depression

Christ almighty. Every year. Every! year! I do this.

The past week I have felt a variety of things, most of them not great. I have felt delicate, wonky, off the rails, anxious, sad. I've seen that black hole of "you can't do this" open up in front of me twice now in the past week, and I was just barely able to pull myself from the brink of it last night. Tuesday I fell in completely, limbs akimbo.

I've gotten pretty good at soothing myself over the years. Learned how to slice through the crazy talk to deal with what is actually bothering me. It's a lot more efficient to work that way, I've found and a lot more pleasant for everyone involved.

But Tuesday, especially, I tried. I tried and tried. All the tricks in all my books. But the whirling staticky ball of anxiety in my chest wouldn't disperse. Everything I was thinking sounded manic and crazy even inside my head. But I couldn't stop thinking all those everythings. And then I started crying. At work.

My room is beautiful in the mornings. I love it. It's painted sky blue and faces east, so the light is bright but gentle after being filtered through the curtains. I have a hard time getting out of bed. I like to lie there and look at the ceiling and look at the curtains. Freya comes for pets and cuddling and to drool on me. I let my mind wander and pay attention to where it lands and what it chews on.

This morning it occurred to me that it's the end of June. Every year, the end of June surprises me. The beginning of July is when I tried to kill myself. And every year at the end of May I think, well it's been a long time now, it's really not a big deal any more, it probably won't be a problem this year. And this year, too, I thought I'd be safe because I have a really fun trip to Montreal planned with d.jack for the beginning of July.

But oh, bodies. What we put them through. What they hold on to.

It's normal to hate yourself every once in a while, isn't it? Everyone does, don't they?

Anyway, I think it's normal.

Maybe that's because I spent enough years hating myself so fiercely and pervasively that a few hours every now and again, feels, well, awful and sad, but also eminently manageable.

It's no surprise, either, that the self-hatred gets played out through my body. It's no secret that when women become enraged, ashamed, worried, guilty, they often don't push those emotions out into the world, but focus all that swirling insane metaphysical mess on the physical mess our culture tells us our bodies already are. The ant under the magnifying glass.

Because hating my body yesterday has little, maybe nothing, to do with how I look. A couple of weeks ago, I was pretty happy with my body. Perhaps not loving that a pair of pants I've had for four or five years - my baggy jeans - are now pretty tight, but okay with the general state of things.

Then the holidays.

Three days of shrinking myself smaller and smaller inside my skin, three days of sitting to make my joints and muscles stiff, a new year to point out how much I haven't gotten done, as well as frustration that I just can't buckle down; that I am seemingly unable write more than one non-blog related piece a year; of realizing that you know what, fuck, I don't want to be single, but fucking fuck, I become miserably clingy and needy when I'm coupled and so yes, I am just going to have to damn well get used to this uncomfortable internal in between push-pull frustration that means. I don't know. Probably something very meaningful. And single.

Then winter making it hard for me to push myself outside and into exercise. I worry a bit about it, the exercise, that my push is sometimes too hard. The amount I exercise could easily turn into yet another way to punish myself.

I watch that pretty closely, used to be careful to take at least a day or two off a week.

But over the past month, the day or two has turned into two or three, has turned into three or four. Has turned into nothing, last week. I haven't been out for another snowshoe, I haven't been out for a run.

It's brutal for me, missing that time outside, the moments of exhilaration. The black branches limned by an orange sunset down the icy runnel of Gilmour; the cove made by the evergreen branches on Queen Elizabeth, its snow cover sparkling down behind me when I tap the branches just above my head; or, when I'm lucky, the water, the water, and the thick wind off it.

Jokingly, a few weeks ago, I said to someone (Jennifer? Shelley? Paul?) that running was my medicine. Except I wasn't really joking. Going from 4 or 5 days of exercise a week to none gives me a panicky off-my-meds feeling.

Not too surprising, since it's pretty well known that exercise helps your brain as well as your body. They don't know how, exactly, but I don't really care exactly, so long as I don't look down at my stomach and feel like clawing four red streaks across it.

But blah blah blah.

I'm feeling better. Mostly. I still wish my old jeans fit.

But I had a good yoga class this morning, followed by a delicious lunch with Shelley, who then helped me buy a scandalously slinky dress to wear tomorrow night. Then a fast cold invigorating walk home, a low waning moon cupping the darkening sky, some bright planet, unblinking, to its left and up. That cleared out a lot of the cobwebs. Then pad thai and beer with Jennifer and Shy Dog.

