Love

Marking Time

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Another year. Today, like last year on this date, I reflect on where I have been and where I am now.

Last year, however, I was in California facing the real possibility that a person I love and admire would lose her life to cancer. It felt completely unfair, because disease does not care about fairness, and that piece of her experience, discussed in private moments, over tea and toast with Marmite, that part of us that wants there to be reason and rationale for the horrible things that occur, struck me then, and now, as the element of my own path with depression (oh, and life generally) with which I struggle.

Deep gratitude to my family, my partner, and most of all my friends, who have listened and helped me through the darkest moments, or the times when I was stuck in a loop of pointless thinking, unable to get out of my own way, unable to release worries that cannot serve me. Deep gratitude to my therapist, who has seen me through times when I could not articulate complete thoughts, through blind rage, tears that do not stop, and sees me now, as we move into a new place where I may actually find some understanding, not of my reactions to various things (we work on that all the damn time), but what is at the root.

What I know about myself is that I do believe there are reasons for most things in our lives. I don’t mean in a transcendent sense, though perhaps that too, but in that sense that we all have things we choose not to or cannot face, and those experiences, relationships, or memories, do impact how we live. Maybe you are someone for whom this does not apply, however, I’ve yet to meet someone with that much clarity or unity to their life. We’re all imperfect and life gives us some scary shit to bear. Leonard Cohen said it best, ” There is a crack, a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything), / That’s how the light gets in” I feel I am ready to look at those cracks a bit closer and maybe find where they begin.

This last year has held so much change and letting go. I am not living the life I thought I would be; I’ve had to accept that some things will not be. I have pushed boundaries for myself. I have been intolerant and patient. I have been angry and have felt my heart open in unexpected and welcome ways. I have faced moments when my mood has dictated my actions and others where I have exercised control. Most importantly, I have felt all of these things and faced my life with strength that I did not possess two years ago.

This is me today:

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Reminder: Love

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I have been trying to put pen to paper since I learned the hard truth of what is happening in your life right now. When I picture you it is always your kindness I recall first, and your beautiful smile, and what a good friend you were to me almost twenty years ago when we first met. You were brave then, and like me, growing braver, as you learned to manage and release the things which had made it necessary to be brave, early in life.

So I know that you are brave now and I know that you are strong. But when you are not, please know that you are always loved — and within that love — you are brave and strong when you cannot be.

Life gives us reminders sometimes, with difficulty and heartache, which help us to see that there is more to be thankful for, in drawing breath, in shedding tears, in grief and love, because we are given another opportunity. The chance to feel again, and more.

Depression takes away the awe that these momentary reminders inspire by removing the variation, robbing one of the grief or gratitude, greying the love and dulling the joys.

A year ago, had I received news of a friend’s battle with cancer, I don’t know that I would have been able to feel everything that I feel now. I am not sure I would have been able to rise out of the dark void depression created, to feel fear, and shock, and deep gratitude for the community we have cultivated these last two decades.

The fact that I can feel now, and that these feelings come in waves and are true, and hard, makes this living I am doing very precious. I will take this welling and difficulty all day long.

Gratitude

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This afternoon I will drive to Maine with my family to spend the week with my parents, my siblings and their families. In the wake of what has been a very trying, chaotic and dark, and in the same moment, transitional month, I am looking forward.

An old friend suggested keeping a gratitude list to help in times when it is easier to believe life is dominated by sadness and failure, when it is most difficult to see out of the emptiness. From this space of love for family and Maine summers, I can see quite clearly what I have to be grateful for today.

I am grateful for compassion – for myself and others.

I am grateful for quiet

I am grateful for notebooks and deluxe-micro uni-ball pens

I am grateful for hands that can create and show affection

I am grateful for the ability to write and speak true things

I am grateful for small dogs

I am grateful to be surrounded by profound honesty and love that is present even when I am not

I am grateful for the powers greater than my depression – for the ocean, morning stillness, birds and their songs.

Next week I will begin the work of finding a therapist and wellness. There is nothing linear about this process and I expect missteps and frustration as well as relief and hope. And to be in a place where hope is something I can imagine is also a gratitude.

This is me today:

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Deadline

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Sometimes it is necessary to set a deadline in life. We spend a good deal of time anticipating “the moment” when we will be ready for something to happen: new work, new space to live, children, love. We expect, perhaps foolishly, that when that arbitrary time arrives we will be ready. For example, when I was in my early twenties, I thought that by the time I was in my late twenties I would be ready to have children. Never mind that my romantic relationships had been less than healthy, or that I was still quite clueless about what I wanted to do for work, I felt that twenty-six seemed like a perfect age to become a mother. Fortunately for me and my maybe baby, nothing lined up to make that a reality.  I was ending a damaging relationship that had dragged on several years too long, beginning graduate school, and moving to a new city. More than that, I was starting to change the way I viewed my life and I was reasonably happy with those changes. The happiness factor, turns out, was the essential part of transforming the right time into the not quite yet time.

