Last night after I crawled into bed Pony wrapped his arm around my middle and asked me what I was going to do today, a rare day off. I told him I had no idea. I’ve been in the thick of a depression for a while now but I keep plugging on because there is no other option. I keep waiting for the clouds to part like they always do, but I just get little sun breaks here and there. At least I get those. Honestly, I am thankful for any amount of light and levity.
I’m going to keep writing and not edit because part of my heaviness comes from lack of contact and part of my lack of contact comes from feeling I need to be perfect in my presentation. So I will let this flow and be random and will consider it a sign of love and acceptance to myself – i offer you and myself, on this dark and dreary winter morning, the blessed gift of incoherence. Even architects need to say fuck it once in a while.
It’s sort of embarrassing to admit, but i miss the people who treated me like I was someone special on my last blog. i really do. and honestly, i don’t even know if they were who they said they were. I’ve come across a number of examples of bloggers who were pretending to be someone they weren’t, someone sensational, like a hipster girl talking about her hipster life with a brain tumor. She was supposed to die sometime in the next few years. I read some of her posts and my gut told me she wasn’t close to death but I knew many bloggers who were into her so I kept my impression to myself.
Sometime later I learned from another blogger who had had a private correspondence with her that she was a pretty messed up girl and she was in fact making the whole dying beautifully thing up. Her blog has since closed down; I remember she came to my old one a few times. After reading one of my post about a depressed woman who continues to frequent a coffee shop in which she is routinely snubbed by the barista, the dying girl encouraged me to write more such similar tales. Her only caveat was that I write the book quickly so that she might gulp it down before her time came. Her farce bothered me on my levels, but mainly it hurt because my 5 yo niece had just died of a brain tumor the year before, it was a sudden thing, three weeks from diagnosis to death.
The child never knew what was happening to her. I don’t think she could have comprehended it if they had told her. I met her in the ER, with my brother and his wife. You don’t know what it’s like to stand outside a room in which a tumor has hatched inside such innocence. The invasive growth changes the atmosphere, turns it and anyone touched by it thick as cement. I wrote a post about it, how it felt for me, but even after rewriting it, and rewriting it, I don’t know how many times, over how many months, I just couldn’t bring myself to publish it, couldn’t bring myself to be the person who could speak for the child who was lost to us. I called it, What I appreciated Most, when time stood still for me. Sometimes I still go back and reread it, tinker with it, cry.
I never wanted to be one of those bloggers who came on and just said how depressed she was. Somehow it seemed wrong to ask for support without performing a trick or two. Before I could hit the print button, I was required to transform my fire. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe all that’s necessary is to show my body going up in flames, every last drop of me consumed in the blaze. That sounds horrible. But sometimes I think this is the only way to pass through the pain. Sometime we just need to let go and permit the terrible heat to eat right through the knotty core of us. It’s hard for me to believe this, but I’ve been reborn enough times to know I’m capable, more than capable of rising from the ashes.
Sometimes I’m sure the people who believed in me weren’t real. And I don’t mean that in a paranoid way, but honestly, they were utterly devoted to me, the way people are devoted to you in a dream. i thought they were too good to be true and worried from time to time they might be predators. If one person can find nourishment while pretending to be dying of a terminal illness, couldn’t another find a similar sustenance in providing love to the inconsolable?
Maybe the people we pretend to be are not so much pretend.
Maybe we’ve gotten so far from ourselves, have grown so out of touch with our humanity, the only way we know to reach our authentic selves is through fabrication. It’s possible. We invent a person we can be proud of. When I look at it this way, I have more compassion for people who lie about who they are online. Maybe, for them, pretense is a form of salvation. I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud here. It helps to write this down, it has troubled me for so long.
What if the man who has only words of approbation for me online hasn’t the opportunity or the courage to express this potency in his real life. Maybe he wants to know what it feels to bring peace to an aching heart, and maybe she, the dying girl, wants to know the deepest, most sacred kind of love. Maybe she has died a thousand deaths without the benefit of the witness. Maybe she decided to reach out and take the love she felt was owed her.
I think of the man who claims to love me from afar, my own private Don Quixote, who after reading my words online has told me on numberous occasions how he will never stop loving me. He claims this love divine. When he calls me a lady, I want to scream, just as Aldonza screamed. I am not any kind of a lady.
