Depression, Or How I Deal

Apocalypse Wow

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 8 Comments

When I was around age 20, my life exploded. My entire world literally blew out from its center.

Looking back, I suppose it was destined to detonate at some point or another.

I oscillate between feeling sadness that it did not happen sooner and gratitude that it did not take longer to happen.

Spiritually-evolved and wise people would say that it happened “right on time. ”

I say “Bite me.”

(OK, I got that out of my system. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself. Maybe we all do. We all have our crosses to bear in this life, right?)

No, seriously, I guess it did have to happen sooner or later.

At that point, I had been away from home for several years…the deep truths that had been bubbling molten hot at my core had had time to gain strength unencumbered by parental presence.

I was also living a breakneck speed: I was a full-time acting student, working a part time job and stage managing productions for the acting company associated with my acting school. I was busy 24/7 and running on fumes.

And then, one day in a bookstore, I was drawn like a magnet to a particular book. (This is the book that was to teach me that I do not chose books but rather they choose me.) It was Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child.

I bought it and read it as quickly as I could, and shortly thereafter, the volcano of my psyche erupted.

This book seemed to be explaining things about my experience growing up that I had long since hid from myself. It was as if in reading each chapter, carefully placed barriers were loosed around the nucleus of my being.

In the days following reading it, I felt like the ground I was walking on was constantly shifting and moving underneath my feet. It was unsettling.

Pressure within me began to build, until one day, one Sunday shift in the restaurant where I worked, my internal world just exploded.

Shards of self flew from my core, and in an instant, a horrific revelation from within flew up through my body from my gut into my consciousness in a searing flash and the fairy tale fantasy that I had been living inside my own mind of a perfect family and a perfect childhood turned to ashes.

And, just like that, I was forever changed.

From that day to this one, it has been a whirlwind, rollercoaster ride filled with astonishing kindness, loss, addiction, danger, self-abuse, despair, hope, comedy, tragedy, loneliness, desperation, shock, torment, friendship, mentorship, recovery, love, joy, bliss, confusion, celebration, emptiness, wholeness, perversion, goodness, synchronicity, luck, terror, horror, wonder, adventure, growth, overwhelming gratitude and grace, forgiveness, miraculousness, passion, sexuality, understanding, caring, shifting, healing, working, giving, taking, receiving, being lost and being found, again and again and again.

(I suppose that is simply a life being lived.)

I would not change one moment because if I did I would not be right where I am today.

Don’t get me wrong. Right where I am today is not puppy dogs and moonbeams.

In some ways, I feel like I am only now rising, like a phoenix, out of the ashes of that apocalyptic day.

And as uncomfortable, often terrifying and unsettling as that feels, to be in totally unfamiliar territory in my own surroundings once again, I know that I am indeed in the process of rising, like a phoenix, out of those ashes, and that knowing, in and of itself, is pretty amazing.

I don’t know where I will land, or even if I will. But I know that this is my journey, meant just for me, and I am rising to the occasion.

 

Prompted by The Daily Post Word Prompt: detonate

 

Split Decisions

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 7 Comments

I have been thinking a lot lately about trusting life.

I have come to realize that I have been living, but not trusting, life.

What does that mean?

It means that when I was six, things occurred that were so traumatic that decisions were made on an unconscious level that 1) the world was not a safe place, 2) I could trust no one and nothing, and 3) life was not meant for me.

Fast forward through decades of living from the decisions of a wounded child who felt that what had happened was on some level her fault and who also thought that she carried responsibility for the whole world as she knew it.

What does that look like?

It is exhausting to live but not trust life. I am exhausted. I have been dragging my soul through all of these years, cheerleading myself every day to show up despite feeling on deep unconscious levels that life was not meant for me.

It has been a strange dichotomy: wanting to live so badly, to work so hard to have a happy and meaningful life, yet to have an equal and opposite drive in my telling me that life is just not for me. That I was not meant to be happy. To live “in spite of” not feeling as if I deserved a good life or even was a worthy or necessary part of the world.