Now home, in my lovely home, my cold feet tucked under me, half way through a pot of tea. Joie de vivre, indeed.

Christine is mad for the podcasts. She listens to them while she does her logic puzzles.*

Yesterday, she wandered downstairs to tell me about a science one where some cardiovascular guy was talking about how if you listen to your favourite song it will expand your blood vessels as if you've done an aerobic workout and make you very happy. But only if you don't listen to it more than once every two weeks. Any more than that, the desensitization sets in.

Today, this afternoon, after the market and the Herb and the Hartmans, I was puttering, cleaning for dinner, chopping for dinner, sifting for dinner, my iTunes providing the background. She was feeling a bit blue, with the hormones, with the grey sky and impending winter. I was trying to be entertaining. She was lying herself out on the couch.

"Is there anything I can do?" I asked.
"No, no."
"You sure? Tea? Food? Hot toddy?"
"Oh, yes maybe."

That helped somewhat, the whisky and the cloves and the lemon. I kept on with the cleaning and the chopping. She was a muddier and muddier puddle every time I look over.

"Oh chicken. I feel terrible. Are you sure there's nothing I can do?"
"No," she sighed. "There's really nothing. Exercise would help, but I'm not prepared for that here. I need to get my light box out when I get home. But thank you."

The song changed. Moved seamlessly from one angular and melodiously melancholic song to another. The light bulb above my head went on.

"If you could listen to any song in the world, what song would it be? What song would expand your blood vessels?"

In short order, Rubberband Man was coming through the speakers. She was up off the couch almost immediately. As it was ending, she hauled out her iPod and off we went. When Shelley and Steve got here for dinner, we had a dance party in the kitchen. Chris was smiling and laughing and neither puddly nor muddy at all.

The moral of this story? If your dear dear friend has the random sads alongside wicked fierce seasonal affective disorder, don't be confused as she gets more and more deflated as an album called Autumn of the Seraphs winds through a darkening mid-November afternoon. No, dear internet, at that point you should know that it is time to get out the funk.

*1) Yes, you read that right. 2) That tickles me to no end. While I can deduce that there are other people who do logic puzzles, as evidenced by the giant website she uses to get her fix I do not personally know of any others. Though maybe I know dozens, and they're all too embarrassed to admit it. Fear not! my logicians, for your kind is a kind I love.

I took Monday off to recover from Sunday. What a fucking day that was. Like my heart - the current locus of human emotion - had floated up to my skin and was rubbing itself raw, trying to get out.

Early Monday morning, I dreamt that I was at my granny and poppa's house, the house that is the place I think of when I want to feel safe.

It had been razed. Everything from the ground up was gone, just a foundation made of red brick, which is strange, since the house was grey brick. The white wrought iron furniture was there too, on the patio stones in front, the red cushions faded uneven pink. In the dream, I was happy I was able to take a brick home as a momento, but I woke up feeling lost.

I went for a run, got to see a blue heron. I finished a piece of writing that had been hanging over my head. I stood in the sun. Shelley and I shopped and ate Mexican food. Come evening, I had shaken off the sad.

If nothing else, days like that make me grateful I am 33, not 23, when days like that were good ones.

N.B. Eric! This is partially about how I'm continuing to process our break up. I don't say anything bad about you at all, but it might make you uncomfortable to know the painful details.

For many years, I didn't keep acetaminophen in the house. I didn't trust myself to have them around.

Yesterday was the 12th anniversary of the day I tried to kill myself by taking an overdose. I've written about this before, so I'll spare you those details.

I'm not sure if it's the fact that I made an attempt that shook me so much.

I'd been deeply depressed for months: I weighed 103 pounds, I wasn't eating enough to keep that up, I was sleeping 15 hours a day to avoid being awake, I was on anti-depressants, I was seeing two therapists, I was crying all the time, I'd already been to the hospital because I'd stabbed myself in the leg, I'd been having suicidal ideations for weeks. That I might try was certainly no surprise to me. That I did try?

My ex and I were having one of our huge knock-down fights that he wouldn't remember the next day. We were in our office, what had once been a dining room. I screamed something, I can't remember what, and ran out of the room, down the hall, to the bathroom, shut the door and locked it behind me.

