I am impatient with myself these days.
My life is, objectively speaking, good. I am loved. My relationship with The Raven is likely the healthiest I’ve ever had, and all my important exes love me. I know what makes me happy — being in the desert — and it’s readily available, just an hour away. I am respected and I can turn that respect into income. Though that income is far from enough lately to keep the debts from mounting, there are glimmers of change on the horizon there. I’m making progress on the book: I can see it finished now, and I know what it will say.
Why then this persistent sadness?
Yes, I’ve lost a lot in the last few years. I had lunch with Becky last week in Los Angeles. It was nice. It was good to see her. She came up to the apartment and petted Thistle for a while. It was good just to relax with her. And so of course, my defenses down in a way they have not been since before the divorce, I started — again — to miss us, to mourn what we’d lost. That’s predictable. I’m not any less persuaded that we made the right decision, but it’s a weight to carry. And digging through the remains of that old life to write chapter after chapter of the book, dredging up happy memories of Zeke whole and the marriage unquestioned as handy metaphors, grafted-on plot in a book about a tree? That’s picking at wounds not completely healed, and it has its effect.
There’s something deeper going on, though. I’ve lately started wondering whether something along the lines of PTSD might be at issue here. It has confused me in the past that I don’t have a specific trauma to point to, just a long grind of endurance of the first twenty years of my life. The topic bores even me. Who cares about a fifty-year-old’s unhappy childhood? I want to get on with it already. But I keep fighting the same demons I fought back then, back when the people who really mattered to me seemed to do everything they could to show that I didn’t matter to them.
In the wake of my blisteringly stupid dive into a rebound relationship after moving out of Pinole, once that assignation had quickly — blessedly — fallen apart, I talked to Larry the Gestalt Guy, the pshrink that had seen me and Becky through our parting. Why was it, I wondered at him, that I fell so hard for someone who seemed to stake her ego on undermining mine? Who responded to upset by finding my nearest hot button and hitting it, hard?
“We have a concept in the gestalt world called ‘unfinished business,’” Larry said. “You have old unresolved issues from your past, with your parents or siblings or whoever, and someone comes along who seems to fit into that same mold, and you think ‘aha! this time I can get it right, make this person see that I’m worth something!’”
Larry had something there, I thought. It’s the sadistic inversion of the aphorism about it never being too late to have a happy childhood. In fact, it was too late for me to have a happy childhood, I realized, and I probably ought to stop trying, start trying to have a happy adulthood instead. All the friendship and love and recognition in the world would never undo that thing about my mom trying to give a serial killer my birth certificate for fake ID, would never rewrite the history of the early 1970s to award me even a parental pat on the back for, I dunno, getting into college at age 14 for instance. For that matter, none of the good things in my life will cause me me to have felt like less of a failure in subsequent decades for my inability to forgive my parents their failings, which after all they committed when they were younger than I am now.
I know full well that I ought to stop pouring those good things, the present-day friendship and love and respect and work, down the rathole of unfinished business. Doesn’t mean I’ve been able to stop. That rathole doesn’t even exist anymore, except in me. It’s mine, I own it, and yet it seems increasingly these days to own me. I’m getting really tired of the feeling of worthlessness, and knowing its untruth only makes that feeling all the more painful. Rebound Relationship Person periodically bemoaned my apparent and constant possession of something to prove, a handy accusation in that the only possible response, other than “see ya,” is to try to prove you have nothing to prove. This is like that: the constant internal dialogue in which I argue that I’m not worthless is an activity engaged in by those who suspect they are, in fact, devoid of worth.
I read someone somewhere recently, and I wish I could remember who and where, comparing depression to the Cordyceps fungi that infect ants and control their brains chemically. Responding to fungal instructions overwritten on their neural circuitry, the ants climb to the tops of plants and die, which gives the fungus’ spores a better chance to spread. Depression does feel that way sometimes, like an external influence, a mental parasite. If only there were an antibiotic for it. I find myself wanting to grab that network of fungal mycelia, gouge it out of my nervous system root and branch.
