I began writing a blog four years ago with one of the most frightening broken hearts on record, a completely (so completely) fucked up head and a shattered sense of who I was on every level of which I am and am not conscious. I felt like shit and it showed, and I continued to feel that way and show it to varying degrees across these ensuing four years, give or take some days when I was happy.
Me and B and a juice box on Moon River. When your best friend's baby - a magic child indeed - immediately decides you're soul mates when you meet her for the first time in that way that only open-hearted children and dogs do, if you're not immediately happy about that situation, (if you're me anyway) you'd need to be hospitalized if it didn't make the lights come on for a minute, or in this case the week I spent with her following me around calling me Laurie Wife and getting in bed with me before preschool just to chitchat about the day's plans and send me home with a raging case of the flu. I am overdue for a visit with my girls.
New Orleans, 2008, the night we met Jane Fonda and Eve Ensler. I called these days breaks in the crazy. It's even worse to feel bad when you've got a life that involves this kind of love and opportunity, but it's no less real at the time.
Anyway, motion was crucial. I threw myself with insane, frenetic abandon into whatever activity or diversion or stopgap measure I could get my hands on, from one of a gazillion bottles of wine to a trip across several time zones. Some things were smart, like the whole camera thing, which has worked out pretty well, and writing in general, but everything in the aggregate was just a lot. Other things, like blowing money at Target when I didn't need to and pushing myself past the point of exhaustion for relatively trivial things, maybe not so smart. It was just that I had a strong belief that if I stopped I'd die, or implode, or make poor fashion choices or ill-advised phone calls, sometimes concurrently. I was on a mission with no theme, which means I think that I can simply call it survival.
Today I am better, pretty good even. I look at my now as distinctly different from the days that began in January, 2005, and really escalated from the end of 2007 until they tapered off in January of this year, that last 15 months a period of such loss as I've never had in my life, which served its purpose so thoroughly that I'd almost consider it useful if I hadn't hated most of it quite so much.
I never called you a furbaby because that's not my style but you did have a t-shirt that said "Rock star" on it and I miss you every day.
I've talked about you enough, maybe? There's just a lot to say. It was a bit of an unusual situation. Thanks for teaching me that swearing was therapeutic and entirely forgiveable by you and Jesus. (Guess whose opinion mattered to me?)
I'll always be sorry for the way she left which is probably why it was so important to shoot the roses the day after.
I've completely come to terms with the way love walked out (whatever, Sammy Hagar. WHAT. EVER.) and the very unbalanced way I responded to that development, which in a sentence is a miracle of whose magnitude only I'm aware, plus maybe the two or three people who were willing to listen to me at my most jacked up about this, when I was completely convinced I'd nevereverevereverseriouslyever be better. I'm even comfortable with the idea that what I lost was better off that way, that what was allowed to emerge as a result is such a better thing even though it's still totally rough-draft and work in progress and utterly, comically half-baked. Suffice to say that I never liked Barenaked Ladies as much as I forced myself to, and I also don't like tennis and I can admit that now.
Also today I don't check my stats for twice-daily hits from a college in a city that I thought took away everything of value that I had or would ever be given or become, which was a simple, reflexive belief and not in any way an over-dramatization of events as they occurred, both externally and in my brain.
And when I started this blog that was all I thought about and couldn't write about, not really, because of the person behind those stats, hello, so the posts on here weren't even really openly about what was going on at the time, which makes all the very authentic stuff that's happened to me as a result of this site all the more awesome and serendipitous.
It's thankfully not about a man at all anymore. Today I don't check those stats or any others (which some of my best sources of writerly conscience would remind me is because who the hell reads you if you don't write so why would you need to check on nothing? So yeah we're gonna try to get on that around here.) I also don't censor myself in real life or in print so much anymore in fear of who will read or stick around, or what they'll think about me as a result of it. There's nothing I can do about that anymore. There was, actually, nothing I could do about that then, but I still thought I was driving this train all alone at the time, which, sorry, none of us ever is.