I must have made the decision in the 4 steps between the office and the kitchen, because I grabbed a glass along the way.

That was the extent of my planning. A cup off the counter on the way to the pills.

That I hadn't planned it was a good thing to most of the doctor-types I ended up talking to. I suppose it meant I was less serious about it, that suicide as a real solution hadn't yet taken deep root.

Maybe that was good. But it left me with yet another reason not to trust myself.

Eventually, maybe 8 years later, I bought my first bottle of tylenol. But only a little one, only with about 20 pills in it. Nothing untoward ever happened. 12 years later, I fully trust myself with any kind of pills. Never occurs to me to take one, maybe two, other than when I'm in serious discomfort.

Reading this over, I'm realizing that you're probably waiting for me to make an explicit link about being dumped by Eric and suicidal ideation. Happily, the tangent is much more obtuse than that.

What that break up left me with is an inability to trust love in a way that feels very similar to how I was unable to trust my desire to be alive.

I know Eric loved me very much, to start. I believe, to end, that he wanted to love me as much as he had for those first few months. But he couldn't.

It was there, and then it was gone.

And that was that.

Even at the start, I knew our deal might be too good to be true. But I let myself go, really let myself fall into him, into us, thinking that I was strong and could handle whatever came.

I could, I did, I have; but the price was really more than I could afford.

Now, when someone acts like they like me, I feel myself curling my arms around the small hoard of coins I have left. This person can think I'm hot, funny, smart, blah blah blah. That's great. I love that. Who doesn't love that? But the moment I get even a hint of someone having actual romantic feelings for me, something inside seizes up, twisting around fast enough that it folds over on itself into an impenetrable knot.

Who knows, maybe in 8 years I'll be able to trust romance enough to keep it in the house.

In the summer of 2006, a few weeks before I told my ex I didn't want to live with him any more, I developed a cyst on my left wrist. It wasn't huge, but it was noticeable: I've a clear memory of being in Grace and Greg's living room on a yellowed August afternoon. I'm sitting on a chair, leaning forward, my elbows on my knees and my hands hanging loose between them. Grace is several feet across the room.

"What's that on your wrist?" she asks.
"That," I say, "is what I'm not saying."

A week or so later, he and I were walking beside the empty lot on Preston Street, cooling off after another screaming match. Sand and milkweed desert colours beside us, smelling like straw in the heat. I told him I thought it best we not live together. Or rather, I agreed with him when he said it, and then didn't take it back when he balked.

Within two days, the cyst was gone.

You know, I've never really doubted the mind-body connection, but that's the first experience that gave me proof. As soon as I saw that cyst, I knew exactly what it was. Why it was there? No. Though the cyst part is obvious, I should hope, I'm not exactly sure what correlation there was between my left wrist and not moving out. But there was never a shred of doubt in my mind that that bump was my words. It was an unassailable internal truth.

++

I have been not crying for weeks. Since I found out about my grandmother being sick, actually. As soon as I heard that, through email, I got down to the business of making plans, not crying - what was there to cry about? She was okay, wasn't she? She'd lived a good long life, hadn't she? The only time I came close to crying was after saying goodbye to her, standing in the parking lot with my sister and father. And I sucked the tears up, because it felt like they would have been a burden, unseemly, and I didn't want Amy and Dad to have to take care of me, since they didn't seem all that fazed.*

There have been other things over the past few weeks that have added to my store of sadness, but every time I've had that lump in my throat, I would think - no, not now - and my throat would tighten and release, this time tear free.

Then two Sundays ago, I was getting fucked, hard. And I came. Hard.

You know how some people laugh when they come? I'm a crier - doesn't happen all the time, but it's happened before and it feels good, like it's part of the come and the tail end of letting go.

So I started crying. But it wasn't the usual crying, a few tears, a couple sobs, some hiccups. I disappeared into it. A vivid image of being on the edge of grassy shore, at the edge of a forest, the moon coming up straight ahead, dark water from one side of the horizon to the other. Not rising, not rocking, not wild; smooth and pervasive, hiding god knows what monsters.

Felt like I was falling headlong into it. I stopped crying.

For the first time in a long long time, I had the feeling that if I really started, let go, I might not ever stop, because that water was fucking everywhere and deathly still.

++

My massage last night has to go down as one of my top five most intense physical experiences. Perhaps more intense than the Sunday fucking, if only because there was no orgasm to stop it.

