When I named this file, it was very, very strange to start it with three zeros. It looks wrong, but I'll get used to it.
Right now, I feel like something needs to change. I have a restlessness now that December is over, an urge to rearrange things and see if I like the rocking chair over in the other corner. I've been wrestling with a recalcitrant table all afternoon and it's been really chapping my hide, but it's something more than that. I can't tell right at the moment if it's because something is wrong or because, simply, it's time for changes.
I'm sitting here, drinking water, and staring moodily at the screen. There is a tension between myself and the place I'd like to be, one that's gotten more pronounced in the past few days. November and December are all about sliding into holes, hibernating, disappearing. They are about the end of one of the calendars I live by and what happens when light is taken away from me. I whimper, pity myself, and don't do much of anything to change it.
Bzzt. Wrong response, kid.
So January is about starting over, about taking that tension and using it to snap myself up and out of depression. November and December are valuable; they are a resting time, a time to send down deep roots, a time to listen to and appreciate silence. There is a terrible beauty to my black moods, even uncomfortable as they are. I hate admitting it at this stage of my life, but the fascination with my own capacity for self-absorbed navel-gazing and self-pity still exists. It's a wonderfully compelling thing, feeling like a half-amused observer in my own life, watching the critter with skanky tangled hair and broken fingernails scuff her way to the surface.
But it's only interesting for so long. Eventually, I get tired of the bad poetry and the urge to drink more red wine than I really ought. I get tired of the grandiosity of my own unhappiness. It wears on my nerves much faster than it wears on anyone else's, I think, mostly because I'm closest to it, and I can hear the echoing thoughts in my own head when I pause long enough to listen.
I think I needed to get it out of my system; to get through it and prove to myself that I could experience depression (the irony that it's called 'the common cold of the human psyche' has never escaped me) without completely falling to pieces.
I did that for thirteen years. Thirteen! That's just over half of my entire life, and I spent it *sniveling*. Okay, I wasn't exactly sniveling, I was coping as best I could with a physical illness that made my life unpleasant at best. And I managed to get quite a lot done, too—high school and college and starting a career, with a number of interesting relationships in there.
Restlessness is a good thing. Restlessness means that the energy needed to change has arrived and simply needs to be put to work.
And the sun is out, for a little bit. I stood at the window down the hall and let my skin soak up a few rays.It refilled my reservoir of faith that everything is going to be all right. I feel much better, now.
The light is coming back, we're now a couple of weeks out from the solstice, and as I oh-so-sagely predicted a couple of months ago, once the days start lengthening again, all becomes right with the world.
And through this I've realized that just as the healthy me is worthy of praise and love, so is the depressed critter with dirt under her fingernails from scrabbling at the ground. She snarls and lurks, she's like Witch Baby, picking at herself and the world in an attempt to figure out where she belongs in it. If you look at her long enough, she's got long fingers and lovely purple eyes, but she doesn't like to let anyone get too close.But she thinks a lot more about the world than the healthy me. She watches people on the slant. She's honest, at least, about her discomfort. She has resources that the healthy me doesn't need. She takes more chances because she has less to lose. And she can be charming, when she wants to be.
I can feel her under my skin, sometimes, itchy and dirty and uncertain.
And there's an important part of being human, I think. The ability to feel that, and realize it's not the end of everything.
how goes the war?
preparing for celebration
