Where did this sunshine come from?

First of all:

Look, I know I'm late to the party, but Lizzo is so great. I just want to listen to "Juice" on repeat. I'M INTO IT.


Secondly:

This whole thing of emotional resilience is fucking amazing. I don't really know where it came from...maybe I was building the muscle while I was on Gabapentin*, and then when I dropped the med I bounced straight up into the sunshine? Like when you walk around with a heavy pack for a while and then when you put it down you feel like you might float up into the air. I can't think of another explanation but it's amazing, and I hope it stays.

Like, my godmother is extremely ill right now--she has a treatable but incurable cancer, so there's no knowing how much time she has. That is truly awful news, and I sat in my car and cried for an hour when I found out. But miraculously, I'm ok. It's a horrible thing that is happening but it's somehow not blackening my entire landscape.

I've gotten middling to bad sleep for the last week, and I had hoped this past weekend would be my chance to catch up--but (probably because of who I am as a person, or maybe because it's my Fate to never go to bed on time) it wasn't. I still averaged between six and seven hours, when I'm a person who needs eight. And then last night I'm not sure I even hit five. For most of my life, a night like last night would have had me in hysterics. But it didn't.


Guys, walking through this world every day without wearing the 1960s solid metal deep-sea diving suit that is chronic depression is like winning the goddamn lottery. It's incredible. 10/10, would recommend.















*In case I didn't cover this before (since I never write this decade), I was on gabapentin for several years to address the nerve pain I get due to an inherited degenerative neurological disease, but since Ian and I are considering starting a family, we were trying really hard to find a way for me to function without it. My nerve pain is triggered by stress, and for the last several years the prevailing theory has been that it got too bad for me to handle (without medication anyway) while my dad was in the hospital for two straight months with an infected pressure sore, and my friend went into the hospital at the same time with ovarian cancer. But then when we examined the situation further, we remembered that I had also started drinking coffee during that time period, and I decided to experimentally cut back on coffee. My pain was instantly a hundred times better, so I've (very sadly) dropped coffee and dropped gabapentin, and now I control the pain with CBD capsules and/or Lion's Mane Mushroom capsules, depending on my pain levels.

And gabapentin...I knew it was rough stuff, but man. The withdrawal made me sick for days, and once I was off of it I realized that it had been keeping me depressed and giving me pretty extreme brain fog and memory problems. Life is so much better without it, and I'm so grateful that I'm able to function without using it now.

General Updates

In looking back, I just noticed that I never posted again about Ian's mother.

She died. Jyl died too, by suicide, and my darling friend Aby died as well, by accidental overdose, in a relapse.

It was a hard year.


I know I've tried to write about my almost-mother-in-law's death several times, but I guess it must have just been too hard. I don't remember what I wrote or why I didn't post it. I have probably attempted to address Jyl's and Aby's as well, but I guess those words never made it through.


By some miracle--by a whole bunch of miracles really, and with a lot of help--we did manage to get married. In large part the wedding was beautiful, but looking back I have a lot of negative feelings surrounding the planning and the day that I don't want to try to dissect right now.

I have an office job, which I both like and hate. Mostly I enjoy my coworkers, and obviously the stability of a regular paycheck. But I feel trapped. I never see the sun. The sameness of my environment and my work, day after day after day, is rotting me away inside. I am starting to feel old, and empty, and (at the very high risk of being nauseously over-melo-dramatic) lately this has been leading me to ponder my own mortality in a very dark way. I am sure the awareness of one's own mortality is normal, and maybe early thirties is when it usually hits--but I am really not liking it. I was hoping to get away from the total surety that the rest of my life was going to be nothing but a long unsteady irrefutable slide down into a dark tunnel. Lately, mostly, each day has felt either the same as or worse than the last and the horizon looks dark and dangerous. I feel like I've made all the wrong decisions and now I just have to learn to live with them until I die. But maybe it will get better, right? People say it sometimes gets better.

Again. Still. More.

It's not so much that I want to kill myself these days, it's more that, roughly eighty five to ninety percent of the time, I find myself wishing I'd never been born.

Indecision

You know, I hate that I'm such an indecisive person, but if I weren't I probably would have killed myself a long time ago.

So I got that going for me, which is nice. I guess.

That being said, if I weren't so indecisive, I might not be so anxious and depressed all the time. It's hard to say which stems from which.



