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

2 replies
  1. Christine Brennan
    Christine Brennan says:

    oh don’t try and sugar coat it baby. Sounds crappy to me to me no mater how you choose to label, frame or try and make ‘thought’ sense of it.
    Sometimes things- life- just feels sucky, the only thing that helped me is the knowing that it is not my true state and it will not last forever. (sort an emotional flu). And of course Monday breakfast was always something to help me when I needed it. I hope you have a bit of check-in. Pick up the phone anytime you need. I am ALWAYS here

    Reply

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