But this one will be. Sometime last week I was stopped by the word "crucial" in the sentence "That crucial, formative time." Having both suffering and Harry Potter (Crucio!) much in mind, I realized that the word was related to "crucifixion", and to "crossroads": the cousin of one word, the daughter of another, and sister of "crisis."
It was a very full thought. I don't have much to articulate on the intersections of all of those words at the moment but they all rushed to the front of my head at once, and I've been carrying them around there since. Suffering, change, choices, pain, importance...
Plunder the thesaurus and it gives me "acute, central, clamorous, climacteric, climatic, compelling, crucial, deciding, decisive, desperate, dire, essential, face off, high-priority, imperative, insistent, momentous, necessary, pivotal, pressing, searching, showdown, touchy, urgent, vital"
and
"alliance, annexation, articulation, assemblage, attachment, bond, coalition, coherence, collocation, combination, combine, concatenation, concourse, concursion, confluence, conjugation, consolidation, convergence, coupling, crossing, crossroads, dovetail, elbow, gathering, gore, hinge, hookup, interface, intersection, joining, joint, juncture, knee, link, linking, meeting, miter, mortise, node, pivot, plug-in, reunion, seam, splice, terminal, tie-in, tie-up, union, weld"
as well as
"adieu, bisection, break, breaking, breakup, crossroads, departure, detachment, divergence, division, eighty-eight, farewell, going, goodbye, leave-taking, partition, pffft, rift, rupture, severance, split, split-up, splitsville, swan song, valediction"
and
"climax, crisis, critical juncture, critical point, critical stage, crossroads, crucial moment, decisive moment, defining moment, emergency, high noon, moment of truth, pivotal point, point of no return, turning point, zero hour"
You could play in the dictionary for days on this one. Aaaaaaand doing so has gone and padded the post, so now it's long.
Like a person with a fever, I think my life reached the crisis at some point last week, and I'll survive, I am going to make it, I have rounded the bend and I am finally coming back.
Of The Best Stuff, but Cracked
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Monday, July 30, 2007
Just a short post today
Unrelated things:
I spent the first half of the day fighting buses and heat. I lost both battles soundly. I made it to the saint shop, but most of the cards were laminated which was disappointing. Plastic spoils everything. I still got some cool things, and finished up the shadow box, I think.
I am getting all sorts of opportunities to practice my "skills" from therapy in my everyday life. I always have a hard time drawing the line between doormat and generous/thoughtful/giving. But the more often I say "No" when I mean it, and "I need this" when I do, and "I do not want that" when I don't, the stronger I feel. It's like a tonic. And I don't feel I'm losing any of my thoughtful/generous/giving nature through all this. In fact, I'm discovering how much more honest it is, and what a relief it is not to walk around covered in the weight of a thousand little "this does not bother me" lies.
Finally caught in the snare of the LaRouche Cult, I spent a good 1/2 hour in the sun debating Canadian (!) politics with a very very very veryveryvery earnest boy my own age. My usual dismissal of canvassers with "I'm Canadian!" didn't work this time, cause he was too, which is weird. Long discussion about imperialism and why Canada never had a revolution. Learned some scary things about the Canadian constitution, which I am afraid I had never read before. I went home and looked it up and it's all true. Anyway, I finally admitted that the questions they are asking sound interesting but the answers (and the org) are a bit (!) frightening. Walked away with a pamphlet but did a good job explaining why I was not going to make a donation of any type. In the old days I would have given away money I didn't have to an organization I didn't care about, just out of some odd sense of not wanting to hurt the other person's feelings.
Had an entirely random interaction with a tiny Irish Mr. Clean. He was almost unintelligible as he walked by me sweating miserably at the bus stop, (and I'm usually not bad at understanding people through accents) but once I'd run the translation, I realized he'd said "Ah, didn't you hear all the buses are broken down for the day! Ha, just kidding you! Ha ha!" At least he seemed to be enjoying himself. He was so cheerful it almost knocked me over.
