Just nipped in to pick up the mail. Did a little tour of the neighborhood, knocked on some of your doors, even. Nice to see familiar names and pictures; bummer to see some of the same storylines. Then, depression is an inertial condition. This has been my own experience this very year. Having cut back on many of my old time-wasting strategies (like spending massive amounts of time online), I'm still plagued by the toxic sense thatthere simply aren't enough minutes in the day–the biggest time-robber of all, as it prevents me from dropping deep into the moment, making me dangle instead in a flexed-arm hang from its sharp rim, eyes popped for anything else that might need doing. In other words, I'm rarely where I am, with the result that I don't feel really and truly alive, and am only 1/8 as useful on this planet as I could be.
I see this tendency of mine, however, and so am at least in a position to begin addressing it. That's something. But do I want to address it? Seriously. Call it inertia, call it resistance, call it the comforting cave of habit, the fact is, these past four months have brought me face to face with the part of me who doesn't want to lose my depression, who finds it safe, comforting, familiar, "just the way I am." Knowing how homeostatic the human organism is, I've always been sure that this status quo-ite was in me, locking swords with the parts of me that want adventure, change, success; but I hadn't seen her so starkly in action until I discovered something that helped me feel better, used it to great effect for about three weeks, and then watched her find all sorts of reasons why I shouldn't stick with it. Once I caught on, I urged myself back onto the healing path, but then began sabotaging myself with food and alcohol (nothing tromps down on my depression's gas pedal like sugar). When I twigged to this pattern, I again talked myself over to center, my body pushing back every inch of the way.
I was about to begin another try-quit cycle when I found a lump in one of my breasts. I knew that statistics were squarely on the side of its being benign, but I had it checked anyway. (I'd been having pain and swelling in one of my armpits, and had had to go on a dread course of antibiotics when the pain started traveling down the inside of my arm toward my elbow.) Unfortunately, the doctor's exam wasn't as conclusive as either one of us would've liked, so in I went for an ultrasound. Those findings, too, were questionable, so: biopsy time. That was a Thursday afternoon, and I was slated to go away for the weekend with my boyfriend's family. And here I do have to acknowledge some "progress." The old me would've stayed home and built a firewall of worry around myself (we all know that worrying maniacally about something keeps it from happening, no?), and in fact J was very sympathetic to the idea of our staying in town and having a quiet weekend if that's what I chose; my wishes trended in another direction, however. I finally saw that worrying accomplishes absolutely fuck all, burned a Vonnegut and some Paul Theroux interviews onto a disc for our drive, and for the next three days did my best to keep my thoughts out of the grove of past guilts and future fearsand in the clearing of the present moment. I didn't always succeed, but still, experienced a string of minor revelations: the feel of the bubbles in the California methode champenoise served in the bar versus those in the prosecco we had for dinner; the demonic flowers of the casino carpet; the deep, unshowy affection of J's sister and brother-in-law; the white noise of the hotel at 3 in the morning, and the bafflingly regular sneezes of a man several rooms away; the long, straight drawcords of the Atlantic waves, pulling in towards the shore; the feel of beach wrack under the soles of my fivefingers; the typeface of Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands; the pain at the biopsy site; the quality of my own insomniac fear (simultaneously honed and dulled by a cephalopodic hangover).
It's been awhile since I listened to the Dave Matthews Band, but the Ecclesiatical refrain from their song "Tripping Billies" kept surfacing in my mind:
Eat, drink and be merry
For tomorrow we die