That’s a pretty chilling image for depression, Chris. And it makes me realize that while I’ve been sad, blue, down-in-the-dumps, and even—for a space of about three years in my youth—damn near heartbroken, I’ve never really been depressed. At least not like that. So I have nothing useful to say other than that I sincerely hope you and the Raven will be able to get you over this. Ordinary sadness isn’t so bad a thing, really—in fact sometimes it feels like the only sane way to be in the world… until someone cracks a hilarious fart joke, that is.
Heh. When the rest of us start climbing trees and despondently waving our feelers about, you’ll know it’s really a parasite and you’ve infected us.
Seriously, I recently realized I’ve occasionally measured bits of my life against a standard absorbed from a boyhood friend, the “tough guy” a bunch of us ran around with. I’ve thought, “What would Roger think of this?” Or “Boy, when I go back to visit, I want to show Roger all the cool things I’ve done.”
Nothing conscious, but there nevertheless. Dragging this out into conscious light recently, I realized I don’t really even have reason to respect the guy, either then or now. He was an ignorant thief and a thug back then who beat his horses and dogs and abused his wife, and a loudmouth who browbeat everyone around him. Contacts over the past few years show him and his wife turning into extremely goddy conservatives, who appear to believe Obama is a socialist bent on destroying America, and Bush was a saint.
One of the many things he used to say: “Uh-uh! You ain’t gettin’ me up in one of them airplanes! That’s CRAZY!!” Roger was almost 45 before he was FORCED to fly ... after which he loved it. But I was flying fearlessly by the time I was 16 or so, and I loved every second of it.
Looking back on it, a lot of the motivation behind his bluster was so obviously fear. Fear of being wrong, fear of being contradicted, fear of new things, fear of being embarrassed. Much worse than him, I was afraid of just about EVERYTHING when I was a kid. Nevertheless, I hitchhiked off to California and started an entirely new life. I jumped out of planes, I ate sushi, I tried whitewater rafting, I rode bulls, I met new and scary people, I tried out new careers, new experiences, new cultures.
And there he is back there turning to God, reliving that old, old pattern, like he never had one new thought in his life.
Thinking about it just a few days ago, I thought “Why am I dragging this little chickenshit around in my head? Hell, just leaving that cramped little culture where we grew up, going out and seeing some of the world, I’m twice the man he is.”
Bye-bye, Roger. It was nice knowing you, but I’ve got stuff to do, and having you in my head is like being tied to an anvil.
*hug*
I don’t know if this is helpful - I’m always leary of advice from personal experience, because we’re not all the same person - but I remember an analogy I read in some yoga or Buddhist magazine. Meditation tries to help the practitioner develop a calm surface, like on a lake, but the thing is, that in every person, there are depths below the surface. Some of those depths include the topography of the bottom of the lake, a topography shaped by our experiences. The point the author made was that it’s tempting to think that the surface and the bottom have little to do with each other, but, as in a real lake, the currents of the water are shaped by the terrain of the lake floor, even if you can’t see it. The other point the author was making is that, while the terrain shapes the currents, the currents also shape the terrain. It’s hard for the surface to change a major topographical feature quickly, or easily, but it does happen, slowly, if you don’t let old currents keep swirling in the same patterns.
It sounds to me like you’re at the point where your currents are rubbing up against the topography of your earlier life - and because of that, you’re more aware of that topography and how it affects you. I think the thing is to keep going. I’m not going to say it’s easy, not least because depression isn’t always about past experiences but also just about genetics and personal biochemistry, but I myself take comfort in the idea that even old, calcified patterns can be reworked, given enough time. Maybe you might too?