I've been laughing a lot recently, and it feels very good. I'm still really depressed, and there are moments when it stops me in my tracks, when I can't catch my breath and I think my heart is going to stop from sheer sadness, but there have been as many (possibly more) moments of full, real laughter. It's good.
What is not funny are the last six rows of this thing I am knitting. I keep messing up somewhere critical, and I try to fix it until I am wild with frustration, and then I put it away for three days, rinse and repeat. I may have lost to the buses and the sun, but I am going to win the battle of the sticky pink yarn.
I spent the first half of the day fighting buses and heat. I lost both battles soundly. I made it to the saint shop, but most of the cards were laminated which was disappointing. Plastic spoils everything. I still got some cool things, and finished up the shadow box, I think.
I am getting all sorts of opportunities to practice my "skills" from therapy in my everyday life. I always have a hard time drawing the line between doormat and generous/thoughtful/giving. But the more often I say "No" when I mean it, and "I need this" when I do, and "I do not want that" when I don't, the stronger I feel. It's like a tonic. And I don't feel I'm losing any of my thoughtful/generous/giving nature through all this. In fact, I'm discovering how much more honest it is, and what a relief it is not to walk around covered in the weight of a thousand little "this does not bother me" lies.
Finally caught in the snare of the LaRouche Cult, I spent a good 1/2 hour in the sun debating Canadian (!) politics with a very very very veryveryvery earnest boy my own age. My usual dismissal of canvassers with "I'm Canadian!" didn't work this time, cause he was too, which is weird. Long discussion about imperialism and why Canada never had a revolution. Learned some scary things about the Canadian constitution, which I am afraid I had never read before. I went home and looked it up and it's all true. Anyway, I finally admitted that the questions they are asking sound interesting but the answers (and the org) are a bit (!) frightening. Walked away with a pamphlet but did a good job explaining why I was not going to make a donation of any type. In the old days I would have given away money I didn't have to an organization I didn't care about, just out of some odd sense of not wanting to hurt the other person's feelings.
Had an entirely random interaction with a tiny Irish Mr. Clean. He was almost unintelligible as he walked by me sweating miserably at the bus stop, (and I'm usually not bad at understanding people through accents) but once I'd run the translation, I realized he'd said "Ah, didn't you hear all the buses are broken down for the day! Ha, just kidding you! Ha ha!" At least he seemed to be enjoying himself. He was so cheerful it almost knocked me over.
I've been laughing a lot recently, and it feels very good. I'm still really depressed, and there are moments when it stops me in my tracks, when I can't catch my breath and I think my heart is going to stop from sheer sadness, but there have been as many (possibly more) moments of full, real laughter. It's good.
What is not funny are the last six rows of this thing I am knitting. I keep messing up somewhere critical, and I try to fix it until I am wild with frustration, and then I put it away for three days, rinse and repeat. I may have lost to the buses and the sun, but I am going to win the battle of the sticky pink yarn.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Three Things I Did Not Write
These are three moment in literature that I have found tremendously helpful and healing. None of it is...cheerful. People might cry "Macabre! Depressing! Why are you reading this stuff!? Here is a nice book about puppies and rainbows, it's much better for you." But people rarely understand that one of the worst sufferings of mental illness is how unnameable and unutterable the sensations and emotions can be, even within oneself, let alone in beginning to describe or share them with another person. Each of these writings names some emotion in a way that heals me to read. And so I read them and read them, because I am in need of healing. So I read them over some more. And then I copy them into my blog just in case somebody else could use them.
One:
From A Moment's Liberty: The Shorter Diaries, Virginia Woolf. This entry always stuns me with its graphically, technically detailed, accurate description of a few moments in the life of a depressive.
