Poetry

Don’t worry. I’m not going to be writing any*. It would be so awful, you guys. So. Awful.

I’m not a huge poetry gal. Even as an angst-ridden teenager, I tended more towards fan fiction and long dramatic walks in the woods – somewhat anticlimactic because there was no one to see how sad and dramatic I was being – bloody terrible teenager logic. Anyhow, I’m trying to learn more about poetry. I read this one and thought: that’s depression.

A Minor Bird
By Robert Frost

I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.

 

Isn’t that lovely? You can kind of feel it, hear the bird, see the sadness in the man’s eyes as he turns away from the window, ashamed and worried about himself.  Good poetry is impressive.

And now for fun, I will write my version of this poem:

Dear Stupid Bird
By Gwen Hill

Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!
You need a mate.
You’re hungry.
I get it.

Please learn another note
And go to someone else’s house
You stupid bird.

 

*I lied! Haha.

Recognition and Coping

“It is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate.”

 ― William Faulkner, Light in August

A few weeks ago I posted about losing my grandfather and how it feels like a loss piles on top of all the others, every time, so that for a little while it’s overwhelming. The clarity with which I cope directly relates to how long I have to do so – how long I have to be in ‘coping’ mode vs. ‘living’ mode. Being able to take a step back and look at myself and my actions from a detached perspective is the only thing that allows me to be aware of how I’m feeling sometimes. For example: Let’s say I notice that I’m short-tempered at the office one day. That might mean nothing – might be a bad day. But if I step back and notice that, all right, I haven’t been eating well, my sleep is erratic, I’m not getting as much done at night as I usually do, or whatever the signs are, then I can make a concerted effort to take care of myself and be conscientious about how I’m living, rather than just rolling with whatever comes my way. I want that. I want to be as aware and conscious as possible. If I hurt someone’s feelings, it shouldn’t be because I wasn’t paying attention. (It should be because…I’m a dick?)

That’s the core of it, actually: because I don’t give a lot of thought to other people, I assume they’re not giving a lot of thought to me. This is why it throws me off when it turns out that I’m devilishly wrong. When I was in, er, early high school – whatever that is – ? Grade 7-8? I was meandering through school in a state of blissful ignorance, neither having nor missing friends, happy with my books and my school work and my family. And assuming everyone else was kind of doing the same thing. Turns out: Nope! Those years are some kind of social primer, and everyone else was busily forming creepy little pre-teen wolf packs and preying on the weak. Which I didn’t notice, until I did, and I realized that I didn’t have friends because I was the weird kid and everyone hates the weird kid.

That moment, the moment of shift between “I’m just wandering along, nobody’s bothered by me, lalalalaaaaa,” and “I am in a school full of hormonal teen wolves who have decided to pick on me”? That. Moment. Blows.

All of a sudden, you can’t trust yourself. You can’t trust your perceptions. And if you’ve been wrong about so much for so long, what else could you be wrong about? That teacher that seems to like you? She probably makes fun of you every day in the staff lounge. Oh, you have a pen pal? It’s probably someone in prison who makes creepy wallpaper out of your letters.

Well. Anyway. You get the point. Cognitive dissonance, kids: more than just buzzwords.

Obviously, it all worked out. I actually got a couple of lovely Facebook messages from the horrid wolves when I was in my early 20s, apologizing for being horrible crazy children. To which I can only think: But you were children.  That’s the thing. You can’t even be tried as an adult for criminal activities, let alone perfectly normal pre-teen asshattery. It doesn’t mean it didn’t suck. It does mean that I’m largely over it.

Largely.

Every now and then, I have a moment of dissonance. I believe myself to be a certain way, a certain person, and a conversation or (as inspired this post) a self-assessment will point out that I’m wrong. And it happens again: the weird, falling-into-a-tunnel-a-la-Jerry-O’Connell-in-Sliders feeling, the shift of the world around me from a friendly place to an unsure one, the realization that the way I think and the amount of thought I give to others isn’t necessarily the industry standard. And this is the amazing thing: my body remembers. It remembers every other time this has happened. It can call up all the same feelings, and all the same doubts. If I didn’t have the tools that I have and, frankly, self-esteem that you could bounce rocks off of 98% of the time, I don’t know how I’d cope. I think this is a large part of what depression feeds on: doubt. Everyone probably hates you. You think they don’t, but you’ve been wrong before. You’re always wrong.

Gaaaaaaahhhhhhhh

Fucking gremlins, is all I have to say to that.