I have loved life. Needed life. Wanted life. Fought life. Almost killed my own life. But I have not trusted life.

And not trusting life, it has been hard to trust myself. I mean, if you do not trust the very force that sustains you, what can you really trust anyway?

I did, indeed, survive. Miraculous, indeed, because when you live from unconscious wound-influenced decisions from a child’s psyche, you tend to make some very, very poor and unhealthy choices.

I look back at all of the choices I made from those 6 year old’s decisions today, and I am truly in awe. I used to be embarrassed, ashamed even, at how poorly I have managed for some times in my life. But today, I am astounded at my resilience and my ability to bring myself through it all. I survived, and I live to write this.

But I have not yet truly thrived.

I have healed so much. But here I am, having cleared away so much wounding, seeing these decisions that were made about life and my place in it, and I am exhausted.

And it is time. Time to finally trust life.

I have blamed Life for what happened to me when I was six. Life and God. But mainly Life. And I understand why. The pain and shock of what happened was just overwhelming to me at 6. I just could not trust after that.

One of my favorite lines from a play is from Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz. “Most people don’t have to make a step-by-step decision to stay alive, most people just basically want to live. I am not one of those people.”

I have always deeply identified with that. It has taken me work each day to push through the energies around those early decisions to find the strength, courage and hope to face another day.

But I want to address that. Really see if I can forgive Life — it was not Life that did anything to me. Life is not to blame.

Life has held me through. Life has loved me no matter what. Life has always just been there, offering me breath, love and trees.

I don’t know how I will heal this or how long it will take but I am ready and willing to try.

I can start by making a list of what I think that might look like. If I were someone who trusted life, how would I act? How would I talk? How would I make decisions? How would I love?

Will my smile be different? My laugh? Maybe my very breathing will change.

I am eager to live in these questions, this exploration.

To take my six year old lovingly and gently by the hand and take over the reigns. Give her a soft place in my heart to go play in and reassure her that I got this now. Yes, my child, it is time.

Here we go.

Sea Wish

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I bob and weave/gasp for air

Choke on the waves of my own home-self.

Surfacing, I am adrift, again –

Singular, supine, searching.

The shore in sight but always foreign

No matter how many times I land.

Longing, leering, leaning –

Never touching what I reach for.

Though the waters are troubled

I know who I am in them.

To be a fish, no mind to muddy the picture,

Must be better than this compass-less life.

 

Prompted by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: adrift

 

 

 

 

A Turncoat Collaboration

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“Traitorous cooperation with an enemy”

It’s what I entered into with you

But I didn’t know that at first.

At first, you were my soulmate, my joy, my everything

There was nothing that you could not make better

No feeling you did not temper, no event that you did not help me through.

After my first taste of you

I chose you, again and again.

Like a vampire needing the invitation to enter my doorway

You waited patiently for me to choose each time

Knowing that I would.

And one day, I found that

choice had become need; need, compulsion

I was a turncoat against my own life force.

In a battle with the dark side

I was sided with the enemy

inflicting sabotage against my own forces.

I surrendered and I survived, even thrive

Yet I see you there, ever waiting for an invite inside

That slight grin on your face, as if to say, you knew I’d be back.

I say no invitation today, old “friend.”

I am in cahoots with my life now.

 

Prompted by the Daily Word Prompt: collaboration

 

 

 

 

 

 

Free Fall

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 3 Comments

I’m in the middle of a massive shift.

The last time I felt such a massive shift in my life, there were all of these external changes happening.

In the space of three years, my mother died, I planned a wedding, my brother died, I got a mortgage, bought an apartment, my father died, I got married and moved from Manhattan to the Bronx.

By the time I was settled into our new apartment, I didn’t know which way was up. I literally did not recognize the outer landscape of my life.

With so much having changed on the outside, it made sense to me that my internal landscape would need to recalibrate. I was living in a new world. I needed to find a new true north.