Wednesday 15 September
"A State of Mind. Woke up perhaps at 3. Oh its beginning its coming - the horror - physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart - tossing me up. I'm unhappy unhappy! Down - God, I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling like this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Yes, I detect that. Failure failure. (The wave rises). Oh they laughed at my taste in green paint! Wave crashes. I wish I were dead! I've only a few years to live I hope. I can't face this horror any more - (this is the wave spreading out over me). This goes on; several times, with varieties of horror. Then, at the crisis, instead of the pain remaining intense, it becomes rather vauge. I doze. I wake with a start. The wave again! The irrational pain: the sense of failure; generally some specific incident, as for example my taste in green paint, or buying a new dress, or asking Dadie for the week-end, tacked on. At last I say, watching as dispassionately as I can, Now take a pull of yourself. No more of this. I reason. I take a census of happy people and unhappy. I brace myself to shrove to throw to batter down. I begin to march blindly forward. I feel obstacles go down. I say it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. I become rigid and straight, and sleep again, and half wake and feel the wave beginning and watch the light whitening and wonder how, this time, breakfast and daylight will overcome it; and then hear L. in the passage and simulate, for myself as well as for him, great cheerfulness, and generally am cheerful, by the time breakfast is over. Does everyone go through this state? Why have I so little control? It is the cause of much waste and pain in my life."
Two:
From The Essential Rilke, trans. Galway Kinnell. Every woman closest to Jesus was named Mary. And the name Mary means "bitterness" or sorrow. The sadness and wholeness and wistful longing and love in this poem smooth something out inside of me that usually prefers to stay twisted.
The Quieting of Mary With The Resurrected One
What they felt then, is it not
above all other mysteries the sweetest
and yet still earthly:
when he, pale from the grave,
his burdens laid down, went to her:
risen in all places.
Oh, first to her. how they
inexpressibly began to heal.
Yes, to heal: that simple. They felt no need
to touch each other strongly.
He placed his hand, which next
would be eternal, for scarcely
a second on her womanly shoulder.
And they began
quietly as trees in spring
in infinite simultaneity
their season
of ultimate communing.
Three:
The Only Animal by Franz Wright. Especially if you are identified as depressed, people really freak out about poems with first lines mentioning suicide. But this is not a poem about suicide. It's a poem about the gift of life, the most forgiving poem I've ever read, a poem that God must have written first and then passed on to Wright, a poem I come to again and again and again whether I need tears or hope. It's visited this blog before, and it will probably visit it again. I'll probably have something from it carved on my urn. I love this poem, have you noticed?
The only animal that commits suicide
went for a walk in the park,
basked on a hard bench
in the first star,
traveled to the edge of space
in an armchair
while company quietly
talked and abruptly
returned,
the room empty.
The only animal that cries
that takes off its clothes
and reports to the mirror, the one
and only animal
that brushes its own teeth—
Somewhere
the only animal that smokes a cigarette,
that lies down and flies backward in time,
that rises and walks to a book
and looks up a word
heard the telephone ringing
in the darkness downstairs and decided
to answer no more.
And I understand,
too well: how many times
have I made the decision to dwell
from now on
in the hour of my death
(the space I took up here
scarlessly closing like water)
and said I’m never coming back
and yet
this morning
I stood once again
in this world, the garden
ark and vacant
tomb of what
I can’t imagine,
between twin eternities,
some sort of wings,
more or less equidistantly
exiled from both,
hovering in the dreaming called
being awake, where
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.
You gave us each in secret something to perceive.
Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental
child
You said, though your own heart condemn you
I do not condemn you.
One:
From A Moment's Liberty: The Shorter Diaries, Virginia Woolf. This entry always stuns me with its graphically, technically detailed, accurate description of a few moments in the life of a depressive.
Wednesday 15 September
"A State of Mind. Woke up perhaps at 3. Oh its beginning its coming - the horror - physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart - tossing me up. I'm unhappy unhappy! Down - God, I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling like this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Yes, I detect that. Failure failure. (The wave rises). Oh they laughed at my taste in green paint! Wave crashes. I wish I were dead! I've only a few years to live I hope. I can't face this horror any more - (this is the wave spreading out over me). This goes on; several times, with varieties of horror. Then, at the crisis, instead of the pain remaining intense, it becomes rather vauge. I doze. I wake with a start. The wave again! The irrational pain: the sense of failure; generally some specific incident, as for example my taste in green paint, or buying a new dress, or asking Dadie for the week-end, tacked on. At last I say, watching as dispassionately as I can, Now take a pull of yourself. No more of this. I reason. I take a census of happy people and unhappy. I brace myself to shrove to throw to batter down. I begin to march blindly forward. I feel obstacles go down. I say it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. I become rigid and straight, and sleep again, and half wake and feel the wave beginning and watch the light whitening and wonder how, this time, breakfast and daylight will overcome it; and then hear L. in the passage and simulate, for myself as well as for him, great cheerfulness, and generally am cheerful, by the time breakfast is over. Does everyone go through this state? Why have I so little control? It is the cause of much waste and pain in my life."
