A Palimpsest of Soul and Skin

Sometimes creating one's own momentum is the only way to start working one's way out of a depressive episode. Yup—I've been depressed. Like, actually depressed. As someone who has been clinically depressed for pretty much the entirety of my life, it's too easy to see depression as the normal way to live. It's easy to forget what it feels like to just feel centered and balanced and just okay. Not exhilarated. Not over the moon ecstatic. Just...okay. In general. Without feeling like everyday life is rubbing my nerves raw in a persistent, insidious way, making everything gray and achey and foggy and sluggish and difficult and muddled.  Granted, this hasn't been a great winter. Between being *really* sick in November, and the lack of light and the "goings-on" in January—experiencing the illness, hospitalization and death of my grandmother, I've totally lost my stride. And it's been dawning on me: I see the signs:  —I've barely b...

Well...asleep by 10:45 p.m., awake at 4:30 a.m. after hours of vivid melatonin dreams. I may just get up and *stay* up now and see if I can actually keep reasonable hours. There's much I want to do, and losing the day to catch up on sleep always leaves me feeling rather defeated.

It just hit me: in the last year—if not longer—I'd have a daily sense of anticipation and anxiety that I'd receive a phone call from my mom saying that something had happened to Granny—that she'd taken sick or died. I carried that fear around for a long time. In fact, I think I've carried that fear around for decades. It became a habitual thing, that anticipatory grief. I just had that old sensation once again, like feeling around for a tooth that I used to wiggle, but finding only space. It's very disorienting. Anticipatory grief has done me no good; I certainly don't feel more prepared for this loss, and it only stretched out the sadness over the years.