October.

I feel that I ought to remind myself that I love days like today. Days when work is almost unnaturally smooth, when the kids are so self-sustaining that I can actually read a bit at times, when even my worst bus run is tolerable, when homework time is blessedly quiet and we suddenly start making bats out of construction paper, and that carries us through the rest of the evening, and then suddenly there's a bat garland in the art room and they all loved it.

And then I get off work and the air is cool and clean and clear, and the sky looks like a three hundred and sixty degree fairytale. It was beautiful.

Tomorrow Ian and I are going pumpkin picking, I think. I ought to do some planning for carvings tonight. Doctor Who will probably be involved, because I'm suddenly obsessed this fall, and I've dragged him down with me. Evidence? I drew this in my shower sometime last week:

A few days later, when I wasn't looking, he drew something else in my shower and then went home, leaving it for me to find. He drew this:

I laughed through the first ten or fifteen minutes of my shower, and responded (with slight spoilers, if you are a fan who hasn't watched all the Eleventh Doctor stuff).

In case you can't read my shower-crayon writing, that says "Would you like one of these souffles? They're killer."

It's that kind of day.

Do you ever just...collapse on the kitchen floor, and start sobbing over things that happened years ago?






Right. Me either.

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.

Turnings

There is a different tenor to cut grass in the fall. The smell has mellowed; the feel has changed. It's difficult to tell whether there is a real, physical difference, or whether the fall fund drives and the warming leaves and the cooling air have all colluded to make the last few mowings of the season seem strangely significant, like a soft, wistful, anticipatory turning from the picnics and the green woody cathedrals and the barefoot splashes in the mountain waters of summer toward the soft mittens and snowy eyelashes and warm, chocolaty mugs all sprawled out in the glow of the fireplaces of winter.

Ignore my grammatical errors. I am taking poetic license. I have been listening to the News from Lake Wobegon.

There was talk of a "travel club" in which the members met every month and took turns speaking of their imaginary travels, and showed slides borrowed from the library, and sang songs from the host country, and ate its food, and imagined. And sometimes, imagined moments are what we need. Sometimes they are nearly as good as the real thing. He said,

"Sometimes, you just need to look reality in the face, and deny it."

Everyone laughed, and I laughed and clapped alone in my car where I sat trapped by my unwillingness to miss any of the News, and it was just so true.




In church today, or the weekly meeting that I generally attend each Sunday that roughly approximates a church service, one of the questions brought up was this:

What if we learned to stop objectifying people based on their sexuality or behavior? What if instead we learned to see the humanness of each person we met, and to recognize, about each one, that this is somebody's baby. That this is someone's beloved. How would that change how we thought about and treated our fellow humans? How would that change the world?

9/11: This is not a reflection on the date.

It seems like bad form to write a depressing entry about depression and then disappear for weeks, but nevertheless I continue to do just that. To anyone who may have been concerned by this, I apologize. I obviously have not been doing much writing lately. Things are okay, not great. Not awful. Emotionally it is, of course, all a matter of perspective. Financially it is not good. I don't currently feel depressed and stressed, per se, but at the same time my motivation has been quite low, and I have had basically no sense of humor at all. And Ian, bless him, has put up with it like a champ.

On Ian: as I tend to do when in relationships, I have been changing my mind about "us" all the time. But I don't say so. And he doesn't read here, though he has been invited to. He doesn't want to snoop. But aside from that...we have been baking. Isn't that something? In the past I have been the one in the family that only cooks when forced, let alone baking. But put me in a relationship with someone who has never baked and suddenly I am the expert and we are making cookies. And he wants to. "We should do cupcakes next," he says. "Man, now I wish I were baking and watching the doctor [Doctor Who--we like Matt Smith] with you," he says. Where did this come from? And we do dishes together and make chicken parmesan for dinner together (not necessarily in that order, of course) and clean the house together because I think it needs cleaning and he is a good boyfriend.

My sister came over last night and we talked about depression and this book that our uncle gave her about "The Work," which she had been having mixed feelings about. It turns out that I read an article about it years ago and had been wondering about it ever since, so I'm excited about it. She wants us to kind of read it together, and talk about it as we go. I'm game. The basic premise is that all (says the author) of our suffering is caused by our desire to fight with reality, and that therefore our suffering can be alleviated by deciding to accept reality instead. I'd say that that would probably apply more to "first world" problems, and that it is a bit of an oversimplification. But still, I like it. Translated into terms that are somewhat more interesting/meaningful to me:

It is thought that our right brain takes in sensory information--everything we see, hear, smell, touch, taste--and then our left brain has the job of making sense of that information and fitting it into a framework of everything else that we have ever seen, heard, smelled, touched and tasted, and fitting it into our own personal timeline, and (here's the rub) deciding what it means. I would say that that last part is the blessing and the curse of mankind. That capacity for abstract thought. What does it mean? causes us no end of trouble. We often assign meaning where no meaning is due. We also tend to forget that our sensory input doesn't include, you know, everything, and so we often assign meaning that is simply wrong. What does it mean that Sean was rude to me this morning? It must mean that he doesn't like me, right? No. Really it means that Sean couldn't sleep last night and had a rough morning and thus wasn't really paying attention to interpersonal niceties when we ran into each other. You know the story. So anyway, I guess the idea behind "The Work" is that there is no good reason to hold on to meanings or thoughts that are making us miserable. And it is a system for analyzing your own thoughts and miseries and deciding what is worth keeping, and what isn't.

And now for something completely different:

It is nearly fall. In the evenings now, the air begins to smell of it. The world begins to feel like it. I am so happy that it is coming. My cousin and I are planning (I use the term loosely) a Harry Potter party, to be held at my house, probably around Halloween. Should it actually happen, I think it will be great. There will be movies and butterbeer and God knows what else. A lot of the "planning" thus far consists of pinning things to a board on pinterest. Don't hate.

Oh. I see it now.

And here is an ugly little thing, unwelcome guest in my home of a being. He has been here a while, having snuck back in after a long absence, cleverly disguised and under cover of darkness. He is the feeling of being unclean, unhealthy, small and dark and rotten on the inside. I feel like I need to be broken open and my insides scraped clean and washed out and dried in the sun, but instead I am stuck with all this decay locked inside my skin, like an overripe apple.

here we go

I have no idea when I last wrote, and I'm on my phone, so checking isn't really worth the effort. It's been pretty rough lately--death and depression in the family, joblessness (that my fault), lots of confusion--and I can feel myself sliding. The ambient sadness is settling in, the constant irritability, the poor attitude. And my heart is cold, and growing colder, and thusly is the confusion multiplied. It has been such a great victory for me to be able to allow myself to rely somewhat on my emotions, and watching many fall away and many of the rest degrade into pettiness again is difficult to take. I need to find, or make, a way back out of this. And I need to do it now.