What I’m learning now is that every time an event brings up all of my past grief or moments of dissonance or whatever it may be, that’s kind of a gift. The human brain is designed to make connections; that’s pretty much what it’s good at. A smell reminds you of a day, the day connects to a feeling, the feeling connects to muscles and the muscles make a smile. A moment of dissonance connects to all the others in your past, which gives you options: you can give in to the gremlins – who are ALWAYS wrong, the dicks – or you can take that opportunity to process what you went through, to learn what you can, and to apply it to what’s happening in the here and now.

Everything that sucks in my life gives me a way to be a better person.

How annoying is that?

 

 

 

 

**A note: I think true cognitive dissonance causes a fractured psyche, is a major event, and can land people in serious facilities where they spend many years trying to reconcile real life with their internal lives. I don’t mean that. I mean the pop-psych version of the term, which I am not proud of myself for using in this way, but I don’t know what else to call it. And so I’m doing it anyway. (Being a dick on purpose! Ten points!)

 

On the familiarity of grief

My grandfather died yesterday.

I’m dealing with this lovely wide variety of emotions and, because of the last three years of therapy, trying to process them carefully and feel them all in their entirety so that they don’t come back and bite me in the ass in the future. A largely introverted nature means that I do most of this alone and quietly, which works for me, but is likely a bit hard on others. I don’t know what to do about that. Nothing, I think.

I feel the ache of loss that is a tight fist in my chest, that occasionally tightens and squeezes and lets go again. I am already aware that this loss is less brutal than the loss of my father, will pass faster, will be easier to process, and then I feel a twinge of guilt that I am not as sad as I ought to be. Then I remember that there is no ‘ought to be’ and I try to let it go. This is the process, as it were, of processing.

I am aware of the depths of loss again, as each loss brings back the ghosts of others. Pain is pain and my body and mind want to say, this is familiar, and this is like that time when, and even though my grandfather’s death is nothing like the loss of, say, my first love, I remember them all in fits now because of the familiarity of grief.

I woke up this morning thinking about my grandfather, and his life, and his kindness and strength and all of the things that made him wonderful. Then I thought about the plans I have for today, the board meeting I have to prep for, the writing and work I have to do, and I didn’t want to do any of it. Still have to get shit done, said a little corner of my mind. And of course, that’s not true. I could cancel everything. I could sit in my house and find this little core of grief and cut it open and let it bleed, find all the things that grow there and dig them out until the core is sparkling clean. I could do that, couldn’t I?

I’m not going to, though. I think because just having the option is enough, and at some point I am still a member of western culture and society. And it’s nice that it’s a choice now. That’s maybe the most valuable tool I have these days: recognizing choice. So I’ll get on with things as we do, and take my time to grieve in my own way when I need it, and find moments of peace and reflection. And I’ll process.

In all of that clever, thoughtful processing, it is still very clear to me that this is just very hard, and I wish it didn’t hurt so much. And my goodness, I am so grateful for this blog, that gives me a quiet place to still think ‘out loud’ and is waiting for me even at 3:30 in the morning, when otherwise I would have to talk to the damn cats.

The word that allows yes, the word that makes no possible.
The word that puts the free in freedom and takes the obligation out of love.
The word that throws a window open after the final door is closed.
The word upon which all adventure, all exhilaration, all meaning, all honor depends.
The word that fires evolution’s motor of mud.
The word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar.
The word that molecules recite before bonding.
The word that separates that which is dead from that which is living.
The word no mirror can turn around.
In the beginning was the word and that word was

CHOICE

-Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

Wise Words from Jim C. Hines

Over at SFSignal, Jim C. Hines has written a great little post about his upcoming book, Unbound, in which his main character (Isaac) struggles with depression. The post addresses the issue of writing with depression, and applies nicely to doing anything with depression. In particular, these bits stood out to me:

Looking back, I’ve been dealing with depression off and on for much of my life. I just never really labeled it as such until 2012. I still made it to school and to work. I still met my writing deadlines. I was functional.

We tend to associate being clinically depressed with non-functionality. That’s never been true for me–at my very worst, I have always managed to do my job. Something about our society elevates that to the status of ‘functional’, like that’s all there is, like that’s how you pay back the world for all that oxygen you’re using up. But since I’m going to be using up all that oxygen anyway, I figure I might as well aim for something higher than ‘functional’. Like ‘happy’.

For people who believe mental illness helps your creativity, or that medication will ruin you as an artist, I’ll note that the past two years have been the best of my career. 

Yes. This. I worried about this, and I know a lot of other writers and creative folks who believe that you need your demons scratching at the inside of your skull in order to foster creativity. And who knows, maybe I was wildly creative when massively depressed, but the point is that no one would ever have known because I Could. Not. Write. (It wasn’t my job.) Since the slaughter of my own skull-demons, I’ve been writing regularly, I’ve published a few things, and I’ve learned a hell of a lot about the craft of writing and finding ways to call on creativity when it’s being a pissy little kid who won’t come out of their pillow-fort to work. There may be medications out there that kill creativity, but they don’t comprise the whole shelf of options. Cipralex certainly isn’t one of ’em.