I'm sitting here in my parents' bathroom, because I stopped in here before leaving their house and I can't stop crying long enough to leave, and my parents are both on edge now and it just reinforces my belief that I have to control my emotions or else they'll fuck other people up. Which might be true, but it isn't healthy.

I was supposed to have a nice afternoon of socializing but I can't even get to my goddamn car.

Predicting the future

Badly, as usual. I've realized that one reason I tend to fall so easily into despair is that I expect the rest of my life to be all downhill from here. I can't imagine taking on a new responsibility because i feel certain that in the future I'll only be more tired, more anxious, more achy, less physically able and thus less mentally or emotionally capable.

I don't want any of my problems to have anything to do with my father, but I think maybe they do. I have two wonderful parents, but growing up with a parent that has a debilitating degenerative disease will do things to your head.

Oh, that

God, I am way more of a suicide risk than anyone realizes. Most (?) of the time I'm fine, but it takes about three seconds for me to go from functional to about-to-throw-in-the-towel. And it happens a lot. Maybe most days. Maybe a couple of times a week. I don't know.

That sounds so extreme. I'm not saying that I've got elaborate plans or anything, letters composed, anything like that. I just wish dying didn't feel like such a good idea. Like a fantasy vacation I don't ever have to come home from.

Post-wallow

Update: getting the fuck out of bed made me feel quite a bit better. And somehow today (or at least this evening) I've been doing a better job of not withering under the weight of all the scary things in my life that I can't control. Hard to say whether that's health or denial, but for now I'll take what I can get.

On another note, this just happened.

Marie: I am lying around in a towel and I just found a spider crawling on my inner thigh. Sweet dreams.

Ian: I just drank a gnat with my medicine. Saw it right as I was gulping.

Marie: high five.

Wallowing

Feeling very low this morning, very suddenly. I'm not even out of bed and almost all I can feel is fear, worry, sadness. It's been a while since I woke up this way.

Note to self: don't wallow.

In brief (ish)

I often think of things I'd like to write here and then don't do it, perhaps because I feel that doing so would take too much time or because the thoughts are too long to type on my phone keyboard. This, however, is a brief thought, and definitely not too long.

I've known for a while that I am somewhat lactose intolerant, but in general I eat what I want anyway aside from limiting my cheese intake and eating cereal with almond milk.

Yesterday I put real milk in my cereal (oh, the horror) and today I woke up wishing I were dead. That isn't a metaphor--I actually lay there and wished I could simply wink out of existence.

Obviously there are other factors at play here, and I am certain that my fatigue and my uncertainty regarding how to proceed or whether I am in the right place in life and making the right decisions contributed to the moment. Still, I don't usually get that far. So that's something to keep an eye on.

A friend encouraged me to keep writing--I've known for a while that I needed to, but it never seems like the right time. Or never seems like the right thought. Or never seems nonthreatening enough. In good moments I have felt that I wanted to just live and enjoy it, rather than watching it through a camera lens, so to speak. But I think that running beneath almost all of my choices not to write has been fear and discomfort--an uneasy reluctance to turn my gaze too sharply on any part of my life. I still have not rectified this.

But lately there have been enough difficult moments to drive me back toward my pen, though I still have actually written very little. I have taken to carrying a notebook around to encourage myself to use it. 

I composed this in my head tonight on my way home from the hospital, and wrote it down in the driveway when I got home. I labeled it,

"April 17, returning from my 58th visit to the hospital in as many days."

It hurts too much to keep hoping.
Some days, all I can believe is violence.

I hear, in bright, energetic voices--
--too bright; they hurt my eyes--
--that honesty is all. That masks
only hurt.
I'll be honest: I've said it myself,
in better days.
But how can I believe it when I,
seeing my hero falter, wince, struggle for breath,
Feel my heart pound, and weaken, and sink into the ground.

It hurts too much to keep hoping.
All I can believe
is violence.

Apparently it's that time again

I wish I wanted to post here more. It seems like I always find myself wanting to look back on something that I feel I must have written about, and then find that I didn't.


