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Gretchen Schmelzer: The Wisdom of Respite

Posted on November 13, 2023 by jenny

From Gretchen Schmelzer’s blog for August 23, 2023: The Wisdom of Respite. Gretchen is a trauma survivor and a therapist for people suffering from trauma.

Respite is noted to be a break from something difficult. And it’s true that we feel the need for respite the most when we have been through something hard, or when the stress has been relentless. It is like a deep thirst, not for water, but for energy, for renewed hope, for a solid center.

Oh the desire for energy, for renewed hope, for a solid center. I don’t have any of them right now.

The irony is, of course, that even though respite is often called a ‘relief’—when you are healing, it doesn’t always feel like a relief. Sometimes it does.

But sometimes you actually have to put effort in to not working—you have to be disciplined about sitting still. Why? Because when you sit still you are more able to see the work you have been doing. You are more keenly aware of the loss or sadness that may accompany the change. So, sometimes respite may be a relief from one thing, but not another.

Having to put effort into not working. Like when I try to sit still, and not get distracted. Sometimes so uncomfortable to sit still. This is often the feeling that drives me to do a digital jigsaw puzzle. I think I’m getting a break, but it’s only a distraction. In fact I’m almost addicted to it. I have good enough discipline to stop myself frequently, and using my right hand that way has been exacerbating a difficulty with my right shoulder blade. But after doing a puzzle, or two or three, I don’t feel renewed. I have to force myself to do yet another task.

But mostly, like all the emotions of healing, respite has an intermittent quality. You feel the relief, the slowness and you can finally breathe again. The rest allows your system to calm down and you notice your brain starts working better again: You can think! And then you get pulled down. Your heart aches. The anxiety comes back. You look around for a way to distract yourself. And the discipline is to stay and breathe. Stay and rest. Do what you need to really feel respite. The difficult feelings might bubble up, but they aren’t all of your feelings, they won’t take up all of the time. And you need the rest. You need the respite.

I wrote this in my journal this morning: Gretchen’s blog talks about the need for respite. Respite not distraction. I realize that when I turn to a puzzle I’m looking for distraction. Respite from trauma may feel uncomfortable. Right now I am overwhelmed and badly triggered. There there dear, I am sorry that you are having such a hard time. But the truth is that you’ve been alone too much and there hasn’t been enough support. Sharon & Bob have been eating alone, Judith has had friends visiting, writing group hasn’t been meeting and Erica is away. The upsurge of COVID has caused some of this. It is not that you are worthless, but that’s what’s been triggered. Your friends have been unavailable, not because they don’t value you, but because of things that have nothing to do with you. I can tell myself this, but I don’t believe it.

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1995: Permanent, Pervasive, Personal

Posted on November 11, 2023 by jenny

Seligman talks about the pessimistic worldview which sees that problems are “permanent, pervasive, and personal,” and describes the “ABC technique” for dealing with each element one by one.

From my journal for December 21, 1995

I had a bad night last night. I was able to get to sleep, but woke about quarter of one feeling just awful. It was hard to tell whether it was physical or psychological. I felt a degree of irritability that’s beyond anything I’ve felt before — I tried to do the ABC technique, but I concluded that I didn’t know what was causing my feelings, so I couldn’t convince myself that it was temporary. I see that illness is pervasive, that’s not a belief, that’s a reality, it does significantly undermine most other areas of my life. And as for whether the cause is external or personal, that’s hard to tell too — do I feel so awful because I’m coming down with flu? because I ate potatoes for dinner? because I’m too pessimistic? I forgot to add menopause into the equation. I also see that illness is an experience of being attacked by one’s own body, so it feels like something about me that I can’t change — permanent, pervasive, personal. No wonder I have such a hard time with being sick! And it’s a vicious circle if the pessimistic feelings affect my immune system in a negative way. …

It’s interesting that the belief that I have caused something gives me the illusion that I can make it stop, but it also restricts me to what I can do and what I know about. Then I say that illness is an “experience of being attacked by one’s own body” but I seem to have no idea that the body has healing powers of its own.

