into a blizzard.
That was the second worst driving experience of my life. At first it was fun. Driving along the Bayfront, almost alone on the road, with the old factories brooding under the bluffs and the masts of the sailboats glowing spookily in the light from the wharves, I watched tendrils of snow rippling in waves like mist across the pavement, eerily, playfully, occasionally whipping into a dervish, a reverse tornado spiraling up ex nihilo from the ground. I felt like an accidental witness to a different world, an elemental world of bodiless spirits that emerges only when human eyes hide in sleep. It gusted around me, slightly malicious at my intrusion, teasing, showing off its ghostly powers to the puny mortal creeping among the players of its weird and beautiful symphony.
I wouldn't miss this for anything, I thought as I turned onto 955 through Lawrence Park. It was a little like driving through water, if one could see the individual molecules. Where the streetlights glowed, a little light illuminated the crystals of snow, throwing everything into spaces of rich and shallow orange.
But that's when I almost changed my mind. Suddenly I felt I was in the middle of Alaska. (A presumptuous feeling; I've never, oh-so-sadly, been to Alaska. Somehow that fact is more bitter to me than the fact that I've never been to Europe; I've always wanted, Shasta-like, to head North.) On Route 20 the weather tore off all pretext of playfulness and howled around me. In that instant any anthropomorphic imaginings vanished; this was the Nature of Stephen Crane, utterly indifferent, impersonal, with a power that rendered all human attempts at civilizing the planet absurd, a child attempting to make an umbrella out of cellophane and kindling in the face of a hurricane.
I couldn't see. In places the snow erased any visibility at all, and on an open highway I slowed to 25 miles per hour and peered at the road immediately ahead of me, which could only be recognized by the treadmarks of former traffic in the snow. I used them as my guidelines; I couldn't see the edge of the road. I didn't know where I was. The wind buffeted my parents' light little foreign car in any direction but forward. I didn't know if I drove in the right lane, or if I was on the wrong side of the highway altogether. I only knew that I was driving roughly in the direction of home.
I mumbled prayers under my breath, gripped the wheel, and kept driving. Somewhere I passed familiar landmarks, but they were invisible and I was blind. I only relaxed a little bit once the lights of the strip at the head of the Valley leading into my town began to glimmer into view; and then I stared in utter amazement as the snow blocked even the light farther than a fifth-mile ahead.
I parked in the driveway with a breath of relief, bundled up into my warmest pajamas, turned on the electric blanket, and sipped scalding tea in bed. It was idiotic to attempt the drive home -- forty mintues on a clear day -- I had been offered a couch at the house of a coworker who lived much closer to the store than I. But unless conditions are completely unbearable, I have this compulsion to sleep in my own bed, use my own toothbrush, bury my face in my own pillow, wake up in my own home. Couches are seldom long enough for me to sleep comfortably (Meg and Phillip's is the one grand exception), and there's the problem of the absence of my happy pills.
Gah. Speaking of which. The devilfish got me by the throat this past weekend. A combination of exhaustion, stress and hormones threw me into the kind of tailspin that only happens a few times a year and completely wipes me out. I felt badly for my parents; I kept it bottled in in high school, went more or less catatonic at times in college, and in the four years of living independently far from family I learned how to deal in my own way: I would vanish, drop off everyone's radar, and curl in on myself alone in my apartment until I was well enough to reemerge and let everyone know where I'd been and that I'd recovered. So this weekend was the first time my parents have really seen me in that state, and I didn't know how to handle their seeing it any more than they did. Uncomfortable all around.
I found myself, though, really looking forward to church on Sunday. I woke up weepy and dragged myself around the house getting ready, wanting only the compassionate eyes of the girls with whom I've reconnected in the Baptist church. And I prayed. I prayed and prayed and prayed. And dealing with it in terms of community (the girls at church were wonderful) and in terms of flinging myself at God brought me through it much more quickly than usual. The entombment generally lasts three days; this time I was more or less fine in twenty-four hours. For which I'm grateful. A sentence popped into my mind as I readied for church that morning, wondering who on earth would put up with me like this, how I could even ask anyone, anyone at all, to love me in such a broken condition, how God could possibly use me for any good whatsoever when I was such a mess (Laura says I need to engage in more healthy self-dialogue. She's right, of course), and the sentence came visually into my mind's eye: You don't have to be whole to be effective.
Ironically -- or no; paradoxically, as all of Christianity is a glorious paradox -- it was relaxing in that knowledge that brought me to a quicker temporary wholeness. Grace is sufficient. And God loves me, has always loved me, when I've least been, or thought myself, loveable. Which (again the paradox) frees me more to let other people love me.
Ah, the strangeness. Ah, the growth. Ah, the healing -- constant, slow, up-hill.
