I’ve just had therapy, or as I like to say, got my head shrunk, and let me say I’m not fixed. Ha ha, no. I’ve been stumbling my way through years and years of sessions, and though I work very hard to not be a drunk, or depressed, or enraged, or disappointed with everything, I have concluded that something is broken inside me.
My therapist, bless her, is cool, edgy, cerebral, and life-affirming, and clearly admires and likes me. That’s crazy considering she knows me better than anyone in the world. I’d say her starting basis is how amazing I am, and a hope that I would believe it. I sometimes ask myself, do I pretend to be someone I’m not with her? No way. I am my most comfortable, true, articulate self.
So, WTF is wrong with me? I know why I’m messed up. My blog is a testament to my broken childhood. My broken heart. I can’t figure out how to heal.
After Covid, I started watching a local Black led church online. I was drawn to attend in person. So eventually we did after about a year. What I wasn’t expecting was my own tears. I found week after week, at some point in the service, this person who couldn’t cry started weeping, and couldn’t stop. I tried. The more I tried, the more i became a snot-nosed, blubbering fool. Embarrassed, I frequently ran out to the lobby because I wanted to be in control.
And I am afraid. I can say that now. I don’t understand, and I’m afraid. Eventually, we left the church. Lots of reasons. We’re not Pentecostal, but for me, it was mainly fear.
I don’t cry. Tom cries at movies and shows, writing songs, normal, sad stuff, but I’m usually unmoved. I feel dead inside when I see someone crying. The last movie I remember crying at was The Killing Fields. I’ve always been broken in there, and antidepressants make it worse; like pouring cement in the desert.
More and more, probably because of the lull that I had in writing, hardly anyone is reading what I write.
Ironically I stopped writing around 2015 at a time when life was falling apart — our business partner imbezzled, we were bankrupt, our family was in shambles, my mom was diagnosed with dementia and I was her medical POA, and I went back to work, in the company, to help Tom.
My kids were of the age where it mattered what I said about them. I didn’t want to be the writer that regretted telling my kids stories. I couldn’t yet write about the business. Stuff with my mom was complicated. And I was busy!
I gave up my career at a local non-profit to (more closely) raise our kids. But truthfully, mainly, we were just trying to save money on daycare with three kids in diapers and one in middle school. The American dream. Although my “staying at home” was a good choice that I’m glad we made because I can see now how that time was important both to my kids and to the person that I was becoming. I was a workaholic before I quit. And long after. Those were hard years.
It was hard to be at home. This was before social media dominated people’s days. Before cell phones were attached to us. From 2001 to 2015, I was lonely, hurting, a recovering alcoholic, a workaholic, depressed, anxious and bored.
As I have written copiously about I suffered from depression, and my husband suffered frommydepression. This morning he was sharing a song with me, there’s many he’s written, about my depression from his perspective. It’s so sad. I’ve hurt him. The lyrics are beautiful. (See below.)
So I’m comfortable with a small readership, helloreader. I still don’t know what I’m writing for but I have learned a few things about myself in the last decade.
One, I have copious courage and it’s built into my DNA and I don’t fear the opinions of others. I’m more afraid of the idea of sounding stupid or ignorant than of expressing myself. I love expressing myself. Not verbally persay. I’ve gotten more introverted and anxious since retirement. I loathe it, and shall have to overcome it.
Two, I’m an empath. My heart breaks for people. Injustice hurts me, physically sometimes. I haven’t learned how to control it or protect myself from it yet.
Three I’m generous. I’ll give away the shirt on my back if it would help. I’ll give my last $20 in my wallet. I’ll give generously to a charity as I’m moved. Not frivolously, but carefully. Not when asked directly, that makes me uncomfortable, but as people talk about the needs around me I give.
Four, I love learning. That’s saving me in my “migraine retirement.” Everything I read or listen to leads to further learning. A million more authors, topics, places, and histories. It’s endless. I have a disorganized library at home. I love saving used books the older the better.
Five, I see. The world. People. Hearts. Pain. God. Bad. This trait has a through line to 1-4. Sometimes that includes my photography or travel. But lately, it has stalled as I’ve been working on my migraines and trying not to despair of ever traveling again. I have a dog, my husband’s dog, who is old but still with us, very anxious without one of us. Tom’s waiting till Comet dies to travel. So I read and collect travel novels. Would love suggestions for the first place to travel to. Or I may go alone.
Six, I can be wise.
I observe well, I am unafraid to express myself, I read, and I may have things to say. We’ll see.
P.S. About my accident, my face is healing with very little scarring. I’m fortunate there. Now I’m afraid to go for a walk. It’s annoying.