This morning it was more clear that I was “just sick” instead of eternally damned, I had a headache at the back of the head, a slight sore throat, and was more ache-all-over than irritable. … I went to talk to Dana, and all my horrible feelings just bubbled up and boiled over. He was a little upset that I was so upset, talking about stopping eating etc, and also annoyed with me for talking so fast and compulsively that he could hardly think about what I was saying. But he was able to bring a more balanced viewpoint to the ABC format and that helped a lot. On the score of permanence, he said I’m just sick, it’s a different virus because the symptoms are different, I’m often sick, vulnerable to many illnesses, but I’m not always sick, I do have times of feeling better. I see that a belief comes into play that if I don’t know what’s causing it, if I don’t know what to do to make it better, then it won’t get better. I have no faith in any process other than my own active intervention.

“Stopping eating” is one of my methods for committing suicide, still a possibility. The other method, a little interfered with by global warming, is to walk into the woods on a freezing night and just lie down in the snow.

On the score of pervasive, it’s true that illness affects every aspect of my life, but it’s also true that that’s only for today, I don’t know about tomorrow. I see that one of the painful things about being sick is that I feel sick so often, have so little energy, that most of the things I can do I’ve already done. I have no book to read, I’m tired of writing, typing into the computer is painful, etc. It occurred to me that I could work on the 3-D puzzle today — that would be fun! Perhaps I could intersperse it with short bits of work organizing my desk or reshelving books. I can’t remember what we said about the personal/external dimension, except for uncovering the belief that if I don’t do it, it won’t get done, which certainly makes any problem to which I can’t see the solution look permanent instead of temporary. Dana suggested focussing on today: “Today I’m too sick to go to Montpelier” and not even thinking about tomorrow. Good advice.

The belief that “if I don’t do it, it won’t get done” goes back to my parents refusal to help me with anything I was trying to do. My father told me “If you didn’t know how to do it, why did you even try?” I remember thinking “what happened to if at first you don’t succeed, try try again?” but didn’t realize the power of a parent. I think this contributed to the pattern of “concluding I can’t do it” when something went wrong with a process I was trying to complete.

The 3-D puzzle was St. Basil’s Cathedral. After I completed it, I used it for a centerpiece for a program of Russian dancing.

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1995: Pessimistic World View

Posted on November 10, 2023 by jenny

From my journal for December 20, 1995

Seligman [the author of The Optimistic Child] suggests that people are able to deal with setbacks in a more optimistic way if they are living for something bigger than themselves. In the past, people lived for their families, for the Nation, for God — but these have become meaningless for many in modern times. Families are abusive, extended families have lost cohesiveness, Nations are oppressive and racist, God has disappeared behind scientific explanations. So I wonder, what am I living for? My first take is that I live an entirely selfish life, completely absorbed in my own comfort, and I’m depressed because I wallow in my own inner process all the time. I notice that the first thing I do with this new idea is make myself wrong. But yesterday I was thinking “How would I live my life if I had a belief that there was something larger than myself to live for?” and what I felt was a great sense of relief, that I was a participant in the human experiment, that I was doing my share just by continuing, each day, to do the little bit that has been entrusted to me: to take care of my health, love Dana, support Lynelle, walk the dog, feed the birds, wash the dishes. This is what I can do, this is my contribution. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t been able to “save the world,” other people, with better health and more confidence in themselves can work on the bigger tasks of “saving the world.”

As I get older, most of my energy has to be spent on keeping myself going. There’s very little left for more interesting activities. This is painful, because “just taking care of myself” isn’t much to live for. Where is the meaning?

The question of “self-involvement” — I think I seem so “self-involved” because my life is so narrow. I don’t have the energy to keep up with more “outside” pursuits. So I devote my intellect, my questioning mind, my passion to understand, to the territory of psyche, and my own psyche in particular because it’s right here, doesn’t take a lot of energy to get to. Sometimes I think of all this writing that I do here as valuable research into the human condition. Then it seems too bad if it doesn’t get published because no one will ever be able to make use of it. What’s the good of research if no one ever finds out?