=v= I had a couples counselor who explained “unfinished business” in a useful way: We are attracted to others when we see a potential to engage with whatever growth we (consciously or unconsciously) need to do. This is also a potential for having our buttons pushed, and can be painful for all involved, but at its root it’s not a masochistic or self-destructive impulse.
This was a real epiphany for me. It’s not easy being a brainiac and paragon of virtue while doing something stupid and wrong. Now I can approach a relationship with my eyes (one of them, at least) wide open.
Knowing of the unfinished business and knowing who not to inflict it on are only the first two steps, though ...
tried weed?
tried weed?
Yep. Pretty much hate it. But I understand it does help sometimes.
Yeah. I think the impatience is a good thing. And in my experience the chronology of this sort of thing is never what you expect—i.e. it may seem like you’re just starting to really engage it when in fact you’re in the thick of it and have almost gotten the better of it.
“Whatever gets in the way of the work, is the work,” as somebody-or-other said.
I couldn’t have made the turns I’ve made without meditation, lots of it. But it’s not as if I don’t have unfinished business lying around in heaps, too :-)
Anyway. My bets are on you getting the better of it, and a lot sooner than you think. And I’m an old man, I’ve been watching this kind of stuff come down for a long time :-)
Chris,
I don’t know you personally but I do appreciate you opening the window a bit so I could look in.
I have a great marriage but I battle with depression that stems from my many years as a Fundamentalist pastor. I have made a break from all of that, and turned from it, but as my counselor tells me..I haven’t been able to step forward. I am stuck. Stuck in the past. Guilt. Loss. Knowing what I NEED to do but seemingly unable to move forward.
My counselor calls me a reverse narcissist. I think of myself as worthless because of the bad things I think I have done (in the name of God) to family and others. He reminds me I am not as bad as I think I am. It sounds good but I have a hard time still.
I appreciate your blog.
Bruce
You don’t know me, I don’t even think you’d like me ;-) But like Bruce who comments right above, I appreciate your blog, very much. I’m so often moved by your writing. Your writing so often deals with the forms, shapes and patterns of things where feelings are one of the ways of knowing about them.
Clearly I do not know, but what I thought about with “unfinished business” was it doesn’t seem to me entirely your own business as the source of your sadness. In late January Sharon Astyk wrote a piece about how men and women seem to react differently to societal crisis. It resonated with me, and maybe I’m projecting from a strange theory that my own depression has more to do with an economic depression than something inside me. Locating where the unfinished business lives makes a lot of sense if we’re doing work on it. Locating it seems hard and Astyk was onto something when she pointed to gender differences in response.
Sometimes being around male friends, especially when the purpose is camaraderie is very good for self-esteem. I think some of the hurt you are feeling is hurt that lots of guys are feeling. I know that depression is something specific, it’s just that I think it’s exacerbated by a more general societal depression.
Something you have much more than most is a skill with words. This post is truly a gift because too many of us have a hard time naming what we’re feeling at all.
Interesting take, John. Thanks for the link to Astyk: her argument is similar to Faludi’s in Stiffed, but usefully updated. (And I suspect I’d like you just fine, or at least as much as I like anyone.)
Bruce, I’m very glad you’ve seen fit to comment here. Your blog is fascinating and I’ll be sending people your way. (You may be interested in a profile of a former teacher of mine who shares your surname.) It looks as though you are working to undo the things you regret doing: would that we were all so wise and generous.
After Jeannie died, in the course of a lot of raw pain and fury and thinking about the Rabies List, I remembered very clearly how Mom had reacted so weirdly, unreasonably, to Kevin when he was a very young child. How she must have been seeing something other than a three-year-old child, no matter how stubborn and infuriating, when she was beating him, screaming that he was a devilouttahell, a monster, when I at six years old was watching, cringing, trying not to show or even feel what I was feeling. Whatever that was and I’m still not sure.