Things have been okay. I've been dreaming a lot--daydreaming sometimes about this idea I've had for a while about becoming a counselor, and daydreaming a lot more about designing and building and sometimes even living in tiny houses of the variety that can fit on an 8x20' trailer, and be hauled around the country. I have such a love of efficient design, and of the idea of efficient living--living without the unnecessary accumulation of the mounds of stuff that perversely ensnare our affections and weigh down our lives without enriching them at all. More recently this has expanded to include the desire for a small, high mpg car. I'm tired of using up gas to lug around all this car that I'm not even using. I'm using the driver's seat and maybe the passenger's seat too, and yet I'm pulling the weight of both back seats and a trunk halfway full of crap that was left there by the family members who drove the car before it came into my hands.

Anyway, I've been funding the daydreaming by still working part time at that daycare I thought I had quit back in the spring, and doing some odd jobs for various people, mostly extended family members. I am tired of this, and I want to find doorways into something new, but I don't know where they are. And I don't know how to stop being afraid of committing to a plan.


And I love Christmas, and it's my favorite holiday, but I am tired, so tired of getting depressed every Christmas season. Back when I was with David (Oh Lord, his name is still like honey. Will that ever fade?) I thought that my issues at Christmastime were due to strife--some new one each year--within our relationship, but it doesn't seem to have changed. Or maybe it did, and maybe I am just in another doomed relationship and I can somehow feel it and it is hurting. I don't know. Was I sad like this last year? The year before? I can't remember. Lately I feel like I can't remember anything. And sometimes that's okay. Sometimes I feel like I just live in the present, I just am where I am, and maybe that's okay. But sometimes I feel this void where memories should be, and I feel like I am surrounded by nothingness, and it's a frightening thing. Obviously I don't exactly have alzheimer's, but I was listening to this radio special last night, and a man from Ireland was talking about his childhood Christmases, citing memory after memory after memory, and it was lovely--but I don't have that. I have a handful, but for the most part it's all a haze. Everything runs together. Why? Does that happen for everyone? Does everyone's mind feel like a chalkboard in the rain?


I admitted to myself tonight that I've been unhappy. It's been going on a while--weeks? Some months?--but I have not been seeing it. But sobbing on the floor (apparently that is my red flag of choice this past year or so) is difficult to ignore. So. Now what.

Forgiveness. Is that a thing?

I did a really stupid thing this morning, which probably in the long term, grand scheme of things wasn't a big deal, but for me it is so symbolic of my personal eff'ed-uppedness that I am very ashamed and I don't want to talk about it. And I sent Ian a text about it, and he, in an attempt to be kind and helpful, sent back (among sympathy and other things) reasons why this wasn't my fault. The same reasons I had come up with myself. But really, the bottom line was and is that it was my fault. Entirely. Yeah, things could have been different, could have been easier for me, or the other people involved could have made more of an effort, but they shouldn't have had to. I wasn't where I needed to be, doing what I needed to do. I was the irresponsible, lazy one. No excuse will change that.

While I was going on about this, Ian pointed out that I have a tendency to beat myself up. And while I guess that's true, I don't feel like I'm doing that right now--or at least, I don't feel like I'm doing it more than I deserve, which I guess is the issue.


I realized, not for the first time, that while I am pretty good at forgiving other people, I am really not good at forgiving myself. And that's pretty normal, I guess. But it still isn't healthy or good. I don't ever do it. There are some things, a lot of things, I think, that I sort of just let slide--I consider them to be an acceptable symptom of an issue that is "in progress," or whatever, I let them go, I move on. But then sometimes I do things that are much more difficult to let go of. Usually this involves breaking/losing something irreplaceable, doing something unfixable, and/or doing or failing to do something really stupid that would have taken little or no effort to do correctly, if only I would just be where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to do.

So instead of dealing with this or forgiving myself or whatever, I obsess over it for a while, and then I push it away and forget and refuse to think about it until the next time. And today I realized--or remembered--that while I do a fair job of convincing myself (when it comes up at church or in conversation) that 'I have got that shame thing under control; that's not an issue for me,' I don't. In actuality, I have a denial complex and I am pretty good about temporarily forgetting things when I want to, and what looks like a clean slate is really a sheet thrown over this big ball of unresolved shame and anger that I carry around. Doing stupid things like I did this morning, or obsessing about having done them, brings back memories and more negativity about stupid things I did as a child, even, and spins in circles of why-am-I-such-an-idiot?


I don't write this as a pity party. I write this in hopes that I will remember it this time so that I can work on it and so that one of these days I can, I hope, find a solution.