Isaac’s depression is truer to my struggle. I worry that he’ll be too unlikeable…because that’s how I felt at the time. I worry people will say he’s too weak, that this character should just man up and get over it, because that’s how I felt. That’s what I expected to hear if I talked about it. I worry about readers who don’t understand that depression isn’t something you just snap out of.

Honestly, sometimes I still feel like I need to man up and get over it. But that’s just … that’s other people’s voices, in my head. That’s grandparents who didn’t understand, generations of people who thought depression was just a weakness of spirit (or something that could be fixed with leeches). And because I know those things to be untrue, I can turn them away, and remember that I’m dealing with a real issue, and I’m doing it well. And I hope that others can do the same. In that way, we slowly change things for the generations to follow.

 

Hello, Old Friends

I picked up a new prescription for Cipralex a few days ago. I’ve been keeping track of myself for a few months now, watching for red flags – foggy brain, lousy memory for details, irritability, fatigue, random appetite changes, dizzy spells, insomnia, and of course the hopeless/worthless/useless slew of thought patterns. I have ten main red flags; I decided that if I got up to 8 on a consistent basis (more than two months consecutively) I would talk to my doctor about going back on the magic pills.

I did, and so here I am. Sitting with a little bottle of meds beside my computer, looking all innocent and helpful (the pills, not me).

I filled the prescription today. I think I’ve been waiting for some feeling of failure, or guilt, or something to kick in, but all I can think when I look at this bottle of pills is oh thank god. There is no prize for living on the hard setting, far as I can tell.

That’s all, I guess. The funny thing about depression is, it’s hard to talk about it when you’re in it, so I feel doomed to always write this blog in the past tense. Ah, well. C’est la vie.

 

I Miss My Drugs

– so why don’t I go back on them?

I’ve been thinking about this lately. Especially today, because someone asked me that very question.

When I was <insert random age that I don’t remember; late teens>, I dated this guy. Who was wonderful. He was really nice, and funny, and open hearted. We had a great time together. He was good in bed. There was literally nothing wrong with him, and nothing wrong with me, but we were going nowhere – and he wanted to be, and I ended up breaking it off because I couldn’t stop thinking about how much of a giant waste of his time the relationship was. He wasn’t a bad guy. In fact, he was really awesome. He  just wasn’t the right guy, and I knew he was never going to be. And I missed him, because (understandably) he didn’t want to be friends with me after I couldn’t give him a reason for the breakup beyond ‘It’s just – there’s no – I’m not.” (Teenagers are articulate.)

It would have been really easy to stay with him. I didn’t, because it wasn’t right for me (or, I think, him). The years between that relationship and the one I’m in now were full of relationship-shit, which means I earned the one I have now, dammit. And it’s worth not having taken the easy route, a hundred times over.

In case that metaphor isn’t painfully obvious, that’s how I feel about cipralex. I miss it. It was wonderful and easy and uncomplicated. It would have been easier to stay on for the rest of my life, but it wouldn’t have been right. Now I’m going through those ‘shit years’ (except they will not last YEARS, dammit) and at the end, I get the ‘great relationship’ – the goal for that one being a healthy whole human who’s not having to remember to take the (lovely wonderful) little white pill every day.

Anyway.

I miss my pills.

Shit years are shitty.

Therapy tonight. Also, I’m going to go and see a nutritionist about eating-for-brain. (Please note distinction: not eating brains. I hope.) Onward, forward.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
-Robert Frost

To the US of A at large:

“I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside of us that insists that despite all the evidence to the contrary, something better awaits us.”
-President Barack Obama’s victory speech, 2012

Dear America, United States of:

This is not a political blog, but I have to say it: Today I am very proud to call you my neighbour. Thanks for showing up, standing in line, shouting on twitter, battling identification problems and busted machines, and all of the other million small things you did in order to VOTE, that meant I got to fall asleep happy last night.

Sincerely,
Gwen

Monday Morning Quote Time

“You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.”

-Christopher Robin to Winnie the Pooh

 

Quote Time

Plant growing out of the middle of the Alaska Highway illustrates this point.

A traumatic event doesn’t doom us to suffer indefinitely. Instead, we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives.

— Jane McGonigal

Yup. Truth. That’s from her Ted talk, “The game that can give you 10 extra years of life”.

Tomorrow is guest post day!

Random Quote Time

‘Cause it’s a good way to start the day. (Click to make it easier to read.)

– Tom Robbins, from ‘Still Life with Woodpecker’.

Stay tuned for the Friday Guest Blog.