And as for “family” — I do spend considerable time and effort on my family, it’s just that they’re not my blood family. I include Dana, Lynelle, Shenanigan, Beverly as family, and Sybil, Alice, Lucy, Christie, etc as “extended family” who I try to help when appropriate — and am learning to let them help me. For “Nation” I substitute community. I think political entities are unhealthy and refuse to support them. On the other hand, in teaching circle dance and building Neskaya, I am making a major contribution to my community. As for “religion” or “god,” although I “believe” in a divine foundation for all life, I don’t experience it very often. It’s not a belief that gives rise to appropriate feelings of safety or connection or worthiness. I think in fact my “belief” in God would be better stated as “I’m sure there’s meaning here, if I could only find it.” This is an interesting form of the pessimistic world view — I’m essentially blaming myself for not being able to find meaning in my life.

I was thinking recently that this way of blaming myself is a child’s way of trying to take control in a chaotic environment. or maybe a way to try to make sense of a chaotic environment, in which what I do does not have the results I had hoped for a lot of the time — in an inconsistent and confusing fashion so that finally I stop trying to look for evidence in the environment for why something didn’t work. I see that this continues to function in my assumption that it’s always “something I ate” when I feel bad. I discount environmental stressors such as air pollution, and external stressors such as listening to Lynelle’s pain. The notion that I am helpless, that I am at the mercy of a chaotic and unpredictable environment, is just too scary, certainly was too scary when I was a child, and is still pretty scary now that I’m an adult — still at the mercy of external forces, though the environment is actually much more orderly and predictable than what I lived with as a child, and I have now some adult coping strategies that actually work.

[I list the strategies for dealing with the noise of the planes. I can’t say they work very well.] And I can see why — any setback in either my health or a creative project offers an opportunity for sabotage by pessimistic self-talk which is reinforced by the learned helplessness from uncontrollable noise.

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“In the Marrow of Our Bones”

Posted on November 8, 2023 by jenny

Clint Smith, Black man, talking to Krista Tippett. He is best known for his 2021 book, How the Word Is Passed. He talks about going to places where horrible things happened to Black people. He wants to know the truth of what happened and he wants his children to know it too.

Clint Smith — What We Know in the “Marrow of Our Bones”

“I want my children to recognize that. I want them to hold that. I want them to sit with that, not in a way that’s meant to overwhelm them, not in a way that’s meant to cause them despair, but in a way that is meant to help them accurately situate themselves in this sort of long lineage [of slavery]

“And that does not come at the exclusion of or the expense of joy, and love, and laughter, and levity, but part of what I think about all the time is the simultaneity of the human experience, how our lives are both defined by that love, that joy, that laughter, but also defined by anxiety, fear, despair. And somewhere between those is, I think, a responsibility: both recognizing the truth of our past and all that has preceded us, not in a way that’s meant to paralyze us or overwhelm us or trap us in a sense of despair, but in a way that is meant to help us recognize and remember our own agency.

“I want all of us to understand that what our lives look like are only because of people who’ve created the circumstances that have given rise to our lives today in ways that are generative and wonderful, and in ways that we’re grateful for, and in ways that we recognize are profoundly unjust, and in ways that are profoundly unfair, and in ways that should not exist in the way that they do. And I think it’s about holding and recognizing and sitting with both of those and figuring out how we move forward collectively.”

Krista and Clint talk about their travels in Germany, and visiting the sites of Concentration Camps. She talks about what he says about Angola:

“I want to just raise up this very stunning and shameful reality that you also have lifted up in the context of this discussion — that Angola prison, which is also a place of pilgrimage for you, I would say, is built on the land of a former plantation. You have pointed out in the book, if in Germany today there were a prison built on top of a former concentration camp, and that prison disproportionately incarcerated Jewish people, it would provoke outrage throughout the world. This is not something that is in American awareness.”