Reasons

I think a part of the reason that I have been (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) avoiding writing lately is that I've been pointedly ignoring this little existential crisis I've been having. It is totally unlike anything anybody else in the world has ever experienced and it goes something like this: what's the point of all this? I don't see a point. I mean, life is kind of nice sometimes I guess, but it doesn't really seem worth it. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow and (assuming I didn't end up having to live on in extreme pain/disability) I'd probably be okay with it.


It should go without saying (or at least, I tell myself that it should) that I probably wouldn't be all that okay with it (or at least, I tell myself I wouldn't), but that's how I've been feeling about all this lately. Just don't really feel like doing it. Like doing any of it. So I haven't been writing.

Probably this is all the result of some minor depression, dysthymia I guess, that is sapping my will to live and write and listen to music, or possibly it's related to my paralyzing fear of decision-making and the accruement of additional debt and the idea that I will never figure out what to do with my life, never find the motivation to just, for God's sake, do something that will pay the bills, never again find the will to really live, and so on. I know that some days a beautiful flower is enough to keep me going, but other days, and all of them lately, it seems like nothing is enough.

It occurs to me that this might be remedied if I did x or y or z--if I went back to school and became a counselor, or if I fell in love, or if I have children someday--but I wonder whether any of that is actually true; whether any of it would actually work. Whether this all feels pointless because I am doing nothing that has any real purpose, or whether it feels pointless because the days are getting shorter, or because my brain or hormones are somehow otherwise unbalanced, and I need to correct the imbalance with some kind of dietary change or sleep schedule or scintillating, brilliant conversation (Anna, are you free?) or self-talk or therapy. This kind of depression can be difficult to address via emotional bootstrapping, which (in addition to the wait-it-out method) is the way I have handled just about every other depressive episode I have ever encountered, because it's just a general feeling of malaise. There are very few specific thought patterns to address, very few negative thought habits to replace with positive ones, and so on.

Or maybe I just need to look harder.

Face to the floor.

I never know what I want except that sometimes it's to stop existing. I feel like I must be walking around with "whatever you do, don't hire me" tattooed on my face--unnoticed by me, obvious to everyone else. Maybe they can sense that I don't really want the job; I just want the diversion and the money. People always ask me what I want to do, meaning what job I want to do, and I say I don't know. That's true, in a way, but really the answer is no job. Not that I don't want to work, but that there is no job I want to do.  Sometimes I feel like I wish I could just get paid to be a friend, but when it comes down to it, I'm not even a very good friend even to the people I love most. Maybe especially to them. I don't fit anywhere and I never have, unless happy retrospective moods where I forget all of the bad bits count. I don't want to do anything. Lately I have been finding reasons to dislike or to be angry with almost everyone I have come into contact with. I have been worse than usual about communicating. This past weekend at Jimmy and Missy's it was a full moon and so beautiful, and I meant to go out and look at the mountains in the moonlight--I really did. But instead, both nights, I watched "Most Terrifying Places In America" or "America's Top Model"--neither of which I actually enjoyed--instead, and then went to bed. I just crawl around in circles. I never go anywhere. I don't even sit up. I just keep my face to the floor.

While walking Miley I was holding it together, mostly, then followed her off the road and slipped in the mud, and cracked my knee against a rock. Two minutes later I started crying as I walked up the street through the drizzle, imagining myself talking* about my mental state and seeing pieces of my face, myself, melt off and fall to the ground in the rain, sobbing out loud in the dark, feeling so utterly worthless.

















*To David. Of course.

Just roll the bingo basket and pull out a negative emotion, and I'll stick it on my name tag.

roll

roll

roll

roll

roll

Bingo.


Can't I please just check out of here?

The weekend was not always easy, but it was good. I got to spend some time with Sean and geek out about Wheel of Time. I got to be there for Rhonda (mother of Chris), for a little while. I gave her massages Friday and Saturday night, and talked to her a little. She had so much pent-up tension and energy in her shoulders that I could feel my hands buzzing when I put them near. She hasn't been able to grieve for Chris yet because she's still trying to deal with the trauma of having found him hanging in the family garage. I can't even imagine the horror of it. It must be like an unending nightmare. I love her and her family so much. I wish there were something more that I could do than rub her back and hands and feet. She's lost so much weight.