IN THE MEANTIME BY TOM HANSON
In the mean time I am waiting Through the winter without you On this thin ice I am skating Am I falling through?
In the desert I am crawling In the mean time without you Is this penance, is it stalling? Don’t be cruel, don’t be cruel I miss you
In the mean time I am fading Won’t you tell me what to do? A single word persuading And I’ll wade through A world of blue And the waning moon
I know who you are Yes I know what you are And I know you won’t go too far In the mean time
Now in your mean time I’ll be waiting In these long days without you Pray your rainclouds will be breaking ‘Cause I miss you You know I do I need you
Do you remember when I last saw Holly? It was around this time, six years ago, in late February 2018, and despite the challenges she was going through, she was determined to keep her kids’ lives as normal as possible. She drove over to Couer d’Alene, ID, from Washington with her kids. We had about half a day, so we ate breakfast, let the kids swim in the resort’s pool, and hung out. It was inspiring to witness her strength, but I recall she was pretty depleted from all the adversity she faced with the divorce. Although I was feeling drained from our social commitments and meetings, I remain grateful for the last memories and Tom and I having had the opportunity to be there for her during such a difficult time.
I have been struggling with migraines for the past three years, which has been quite discouraging. Despite receiving countless recommendations from various individuals, I have tried many remedies with some success. However, my life has been heavily impacted and many activities have become difficult to manage with migraines, including travel, communication, productivity, reading, writing, creativity, work (both personal and professional), shopping, cleaning, caring for others, and taking care of my own well-being. According to my neurologist/headache specialist, the headaches I’ve been experiencing are likely a result of the chronic stress I’ve been under for the past decade.
I “retired” to tackle migraines head-on, not to mention it had become impossible to work. By now, I presumed I would be better at spending my time doing something fun and creative, but that didn’t happen, and I have a chronic illness because otherwise. I find myself once again nosediving straight into a mental health crisis. If you know my story, you comprehend how frightened I am.
Yesterday, I acknowledged to myself that I need a non-negotiable daily routine. I began with walking. Cleaned my study for the first time since Christmas.
I’m thinking, for self-care:
Sleep hygiene by setting a bedtime and wake time, getting sunlight first thing, movement, nutrition, eating breakfast, getting dressed for the day, limiting the people and things in my life that vex me, spending time in nature a couple of times a week, and stress management.
How do you manage self-care? What are your daily non-negotiables?
I am sitting in my car waiting. As I have sat inside and outside of schools, doctors’ offices, and in cars, all these years.
Always sitting with my sorrow, I wait.
I wish my mother was here, I find myself saying out loud, welcome tears spring to my eyes. Also, I am still surprised by them.
My health feels like a constant betrayal, as if. Am I owed good health, not headaches, not body aches, not a loose stomach, not fatigue, not depression, not anxiety, not sleeplessness? How is it that I of all people “deserve” good health? I know that I don’t. But my mother would have had wisdom about it. I am lost.
The sky is as gloomy and dismal as my mood. It follows the grief of Palestine that is ringing in my ears, my heart, and my mind; abuzz with adrenaline from witnessing genocide. Don’t we remember Rwanda?
So many families, generations lost. I think.
How do I preserve mine? We’re fractured. My sister doesn’t speak to me, specifically. My parents are dead. Holly is dead. Our children are many including Holly’s and those that have joined ours. We are all a legacy.
We each and all matter.
Even though I feel lost, unmoored, untethered, and without roots, I feel my family lineage breaking in my body; I know that it is now my responsibility to be the strength that holds the generations together. Even though my sister has chosen not to be with me, we are vital. We are a link to the next generation. We are blood.
“Grief and despair, heartache and humiliation, rage and regret — this is the hellfire of the mind, hot as a nova, all-consuming as a black hole. And yet, if we are courageous enough and awake enough to walk through it, in it we are annealed, forged stronger, reborn.” Maria Popova, The Marginalian
She’s not wrong but I couldn’t be reborn. I wasn’t enough. It has consumed me.
Grief is like a hard fall, to smash head-first into the cement repeatedly. Bruised and bleeding, utterly destroyed, but still getting up and on with life.
But what is there to get on to?
I made a grave mistake in the “getting on,” an amateur foolish error, believing I should be strong…
For the children, for the company, for my mother, for my sisters, and more children.
All these minutes, hours, days, months, years, and decades, I’ve been devoted (beyond what’s humanly possible) to those who needed me. I thought that was a good thing. I thought I was superhuman. I was lauded. I was built up as “amazing.” I had no boundaries. And I believed being superhuman was achievable.