Maybe I am too harsh. Maybe that which we deem irretrievable can only be found in play. Maybe it is the unique dream state of the blog that has allowed this ardent supporter access to his own lost decency. When I think of the pretenders this way, I am happy for their imaginations, and feel a similar impulse to see this shroud we call reality stripped away.
last night on the drive home from her violin lesson, my daughter, she’s 17 years old, said she couldn’t get her thoughts out, said there were so many there were none. I thought that profound. I know just how she feels.
So many there are none.
When she stopped the car, we sat there in the dark of the driveway for a few minutes and then she turned to me and said, i think i know why all of our talks are stolen.
Why?
It’s because i never know when something is going to show me the way in to my thoughts. she admitted to hating her good friend.
i said she should pay attention to anything that gets a rise out of her, good or bad and then because my eyes were filling with tears I turned my face to the night sky; it’s so beautiful after the rain. the clouds were swirly and forgiving, moving graciously like feathers across the blackness.
but when they are alone together she loves her again.
She wanted to know why she could hate the girl. I said maybe she was threatened by her in some way.
Really? Why do you say that? I’m not threatened by her.
Well…I don’t think feeling threatened is unnatural. We’re all threatened, all the time. It’s because we’re human.
Yeah, maybe you’re right. She does threaten me. Everyone loves her so much, they don’t see through her like I do.
When you get to know people, when you realize their patterns, and then you get to love them for who they are, not just who you thought them to be. you know? It’s normal to be disillusioned with your friends in the beginning, it means you’re going deeper.
She’s so sweet, but she talks about herself all the time and she’s always trying to find a way to brag about herself and make herself seem really cool, only she pretends she isn’t doing it. Like this guy at the gym gave her his number, some random guy, and she said she was embarrassed. Like, OK, why are you embarrassed? and she’s all, well, I felt bad because I’m not going to call him.
I guess she needs some attention. She’s gone through a lot.
I know, I really like her, we can really talk about things. I just wish I she didn’t irritate me so much.
Can’t you just say, hey, enough about you, let’s talk about me. Sort of joke about it.
No, she would be devastated. She’s not jokey.
Oh, your friendship is precious. It doesn’t have shocks, nothing to absorb who you really are.
Exactly! Our relationship is riding on these big wooden wheels.
Oh, yeah, like the kind on baby carriages you see in antique stores.
Yes! There goes our precious relationship for a dainty stroll in the park.
This is a funny metaphor. I like it.
My friendship with Mia is like a pogo stick. We can say anything to each other. We just bounce all over the place.
That’s nice. It’s good to have different kinds of friends.
i love being with my daughter. i’ve never met a person so much like myself. but she really is not at all like me, yet we have this understanding. she’s intuitive. We fight and we love. it’s rare to be this comfortable with another human being and more than grateful to have experienced this kind of presence in my lifetime. for as much as she puts me down, I know she must. yet she trusts me implicitly.
I love to make her food. when i’m depressed, wanting so badly to lay down on the bed, which i simply will not allow myself to do, I will make her a fancy salad, or a stir fry, or a cup of tea with milk and sugar, and I’ll ask her about her day and to deflect this terribly blunt question she’ll turn it back on me and then i will run back through my encounters, see if i can cobble together some bit of a story, a thought about something, an impression she can nibble on.
I’m not a regular mother. And that’s OK. I don’t know what a regular mother is. I don’t want to take away from what is good, not too soon. this is the hardest fucking freewrite.
When i told him i didn’t know what I was going to do today Pony suggested I could take a hike. I took a deep breath and resisted hurting him. It’s not that I can’t think of things to do, I explained, it’s that everything feels pointless. I’ve lost that loving feeling for my life. i am not suicidal or anything, i’m not like that, but i just have this dread that everything i’ve been running away from has finally found me.
Maybe that’s OK.
I love someone who suffers from depression. It is a scary, helpless feeling not knowing what to do or say or how to understand. I hope the sun comes out for you soon.
Oh, it will come out…it always does. Writing has always moved me through darkness. I am going to the thriftstore soon to look for cool clothes.
I miss you WW. I’m sorry someone you love suffers from depression. I wish there was something I could do.
For me, I stay away from most people until I’m feeling better. Normally I can be fine around my immediate family because keeping myself busy and useful for them makes me forget I’m sad or lonely or whatever it is. also, being around others tends to snap me out of it very quickly… writing this post helps.
i’m thinking back to my twenties and how when i was first experiencing periods of blue my older sister would get so upset with me. she simply couldn’t relate, or so she said, to my feelings. She would say, “how can you be sad when I’m your big sister?” it really hurt me that my sadness made her feel judged and small. Now i realize i was feeling all the sadness she couldn’t allow herself to feel. I was the feeler for a number of people in my family. i honestly think this is how families work. my sister was the producive one, and I was the one who emotionally self-destructed. i didn’t choose this role. it just sort of happened, I think, because I’m wired so sensitively.