Two:
From The Essential Rilke, trans. Galway Kinnell. Every woman closest to Jesus was named Mary. And the name Mary means "bitterness" or sorrow. The sadness and wholeness and wistful longing and love in this poem smooth something out inside of me that usually prefers to stay twisted.
The Quieting of Mary With The Resurrected One
What they felt then, is it not
above all other mysteries the sweetest
and yet still earthly:
when he, pale from the grave,
his burdens laid down, went to her:
risen in all places.
Oh, first to her. how they
inexpressibly began to heal.
Yes, to heal: that simple. They felt no need
to touch each other strongly.
He placed his hand, which next
would be eternal, for scarcely
a second on her womanly shoulder.
And they began
quietly as trees in spring
in infinite simultaneity
their season
of ultimate communing.
Three:
The Only Animal by Franz Wright. Especially if you are identified as depressed, people really freak out about poems with first lines mentioning suicide. But this is not a poem about suicide. It's a poem about the gift of life, the most forgiving poem I've ever read, a poem that God must have written first and then passed on to Wright, a poem I come to again and again and again whether I need tears or hope. It's visited this blog before, and it will probably visit it again. I'll probably have something from it carved on my urn. I love this poem, have you noticed?
The only animal that commits suicide
went for a walk in the park,
basked on a hard bench
in the first star,
traveled to the edge of space
in an armchair
while company quietly
talked and abruptly
returned,
the room empty.
The only animal that cries
that takes off its clothes
and reports to the mirror, the one
and only animal
that brushes its own teeth—
Somewhere
the only animal that smokes a cigarette,
that lies down and flies backward in time,
that rises and walks to a book
and looks up a word
heard the telephone ringing
in the darkness downstairs and decided
to answer no more.
And I understand,
too well: how many times
have I made the decision to dwell
from now on
in the hour of my death
(the space I took up here
scarlessly closing like water)
and said I’m never coming back
and yet
this morning
I stood once again
in this world, the garden
ark and vacant
tomb of what
I can’t imagine,
between twin eternities,
some sort of wings,
more or less equidistantly
exiled from both,
hovering in the dreaming called
being awake, where
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.
You gave us each in secret something to perceive.
Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental
child
You said, though your own heart condemn you
I do not condemn you.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
I spent a large part of my day today
on a wild-goose chase. I have been making a lot of art recently, mostly collage. Right now I am working on a shadowbox based on a few lines of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem that have always haunted me:
"I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints..."
In the box already are a picture of myself at one with my teddy bear and a bottle hanging out of my mouth, a picture of myself at six with my pony, a pile of tiny rocks from the Canadian maritimes, two tiny naked dolls, some lavender, some gold stars, a candy necklace, curtains made of the silk gauze from my wedding veil, and a blue enameled pendant I bought one day dreaming of a possible wedding some other day in the future. But I need some of those old-fashioned gold-bordered "holy cards" -- little trading-card type devotionals with pictures of different saints. I have some coming from ebay but I was caught up in the inspiration of the moment and wanted them NOW so went on a mission to find a Catholic gift store. It was hard! I traveled all over Boston from the North End to the South End, from the Italians to the Irish, and for all the billions of Catholics around I couldn't find a single store! Several trails went cold when I arrived at a site only to find yet another benchfull of old men or old women who would tell me that the nuns had packed up and gone to the suburbs, but they thought maybe there was a "saint store" over in...
