From my journal for November 25, 1995
The truth is that my ability to express my creativity is very fragile, needs a lot of support and safety and no expectations. This is very painful because at the same time I know/feel a wealth of creative energy pressing to get out. But at the moment, I don’t know how to do it, and I don’t know how to set up support for myself — other than what I’m already doing, i.e. pottery class and circle dance.
November 26
The night before last I was lying there trying to go to sleep, I was in both emotional and physical pain, and instead of getting a Nuprin I tried saying “there there” to myself, and it actually worked to ease the pain. Last night I was having similar difficulties, so I tried to pay attention to what was happening and discovered that there was a lot of tightness in my middle and I was trying to open it up or escape. So I worked at just being with it, at noticing how the tightness inhibited my breathing and pressed on my heart, and it began to ease. I make these notes to remind myself that just “being with” something does seem to make a space that allows it to change. I don’t have to be always frantically trying to make something happen, and it doesn’t mean that I will be stuck with something unpleasant if I stop trying to make it go away. I see that this is beginning a practice of “being with”, beginning with things that are relatively easy. Perhaps if I keep practicing, I’ll be able to one day ‘be’ with the noise of the planes. (One went by yesterday, a distant sound, but I felt my heart close up, I felt completely frozen and stuck, and it was very scary and discouraging. But I see that I am too overwhelmed to even try to “be with” it, I need to get further along with the practice.)
My plan for today is to go up to the hut and paint a big piece of paper black, green, and purple so I can make a fright wig for the Lady of the Black Lagoon. I got two tarps yesterday, the plastic and paper kind, so that’s the last obstacle removed.
This is the first mention of the “Lady of the Black Lagoon.” I wonder if this is an expression of “celebrating the depression.” I do wish I had a picture.
I like the idea of celebrating the depression instead of fighting it. Did I ever finish writing about the gifts that I see? That the depression has forced me into a place where life looks so bleak, and accomplishment so impossible, and the future so uninhabitable, that I am actually considering building a sound-proof room and spending my time in there making — no playing around with collage projects — just the lowest scale, most “useless” pretense at creativity that I cam imagine. Instead of saying “But it’s self-indulgent, other people can’t afford to retreat like this, blah, blah, blah…” I say “Why not? I can’t do anything else.” And as for worrying about having money for the future, that seems ridiculous. I can always climb the mountain and go to sleep. So there’s some sense of being brought back to the question “What is really important in my life?” and being reminded, as in the aftermath of Fiona’s death, that what counts is the quality of daily life, the little blessings, the people, animals, and things I love. This is harder than that time, because Fiona’s death made the little things shine out with great clarity, there was light within the pain. Depression feels like there is no light at all, and even the pain is too dull to remind me that I’m alive. Instead of feeling unbearably alive, pierced by the contrasts, I just feel dead, the little things hidden in the fog, the people I love at a distance. All I have left is my knowing that these things are important to me.
I think I’ve been very lucky that I was, and still am, able to “know” what’s important to me no matter how disabled I am. Yes, there are times when I can’t even manage that, but they’ve never lasted long enough for me to commit suicide.
I never did a blog post about Fiona’s death. She was our first dog, hit by a truck on the road before she was a year old. In an earlier blog post, material from 1996, I wrote “I think of thunder and wind and fire, and the hands of God, at the time of Fiona’s death.”