So I'm better. I don't know how or exactly when it happened, whether it was journalism school ending or my grandmother dying (because when you lose someone so elemental to your existence who would never voluntarily leave you ever you realize that most of the other stuff, it matters so much less, and a person who would isn't meant to stay) or the sudden emergence in my life of a number of absolutely perfect-for-me people in various quarters or maybe it's all the eclipses. Sometimes I think it's just time rewearing a new route through my neural pathways, to cut the counter-productive, played-out bullshit ones off at the knees. (That's a wreck of a metaphor but I'm leaving it.)
You know, I don't know, and honestly I don't really care. I'm just grateful. I'm so grateful that after years of anti-depressants alternately saving me and kicking my ass (because they came along when I desperately needed the curtains to open so I could see some alternatives where there hadn't been any but I am terribly non-compliant with any kind of medication and with these, for me, it was part of the "I feel better I don't need you although you made me feel better in the first place" game), and off and on- with therapists who didn't really get it beyond that they liked the way I told stories and finally one who completely got it and I believe, in a few hours of discussion, helped my head, that I am not miserable. I'm not (entirely) manic and I don't obsess over my problems to the point that I can't act. I'm conscious of goals and somewhat able to complete them. Every funny thing I think or say isn't an exercise in darkness or sarcasm, which was the case for awhile there. I don't cry every week, much less every day, except for when I hear a song or see something in real life that appropriately triggers it (i.e. the difference between mistakenly coming across the Leader of the Band (shut up.) on the radio and crying real tears or, conversely, just weeping out of nowhere at work because that's how my body needed to process unprocessable emotions. Important distinctions.)
Speaking of that, I can really listen to music again, which is huge, because for awhile there I couldn't handle the places it took me, and whereas I'd still go out and listen because I can't not, I didn't have the ongoing relationship to it that is essential to my life because I couldn't swing the triggers.
I am thrilled by depression's absence, to the point that the normal both acutely and chronically upsetting stuff that's woven into every day is manageable now. When you've felt existentially unable to function, like the ground is going to open up and swallow you or you don't really want to die but you just kind of wish you didn't exist without needing to act in any way to end your life, when you need to medicate yourself with something in order to simply make it to the next block on the calendar, I don't see how you can look at being content without feeling incredibly grateful for the simple absence of pain. I'm not arrogant about it - I know with 12-step acuity that on any day, around any corner, the bad place could open up again, although I'm thinking that I have some coping skills now that will make it less likely to take over in such a comprehensive, long-standing way. I just take every minute of it now. I'd pay for it. I kinda did.
This really has nothing obviously directly to do with where I've been for the past several days, but in lots of ways it's inseparable from my ability to experience these things now. Because you know, today I can look you in the eye with minimal need to mask my panic that I'll say the wrong thing, like, every time. And although I might wake up and think, God, I was a pain in the ass, or worry that all I did say were the wrong things (so many of us are too hard on ourselves, I think) I can shut my own shit down long enough to listen to your story without being too distracted to take it in and I can trust myself, from this place of relative contentment like I haven't experienced in my adult life, to tell you mine in a more constructive, maybe collaborative way. I don't have to control so much, although I'll always want to control a lot of it, let's face it. Bottom line, I can hear you (the lot of you, the so many of you that I'll be getting around to naming in a few days because I can't not, not this year because you're too important to how this is all playing out) and not completely freak out at the prospect of you hearing me. I think that means we all sound pretty good.
(Image courtesy of best conference roommate ever and very good friend, GenieAlisa, who also wrote one of the most beautiful things about me - in a larger context - that I've ever read, which is one of the reasons I'm so stupidly lucky at this point in my life. I cannot tell you what those words meant to me, and I thank you from the bottom of my messy little heart. It loves you. You are going to be the best mom.)
I think that all of this collectively means I'm back in the game, and somehow I needed to state that for the record before I moved along here. We'll see how it goes.
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