With the help of a savvy friend I finally tracked down the mildly startling SOCIETY FOR THE PROPAGATION OF THE FAITH store, and from the window it looks promising, but it is closed on the weekend, so my quest will have to slumber till Monday.
Working on this project and meditating on the lines of the poem remind me of when I was first learning about God. I was shown the tabernacle behind the altar and told that Jesus lived there. My six-year-old mind imagines a tiny dollhouse holy palace with a four inch Jesus waiting for someone to open the door, and I am crazy with desire to see it. But it was only opened at the end of mass, and the priest's wide vestments always obscured the view as he put the host away, much to my pained frustration. I don't remember how long it took me to realize that there was no golden doll furniture, and no little walking talking Jesus to be found behind the little locked door, but I'm afraid it was a disappointment.
I reach back and try to remember what it felt like to so easily believe that you could just open a door and find God sitting on a little golden chair, waiting for a chat, if only somebody would unlock it for you.
PS: I think I am going to start linking to a few ancient "greatest hits" posts from the past when they feel relevant to my condition. I've been doing some re-reading, and damn if that bright, energetic, verbose little girlio wasn't fairly awesome. She certainly had no idea. I want to find her again someday. So:
December 21, 2004 (I'd just turned 22. Gawd that feels like ancient history somehow.)
"I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints..."
In the box already are a picture of myself at one with my teddy bear and a bottle hanging out of my mouth, a picture of myself at six with my pony, a pile of tiny rocks from the Canadian maritimes, two tiny naked dolls, some lavender, some gold stars, a candy necklace, curtains made of the silk gauze from my wedding veil, and a blue enameled pendant I bought one day dreaming of a possible wedding some other day in the future. But I need some of those old-fashioned gold-bordered "holy cards" -- little trading-card type devotionals with pictures of different saints. I have some coming from ebay but I was caught up in the inspiration of the moment and wanted them NOW so went on a mission to find a Catholic gift store. It was hard! I traveled all over Boston from the North End to the South End, from the Italians to the Irish, and for all the billions of Catholics around I couldn't find a single store! Several trails went cold when I arrived at a site only to find yet another benchfull of old men or old women who would tell me that the nuns had packed up and gone to the suburbs, but they thought maybe there was a "saint store" over in...
With the help of a savvy friend I finally tracked down the mildly startling SOCIETY FOR THE PROPAGATION OF THE FAITH store, and from the window it looks promising, but it is closed on the weekend, so my quest will have to slumber till Monday.
Working on this project and meditating on the lines of the poem remind me of when I was first learning about God. I was shown the tabernacle behind the altar and told that Jesus lived there. My six-year-old mind imagines a tiny dollhouse holy palace with a four inch Jesus waiting for someone to open the door, and I am crazy with desire to see it. But it was only opened at the end of mass, and the priest's wide vestments always obscured the view as he put the host away, much to my pained frustration. I don't remember how long it took me to realize that there was no golden doll furniture, and no little walking talking Jesus to be found behind the little locked door, but I'm afraid it was a disappointment.
I reach back and try to remember what it felt like to so easily believe that you could just open a door and find God sitting on a little golden chair, waiting for a chat, if only somebody would unlock it for you.
PS: I think I am going to start linking to a few ancient "greatest hits" posts from the past when they feel relevant to my condition. I've been doing some re-reading, and damn if that bright, energetic, verbose little girlio wasn't fairly awesome. She certainly had no idea. I want to find her again someday. So:
December 21, 2004 (I'd just turned 22. Gawd that feels like ancient history somehow.)
Friday, July 27, 2007
Somewhere today
I got an idea for a post, but I forget what it was. Oh well.
I took it easy today. I finally slept after three days but it was a sick drugged kind of sleep so it took me a long time to ease into the morning. Once I got outside I cleared up remarkably. I ran an errand, and went to therapy.