Rob, my massage therapist, is great. He comes to my house, which I love. His massages are not of the happy-relaxy variety, but Kerri warned me about that. I've had a few now, and they really work for me. He finds your shit and he works it. And he can tell a lot about your shit by where and how you're storing it.

I was on my stomach last night, describing the aches and pains left over from spending a bazillion hours in a car: my sacrum, my hamstrings, my calves. He poked and rubbed and prodded and pressed. "A little stressed about being at home, too, maybe?"

Yeah, you could say.

He kept on. I started yelping occasionally as he dug into my calves and the sides of my heels.

"How old are your orthotics? Ten years? You could probably just throw those out."

I flipped over, gingerly. He worked his way up, quick presses here and there, along my sides, up my face, the base of the skull, cracking my ears, feeling along the edges of my chin. And there, under the left side of my jaw, he found a knot, a nut of tension, and he took his fingers from both hands and he pressed in, up.

My first thought: "Those are my tears."

Indeed, within a few seconds a salty fluid was leaking from where he was pressing and down my throat. Not literally tears. I'm sure it that biologically it was something else, but my fuck, metaphorically, that's what they tasted like.

My breathing became erratic, my fingers clenched into the table and my chest heaving in quick bursts. He eased off, but only slightly.

"You just do what you need to do. Take it as far as you can, as far as you feel safe."

And I started bawling. He kept at it, put his finger in my mouth and massaging my jaw from the inside. I cried harder. He made soothing sounds, took one of my hands and moved it so I was gently touching the hand that was breaking down the tears, then was touching my own lips.

I kept crying.

Eventually, he took his hands off my jaw and laid his arms on mine, holding my elbows, holding me together, breathing in what I was breathing out. My lungs calmed, I stopped actively crying, though my eyes were still puffy with the need.

I was a fucking mess.

The last moment before he left, half-way out the door, he put his table back down and turned to me. "I'm going to give you a hug," he said. And did. Held me tight. He breathed quickly: in, push out, in, push out. I could feel that he was trying to absorb and disperse whatever sadness was lingering around me. I held on and let him.

Today hasn't been much better. I feel raw. The fibrous membrane around the cyst is gone, but what's left is the sharpest eye tooth, a snag of tangled hair, and a bloodied mess of ragged nerves.

* They probably were, we probably could have taken care of each other.

Time is running out for the crafting of presents, and somehow I went from 19 stitches to 18 and had to rip out a couple hours work. How the bookmark unravels, I suppose.

As I've mentioned, this week and next are all about the making and baking. I'm not going to divulge all of what I have my hands on and in* because some of the people who are getting that stuff are also reading these words.

I'm really enjoying it, I have to say, though there is some stress involved. Mostly deadline related. I'm not sure I'm going to be ready for Espig Xmas this weekend. It may involve a very late night on Saturday or a very early Sunday morning.

In other news, I concur with Jennifer and cannot wait for my holidays. I've got 10 or 11 days off and it cannot come fast enough.

It's no secret I've had a difficult fall. Problem is, it just seems to be getting worse. I talked to Shelley tonight and she said "Sweetie, you just sound beat down." At least my outside matches my inside, I suppose.

I always think of my ups and downs in terms of light, which is stupidly hokey to write, but feels true. When I'm happy and everything is going well, it feels like I emit streaks of bright light, somewhere on the yellow spectrum. When I'm normal, there's a little glow around me. Right now, I would say that there's a candle in there somewhere, sheltered under a perforated box.

People respond in kind, interestingly. When I'm at my brightest, people smile at me on the street. Probably because I'm smiling at then. When I'm at about where I am now, it's like I'm invisible. People bump into me more, notice me less.

I've read the women's rag self-help blah blah, and know that I should just paste a smile on my face and then my currently fragile ego will be boosted by the goodness that comes back.

But you know, there's not much creepier than a death's head smile backlit by a dull flicker.

When I started yoga nearly a couple of years ago, I didn't expect it to be life-altering. I expected to be able to touch my toes. But I definitely became one of those annoying people newly converted to something and extolling that something's benefits whenever they can.

Jamine was my yoga teacher for a long time and I think she's great. She engages enthusiastically with yoga in all areas of her life, in practical and realistic ways that manage to encompass the spiritual and the humourous at the same time.