Being very moved by this conversation, I thought about my own history. There’s so little I know. I think my great-grandfather died defending the city of Richmond, Virginia in the Civil War. He may well have owned slaves. My parents were upper class and wealthy, but they were also alcoholics. I was the oldest of five children and was given far too much responsibility for them. I felt like an unpaid servant. What happened to me had more to do with the systems we all live in. I believe I was traumatized because I was born in 1942, my father was a soldier in World War II, so my mother was alone and utterly unprepared for the 24/7 care of a baby. I think she left me alone too often and too many times, and a baby can be traumatized by being left alone. Both my parents were alcoholics. My father was probably medicating PTSD from the war. AA had just barely started, and my parents’ social set all drank. My parents failed to teach me many important things like social skills, but fortunately they also failed to teach me prejudice against Jews or Black people. Fortunately I was able to go to good schools, I learned that I was intelligent, and began to see that I might be able to do good in the world. In fact my first motivation for majoring in physics was so that I could teach “them” — meaning poor people — so they could get good jobs and improve their lives. I never believed that people were poor “because they were lazy.” Unfortunately the early damage made that plan impossible. I started seeing a therapist in my 20’s, and spent most of my life in therapy. Fortunately inherited money paid for therapy and also helped me get into Kendal, or I would probably be dead. Sometimes I feel like a Fortunately-Unfortunately story.

Clint Smith talks about “love, joy and laughter” with his children. Something I never had with my parents.

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1995: I Need a Floor

Posted on November 7, 2023 by jenny

From my journal for December 15, 1995

I went into the session with Karen feeling completely hopeless. I didn’t know what else to do, so I lay down on the bed and kicked and kicked and cried and shouted “No!” I stopped after not very much because I seemed to be feeling better — things lightened up inside — though I distrusted my sense that anything had really happened. Later I realized that what was new was a strong sense that it was OK to say No, OK to kick back, OK to express my discomfort. I think something else that helped was the sympathy and sorrow that I saw on Karen’s face as I told her about the body memory (if that’s what it was). I told Karen how I had sat on Robin’s table crying with the words “My whole life!” going through my mind and how quickly another voice came in to say “You can’t say your whole life was ruined by this incident. You still have blah, blah, blah…” I see only now as I’m writing it how I don’t let myself have my pain, how quickly I step in to invalidate it. I also see that the phrase “my whole life” meant not that my life was “ruined,” but that I’ve lived my whole life in the fear of that shadow.

The “body memory” was of someone (male?) feeling my labia. I have no idea if it refers to a “real” experience.

I told Karen how I had found myself talking to Mother recently. “I’m not coming home again. You hurt me badly in the past, and you’ve hurt me every time I come home. I won’t see you again. I’ll come home for your funeral.”

I found that I was in that neutral place again. At first it felt OK to be there, then. I could feel a judgmental presence, probably mother. So I asked to do the “letting go” exercise again. We piled up the pillows and got out the towel. I let go very gently. It felt good to let go — I didn’t cry as I have before. But I felt the anxiety come back in pretty quickly — I’ve got to have something to hold on to. So I grabbed the towel again, pulled myself up until I felt the tension in my body, and let go again. I did this several times, finally realizing that I wasn’t trusting the floor to hold me up, so I ran my hands over the carpet, remembering the dented/wounded cedar floor. Karen suggested that when I had let go of all the old injunctions from Mom, I still needed something to hold on to. I think actually that if I could trust the floor, I wouldn’t need to hold on. We talked about that neutral place — how it was “good neutral,” a place to stay in not run away from. Karen reminded me that I had never felt safe enough in my childhood to experience “good normal.”

“I wasn’t trusting the floor.” Years later, after I had begun to do Somatic Experiencing, I did experience a floor.

I think I first began to feel “good normal” when I was here at Kendal.

So I lay there on my pillows and began to make sound, first the noises of a baby comforting itself which then developed into a deeper stronger richer voice, actually into my “Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah” song which I think of as being my song, almost a warriors song. It comforts me to have it, as it comforts me to have my death chant (“Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world…”) After singing, something had changed, there was a feeling of finding my voice. I realized that I hadn’t dissolved in tears at the idea of a baby left alone to try to comfort itself. So I write down SINGING as something I can do to self-soothe.

I don’t remember the first song. I can still remember my “death chant” and its tune. The words are from Buddhism. “Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world
A star at dawn, a bubble on a stream
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud
A flickering lamp, a shadow, and a dream.”

On the way back to Franconia, I felt pretty good. It felt like I had accomplished something real in therapy.

