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.
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.
Logic & Imagination 