Still, I always try and be upbeat and grateful around her now because I realize it hurts her so much to see me sad. Our family has been through a lot and she just can’t stand to see her baby sister in pain. I don’t fault her for that. Not at all. I love her dearly and realize she, like any person, has her limits. Then again, whenever I’ve been feeling good, she finds a way to put me in my place…she’s a little better at that though.
There are members of my family who understand this dark feeling, and when I go to them, or they come to me, I don’t feel like we’re asking too much of the other. As we both understand the feeling, we find helping each other useful.
This is why I strongly believe in the concept of the wounded healer. Through healing others she herself is healed; conversely, the wounds of others are healed through connecting with her wounds. And in this equation there is no shame ;the shared ache is held and minimized precisely because of this communion.
I always read all of your posts; I’m just not much of a commentor anymore. I am glad the clouds are parting – I read the Born Again post. Perhaps, that will be the key for the person I love. He loves to help people, and I think his intensity for kindness and doing the right thing is (are?) part of what gets him so down (he sees all the wrongs in the world). But, of course, as I said, I don’t know. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts and feelings about your own struggles; it is helpful and enlightening.
That’s OK if you don’t comment. I rarely comment now either.
There are so many reasons for sadness and sorrow. Lately I’ve been thinkings a lot of psychic pain comes from lack of validation, which often times happens to people who think or even see things outside the proverbial box. When we lack corroboration, when we feel too alone in our perceptions we come to doubt ourselves and this doubt is usually heavy.
Your depressed person might feel less depressed if they had someone to talk to who could make them feel less alone. Once the horrible alone feeling is mitigated, the happiness they feel from being found in communion with another person who “gets” that hard to reach part of them, will make it so they can let go of some of the sorrow and start to see not just the pain and suffering in the world, but the good that exists too. There is a lot of good, obviously, but when you feel separated from it, even the good becomes cause for pain.
I will have to keep that in mind. I usually just sit and listen, but I am sure he can sense by my silence that I don’t feel the same way. Thanks. :<3
That was supposed to be a heart.
thanks, I wasn’t sure what it was so I googled it, but that didn’t really help…ha ha
When I realized that I had accidentally put a colon there, I decided I better google it to make sure it didn’t mean something. I was a little surprised by what I found out which is why I decided I better let you know it was a heart.
lol
Your “blessed gift of incoherence” produces amazing insights, which you then express with a matchless coherence. The private thoughts and feelings you had about the hipster girl with the brain tumor, and their connection to the sudden and incomprehensible loss of your niece, was especially powerful. Can people be trusted? Can life?
I’ve also come across a few bloggers who, I suspect, are pretending to be something they’re not. The prostitute and the stripper come to mind — both are a little too graphic, as though they’re going out of their way to be shocking. Then again, maybe that need is part of who they really are, and they have no other way (no harmless way) to let it out.
I hope the clouds part when they’re good and ready, and that it will happen soon. Meanwhile, you are someone special. What gifts you and your daughter are for each other. (And how great that you resisted hurting Pony.)
Thank you, BB, you are special too
. I used to feel trust was the most important quality in life, I couldn’t tolerate what I thought or considered any sort of duplicity. I so badly needed to believe that what I saw on the outside of someone corresponded to what was on their inside. I still long for this sort of authenticity, or as Carl Rogers would say, this sort of cogruence, but I’m much better able to whether incongruence than I used to be. It used to devastate me when I discovered someone I trusted had lied to me or talked badly about me behind my back. But now I know the behaviors of others, their own intentions have more to do with them than with me. I can’t take ownership for the behaviors of others, people are who they are.
OK, enough, gotta go pick my kid up from orchestra practice.
Be well.
Incredible blog. And your daughter, “so many thoughts there are none”! Tell her that really spoke to me, just like your musings. You keep on trucking, my dear. We must do the bidding of Shakespeare and “unpack our heart with words.”
Hi Lew! I will tell her. And thank you so much for reading here, it means so much to me
So many truths, here. “I’m going to keep writing and not edit because part of my heaviness comes from lack of contact and part of my lack of contact comes from feeling I need to be perfect in my presentation.” Yes! This is the very same sentiment I have about blog writing. All of the contradictions you touch on here are true–like so much of life.
Thank you for stopping in and for commenting