This time though, there’ve been no circumstances creating the pressure that precipitates such movement. This time, the shift has come solely from within, a seismic shifting of the tectonic plates of my very soul.

It is terrifying and yet so right-feeling at the same time.

Everything in my life has come into question. A massive excavation. A massive exploration.

It’s as if I have been squeezed out of myself and am born anew, looking around. And the one thing I can see clearly is that my whole life I have been in pursuit of one thing or another. Popularity, academic excellence, talent, money, happiness, fame, career success, love, a thinner body, a better me, forgiveness, acceptance, self-love, a desire to live, a desire to stop wanting to die (they are different,) peace, direction…fame (I come back to that one because that is a huge one)…you name it.

I’ve been running around like a woman with my hair on fire for as long as I can remember, and I couldn’t stop even if I had ever wanted to, and I didn’t. There were times I wanted them to stop, for life to stop, for the pain to stop, for everything to stop, for me to stop being conscious. But I never wanted and could never imagine not being in pursuit.

Until now, that is. Now, I just want to…stop.

That is the seismic shift I am in right now. I am shifting from a life of pursuit to a life of, what? What is the opposite of pursuit? I don’t know.

Is it simply being? I don’t even know what the hell that is. Is that really OK? What will happen? What if I give up the pursuit of pursuit? What will I do with my life if I do not pursue something?

Who will I be? Will I fall I back into the chasm? Will I be falling into the obscurity I have so feared?

And if I fall into the chasm of my own soul, will it be a free fall that lasts forever, or will I land on soft ground at some point? This cannot be yet another pursuit. I have to let it be whatever it is. I cannot fall back wishing it to be one way or another at the other end.

I just have to fall back. And that is terrifying and yet so absolutely right-feeling at the same time.

I’ll either see you on the other side, or I won’t. Deep breath. Here I go.

 

 

Split Decisions

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Rose spit into the dirt, disgusted with herself, so mad she could barely see straight.

What jerks. She hadn’t been doing anything. Why did they hate her so?

She picked herself up off the lawn, peeling away the blades of grass that were stuck to her knees one by one, fingering the long dent-canals they left behind on her skin.

The kids had already moved on down the block, their laughter taunting her as they looked back, turning the corner.

She felt the hot flush of shame rush down the back of her neck and through her body, her fingers tingling, tears flooding her eyes.

She choked it all down and thought about what she could do. There was no where to go. No one to tell.

“This is just temporary, honey. You’ll see. In time, they’ll get to know you, you’ll find friends.” Her Mom tried, but she had no idea of the way things really were.

She folded her pain and confusion back into the loneliness that she carried with her always, and with lips pressed together with determination, she walked back home to the numbing relief and friendship to be found in oreos and chips. 

At least she had that.

#bullying #therootoftheproblem #foodisnotlove

Inspired by The Daily Post word prompt: temporary

Essential Excavation

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I pulled down the walls myself

I was the one who built ’em

They were mine to demolish

I removed each stone, thanking it for its work

I excavated my own soul

I dug until I discovered the me I was before.

Anemic and shivering

I performed CPR on my self

I pinked up, began howling

Raw and primal, hungry

My natural beauty exposed

No renovations necessary.

#soulexcavation

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unnecessary Loss

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 6 Comments

Where oh where did you go

Oh Blankie of mine?

Who would I be now

if it’d been up to me to let you go?

They just saw tatters of a well-worn blanket

An outgrown toy, a nuisance, embarrassing proof of their failed parental skills

You were the key to my security on this spinning planet

My anchor, my buddy

Maybe it would have made all the difference

I wouldn’t still carry this feeling that there’s no thing and no one on this earth to truly rest my heart on

This ever-constant ache for more of something I can never put my finger on yet can never have enough of

One day you were just gone

No one would tell me where you’d gone to

Which was worse — thinking you’d abandoned me

Or that they’d betrayed me?

What book suggested that solution

Was it you, Dr. Spock?

I know, I know

“I am my own Blankie now”

Fuck that.