I knew it, I’d never forgotten it, but somehow I couldn’t articulate it till a certain circuit was closed. I had a dream that Uncle Jackie was Kevin’s father. I think I’ve told you about Uncle Jackie. Embarrassing beloved not-quite-uncle; adopted by Mom’s parents before she was born, her cousin, orphaned by the Spanish Flu.
I spent some time wondering if that were literally true, and then realized it didn’t have to be, that Kevin, who took after her side of the family, had somehow flipped some switch in her, set off something she never did quite tell me about. I knew she’d grown up in a houseful of drunken uncles, unemployed Irish miners, her mother’s brothers who moved in during the Depression. She’d mentioned her loathing for cigars, how all the old nasty drunks sitting on her stoop reeked of cigar smoke, how she’d had to run the gantlet of them after school every day. How she’d lain awake nights hearing one or two of them falling down the attic stairs over her bedroom, terrified that they’d injure themselves seriously. Nobody talked about this kind of shit back then and whatever demons she’d stuffed into the oubliette had no end, no grammatical finish to the sentence, no circuit closed.
I sent email to my sibs about this, but had no way to go further yet. And then Kevin was dying, was back in touch after decades. Had built a life and made close friends and reassembled his integrity when he’d been snatched out of touch, away from us all. Had found a vocation as something other then the family villain. And I didn’t go back—to Binghamton NY, of all places!—and couldn’t go back and then he died. And and and. The tangled story tangled more.
I had a bitter joke that Jeannie had been the last known casualty of the Spanish Flu. Now I suspect Kevin was, only because he outlived her by almost two years. The political is personal, the historical is threads of pain and waste that reach centuries in any direction.
The rest of you: I’m talking about my older younger brother and my youngest younger sister. I blogged the story I had then about Jeannie in February & March on Toad in the Hole.
The point I’m groping for is that no story is as short as we think it is. And read Michael Dorrit’s book A Yellow Raft in Blue Water and then wonder how he could write some of the stuff he did after that. And then his own end. And.
Isn’t the happy childhood supposed to happen during your adulthood? You can’t go back, can’t even rely on others in the here and now. But you can parent yourself through your second childhood. Such a solitary journey, but it’s with someone who will always be there for you. Nobody on the outside can convince you of your worthiness and that you are good and pure and of value. And it’s not an outsider’s job, either.
Well, like I said, I’m happy to crack a bottle of champagne over your head as you embark on your journey. You have a lot of loving fans who’ll be waving and cheering you on from the shore, faithfully waiting for your return.
Seems to be a bit of this going around, anecdotally anyways. Of course any pattern registered by our hardwired pattern-matching consciousness should carry appropriate skepticism and a Surgeon General’s warning. (Look! In the stars, I see a warrior and two bears!!)
As noted above, there is economic depression as far as we’re willing to see. And orbital mechanics and climate currently work against those of us in the northern hemisphere—the days are getting longer but not measurably warmer. Cold sunlight is a cruel hoax. So there are external biases to complement any personal impulses in a meloncholic direction.
Revisiting the “Ray”/Stephen post was pleasant. In a couple of years the post seems to have appreciated IMHO. Besides the compelling story, the comment thread follows some interesting lines. As a package this post illustrates the call and response capabilities of this new medium, a textbook-worthy example.
Finally, there’s a certain amount of depression-like blowback associated with good observation. The arc of few natural stories leads to happy endings. The recent XKCD Science Valentine articulates this inherent unhappiness of clarity.
Chris, growing up where you and I did, regardless of family situation, does not help with feelings of adult worthiness either. I realized not long ago that while I was told fairly often I was good, worthy, whatever, on some deep level I stopped believing it when I went “out” of central NY into the “real world” where a whole other set of criteria were being applied. Depressed or sad periods for me always go back to that feeling of desperately wanting to be told I’m OK, worthy, that my choices have been all right—and then realizing it can’t come from outside, which creates 1)blaming and anger and 2)intense loneliness. Now that I see it clearly, I’ve become very sick of the pattern too, and determined to finally parent-myself into a place where I can at least short-circuit the process. So I can tell you all sorts of true things about your worthiness, and your intelligence, talent, and how much I’ve appreciated your presence here, but you’ve got to get to a place where you believe it, and also to start each day forgiving yourself for the past and welcoming the opportunity of the day with a glad heart. I find so much of it hinges on just that - determination and a shift in attitude, with some meditation and humor thrown in. Good luck, with love.