But I’ve paid a price. I’ve traded for strength and lost my soul—as tragedy, suffering, and heartache collided inside me. And I’m left Empty. Hurting.
I’m done crying out to God who is all-powerful. Got it. YOU ARE GOD. I don’t disagree. But fuck it. Help already?
I tried the Church and a few people to tell my story.
And I found no one cared.
Where was a container wide or deep enough for the ocean of tears and heartache? No one could receive my fury, my destruction.
I have found comfort only in solitude and in the great cavern of nothingness.
My body, the vessel of nerve endings, hurts. My brain holds an ache. Calling it a headache is too benign. My brain was broken by pain. I can no longer think rationally. I told my shrink I won’t kill myself. And I won’t, I don’t (think I) want to, but sometimes I want to be there, with them, less alone.
I live in the void where sorrow lives, where life has no purpose.
When others try to understand, reaching for me, I cringe and pity them. I am defeated.
One can’t get to me because I am gone. This physical vessel that you see with your eyes and touch with your hands, she is empty.
I am no longer courageous. I am no longer strong.
The void is surrounding me and those who know seem too frightened by my weakness. They leave me be. And I am grateful because my body, heart, soul, and mind are destroyed. It’s too late.
The problem of pain is not pain. It is that nothing and no one prepared me for pain. Nothing in my life taught me how to face my sister’s murder, especially not my faith, or community or parents or anything in my life up to that point. And I am not a particularly fragile person. In fact, most would say I am resilient.
We have faced hard things in our marriage, like all marriages, with our children, like most children, in my upbringing, the most dysfunctional upbringing, in our company with fraud. My approach was always to get stronger and stronger, if that was possible. Apply more grit. Dig deeper for more reserves.
Build more scar tissue. But nothing made the deep cut of Holly’s death less painful. And nothing had prepared me for the suffering.
My beloved sister, torn from this earth, from her beautiful children, from a life of service, from me. I needed her. She was my friend. A confidant. We laughed at life together. She coached me on raising a child on the spectrum, how do they learn in public schools? I coached her on being married to someone with depression, though I am no expert. I have just experienced depression, lived with it, lived through it, survived it though it nearly destroyed me. I fought back. And I was loved. I had something to live for beyond myself. My partner, children, mother, sisters. I fought back from the black dog that nips at me all the live long day. The dog that barks at me telling me “It’s not worth it, this living.” I know it is a lie. But a believable one on dark days. But I didn’t see clearly enough what they were going through.
The problem of pain is not pain. I suppose we all expect that life will bring some ups and downs. But nothing in my life prepared me for murder. The violence, the atrocity, the apparent hatred, the cruelty. Knowing my brother-in-law sits in prison only fuels my rage. He doesn’t deserve to live if she is dead.
The problem of pain is that people don’t know how to be with you. They grow uncomfortable with your suffering. They fade away. The isolation of pain is the problem of pain. I am left alone, inside my head, with my howling grief ripping and tearing me to shreds.
And I realized today, trying to express myself to someone, that I am afraid. I am terrified to live. I am paralyzed by the trauma of losing my sister. I’ve got my heart locked down so “safe” that I’m hardly human. Except in church – where without my permission – the grief is leaking out. It streams down my face in an embarrassing fashion. And though I wish I could make it stop, a part of me is so grateful to feel a relief and a release.
I am not fit for humans, I am thinking.
Where do you want to get connected in church, I am asked.
I’ll do anything. But I don’t think you want me to I am so damaged.
The problem of pain isn’t pain. It is that people don’t like to watch someone in pain. Or be with you. Perhaps because they don’t know how to help. But today I sat with someone who just listened. Who without saying much communicated to me that it is okay that I feel afraid, anxious, sad, angry and alone.
The problem of pain is not pain. It is that we don’t know how to be with someone in pain.
We’ve returned from visiting my in-laws, who are 82 and 80. They are very spry. So alive though slowing. I admire them. They’ve traveled the world together. They’ve had such curiosity, such courage.
Siesta Key, Florida
When did I become so afraid? Life’s beat the courage out of me without a doubt. The deaths. My mother’s physical pain and suffering. My headaches. The mental health challenges in myself and my family.
Sobriety taught me not to trust myself. Or was it alcoholism? My family’s unraveling after our parent’s deaths. My sister who chose not to have me as a part of her life. The ultimate failure to be quite honest when your own flesh and blood rejects you. That pain is insufferable, on the daily, sometimes.