I also talked to David while I was there. Friday night it was okay--a little hard, but manageable I guess. We didn't get to spend much time together. I mean, I suppose we could have, but either I could follow him around like a lovesick little girl, like a puppy, or we could not spend much time together. I wouldn't let myself, so we didn't. Saturday Kelly and I took JP and Kate caving before lunch, which was nice. Sweet, in a more traditional (aka not "sweet" as in "awesome") sense. Kate is seven, and cried last time I took her caving. I asked whether she'd be alright this time, and she said that yes, she would be fine--she was in kindergarten last time. After lunch almost everyone went canoeing, but Kelly and I (and a couple of other people) stayed behind. We put some books away and did a puzzle. I love canoeing, but I didn't want to go. I suppose I didn't want to be looking at or looking around for David the whole time. At dinner he said he'd be leaving after he and some of the other guys finished their work refitting the rappel tower. I was upset. I had known he would be leaving Saturday, but I had forgotten. I asked whether we could hang out a little while before he left, and he said I could come help with the tower, which wasn't at all what I had meant. I said okay, but couldn't go. I felt too much like a puppy. I waited for them to finish. I hated that I was waiting, but every time I tried to go do something else, I couldn't because I was afraid he would leave without saying anything to me, and I couldn't stand it. So I waited, tried to leave, waited, tried to leave, cried, paced, waited. It was pretty terrible. I ended up sitting in the kitchen, afraid he'd leave but refusing to move, until he came in. We talked a while about how we felt, about life and family and us and depression and work. It was still sort of okay, though harder than before. Then he got up to leave and stood there talking to me, and I looked up at him from the bench and was suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that David, my David, was standing there and looking at me and was not mine. I can't explain what it was like. I couldn't breathe.

I begged. Or at least I came as close to begging as a person can without saying the words "I will do anything if you will be with me."

Last night I dreamed that my house was repossessed while I was away. When it was time to go home I asked my mom where we would go, but she didn't know.
We packed our things and went back to the house, but it was shut up, and the power was off. We were trying to find a way to turn the power back on, but the house was slated to be burned down.

Sometimes "we don't understand each other very well" seems like a pretty weak reason for us not to be together. I mean, I think I want to be together, or at least, this weekend I feel like I can't go through with this "not being together" thing, this trial apart-ness or whatever it is. I don't know though whether that means that it's a bad idea. I don't know if I'm even making sense.







Today is Sunday of course, so we did a "Quaker worship" type thing, as we often do at retreats. Sharing as led by the Spirit sort of thing. Several of us talked, and I learned a few things, but I learned as much from who didn't talk as from the people who did.
There's a girl who is a counselor now and was a camper for a long time. She's always been very quiet and when she did talk, she tended to talk one or two things to death. Today though, this morning, I suddenly realized that she has been doing exactly, exactly the thing that I do: she has been telling me difficult things about her life in a very nonchalant, matter-of-fact way. It's amazing what you can fail to hear when things are delivered in that tone. It's the kind of tone a person might use if they have things they need to say but can't stand to feel or really talk about. I'd been listening and not hearing for a while. For I don't know how long. Today I gave her a hug and she held on to me for five or maybe even closer to ten minutes, and still, I was the one that let go in the end. I am so glad that we asked her to come back as a CiT and as a counselor. I really am.

It's like a big secret we all carry around, that we all have some deep pain buried within us. I've lost the words I felt earlier, when I realized the absurdity of it. I have hurts. She has hurts. You have hurts. What can we do? I guess it's just life. I want to learn to live in joy anyway.

On hula, and how I jumped the track.

I have been watching a lot of belly dance and hula videos on youtube* today.  I have been a little infatuated with the idea of belly dancing for a few days, having read Snake Hips: Belly Dancing and How I Found True Love,** but I have now realized that I loved belly dance mainly because I love hips. (Please note the mock seriousness in my voice throughout this paragraph.) I have now decided that I love hula instead. This is for reasons which are much more worthy than the aforementioned "hips are awesome." Firstly, hula--or at least the stereotypical hula dance--reminds me of water, and I love water. Secondly, hula actually means something; belly dancing does not. That is, belly dancing does not mean anything unless you count "look at me, ohmyGod, I am so sexy" as "something." I'm not trying to bad talk belly dancing. I wouldn't at all be surprised if it did have some sort of deeper meaning, back in the day. However, today it's pretty much just a sparkle competition for people with shimmy skills. Not that I have anything whatsoever against sparkles or shimmy skills. I'm just saying that I don't think I could stand up in front of anyone and bellydance without feeling like a moron. Hula, or at least this hula:



is a dance that has some dignity and purpose.*** I could perform that, I think, without high levels of embarrassment.