She wrote a couple of posts last week that hit me in some kind of right spot. Practice, Practice, Practice struck a particularly loud chord, all notes ringing in the last paragraph:

So don't be attached to your practice but stay committed! There's a difference. Committing will keep you going deeper, allowing you to notice and respect other practices and keep you out of suffering and being attached will, well it may in time lead to misunderstandings and suffering...

I've been muddling through something similar in my head for several weeks now, but couldn't figure out how to phrase it neatly in a digestible form.

As you can probably tell from my blogs lately, I've been in a not-so-happy place. I am finally trying to be just sad - not protective, not defensive - about a sadness I have been carrying with me for many years.

It's fucking hard. I feel breathless and panicked on occasion. It makes me alternate between holding on tight to all the good things I have and wanting to jettison them; both moves poor attempts to stave off loss.

What Jamine expresses up there, the idea of commitment without attachment, is the balance I am looking for, am hopefully passing through mourning towards.

Things are not so hot here, Chez Butch. I wish I meant inside my apartment.* Sadly, I mean inside my skin.

My mind is a bit off, reverting to old patterns I don't much like. Consciously anyway. It's startling to find that a decade after I really stopped hating myself, those neural pathways are not only still there, but feel entirely comfortable and strangely comforting.

Those pathways snake out into the rest of my body, old patterns like veins. Physical manifestations. That feeling like I want to shake myself loose. Like I have ghost fingers itching to claw myself out through my eyes just to breathe outside air a little while. That tense spinning feeling under my breastbone that gears up after I do anything, that throws off crazy-stupid meteorite sentences like Oh I shouldn't have written that, oh, why did I say that, oh, people are gonna be mad at me. That galaxy of anxiety in my sternum whirling just a little faster and my breathing just a little harder.

It makes me full of tears even though I don't feel sad. It makes me think I don't want to eat even though I know I need to. It makes me bone tired.

Luckily, I know how to distract myself pretty well by now. Luckily, I know the nicest people ever, and my friends and paramour have been saying and doing no end of nice and supportive things to and for me.

Also luckily, a few weeks ago I booked an appointment with my wonder-wonderful therapist. At that time, I was feeling mostly fine, but was starting to notice an aura of needless anxiety around my edges. Consciously, I'm surprised the bad feelings have shot into the centre so fast, but you know, I think my fingers knew when they tapped her numbers into the phone.

*Where I have a brand new giant bat poster to hang up, to make up for my lack of flying mammals this summer. Thank you, mysterious present-giver!

My memories of those couple days are, in the main, blurry or non-existent. Only a few images glint their jagged edges out of the murk. When I write them, of course, the details come, but at this point, after the punch drunk feeling of the overdose, after a decade, I’m not sure what is real memory and what my brain has concocted to make a good story.

Curled up in the corner of the hall, the lines and whorls of the hardwood stretched out down the dark hall and the blurry shape of my ex looming out of the shadow as he yelled. What he was yelling is not part of the memory, his voice worn down over the years into a bloated muted trumpet blare.

Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, the door shut tight and locked, a towel jammed into the crack to keep the rattle of the pills in the room. Another three or four pills spilled into my palm, the small plastic cup of water I had to keep filling gripped in my right hand. Everything in that bathroom was white. The bulb was high wattage.

The moment I started throwing up. The thick feeling of half-digested pills scraping my esophagus the wrong way. I would continue to puke every half hour for 12 hours. At 12 hours I was dry heaving and knew it wouldn't stop. I took the streetcar down Bathurst St. to Toronto Western Hospital. I took a big white plastic bowl, held carefully in my lap in case I needed to actually throw up. People looked at me very strangely. I had never taken a cab before. I was not thinking clearly.

My ex sitting on the side of the bed, where I was lying with the lights out a few hours after the puking started. Asking me what I'd been doing in the bathroom. Telling me I needed to go to the hospital. Leaving the room when I said no.

A look in the mirror. The face of a beaten boxer looking back. My face randomly swollen: eyes nearly closed, cheeks misshapen, lips puffy.

Over a bedpan at the hospital, on a gurney in emerge, shaking and crying and asking the one kind doctor if it would ever stop. She rubbed my back and told me it would. I kept retching and finally threw something up. We both stopped still, the micro-movements every body makes momentarily arrested. "What is that?" I gesticulated with my head. "My stomach?" She nodded.

My mother sitting on the chair by the bed, my first night in the hospital. Scared but acting calm. Holding my hand hard.