I’ve raised the white flag. I surrender to loneliness. Fear has me in a chokehold. I’ve been hiding out. I have never felt more alone in all the years of my life.
My therapist is frequently telling me that’s not who I am. I owe it to myself to be courageous, to be curious, to be learning, and to create. That I have something to say. That my creativity matters. The world is worse off for my muteness. What I see in the world is unique. I used to believe that. My father conveyed an idea that we all have something unique to offer the world, our mark. I’m just no longer convinced that we’re all special.
When you are quiet for such a long time, you don’t trust your voice. Clearing my throat before speaking startles me. It better be worth it. Fraught with doubt. Frequently, I think never mind. Who cares?
I have a partner that creates no matter what, no matter if no one’s listening. That’s bold. That’s brave. That’s also ridiculous to me at times. You wouldn’t believe how much time he spends toiling away alone in his studio with no clue as to what’s happening in real life, in my kitchen, with the kids, with me.
Everything in me, how I was raised, says that’s selfish. Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the middle. My therapist says I need my own space. Where I can shut the door and be. I’m finally making it.
“You must not fear, hold back, count, or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself, and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave, which then carries you, sweeps you into experience, and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, and instabilities, and it always balances them.” The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4
Here’s to reading. Here’s to travel. Here’s to curiosity. Here’s to creating. I’m hoping for it all.
I asked my son to write about his depression. I am trying to save him.
I want to know what it is like to be inside him. Him specifically because every person’s suffering is different. I know the exercise of putting words down on paper heals.
But I know depression only too well. It chases me. It’s never far. Though it’s been a good long while. The monster has been resting.
It’s been glorious to wake without it heavy on my bones.
If I’m lucky enough to live a while in peace, I fill my mind with other things, books, music poetry, and people who tell a different story one of liberation from the destruction, heavy, crushing demolition.
When I slow down now to remember – for I told him I would write, too and put down the words of depression – it feels like letting a monster out of its cage to play a while. A dangerous game. The monster only wants to kill. But if I visit, like in the zoo, perhaps I can view it from a safe distance.
Depression is dogged, relentless. It won’t let me sleep well, and the more fitful the sleep, the longer the dark days awake. Depression hurts me in my bones. It’s a deep ache, heavy, as if I’m full of sand. Each step, each breath, each thought more difficult than the last.
Yesterday, I heard it knocking, I learned I’ll be seeing someone, a family member, who has declared me unfit, unworthy of their love (and time), and the monster came to sit on my chest. Instantly, I was immobilized by anxiety. Meanwhile, it laughed deeply and ironically and climbed on top of me.
As I drove through the Wisconsin countryside, fighting to stay awake from a long day, a great big, emorphous tonnage of a monster crept up and pounced. I feel it now, the next day. On my ribcage. I can’t see it, only I feel it make itself at home on my ribcage. I can’t fling it off, too heavy, but also like water between my fingers, shape-shifting, magical but hideous.
So I am in danger right now. I’m at risk if i keep it to myself. I’ve never achieved anything important by myself when it comes to this monster.
I can distract myself, but that’s a dangerous addiction for me. I can retell my worthiness to myself, but the monster on my chest is about my value, and I’m no match on my own.
But pride always keeps me from speaking. I’m mute against the danger, the suffering which I know will come in the days ahead if I don’t speak aloud. “I am in danger.”
As I chase something truer than her lies, I’m already tired.
I’m already afraid.
I’m already beaten.
I know one of these times the monster will win.
Do I fight?
For now, she settles in. Ignores me. That is her superpower satisfied with scaring me close to death then slowly crushing the air from my lungs. I know if I don’t fight, she’ll more than ravage. Or maim. More than lay waste.
She will consume and kill me slowly, as asphyxiation finishes the job.
Right here, in this moment, being tired already, I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll go sit in the sunshine. That’s a microchoice toward life.
I’ve been on a winding path. One that’s taken me through valleys (yes, more than one) and to even lower places that I didn’t want to crawl out of because these days, just showing up for the people in my home is enough. I can’t be expected to be happy too.
I’m imagining a world in my daydreams where there’s no guns that kill sisters and no fractured families due to generations of anger. Where siblings don’t have to protect their heart by cutting off relationship with each other. Where friends don’t die of cancer. What children aren’t depressed. Where our body’s patience for our mental anguish doesn’t cause daily migraines. Where kids don’t have to think they’ve become adults via murder.
My thoughts are winding just like the path. I thought I’d stop living after I was done raising all the children in my house.
Not die physically, of course, but just lay down in a grassy spot by the path of life and see if it mattered that I don’t get up. Don’t think. Don’t feel. Don’t create. Don’t write. Don’t challenge ideas. Don’t be me.