Thanks for sharing so frankly.
I’m on the downhill side of low myself at the moment. Listening to The Mountain Goats because lines like “Try to think of ways to fix myself but everything ends in a cul-de-sac” sound optimistic compared to my current POV.
My own conclusion is that some people’s brains simply aren’t wired for “the real world.” The solutions then are Door #1: Change the world or Door #2 Change the wiring. Though right now Monty, I think I’ll take the box.
For me I think the issue lies somewhere in the anterior cingulate and extinction of neurotransmitter when faced with masses of non-novel stimulae. Which is a way of saying I don’t know WTF is going on. Psychiatry is a long lonesome road of trial and error and Gestalt, while it can give you a whack upside the head, can mean spending a long time in the cesspool of unfinished business. I think Narrative Therapy (cf. kiwis Epston and White) shows some promise.
OK, well I’m going to start spinning in cricles now. But thanks for keeping on keeping on. There’s something about the peaceful easy feeling of your prose that’s just very helpful.
Oh yeah, a couple of other things that seem promising - EMDR, a very large motorcycle and Irish whiskey. (NOTE TO SELF: be careful how you combine those)
Would that I could offer some insightful, uplifting comment, Chris, but I can’t. I’ve lived my decades in the dark embrace of depression such that I often—always?—feel myself hanging from the precipice by my fingernails. I look everywhere about me for the things that keep me going, whether that be my friends and family, nature, books, writing, or whatever. But in the final analysis, you aptly describe the trap from which I’ve never been able to escape. I wish you the best and most heartfelt hope that change comes and lifts you to new heights.
This seems incredibly, insultingly, obvious, but for a lot of people Depression really is a physical problem in the brain—not fungal, but because of genetics or just bad developmental luck, just as real and physical. And for a lot of those people, there really are drugs that can, to some degree, root out or at least treat the infection.
I mention this because someone I love very much (Hi sweetie!) finally, after years of feeling that anti-depressants were for crybabies and weak-willed people, finally tried some (after a relationship counselor told us she thought it would be a waste of time for all of us without treating the Depression). Like getting eyeglasses for the first time after a life of blurriness, vanity is easy to dispense with when you see that life really is improved when you can see more clearly.
Yes. To just about everything you wrote (just substitute a different nightmarish experience.)
The aging, the lingering regret, the frustration, the inability to see myself clearly through the screen of my depression, the relentless shame of my failures, and the grinding weariness of it all. Yes.
Chis
I second Q. I’m bipolar myself and I’ve done my time in the abyss. There are some very good drugs out there that work.
I read this most recent blog with the greatest interest. I too had a very tough childhood, without going into the gory details I can tell you the only helpful thing for me was to finally learn to live at and in the present. Not an easy task. Not that I don’t remember the the bad things from my childhood on a daily basis, I just have learned to keep them in perspective relative to my present life.
I can certainly say I am happy these days. Not at every moment, but in general, the answer would be a resounding yes. I can say that I learned from a counselor to control the present by reminding myself each time ugly thoughts come into my head that I am no longer in danger. This seems to short circuit the downward spiral. So simple, but it worked for me.
Thanks for sharing, and good luck with your book about the Joshua Tree. I look forward to reading it, you are a good writer.
Bill
It is easy to gauge, and offer opinions on, the problems of others—but sometimes I think, the “problem” is not discrete; it is woven into the totality, so it isn’t a question of “why…this persistant sadness”, but, “it is interesting, and painful, that this is who I am.” If something in your past, or brain chemistry, or genes, were different, who would Chris Clarke be?