You know, they do this thing on a person's last day in the group that I used to think was really stupid and cloying. They have a "rock ceremony" where the person picks a little rock out of a bowl and then it is passed around the group and everyone takes a turn saying something about the person and "infusing" the rock with some quality, commonly peace, love, strength, fortitude, etc. and then the person takes the rock home and treasures it for life, etc. I spent a good deal of time fretting about how I was going to deal with the rock ceremony of a certain person who was leaving today. I really disliked this person, found them abrasive, consistently negative, whining, always talking but never having anything to say, and so on. (interesting how we loathe in others the very things we are paranoid and insecure about in ourselves) I really had tried to support this person all along but I couldn't think of anything genuinely good to say about her, no matter how I'd sought that of God inside her, which was confounding. I was trying to dream up not-untrue positive phrases but feared they'd be transparent and I would hurt this person by being false.
Finally I decided that I would just make my message about rest and peace, because they were two things I could see this woman really needed, and I could be genuine about it, and I'd let it go from there.
And you know, when I held that rock in my hand and opened my mouth, the spirit moved in me and suddenly I could see a dozen little beautiful things about this person and her way of moving in the world, and I said them. And it was a gift for both of us, because my eyes were opened in such a peculiar way. I always thought I'd been trying to see the good in her, and apparently I was noticing things all along but hadn't registered them. The Spirit was seeking more deeply than I was, or rather, I guess the Spirit knew what I had not perceived.
I don't know. But it was cool.
As for me I'm grieving today but steady. I've been given a good dose of grace to deal with the latest Sad Thing in my life, and one blessing of this S.T. is that I've been able to see a little fruit from the weary tedious work I have been doing in therapy these months. In the past, a S.T. like this would have sent me directly to some sort of self-destructive act, some sort of self-loathing reinforcement, some sort of despair. And I don't feel any of those things. I can't express how deeply sad I am, but it's a purer sadness, with the hatred (self hatred, but still hatred) that I've lain with in the past removed. So that is good.
Amen.
I took it easy today. I finally slept after three days but it was a sick drugged kind of sleep so it took me a long time to ease into the morning. Once I got outside I cleared up remarkably. I ran an errand, and went to therapy.
You know, they do this thing on a person's last day in the group that I used to think was really stupid and cloying. They have a "rock ceremony" where the person picks a little rock out of a bowl and then it is passed around the group and everyone takes a turn saying something about the person and "infusing" the rock with some quality, commonly peace, love, strength, fortitude, etc. and then the person takes the rock home and treasures it for life, etc. I spent a good deal of time fretting about how I was going to deal with the rock ceremony of a certain person who was leaving today. I really disliked this person, found them abrasive, consistently negative, whining, always talking but never having anything to say, and so on. (interesting how we loathe in others the very things we are paranoid and insecure about in ourselves) I really had tried to support this person all along but I couldn't think of anything genuinely good to say about her, no matter how I'd sought that of God inside her, which was confounding. I was trying to dream up not-untrue positive phrases but feared they'd be transparent and I would hurt this person by being false.
Finally I decided that I would just make my message about rest and peace, because they were two things I could see this woman really needed, and I could be genuine about it, and I'd let it go from there.
And you know, when I held that rock in my hand and opened my mouth, the spirit moved in me and suddenly I could see a dozen little beautiful things about this person and her way of moving in the world, and I said them. And it was a gift for both of us, because my eyes were opened in such a peculiar way. I always thought I'd been trying to see the good in her, and apparently I was noticing things all along but hadn't registered them. The Spirit was seeking more deeply than I was, or rather, I guess the Spirit knew what I had not perceived.
I don't know. But it was cool.
As for me I'm grieving today but steady. I've been given a good dose of grace to deal with the latest Sad Thing in my life, and one blessing of this S.T. is that I've been able to see a little fruit from the weary tedious work I have been doing in therapy these months. In the past, a S.T. like this would have sent me directly to some sort of self-destructive act, some sort of self-loathing reinforcement, some sort of despair. And I don't feel any of those things. I can't express how deeply sad I am, but it's a purer sadness, with the hatred (self hatred, but still hatred) that I've lain with in the past removed. So that is good.