In other news, my mood today has been pretty patchy, and said patchiness has been directly related to the going-to-RMA/not-going-to-RMA issue. I woke up in the morning convinced I shouldn't go, and then I spend the day until about 2:00 feeling very bleak, and defeated by the whole issue. You hear that "breaking up is hard to do," but people aren't usually very specific about why. Turns out that not knowing where you stand and not knowing how the hell to act are pretty painful things--or, as my mother would say, not having appropriate boundaries can really mess you up.
Eventually I did perk up a little. Ironically, the perking up happened around the time that I cut, not the shit, I guess, but maybe the piss, out of the first two fingers on my right hand. To defend my honor as much as possible, I feel the need to say that this happened because my fingers slipped off the end of the knife as I was pressing it down to cut the butter I needed to make imperial sauce, and not because I made some other stupid knife error. Turns out the tip of a chef's knife is nearly as sharp as the blade. Go figure. Anyway, my boss, who had acted like a bit of a jerk earlier (in my opinion), was nice about my having bled on his chef's knife. This redeemed him in my eyes for the day, and distracted me enough to get out of the "I am doomed and defeated" hamster wheel I'd been running in my mind all morning. Work was busy today thanks to pre-Passover traffic, so it was good to be able to smile rather than shoot death glares.
Unfortunately, by the time I finally got home around 4, I was feeling good enough to think that hey, maybe driving up to old FroRo in the rain, drinking with my so-recent-I'm-still-bleeding ex-boyfriend and some other guys, then driving back the next day might not be such a bad idea after all. I mention this to David. He says, "get Jr and drive up!" and that he thinks "it would be fun." Not that there is anything wrong with those ideas, but I am clued in that we might not be on the same page. At this point I am again having second thoughts. Fourth thoughts? Anyway, several more hours of slighly less intense, but still painful, feelings of defeat and confusion ensue, at which point I decide to stay home and decide to take a nap.
Note: during all at-home periods of defeatedness and misery, I am watching sexy ladies shake their hips on the internet.

Later: Arise from nap! Eat Gorton's fish fillets and mom's broiled potato and turnip slices! (Don't underestimate the deliciousness of mom's broiled anything, okay?) Watch NCIS! Return to youtube!

A small victory of today: my mentee has consented to my coming to her house tomorrow afternoon and attempting to make frozen yogurt. There was a backup plan, provided by the lovely Sara, in case I failed to find the pieces to the ice cream maker, but luckily some considerate angel (probably myself, actually) placed them all together in one place--near the freezer, no less! And anyway, Chloe ate all the bananas.

Aloha, friends.













*I've said this before, and I will almost certainly say it again: I shudder to think of what life would be like without that website.

**Written by a friend of a friend! And well written, and entertaining to boot!

***In case anyone noticed and was tempted, don't hate on Lilo and Stitch. It was a good movie, and this is a good dance, and the source (assuming they made up the dance for the movie, which they probably did not) isn't the point anyway.

Interesting Developments

Today (as I often have been lately) I was profoundly unhappy for the first half of the day. As usual, I woke up angry and upset, forced myself to eat breakfast, forced myself to get out of the car and go into work, forced myself to set up the cases instead of curling up on the floor and crying. I was really looking forward to coming home and climbing into bed at 2:00 in the afternoon, and I was extremely irritated when the rain stopped. I was even more irritated when my dad asked me to take him to the doctor after he finished school, but what can you do?
It actually turned out to be a good thing. He'd asked me to pick him up at 2:35, and because I get off work on Mondays at 1:30, I didn't go home. I decided to just go kick around the school for a while until he was done. Shortly after I pulled into the parking lot though, he called and asked if I could come at 3 instead. Good times. So I went and talked to some of my favorite teachers and staff, which was nice. He ended up not being finished until almost 4, and then we went to Bon Secours. His appointment was at 4. We pulled in at 4:05. We waited until 5, and then I waited for him until 6. Got home at 7, almost on the nose. While I was waiting I read WebMD magazine (evidently they have a magazine), which had some interesting articles, including one on green housekeeping and another on Cesar Millan, with whom I am in love.