HFS… I apparently arrived at Creek Running North after the post about the serial killer.
A small simple accident taught me a lot about the brain. I was hit by a car as a pedestrian (as an adult). I don’t remember anything at all about the accident between the time I turned and saw a pickup grill in front of my face (and thought, very calmly, “no time to get out of the way of this truck”) and the moment when I came to on a stretcher.
But my brain remembered a whole lot more apparently. Because it took me literally months to be able to cross and street or walk near traffic or ride a bicycle alongside a driving lane. Some part of my brain learned it was dangerous in that accident and it took many months of proving to my brain otherwise before I could once again blithely wander across streets!
I believe personally that these kinds of childhood experiences get literally integrated into the brain - physical trauma and emotional trauma. And that it takes concerted concentrated effort to retrain the brain to learn that that was then and that it doesn’t have to react that way now.
I figure it cannot do anything but good to become as acutely aware of what your traumas are and how they affect you since, if you are lucky, part of your brain can sometimes tap you on the shoulder loud enough to get your attention, reminding you that you’ve been down that path, why you’ve been down that path, and why it’s not good for you. That you can pause and rethink what you are doing and look to see which filters the information is going through.
Talking it out and making sense of it was very helpful to me. I don’t believe that I would have the good things I have in my life without the time I was able to spend doing that.
Wishing you well,
Natalie
My current strategy is:
‘What am I telling myself to make myself feel like this?’
The whole mindfulness thing helps. Its a bit of a tap on the shoulder to access the moment I’m in rather than the moment in my head that I am overly dwelling on.
I don’t really want to spend the next 40/50 years of my life so much in my own head with the decaying fungus of a past that wasn’t or the fallacy of the future that isn’t.. because my brain really can’t interpret everything that was going on then and nor what ever will be and insight can only go so far.
I blame myself for the failure of forgiving my parents and not keeping myself safe…two decades later and I was thirty-three for goodness sake. Seeking some sort of resolution I then asked why….because like it wasn’t bad enough already and I had to ask that niggling ‘why me?’ question. And of course the answer was designed for maximum hurt…because no one else would put up with it. I measured out forgiveness. They measured out blame. Therefore I needed more forgiveness, and tried to be even more worthy. Gotta love co-dependency.
Self-worth…starting with the self bit and finishing with non-conditional worth of yourself that doesn’t fluctuate and stays resillient…because some people are attracted to people whose feelings of self-worth they can manipulate in such a way that they are the sole supplier…so that they feel needed…because your failures, instead of your successes, bolster their self-worth. Why is it that some people prefer to see ‘success’, surely something positive, as having something to prove and clearly negative?
I went for driving lessons out in the country as a young adult. The instructor was always asking me questions about things in the distance. My city life really did affect my visual skills….short horizons and all that.
There is such a thing as having too much internal dialogue. Modern society is skewed to spending a lot of time doing this. In some ways it is a kind of sensory deprivation…and perhaps we need to make time for contemplating trees and stuff and connecting to the world around us instead of disconnecting into the world inside our heads.
I think of my depression as having shortened horizons. Too much of a focus on having rather than being.
I’ve been there. Just yesterday I was talking to someone about depression. His daughter and ex-wife are both susceptible to it. Not having ever been depressed, he of course does not get it.
I’ve given it a lot of thought. I included a chapter on it in a book I wrote.
How can a person be fine one day and depressed the next when nothing in their life is really different and when other people have it so much worse?
It has a chemical trigger, that’s for sure, but then again, everything in our bodies is the result of chemical triggers. For me, realizing that it is purely a physiological, electrochemical thing, not a metaphysical or personal failure thing, helped me to ride out subsequent short bouts. I was being victimized by hormones or the withholding of them and I would wait the bastards out.