 

#blanket #childrearing #loss #betrayal

Daily Prompt: Blanket

Translated Psyche

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via Daily Prompt: Translate

When I was a kid, something very traumatic happened to me. The details are not important. Suffice it to say that it was something soul-shattering.

As in, as it was happening, parts of my soul literally broke off and went somewhere else because the pain was too great. Being so young, 5 years old, I simply had no way to cope with what was happening to me.

So my psyche did what it had to do in order to survive. It translated parts of itself. It sent the most vulnerable parts of itself to safer places and left the parts of me that could withstand the trauma better behind to live through and manage.

That’s pretty amazing I think.

Now, at the time, of course, and for decades afterwards, I had no idea that this had happened, that parts of my soul had translated to other climes.

I went about my life, growing up, maturing as best I could as a person with crucial parts of themselves off somewhere else. I cobbled together a way of coping, and moved through childhood into adolescence and into adulthood.

I managed to make a life. A life held together by skewed logic and broken-hearted, suppressed pain, but a life nonetheless.

My pieced-together life was less than ideal. On the outside, it may have looked pretty good. I had a loving family, friends, education, opportunities galore, and the resources to live well and pursue my dreams. I do not want to minimize my gratitude for these.

However, my soul was missing core parts, so my experience of life through all those years was lacking in ways that are hard to explain. I was always feeling slightly off. I had generalized anxiety all the time that I could not define or understand. A seemingly bottomless well of sorrow and a constant sense of an inner hysterical feeling just below the surface accompanied me through even the happiest of experiences.

Suffice it to say that when your soul parts have translated elsewhere, and you don’t even know it, there is an internal confusion that can be terrifying, complex and, at times, overwhelming. It can feel like you are suffocating or in danger of disappearing into nothingness, into the void.

Until I understood this, I did my best to drown out this overwhelm. This led to some pretty messy behavior and a great deal of “lost” time.

Thankfully, I was lucky.

One day, in a voice lesson with a very wonderful man, I happened to mention to my teacher that I thought a part of my soul had been destroyed by what had happened to me. He told me that the human soul could never be destroyed, was beyond human touch.

Something in his words struck me to my core. I literally felt as if I had been gently punched in the gut. And though my mind was cynical, my body resonated the truth of his words.

My journey was forever altered for the better that day. I eventually found assistance and came to understand what had happened to me. With that assistance, I have been able to heal the wounds from the trauma. And grieve. Not only for the original trauma, but for the lost time and the years of moving through life as a kind of ghost of my former self. That kind of loss is real, too. And worthy of grief.

I have learned how to create, over time, a strong and loving core from which to invite those missing parts back. And in time, they have come. Not all at once, but bit by bit.

It is an astonishing thing to actually feel a part of your soul fly back into your psyche.

For me, there is a rush of sensation within my heart and solar plexus accompanied by a kind of flutter of excitement in my belly, followed by a warmth that spreads throughout my body along with a rush of intense emotion, a blend of ecstatic bliss at being reunited and tremendous grief for having missed it for so long. I imagine it is like being reunited with a long lost parent or child.

I cannot adequately express the sensation. Maybe it is what being touched by an angel feels like.

I am left with a sense of wholeness. In time, the new part integrates with the rest of me. I feel more and more like who I really am meant to be. These parts that have returned contain elements of my spirit, my soul, that I haven’t lived with in forever: bubbling joy, innocent playfulness, open curiosity and more. The difficult parts have come back too: rage, terror. But I’m equipped to handle them, unlike the child I was. I can honor those parts too and find compassion and healthy ways to address them.

It is like I was living with 3 crayons and now have 98 to use. I was a walking sieve and now I feel like a whole, flowing, glowing mass of life. I was a lone prisoner in my own skin, and now I feel connected to all of Life. I was blind but now I see. It may sound mystical or hokey, but it is my truth. I do not believe that I am alone in having experienced this, either.