Amen.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Little bird
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
~Emily Dickinson
I took out my window screen to put in a fan. I turned off the fan when I left the house. I came home and was home for an hour before I realized that there was a sparrow hiding in the corner of my room: I heard it rustle. It didn't move as I came towards it, but it didn't look petrified. It just looked at me. I betrayed his trust but saved his life (there is a cat) by throwing a towel over him and then tossing him out the window.
I feel like someone has thrown a towel over me and tossed me out the window. Only question is whether I can fly away sputtering madly but free, too.
I've learned of a new artist
named Elvis Perkins, and he is a connoisseur of grief. People yell at me for listening to sad music when I am sad, but they don't understand what ballad writers have always known, and Shakespeare said best:
Give sorrow words
The grief that does not speak
whispers the o'er-fraught heart
and bids it break
Anyway, I am listening to Perkins' It's a Sad World After All, and it's helping.
Stay if you want, there is enough
sadness for the both of us
Follow the sound to the table underground
there will be plenty tears goin' round
And I would be happy for you to stay
with me till tomorrow can be called today
In a sad world, in a sad world.
But when you leave
my powders and my teas
will speak their heads off to me
Here everyone knows their own name
in a sad world no two are the same.
"Real soon," assures the spoon,
"Watch out" says the twine
"Water, give me water,
Remember me," begs the rain
of a sad world, of a sad world.
Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry, and iTunes has got your back. :)
For good measure, here I am crying at my sister's wedding:
Give sorrow words
The grief that does not speak
whispers the o'er-fraught heart
and bids it break
Anyway, I am listening to Perkins' It's a Sad World After All, and it's helping.
Stay if you want, there is enough
sadness for the both of us
Follow the sound to the table underground
there will be plenty tears goin' round
And I would be happy for you to stay
with me till tomorrow can be called today
In a sad world, in a sad world.
But when you leave
my powders and my teas
will speak their heads off to me
Here everyone knows their own name
in a sad world no two are the same.
"Real soon," assures the spoon,
"Watch out" says the twine
"Water, give me water,
Remember me," begs the rain
of a sad world, of a sad world.
Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry, and iTunes has got your back. :)
For good measure, here I am crying at my sister's wedding:
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Blaugh
Okay, so it was technically already today when I posted, but I have something of note to say: not two hours later and I got the 2nd worst fit of gastroenteritis I have ever had (#1 was las Christmas) and spent the rest of the night in the emergency room, being given IV fluids and giving large quantities of my blood in return. I also got some nifty dissolves-in-your-mouth-not in-your-stomach anti-nausea meds, but even those made me barf, so I ended up getting a miracle Please Stop Vomiting Already, Vomit Girl, Okay, Thanks drug in the arm instead. And I did stop barfing. But before that I barfed on my Harry Potter book, a little, when I was trying to read it to distract myself and my IV got in the way of moving it fast enough. And all I could think of were Puking Pastilles.
I have never horked on a book before. It feels terrible. Also, it's nausiatingly lovely how many words there are for vomiting: heave, hurl, keck, regurgitate, spew...
My mood is surprisingly good given the no sleep and the upchuck festival. Which is a little worrying, maybe. But then, I did regurgitate all my meds.
*urp*
Of the best stuff, but cracked.
"When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time...When I was crazy, that's all I was." ~ Sylvia Plath
It's been a long, long time since I've posted anything here, let alone kept up with the blogosphere, and there's a good reason for that. For the past long time I've been bearing the heavy burden of mental illness, and it has ravaged not only my blog, but my job, my school-life, my faith-life, and my relationship. For the past 4 months I've been on leave from work, and hospitalized or in 5-day a week therapy the entire time. I've been on and off of a total of 14 different psychoactive drugs and 5 different diagnoses. (They've finally settled on Bipolar II and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). I've been in some really dark places. I just got out of the hospital again today, a particularly brutal and unhappy stay.