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1995: Learned Helplessness

Posted on November 6, 2023 by jenny

From my journal for December 16, 1995

Dana got me a book, The Optimistic Child. It was written by a man who worked with “learned helplessness” and put together a team to figure out how to help kids who are at risk for depression. He talks about “explanatory style” which is how we explain to ourselves the meaning of success of failure. An optimistic style is specific and behavior based, a pessimistic style is global and shame-based. Falling into depression seems to be very much related to whether or not one can see/think/feel that there is something they can do that will make a difference. If you find that no matter what you do, it doesn’t have any effect, you will give up, like the dogs subjected to electric shock in the experiments. In order to develop persistence and resilience in the face of setbacks, a child needs to be allowed, or helped, to learn by increments that are not too challenging. I can see how growing up in an alcoholic family would create a depressed child, because no matter what I do, how hard I try, sooner or later I see that nothing makes any difference, and there is no one there to tell me that it’s because the situation has nothing to do with me. I also see that in my family, neither parent took the time and trouble to help talk me through a difficulty. I was expected to “just know” what to do, and made wrong for not knowing. I remember how much I suffered in social situations because no one had ever bothered to teach me the forms — I think of that embarrassing dinner party when I was “hostess” and didn’t know that I had to be the one to start eating. I had always just waited for someone else.

The author says that self-esteem (real, not spurious) is not based on feeling good about oneself, but on doing something well. Learning to do something well can be a difficult process, needing support, helpful feedback, practice of basic moves or easier versions. I think none of this happened consistently (I was shamed, abandoned, and then praised inappropriately) until I was in school, where my natural intelligence had a chance to function. But I see that now, as I try to move into realms that are unfamiliar, like learning to do creative projects, that my intellectual skills don’t help, and I don’t have any persistence or resilience in the face of setbacks.

Once my father said to me, when I was having trouble with a project: “If you didn’t know how to do it, why did you even try?”

I can also see how my constant struggles with my health are also conducive to depression (besides the component that comes from toxins affecting the brain) because it’s a situation where mostly the things I do don’t make much difference. I know that I have to do certain things, like yoga and walking, just to maintain some degree of health, but when I’m feeling sick, and there’s nothing I can do to make it better, I have no sense of efficacy or mastery with respect to my health. A shame-based, trauma-based, pessimistic world-view doesn’t help either. In fact the author says that pessimistic children have more health problems than optimistic ones, which doesn’t surprise me.

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1995: First Dance in Neskaya

Posted on November 5, 2023 by jenny

From my journal for December 11, 1995

And now for something completely different! I’m feeling much better this morning. I find it interesting how easily and completely I can flip from “depressed” to “normal” under certain conditions. Yesterday we danced at Neskaya for the first time. I would say that this activity distracted me from my pain — but it’s done more than that. On the other hand, by no stretch of the imagination do I consider myself “healed” — in the ups & downs of the long climb out of depression this seems to be a longer “up.” I still feel that there is a large piece of work that needs to be done on accepting myself as I am. (It occurs to be with some surprise, that “as I am” includes the person who is building Neskaya, who teaches circle dance, as well as the one who is sick a lot and can’t get her house organized.)

Neskaya. I went over early and set up, black burlap, mirror, candles, Christmas lights. I also lit some frankincense because it smelled rather industrial inside. Dana called Peckett’s and they plowed so no one had trouble getting in. There were just four of us: Jenny, Sybil, Evvie, and Judy came later. It was quite magical, like dancing in a cave. It is a wonderful sacred space.

At this point the windows were covered with plastic, nothing was painted yet, we were dancing on the slab. I don’t mention it, but I think of the post the bureaucracy demanded we put in the center because the roof would sink when we put on the concrete. They were wrong. Hyperbolic paraboloids are very strong. The post was still 3/4 of an inch above the surface. I think I wound the Christmas lights around it.