So the past five days have been ridiculous, and, despite the life-hazarding conditions of the roads, I'm kind of loving it. Every road is now paved with a broken sheet of ice that wants to throw the wheels in four different directions at once. The wind has blown so hard that occasionally one must aim one's car through three-foot drifts. Sunday night I got out of work at 12:15 a.m. (technically Monday morning) and the five of us braced ourselves and walked out into a blizzard.
That was the second worst driving experience of my life. At first it was fun. Driving along the Bayfront, almost alone on the road, with the old factories brooding under the bluffs and the masts of the sailboats glowing spookily in the light from the wharves, I watched tendrils of snow rippling in waves like mist across the pavement, eerily, playfully, occasionally whipping into a dervish, a reverse tornado spiraling up ex nihilo from the ground. I felt like an accidental witness to a different world, an elemental world of bodiless spirits that emerges only when human eyes hide in sleep. It gusted around me, slightly malicious at my intrusion, teasing, showing off its ghostly powers to the puny mortal creeping among the players of its weird and beautiful symphony.
I wouldn't miss this for anything, I thought as I turned onto 955 through Lawrence Park. It was a little like driving through water, if one could see the individual molecules. Where the streetlights glowed, a little light illuminated the crystals of snow, throwing everything into spaces of rich and shallow orange.
But that's when I almost changed my mind. Suddenly I felt I was in the middle of Alaska. (A presumptuous feeling; I've never, oh-so-sadly, been to Alaska. Somehow that fact is more bitter to me than the fact that I've never been to Europe; I've always wanted, Shasta-like, to head North.) On Route 20 the weather tore off all pretext of playfulness and howled around me. In that instant any anthropomorphic imaginings vanished; this was the Nature of Stephen Crane, utterly indifferent, impersonal, with a power that rendered all human attempts at civilizing the planet absurd, a child attempting to make an umbrella out of cellophane and kindling in the face of a hurricane.
I couldn't see. In places the snow erased any visibility at all, and on an open highway I slowed to 25 miles per hour and peered at the road immediately ahead of me, which could only be recognized by the treadmarks of former traffic in the snow. I used them as my guidelines; I couldn't see the edge of the road. I didn't know where I was. The wind buffeted my parents' light little foreign car in any direction but forward. I didn't know if I drove in the right lane, or if I was on the wrong side of the highway altogether. I only knew that I was driving roughly in the direction of home.
I mumbled prayers under my breath, gripped the wheel, and kept driving. Somewhere I passed familiar landmarks, but they were invisible and I was blind. I only relaxed a little bit once the lights of the strip at the head of the Valley leading into my town began to glimmer into view; and then I stared in utter amazement as the snow blocked even the light farther than a fifth-mile ahead.
I parked in the driveway with a breath of relief, bundled up into my warmest pajamas, turned on the electric blanket, and sipped scalding tea in bed. It was idiotic to attempt the drive home -- forty mintues on a clear day -- I had been offered a couch at the house of a coworker who lived much closer to the store than I. But unless conditions are completely unbearable, I have this compulsion to sleep in my own bed, use my own toothbrush, bury my face in my own pillow, wake up in my own home. Couches are seldom long enough for me to sleep comfortably (Meg and Phillip's is the one grand exception), and there's the problem of the absence of my happy pills.
Gah. Speaking of which. The devilfish got me by the throat this past weekend. A combination of exhaustion, stress and hormones threw me into the kind of tailspin that only happens a few times a year and completely wipes me out. I felt badly for my parents; I kept it bottled in in high school, went more or less catatonic at times in college, and in the four years of living independently far from family I learned how to deal in my own way: I would vanish, drop off everyone's radar, and curl in on myself alone in my apartment until I was well enough to reemerge and let everyone know where I'd been and that I'd recovered. So this weekend was the first time my parents have really seen me in that state, and I didn't know how to handle their seeing it any more than they did. Uncomfortable all around.
I found myself, though, really looking forward to church on Sunday. I woke up weepy and dragged myself around the house getting ready, wanting only the compassionate eyes of the girls with whom I've reconnected in the Baptist church. And I prayed. I prayed and prayed and prayed. And dealing with it in terms of community (the girls at church were wonderful) and in terms of flinging myself at God brought me through it much more quickly than usual. The entombment generally lasts three days; this time I was more or less fine in twenty-four hours. For which I'm grateful. A sentence popped into my mind as I readied for church that morning, wondering who on earth would put up with me like this, how I could even ask anyone, anyone at all, to love me in such a broken condition, how God could possibly use me for any good whatsoever when I was such a mess (Laura says I need to engage in more healthy self-dialogue. She's right, of course), and the sentence came visually into my mind's eye: You don't have to be whole to be effective.
Ironically -- or no; paradoxically, as all of Christianity is a glorious paradox -- it was relaxing in that knowledge that brought me to a quicker temporary wholeness. Grace is sufficient. And God loves me, has always loved me, when I've least been, or thought myself, loveable. Which (again the paradox) frees me more to let other people love me.
Ah, the strangeness. Ah, the growth. Ah, the healing -- constant, slow, up-hill.
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