I have come to view the human psyche as an intricate and miraculously brilliant thing. It has the power to survive the unimaginable and come through the other end with even more depth and richness than before. The soul cannot be destroyed or even truly touched by human hands. But it can translate. And return again. And for that, I am truly grateful.

#thebrillianceofthehumanpsyche

Daily Post: Translate

Triggers and Pink Pussycats

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I have been hard-pressed to write a blog since before Inauguration Day.

Like many, I am still processing significant losses that were, for many, contained in the recent election: the loss of President Obama, the loss of the America I thought I knew: the loss of the America of my own personal dis-illusion.

It took until two days after the Women’s March for me to realize how triggering the Inauguration and ensuing Presidency have been and are for me. I think I was operating in a kind of denial until then. While at the march, after first feeling incredibly hopeful, I began to feel uneasy. And after seeing that the march seemed to have had such little effect on the administration, it hit me.

I was triggered. Feelings of powerlessness were flooding my system. I was feeling overwhelmed with the sense that my truth, my voice was falling on deaf ears and was of totally no consequence. That things happening were not of my choice, and I had seemingly no recourse to stop them. Reality mirroring crucial traumatic events from my past blasted open the floodgates of remembered trauma.

I know I am not alone. Anyone who has been violated at some point in their life may be triggered again and again in the next four years.

So what can we do about it? How do we survive the daily onslaught of confirmations and executive orders and hard-won laws being threatened from powers-that-be?

Thankfully, I have found some very helpful posts that address this very issue. And if I cannot bring myself to write about usual things right now, I can write about why and I can share what I am doing to address the problem.

One of the best I have read is “How to #StayOutraged Without Losing Your Mind
Self-Care Lessons for the Resistance” by Mirah Curzer. Some great things to consider as we move forward, together.

Another article has been very helpful to me. N Ziehl’s “Coping with Chaos in the White House”. The author shares their experience of living with a person having narcissistic personality disorder (NPD.) I am not diagnosing anyone here. But this article spoke to me. It made a great deal of sense and gave me some helpful insights.

What I have been feeling are awful feelings to re-experience. But it was a relief to recognize that they are happening: to know that though there is a present reality that is indeed traumatic to me, there are many other layers happening that are from wounds from the past. Knowing this, I can let the current situation be “right-sized,” and then process the past triggered pain so that I can take good care of myself today. From this place of awareness, I can then take actions to do what I can in order to stay empowered and able to persevere the next four years.

I am finding for me, in addition to practicing the best self-care I can, taking actions each day that help me stay informed and connected to the lawmakers that I voted for, as well as those I did not, is crucial. These actions – calls, emails, letters, non-violent protests and marches, donating to re-election campaigns and organizations that I believe in – they keep me sane.

I am careful as I digest the information that pours forth on social media. I check in with my body, a lot, especially after getting shockingly bad news, such as the “alternative facts,” the travel ban, the recent confirmations, the silencing of Elizabeth Warren. I never know when something new will spark a trigger. I take deep breaths and ask my body what is going on, and I listen closely.

And I lean on my communities. I stay connected to like-minded people who are also active, because it is too easy to begin to feel hopeless as all of this unfolds. We can remind each other that there is power in love and that our actions and our voices do matter. They can remind me of the headway that is being made in our causes when I am feeling low. Together we can persist.

My artist friend Laura Baran created the “We are One” illustration at the heading of this post the weekend of the Women’s March. I keep her beautiful image near to remind me to keep love at the center of all I do.

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I also reach for my “Don’t Sass the Cat” tee created by another friend, a clothing designer named Jacquie of jqlovesu. It reminds me to keep a sense of humor and to remember the power of love and of people who love people. I run and I sweat and I cry and I sleep and I work to stay hopeful no matter what by taking action.

I am a Lover of Humanity. I am an American. And I want to be a part of the solution. It will be work. But I have never been one to shy away from a challenge.

#neverthelessshepersisted #pussyhat #dontsassthecat #weareone #beapartofthesolution #loveaboveallelse