The Long and Winding Road
On the way up |
Walking up the Road |
Heading up the road this morning, my blood feels like clay. No flow, and many unanswered questions banging around in my mind. I’m a bit terrified because this was one of the symptoms my severely depressed friend complained about. “Thick blood, and feeling like being stuck in a bubble”. I go back in time to the many walks I took with her in order to cheer her up, pull her out, have some laughs. None of which worked. I was watching a light in my life, one of the main lights, dim and keep dimming, and I didn’t like it. Nothing to do. Now, when I feel under the weather and sort of depressed, I usually go back to thinking how my friend must have felt or she may still feel today.
A close relative once pulled me aside to ask me to please listen to “these CD’s about depression”. He told me he was depressed and he thought I was too. “A generational thing”. I was able to say “No, thank you, I will not take on your depression. It’s all yours”. At the time, I was in the middle of a break up of my marriage and I was sad. I was feeling loss. And yes, was probably depressed. After this depression, diagnoses, encounter, I felt so much anger. It was in the anger that I saw I was able to feel. It was in these guts of mine saying, “no”, that proved to me I am on my own path, and as much as it might be depressed, I am going to feel every bit of it.
Then there is the SAD Seasonal Affective Disorder which I wonder about now, after not seeing the sun for a few days, and knowing this is just the beginning of the season. I can feel what some of my Seattle/Portland friends have talked about. The food thing too. I am buying organic, but does trucked from California count? It doesn’t feel like it does. Down to the health food store for a quick lunch doesn’t happen here- neither socially nor healthily. Stolen hours, which I was accustomed, on a rock in the sun at the California trailhead, aren’t happening either.
The Long and Winding Road |
This subject of depression is interesting, because as I started this post with being “terrified” of noticing the symptoms, I realize the true fear of depression which I actually have. Weather it being me, as a sponge, soaking up others’ feelings or the environment’s affects, who wants to feel clay for blood. I don’t, yet at the same time, when it comes up I don’t want to deny it. I recall Thomas Moore’s The Care Of The Soul‘s one chapter on depression. My introduction to the idea that depression is a gift.
Yes, a gift when, if I’m not so afraid of it, I allow it to happen. In the meantime, I notice the wonderful and tricky part about depression is that a simple sweat up the hill usually nips it.
And, today, walking back down the hill, I hear myself singing The Long And Winding Road….bum….bum…..bum…..bum………dummmmmmm.
Now, is that being depressed?
Back down to town |