It has been more than ten years since I was that young woman and I realize I could stand to take a lesson from her. She called off an engagement because her gut told her it was the right thing to do. She applied to a graduate program at a school she had always longed to attend because her gut told her it was the right thing to do. She moved to a city she had loved from the first moment she visited because…well, you see where this is going. In the space of one year, she transformed her life, which had not been a happy one for some time, into doing and being something she felt proud of and safe within. She took a risk that her body did not reject and that her mind and heart responded to with joy and excitement. She was smart back then and I am proud of her now.

When I made the decision to move from Maine to New Jersey it was the hardest decision I have made since I was twenty-six. No joke. I have moved cross-country in the intervening years, been diagnosed with depression and attended therapy, left all of my closest friends on the west coast, been alone in a life I never expected to have in Maine, but the several months leading up to moving from Maine to New Jersey were harder than any of that. What made this decision so hard was that I tried to let my heart lead and chose to pay less attention to my gut. Sometimes what our guts say feels like fear and does not feel particularly trust-worthy. Sometimes we want to believe that we’ve had so much to fear, been hurt so many times, that our gut is just reacting to all that baggage. I think that may be a mistake; guts care less about our history than we think. And hearts are hopeful in ways both endearing and dangerous. Sometimes we end up with our guts in a knot because of all the acrobatics they have been doing trying to get us to listen. This is problematic for anyone, but coupled with depression brain, it can be downright sickening.

I am making a promise to my twenty-six year old self and to my gut. I am setting a deadline. You are going to hear about this probably more than you’d like in the next two months, because aside from the friends I talk to on the phone and through social media, you are what I’ve got for a daily companion. Which is perhaps better than nothing. I am trying to see the good in being here. I am trying to remember what it is that made me think moving here would be something I could feel good about. I am trying to find a way to be proud of myself again. I am trying.

Naming

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“Is that your mom?” J, the friendliest of The Girl’s new school pals whispers to her while I stand two feet away, waiting for one of the classroom assistants to usher their giggling, jumping, push and shove 2nd grade line into the building. I pretend not to hear, picking dog hair from my sweatshirt.
“No! That’s Sarah. She’s just my dad’s girlfriend.”
It’s the just I want to talk about.
I grew up with my parents. Both of them. Together. This was rare among my friends, though not as rare as it might be today. I was about The Girl’s age, which is seven, when I realized my best friend’s parents, who had three kids together, were not married. I remember how baffling that was for me. How could they have children, be called “Mom and Dad” if they were not married? I grew up Catholic with rather traditional ideas about family and this realization – that marriage wasn’t what created children, but something more mysterious – opened up the world to me in interesting and important ways.
I think it was the beginning of a greater realization for me that names and naming are important. We differentiate our friends and best friends, acquaintances, great and great-great grandparents, cousins, brothers and sisters, half-brothers and step-sisters – we use these terms because they hold a place for a particular person in the larger narrative of our lives. Sometimes names bring us better understanding of those relationships; sometimes naming makes it easier to understand relationships that are not easy to join to the already seemingly complete story of our families. I think this is particularly true for children, which is why I cut The Girl and myself at seven some slack for being limited to just naming.
My own process of understanding larger concepts of family and friendship became more complicated when I was a young adult. I attended college in the Northwest and stayed in that area of the country through my early thirties. My entire family is in the Northeast. I spent holidays with friends, I have nieces and nephews who are not my blood kin, I have at least one young woman in my life who considers me her second Mama. Love is the building of long lasting relationships with people outside of the traditional family and love is complicated. Even my relationships with my siblings has travelled a path of transition; I know my sister in ways that are far more rich and meaningful than the label “sister” implied when we were young. The richness and reward of complicated relationship understanding is the point of maturity, I think. But hearing that just from The Girl still stung.
When I first moved to New Jersey, maybe the first weekend I was here, we took the kids to the beach. The water was, well into October, still warmer than the bays of Maine ever get in the summer. The Boy and his father were triumphantly battling their way through the waves, while The Girl and I hung back on shore. The power of the water here surprised me. A strong swimmer and life long lover of all things Oceanic, I wanted to feel courageous in the face of an undertow that continually knocked me on my ass. I wanted to swim out past the breakers, but I was also aware that The Girl was feeling apprehensive about the water. She, like me, has never lived in New Jersey. She, like me, was born in Maine. These crashing waves, deceptively powerful and sometimes taller than they seem, were making two otherwise brave Mainer girls move with caution. We were finding ways to amuse ourselves, playing chicken with the waves as they broke, burying our feet in the wet sand, laughing and chasing each other along the shore. At one point, she turned to me, wrapped her arms around my waist and with joy nearing ecstasy cried: “I love you!” It took my breath. It takes my breath now in recollection.
We are at a beginning, trying to sort through what we know in each of our lives. I have been loved before, but not like this. I have had many names, with or without a just to differentiate them from another. So perhaps the sting I felt initially is just a piece of this new love and not a limitation.