depression

No Place Like Home

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 1 Comment

Sometimes when I am out in the world, I feel a compulsion to go home immediately.

I literally feel drawn, as if by a magnet, back to the safety of home.

I have lived with this sensation for many years now, since 2001. I blogged about it last year when I wrote about depression.

I am still unraveling what is contained in this dynamic within.

On the one hand, I love life, being alive. I crave connection. I love people. I love humanity.

I am an actress. Human behavior endlessly fascinates me. What makes people take actions. What drives us all to stay alive on this spinning blue ball. That we choose every day to love and aspire to things.

And yet. There are times when I am filled with a mix of emotions and sensations that compel me to get home as soon as I can. Fear, anxiety, panic.

I never thought if it before, but is this a version of a panic attack? I have no idea, no way to guage that. I hear people talk about panic attacks. I know  people who suffer from them.

How do you label an internal experience like what I experience? I guess if there are enough people experiencing  similar symptoms, someone names it and it becomes a way to discuss, diagnose.

I have brought it to conventional therapy. Past life regression work. Rebirthing. Shamanic healing work.

I’ve learned cognitive behaviors to manage it. All have been helpful in one way or another.

But I still don’t have a concrete understanding of why it happens to me. Is it genetically encoded in my DNA? Did my people learn to survive by keeping close to home?

In a past life, was I some tribal member who died traumatically when being away from the others and my soul just cannot let it go?

I know for some years, I withdrew from being in the flow of life because I did not know how to cope. I had to learn how to be in the world again. I had to mature emotionally, with help. That has been an amazing process.

But that period of time is many years past. I have never felt more healed, more whole, more integrated than I do now. I am in awe of the healing I have done, of where I am today. I have a truly gifted life, filled with love, connection, abundance, and creativity.

And yet. The magnet pull comes upon me still.

I believe my body has more to show me. There are answers coming from within, but on my body’s own time. Not my ego’s.

And so I bear patient, loving witness as it happens, listening for clues even as I experience the pull when it hits me. I have finally stopped adding to the pain of it all by beating myself up for its mere existence. Or trying to bully myself into being able to “just bypass it already.”

When I have that pull to go home, I choose to see it with the eyes of a loving parent. I take my own hand and ask myself if it can wait until I finish my day. I promise to give that part of me full attention when safe at home, later.

And I follow thru on that promise. That is crucial. I need that part to begin to trust me, to trust that I can handle whatever may go down out in the world.

I feel that trust growing inside. It is a deeply important feeling.

And I welcome this.

I am building a new home within. And when completed, I will be there, wherever I go, wherever I am in the world.

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: magnet

Pain Management

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ Leave a comment

I long to go under

Lose consciousness, go blank

Slip away into nothingness.

What does that say about me?

A local’s not enough.

I don’t need the area around the wound deadened

I need to be deadened.

I am the wound.

Put me out, put me under

Let me go down into the void.

Maybe I’ll come back

Maybe not

Either way, I’ll have relief at last.

 

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word prompt: local

The Kindness of Strangers

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ 2 Comments

Go ahead, please

Just do it 

Put me out of my misery

Commit me, already

I can’t stand it in here

This world is too bright

The constant chatter

The onslaught of doubt

Can’t you tell 

I am screaming inside

My head is on fire

I am running down streets

I want to be free

Like Blanche DuBois 

Take me to my own Belle Reve

Let me sleep there forever

Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Prompt: commit

Inside-Out

~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ Leave a comment

I have been dealing with depression. Again. This is not a new phenomenon to me. I have been dealing with It all of my life, or at least as far back as I can recall. I call It depression in order to explain it to people. But I have come to understand it more and more as simply energy. Energy from my own system, energy that is mine and is not mine at the same time. It is an outcry. It is a soul strike.

This depression requires of me that I stay at home, alone, with only the company of my cat, Miracle. If I am out and about, and it hits, this depression demands of me to pull out of My Life and go home. If I am at home when it hits, It will not let me leave. There is literally a magnetic, heavy pull. A dragging down. An exhaustion like a huge, thick blanket on my body and in my heart. My belly is tense with a sheet of iron-like tension that I keep trying to release through awareness and breath. I get it to relax a moment, but as soon as my mind wanders, and I return to it, it is there again, hard and steely.

Its’ requirements? No outside interruption. No demands. No stressors. No people. Quiet. Solitude. Just me with all the me’s I have ever been. One or another of them needs my own attention and caring. Some part of me needs to be heard. To be seen. Sometimes, to be saved.

I fight It. It has been years that I have fought against hearing these inner needs, these lost parts of me. I used to use things to try to drown them out. To try to shut them up. They felt so overwhelming to me. I had no way of dealing with them, because I wasn’t capable. I had no core self from which to do such a thing from. I wasn’t grown up enough to mother anyone.

Over the last 11 years I have worked hard to grow myself up, to find my core self, to heal. In the last four years, I have worked hard to know all of my selves and their needs, to become more accepting of these times when my own system just shuts me down. It has been a painstakingly slow but incredibly crucial process.

Today I needed to write something hopeful, encouraging and acknowledging to my self. A combination gratitude and brag list, two practices that have been extremely helpful to me.

I am grateful:

For trusting my own process even when my spirit and body and soul parts feel disparate.

For my intelligence and my lack of knowing it all.

For my inner-knowing and my lack of intelligence.

For the parts of me that I think are ugly and mean and stupid: the “Loser” parts so quick to rise up within and flood my system – they are constantly looking for evidence in the outside world that will mirror back what it forcefully tells me – that I am fat, a loser, stupid, shy, weird, misshapen, disgusting.  These parts that bully me (as some bizarre kind of protection of some other very raw parts inside) – they are precious and worthy and are such important parts of me.

I celebrate them and brag about how wonderful they are in hopes that they will hear me and let my heart hold their pain and their shame so that new life can fill them with love and light. I say to them:

I am not shy. I am sometimes shy. How beautiful I am to feel that way sometimes.

I am not stupid. Sometimes I do not know things. Sometimes I do stupid things. I say, “Brava, Me!”

I am not fat. Sometimes I put on protection. Sometimes I fall into old ways of comforting myself. How human of me. What a vulnerability that proves that I have inside me. What soft crevices I contain that crave such filling. I love that about me.

I am not a loser. I am not ugly and weird looking. I am wondrous and epic and multi-faceted and one of a kind. I am me. I am my own shape. I am my own timbre. I am my own expression of the beauty and wonder of the world. Every single cell of me is a miracle and I celebrate the magical wonder that I was born into this world at this time in this form.

Today I dance with depression. Maybe tomorrow It will quiet down, and I can once again go back out onto the skinny branches, and live out loud again.