I think the God that I thought had forgotten me has different plans, I don’t really want to hear them.
But as I sit in my first church, since before Covid, I’m melting. I can think of no other way to describe my insides, which were solid stone. I sit, and I feel deep inside me the flow of water starting. I sit in church and weep. Sometimes shuttering sobs threaten. Mostly quiet trickles, eyes closed, tears stream from me while I do my best just to BE. Open.
My church, this church, has a chorus of singers that makes me feel like I’m actually with Jesus. In a way never before in my life it’s just Jesus and me and I’m weeping all my rage, and disappointment, and fury, and exhaustion, and fear–oh my God so much fear that something terrible is just around the corner. As if I’m a mole being whacked and each time I’m stupid enough to raise my head with any hop, whack. Whack. Whack.
What an inadequate expression of pain. Generational heartache is heavy, and physical, a sagging weight on your chest. That is what my heart felt like yesterday. Holidays hurt and I am left trying to figure out why.
Yes, I miss my mom and sister, but more so I miss the traditions that my father relentlessly enforced. It is complicated. Growing up I felt controlled by his insistence that we all share all holiday meals together. Those traditions were important to him. I never asked him why just resisted being controlled. But he had no mercy, not for other plans or other people in our lives. Bring them along he always insisted. And now I long for them like an abused child longs for the love of their abusive parent.
On Easter we gathered and living in Texas we got new outfits for church, we ate lamb with mint sauce.
He made us gather.
And now, the lack of tradition creates a crater inside me. I am so averse to being controlling, that we don’t do it at all. I don’t want to insist and I don’t want the hurt of family choosing to be elsewhere. And to labor over a giant meal like my mother always did, only to have family eat and disperse as quickly as possible seems like too risky. Why do I protect my heart at all costs? Or perhaps I’m simply too lazy and I do not want to do the work.
And it is work. It was easy for my father to insist when he wasn’t the one spending all day or days in the kitchen.
I don’t want to become my father a dictator of tradition. I don’t want to become my mother a slave to tradition.
I am left with a hole so cavernous I can hear the wind blowing, whirling, and lashing. I was physically ill for days thinking about it all, so complicated, so twisted, and so hard to understand.
I am broken by my upbringing and unable for whatever reason to create our own traditions. It is too painful to be rejected and that is why I think my father just made us. As crazy as that sounds, perhaps I get it now.
I know I do not want to be that person. Fifty-four and both parents dead and I am still trying to figure myself out.
My first words are lethargic, yet I know it is time. They have slowly birthed themselves, then are bursting out of me like an explosion.
Life is so loud that I can see the thickness and mass of the noise that surrounds me. I feel the sensation of the words. My soul is tired. An atrophied muscle. Sensation and muse have been absent. My ten fingers, slowly tapping out original thoughts are creaky and rusty like a derelict bicycle dragged out in the spring after several winters of inattention and lack of use. Distraction stretches and unfurls squeezing out my imagination.
We should teach children to prepare for an adulthood jammed full of clamoring urgency. Middle age will have paraphernalia that collects in the basement, garage, closets and corners of our consciousness until there are no decent ideas or inspiration, only excuses. Interruptions and noise.
When I was young I would not have believed that I would need to learn to be disciplined in order to challenge the “to-do” of family, work, and possessions. That I would need to carefully clear a room for quiet. As I do I am hopeful that the sparks of creativity will ignite.
Right now I cannot find
spare words.
Clatter invades even with my eyes closed. When I open them again life shrieks to be cleaned up, cared for, carefully ordered from disorder.
This noise competes for our creative soul. Clarity is somewhere the echoes of a silent room.
The empty pages have waited for me to trust myself with words again.
First words spill like heart ache.
I stare hard; curious and hungry, finally ignoring the noise. And for a moment I am filled with wonder.
I squeeze my eyes shut, salty with the sadness that has been pushing and pulsing to come bursting. Fury swells. I remember that I AM MADE FOR THIS! The anger comes because I have walked on for what seems an age. Walked without words.
At some point I left the path of imagination and curiosity which lost my interest. It is a path that requires trust and a willingness to face down the noise.
The energy of rage and the sadness is important in order to walk with words.
As if jumping on the dilapidated bicycle, I press my feet down on the two pedals slowly, beleaguered in the beginning, then faster and faster as the blood in my legs begins to pulse and flow. In my mind’s eye I feel the wind, my salty stinging tears flowing down the worn grooves of my face.
Logic & Imagination 