I've finally decided to re-vamp this blog and write again. I've been aching to write, but my identity as Quaker has been being nudged out of the way by my new identity as Mentally Ill. I've found myself feeling increasingly alienated from my own blog, my own voice. I haven't known what to say, in part because I've been alienated from a lot of other things as well.. In fact, I can't go to Yearly Meeting this year because of the financial and personal toll the Crazy extracts from me. How can I sit in Sessions when I've got 5 "sessions" a day to attend at a partial hospital program?
I've decided to be open about this because I know for sure that there is a deep and important nexus somehow in this kind of suffering and faith.
In Let your Life Speak, Parker Palmer devotes an entire chapter to depression: "All The Way Down," and he begins it with a quotation from Pinsky's translation of the Inferno:
"Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard--so tangled and rough
And savage thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well
I'll tell what I saw. . ."
and it's a good preface to my own writing on the subject, as well. I'd like to share some of Parker's words, too.
"Hour by hour, day by day, I wrestled with the desire to die, sometimes so feeble in my resistance that I "practiced" ways of doing myself in. I could feel nothing except the burden of my own life and the exhaustion, the apparent futility, of trying to sustain it.
I understand why some depressed people kill themselves: they need the rest. But I do not understand why others are able to find new life in the midst of a living death, though I am one of them. I can tell you what I did to survive and, eventually, to thrive--but I cannot tell you why I was able to do these things before it was too late."
And that's what I want to do here now. In this space, as I struggle to survive and thrive, I want to share "the good I find there as well" when it comes. I know that just the sharing of it, the writing of it, will be part of that good. I am going to make a commitment to write here every day, even if it's just a line, circumstances and God permitting, for at least the next month. Maybe it'll be my own yearly meeting, to start with.
Much love to all my Friends. See you tomorrow.
It's been a long, long time since I've posted anything here, let alone kept up with the blogosphere, and there's a good reason for that. For the past long time I've been bearing the heavy burden of mental illness, and it has ravaged not only my blog, but my job, my school-life, my faith-life, and my relationship. For the past 4 months I've been on leave from work, and hospitalized or in 5-day a week therapy the entire time. I've been on and off of a total of 14 different psychoactive drugs and 5 different diagnoses. (They've finally settled on Bipolar II and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). I've been in some really dark places. I just got out of the hospital again today, a particularly brutal and unhappy stay.
I've finally decided to re-vamp this blog and write again. I've been aching to write, but my identity as Quaker has been being nudged out of the way by my new identity as Mentally Ill. I've found myself feeling increasingly alienated from my own blog, my own voice. I haven't known what to say, in part because I've been alienated from a lot of other things as well.. In fact, I can't go to Yearly Meeting this year because of the financial and personal toll the Crazy extracts from me. How can I sit in Sessions when I've got 5 "sessions" a day to attend at a partial hospital program?
I've decided to be open about this because I know for sure that there is a deep and important nexus somehow in this kind of suffering and faith.
In Let your Life Speak, Parker Palmer devotes an entire chapter to depression: "All The Way Down," and he begins it with a quotation from Pinsky's translation of the Inferno:
"Midway on our life's journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard--so tangled and rough
And savage thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well
I'll tell what I saw. . ."
and it's a good preface to my own writing on the subject, as well. I'd like to share some of Parker's words, too.
"Hour by hour, day by day, I wrestled with the desire to die, sometimes so feeble in my resistance that I "practiced" ways of doing myself in. I could feel nothing except the burden of my own life and the exhaustion, the apparent futility, of trying to sustain it.
I understand why some depressed people kill themselves: they need the rest. But I do not understand why others are able to find new life in the midst of a living death, though I am one of them. I can tell you what I did to survive and, eventually, to thrive--but I cannot tell you why I was able to do these things before it was too late."
And that's what I want to do here now. In this space, as I struggle to survive and thrive, I want to share "the good I find there as well" when it comes. I know that just the sharing of it, the writing of it, will be part of that good. I am going to make a commitment to write here every day, even if it's just a line, circumstances and God permitting, for at least the next month. Maybe it'll be my own yearly meeting, to start with.
Much love to all my Friends. See you tomorrow.
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