On the way home my Dad and I talked about my tendency to sabotage relationships, which is a pattern I've recently begun to notice. In the past I've written off individual incidents for one reason or another, rationalizing reasons that I didn't want to talk to this or that person. I'm coming to realize though that I have some deep-seated fear of and/or aversion to any real kind of intimacy. I will suddenly completely lose any interest in talking to or seeing people that I genuinely like as soon as they show any real interest in becoming friends with me--especially if they want to be friends in person. I am far less afraid of online or long-distance friendships. So now I'm trying to figure this out.



In other news, we're going to have universal healthcare. I am a politically completely irresponsible cretin, and if not for facebook I would not know of the passing of this bill. I still don't know the details of it. Anyway, thoughts?

Dinner

Today Anna Sullivan asked me how I was doing. I was floored, and touched, to hear that a person (slightly to the left of acquaintance on the friend-stranger spectrum) from college is still curious and caring and being wonderful now, over a week after the breakup, when it feels like everyone but me has moved on. Slightly later she asked me whether I liked living with my parents. The answer was "sometimes." Being here can be comforting and familiar and easy, but sometimes it's hard to breathe, like sharing the air in a closed room. I want my own air.

Tonight I met David for dinner in Fredericksburg. I wasn't sure whether it would be a good idea or a disaster. I'm not sure now whether it was one or the other, neither, or both. I met him at the river, which I never once visited as a student. It's flooded and beautiful, mystifying and frightening. The sun was setting and it was windy, and I was cold and in awe, watching waves so like the ones that nearly killed me once, and reflecting on the experience. We tried a new restaurant, a mediocre Thai place with very nice waitresses, and then wandered around my old campus, because I missed it. We went back to my car and said goodnight, and I wanted to kiss him, and knew I shouldn't, and he wouldn't. He left at 9:30. I sat in my car and cried like a crazy person for thirty minutes before texting Anna Tuckweiller, because I cannot bring myself to call people when I am in a state. Every car that passed or drove nearby was like a razor, because every car was not David's, because David was not coming back, because David is not my boyfriend, and David will probably not be my boyfriend, and David will probably learn to love someone else. Those, particularly the last one, kept (and keep) hitting me over and over like so many ocean waves, with the tide coming in. Luckily Anna is wonderful and called me and talked to me until I could breathe, until I could keep my eyes clear enough to drive, and almost all the way home. She is one of the wisest and most loving people that I know.

I feel like a divorcee. Sometimes I even find myself missing the ring that was never on my finger. I feel mostly okay, and then fall apart at unexpected times. This sadness though is different from any other that I can remember experiencing. It's not like any other sadness I've ever felt. Every other time I've been depressed, it has been capital-D Depression, and I've been terrified. It's like falling down a bottomless hole, or accidentally driving off a precipice. Sometimes it makes me feel like Prometheus, chained to the rock, waiting for Ethon to tear him open again and again and again. This is qualitatively different. I'm terribly sad, and things hurt a lot, but in a way, it's ok. I know that this is a time for me to be sad, and I know that things will be better again, and life will go on. Even though right now I find it painful to consider any of the possibilities that the future holds for me or for David, I know that it will get easier. Where living with depression is like driving along and knowing that at some point you're going to drive over a cliff (but not knowing when or where, and not being able to stop or change course), this is more like driving through a thunderstorm. I know the rain will stop someday. I know the clouds will clear.

"Hope is a tattered flag."

I saw an article the other day that said that the "you" presented by your facebook profile was "the real you." In some small way, that gives me hope. I mean, obviously the markers they were using were fairly shallow, and for lots of other reasons their assertion isn't as simple and straightforward and true as they'd like to present on the surface. Obviously, as was pointed out near the end of the article, it's only "the real you" in a shallower sense--there are parts of a person that won't show up on a social networking page, and there are parts that you wouldn't see until you've known someone a while. But even though it's just a silly little article and a silly little idea, it gives me comfort to have any reason to really believe that the me I want to be, the me that is happy and excited and loving and upbeat, is a me that really exists, and not just a dream.



"Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up."
Anne Lamott