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1995: Struggle with Chronic Psychological Pain

Posted on November 3, 2023 by jenny

From my journal for December 10, 1995

I’m feeling very lost and uncertain. I finally finished Anna Salter’s book because Lynelle said the last chapters were relevant to her situation. Horrifyingly, I find them relevant to mine too, I see that I have a “trauma-based worldview,” “a profoundly hopeless sense of personal vulnerability and lack of efficacy in the face of what seems to be a random or even malevolent universe.” (p252) It looks like once that basic trust in a benign universe is broken, one doesn’t ever get it back. We just learn how to manage the pain. “The survivor’s arsenal for reducing pain can be fairly extensive: remaking meaning, developing a cognitive life-raft; confronting the internal, perpetrator-based critic, behaviorally de-sensitizing; and consciously avoiding. Even so, there will still be a need for self-soothing after doing all the pain reduction possible. As in the serenity prayer, the adult survivor must self-soothe that pain that cannot be reduced, reduce that pain that cannot be self-soothed, and develop the wisdom to know the difference.” (p295) That’s it. That’s the best I can do. There’s no “making the pain go away.” I’m looking at the prospect of living the rest of my life in chronic psychological pain — so what’s new? I understand that I’ve lived up til now in chronic psychological pain. But I think I always had some hope that I could change it somehow, if I could just understand, it would go away. But all I have done is just break the denial, become more conscious, eliminated the various distractions that I was using to self-medicate. So now I’m left with the pain. I don’t see any way out at all. I look forward to struggling through the winter with various physical ailments, and struggling through the summer with the plane phobia. Circle Dance is a small candle in a dark cavern. It’s all I’ve got. Except for the knowledge that I love Dana, Shenanigan, Lynelle, Beverly, I love the trees and the rocks and the streams. I wish there were also feelings of love, it would make it a little easier to be in this grim desert. I wish I believed in God, or the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, but I have no sense of a benevolent spiritual force. I think of Jesus, and the pain of being forsaken by God, but even that doesn’t seem very real right now.

I almost wish it weren’t so beautiful outside. The contrast makes the dark deadness inside more painful.

I wish I had written the name of Anna Salter’s book. I suspect it was Transforming Trauma, because it was published in 1995. It’s about treating adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

I talk about “basic trust in a benign universe.” This is an idea that Kaethe Weinberg talks about in her book Common Shock. She wrote that “children raised in a “good enough” environment grow up with three assumptions: the Universe is Benevolent, Life is Meaningful, the Self is Worthy. Trauma breaks this basic safety, suddenly the Universe is Malevolent, Life is Meaningless, the Self is Not Worthy.”

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1995: Sacred Circle Dancing

Posted on November 1, 2023 by jenny

From my journal for November 27, 1995

At least the dancing yesterday was good. Just as I was leaving Dana told me that Christie had called and said the school said we weren’t allowed to use candles. My heart went down to my feet. How can we have the sense of the sacred without fire at the center? Especially in this dark season, when so many are having a hard time. Daria suggested an oil lamp which was a great idea. I nabbed the one from my desk, and two strings of Christmas lights so we wouldn’t have to turn on the big lights in the gym. It turned out to be quite magical, just the right atmosphere for dancing. Lucy came with her baby Luke and said she’d had a dream about me, in which she had been feeling overwhelmed by things she thought she had to do and I supported her when she decided she didn’t have to. We had about ten people for a while, and then a bunch of them left leaving six of us to finish with Kore and Dudulas, which I actually liked, it was the quiet ones who were left.

I came back after cuing New Moon Bride to hear someone saying “Change is in the air.” I said something about how the Sun was moving from Scorpio into Sagittarius, and we were moving from the stuckness of fixed water to the more expansive energy of Sagittarius. We danced New Moon Bride and as our circle began to integrate the arm motions, I had a sudden sense of other groups doing the same dance and finding their version of the arms, and I felt that same deep excitement that I felt the first time I taught it. I ran to turn off the tape and came back to hear Karen talking about how all the old family stuff was being dismantled and scattered, and I said yes, this was also an image of the shift from Scorpio to Sagittarius. So I wanted to do Kak Pri Balkye because of the image of the big central circle dissolving into the outer circles. The music that was ready to hand was the more intense one so that’s what we danced it to. I told them that I was getting tired of the difficulty of using the school, and that I hoped that in two weeks we could dance at Neskaya. I warned them that it would be dirty, and the floor is hard, so it would be like dancing in a cave. They thought that sounded fine.

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1995: Practice of “Being With”

Posted on October 31, 2023 by jenny

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.”