Another thought that helped was the possibility that it remains in the gene pool because it somehow moves genes into the future, that it isn’t necessarily always a pathology.
It may have evolved as a heavy handed way to make us seek and maintain social bonds ...a brutal smack up side of the head to keep the babies coming.
Just my thoughts. One thing is for sure. It is important to seek good medical help if the bout lasts too long or gets too deep. “Competent” counselors can do wonders and although anti-depressants are controversial, and nobody has a clue as to why they work, they work, even if it’s partially via the placebo effect, and nobody knows why that works either.
Here’s a link to that chapter:
http://home.comcast.net/~russ676/poisondarts/stateofmind.PDF
Spyder said: “Depression is not ... caused by one’s past experience.”
Spyder, I may have to disagree with you on that point. I think it can be either that biochemical thing OR the result of petrifying conflicts caused by things that happened to you.
In my own case, I was down in the dark for an entire year in my early 30s. During the recovery phase, I realized some or all of it was due to stuff that had happened to me when I was a kid. My reaction, which came to me slowly, was to get angry about that stuff, and to cut out of my life the people who did it to me. (I also got a dog, and had some good friends, both of which seemed to help immensely.)
I’m not an expert on the subject, but I haven’t suffered more than brief moments of sadness since then, and even those aren’t frequent.
I’ve wondered at times if people who were badly treated as children and develop depression later are really suffering from a sort of brainlock where a desire to escape the pain meets up with the “OF COURSE you love your family” meme and just freezes them into immobility.
In SOME cases, I wonder if there isn’t something to be said for going off and building a whole new life for yourself, totally apart from the jerks who screwed you over. No accommodation, no reconciliation, just departure.
Yes, in the best of all possible worlds, it’s better to have family. But in the real world, some things may just be unforgivable.
(I’m aware that for someone suffering from the biochemical imbalance type of depression, leaving your family is probably the worst thing you could do.)
Anyone who wants to think about depression would do well to read everything Robert Sapolsky ever wrote.
For some reason, the post made me think of Leonard Cohen songs. He always seems to be able to capture depression at its most exuberant, and euphoria at its blackest. He expresses gratitude for the things he’s lost, and almost finds them more valuable now that they’re gone.
There really is a tiny thread of empty sweetness in depression, which is why, I think, it’s somewhat addicting.
I think the thing to do is explore what part of your depression is actually sweet to you. You need to come to terms with that. Because, when the day comes when you are no longer depressed, that sad sweetness will be gone, too- and even though you’ll be much better off, you will still miss it.
Some LC lyrics to get you thinking:
Even though it all went wrong,
I’ll stand right here before the Lord of Song,
With nothing on my tongue but “Hallelujah”.
All the bridges are burning that we might have crossed
But I feel so close to everything that we lost
We’ll never,
We’ll never have to lose it again.
there’s nothing left
but sorrow and a sense of overtime
and I missed you since our place got wrecked
And I just don’t care what happens next
looks like freedom but it feels like death
it’s something in between, I guess
spyder: ISTM that some types of depression arise from, an innate vulnerability to trauma—that is, the person can be traumatized by things that normal people would shrug off. One example would be being on the autistic spectrum—many “ordinary” experiences become overwhelming, “normal” abilities go inexplicably missing, the actions of other people are mysterious….
badpoetry: There really is a tiny thread of empty sweetness in depression, which is why, I think, it’s somewhat addicting.
Instead of “addiction”, try considering it as a defensive rejection, along the lines of “a pessimist is never disappointed”.
Hank Fox: Heh. When the rest of us start climbing trees and despondently waving our feelers about, you’ll know it’s really a parasite and you’ve infected us.
Hmmm, is that where tree lobsters come from? ;-) More back at your place….
Chris: That impatience with yourself is a sign that it’s time to move forward, to take the next step in recovery. What that step should be, only you can tell.
I’m taking it that way too, David.