The Unique Is Universal

I often don't see it coming, but when I look back, it seems obvious: the focus on dark subjects, the frequent bouts of crying, disinterested in doing anything, and then asking, "What's the point?"----answered by a long, dead, silence.

That's common for how depression sneaks up on me, and though I do everything I know to avoid it, sometimes I fall in the pit, regardless----and my pride preceded me this time, too, as I enjoyed bragging to myself that I took no medications.

I have an aversion to thinking that I'm "covering up" anything, not facing an issue that seems important to my "personal growth"----regardless of how difficult it might be. And so, I stick out the pain longer, perhaps, than I should----for my own good health, especially since it's suicidal thoughts that are the trigger for me to ask for help with this life-long disease. As I've learned lately through my somewhat flighty "research" (watching THIS EMOTIONAL LIFE, a PBS special, and then following up with some Google questions about whether depression actually damages one's brain [yes], and also whether antidepressants can heal that damage [yes]), it seems that medication really isn't so bad on occasion. (I realize I sound ridiculously naive saying this, but I have an aversion to corporate pharmaceuticals and easy answers.) And so I swallow the pill and wait to feel better.

Today, I am grateful for breakfast fruit with homemade granola again, and the rain that's returned doesn't make me climb back in bed.

But the sun shone yesterday, when my husband and I attended a day-long meditation retreat at a nearby home on the beautiful Smith River, we participants holding to "noble silence," while the teacher spoke or we listened to Pema Chodron on CD, and I was reminded----again----of the truth that the unique is universal----oxymoronic, as many such truths are----that sharing my individual stories isn't at all "pointless" but worthy, too. . . because I rarely question others' sharing, only my own, it seems.

HERE THERE BE DRAGONS

Reading from another writer's posts (from 2009) (here, I reference her as "the beautiful blog-writer") I recognize synchronicity on several levels, feel the curtains part, the breeze blowing in, and I am grateful for the feel of the sun----even if it's only on my back, even if I know now that in this place where I have lived almost four years, people like to say, "Don't like the weather? Wait five minutes," and the sun will likely be covered again. But that's okay. At least it's not perpetually HOT, as it was in Louisiana.

Feeling as if I'm on this sort of threshold----as I described to two of my older, wiser friends in our weekly journaling meeting recently, when I said one of my favorite words is "liminal"----returns me to a sense of mystery. I feel my vision pulling back, back, back, as if I'm a bird flying very high, surveying the land with a soaring sense of freedom. But to get there, it seems I must first have been trapped for a while.

THIS is how it happens for me: I feel stuck, feet muddy and gathering more as I trudge along heavily, beginning to wonder whether that's me hanging from the rafters in the dark attic. No. No, it's not me----at least, it's not how my life will end, I don't think. And I am not at the end now, even though some days it's felt as much, as if I think I am preparing myself, which (of course) we all are, in some sense, each day.

Reading apocalyptic fiction (and nonfiction), in part, has brought me to this place. Margaret Atwood's ORYX AND CRAKE and AFTER THE FLOOD, and now Kunstler's WORLD MADE BY HAND, and THE WITCH OF HEBRON, watching THE HUNGER GAMES at our local cinema. Why this theme? Chance? It wasn't purposeful but it has been synchronous.

Saying what's in my heart, on my mind, isn't easy. Words are more like constellations scattered, and when I've read someone who's said it (what I am feeling and thinking) so beautifully (as the referenced blog-writer did), I wonder "What's the point of my trying to say it any differently? What's the POINT of my additional (small) pebble thrown into the pond?"

Well, the point is, I am curious about what's down in the depths of me, stirring, and if I don't dip down there and attempt to put words to some of it, I feel I'll lose my muddy mind! Of course, that's a bit of melodrama, leftovers from my teenage self.

More than melodrama, I am looking for what the beautiful-blogwriter calls, "forbearance" now. Why that word makes me want to cry, to weep with sad joy, is in part because it's a word of my grandmother's, a word that once would have made me scream and shake my fist at the sky (I do not WANT to forbear, I'd say, I want to CHANGE, to do things differently, which really meant I see now----I do not want to get old and die), yet now I remember, again, how Mamaw learned forbearance in her aging, in her self-enforced positivity and naivete.

I feel all screamed out (and, if anyone's reading this, it's not [usually] a literal screaming, my neighbors in particular would be happy about). Screaming doesn't help much most times, and though it may appear interesting in a young person, it's rather frightening coming from a 58-year-old, not to mention exhausting. I think I shall try forbearance. And I can only hope that my dear friends and loved ones, near and far, are able to use it with me.

Idolatry

I enjoy it when opportunities to chuckle at myself dawn on me (all too slowly sometimes). . . like my teenage propensity to idolize writers, artists, and musicians. (And, of course, that teenager still lives in me somewhere; I still converse with her.) Though I recognized and felt the connection between "myself" and what those famous or simply admired folk were doing up on their pedestals, they were remote, but more than that (because I sometimes reached out to them through letters), it was my perception of my own abilities (in contrast to how I perceived their abilities, way up there) that often held me back from finding my own voice. In comparing myself, rather than acknowledging my uniqueness (that also bore similarities to them but----in my mind----usually fell short in the comparison), I focused on deficiencies rather than my birthright (as ALL have this right) to discover and express myself in an ever-changing way. "Changing" is key, because art appears to be stable, to represent some sort of constant THING----yet any artist/writer knows that once the words and the canvas are set aside, it's as if someone else created them because that person no longer exists. Who's left to praise or ridicule? She's gone!

Those arguments played endlessly, back and forth in my mind as I walked (and sometimes still walk) the fence line between revealing and hiding.

In part, it's because ideas and words and ART can sometimes seem too "precious," and when this happens, as in Gollum's experience, they become all-consuming----consumption. What am I getting at here? I'm trying to understand how I can burn up on one day with a huge passion for language and art and then the next feel myself resisting the propensity to make it too precious. . .

After all----it's only words . . .  (AND THE WORD BECAME FLESH) . . . and flesh. Oh, yes.