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Yesterday was pretty tough.  Even massage didn’t help, though it let me get a clear image of the isolation I was feeling.  This morning things feel more normal.  Even though I’m all alone here, people have energy bodies that extend and sometimes overlap, and then there are threads of connection between us all.  I had no idea I’d come to feel that way until I experienced the other way.  I think that sense of isolation was how it was for a lot of my life, and changed so gradually I wasn’t aware of it changing.
I’ve been reading Maisie Dobbs, and finding comfort reading about people struggling with PTSD.  In one book, she is talking to someone who also went through the war, and says how good it is to be with someone who knows.  Alas, reading Winter Solstice, a book I usually enjoy, just made me feel lonelier because I don’t have relationships like the ones she describes, and I feel bereft because there’s no one to rescue me.

Feeling lonely and bereft of spirit.  I’ve got a candle lit and Bella curled up next to me.  Recently I was introduced to the idea that faith is not good feelings, faith is a stand you can take, a choice you can make.
I choose to believe that the universe is benevolent.  I choose to believe that “All things work together for good.”  I choose to believe that the creative spirit that is continually birthing the universe is hugely loving and deeply merciful, and shares in our triumphs and joys, our defeats and sorrows.

Yesterday was tough.  I felt sad and scared and lost.  So lost that even things like cooking breakfast and setting out supplements seemed strange.  There was bright sun and bitter cold, which always makes me think of the front bedroom in the house in Portland where I lived when I first came back to the East Coast.  I was badly depressed all that winter.  Gosh, just writing about it brings cold to my chest.
I knew lost, scared and sad was a flashback to childhood but I didn’t do anything about it until I was driving to Cory for massage.  This is the third time I’ve sorted out some difficulty in my psyche while driving to someone I knew would be welcoming and comforting.
So I said to the child “Of course you’re lost, no one ever supported you or praised you or mirrored you accurately.  Of course you’re scared, you’re expected to know how to do things nobody ever taught you, you’re expected to do things you aren’t old enough to do.  Of course you’re sad, no one ever showed you any affection or tenderness.”  To my surprise, the feeling faded.  This is the self-regulation Caryn talks about.

But this morning my cleaning lady didn’t arrive.  I called her and it went to voice mail.  So I’m worried that something may have happened to her.  But I’m also scared because waiting for someone triggers waiting for my mother to come when I was a helpless infant and needed her for everything.  Alas, talking to the baby didn’t help this time.

I had started slowly coming out of the holiday depression, when a friend made a remark that knocked me back into it, actually into a worse place than I started from.  She asked something like “Are you holding on to your misery?”  I got angry, said NO.  Said “I’ve worked very hard for a long time to get better.”  As I was leaving I asked her “Do you really believe I’m holding on to my misery?”  She said “No,” but alas, my psyche responded as if she had said yes, and I dropped down into the worst place, where it’s just too hard to go on with the daily struggle.
I told Lynelle about what she said and Lynelle got angry at Sally.  She said “That’s what controlling people do when they are up against a situation they can’t fix.”  That helped a lot,  but the day was wrecked on a hard rock.  I didn’t do my stretches.  Looking back I can feel an angry energy.  “You think I’m holding on to my misery?  then why should I bother keeping up with my daily disciplines?”  The daily disciplines: stretches, walking, medication, therapy, writing in my journal, are not things that help me feel better right away.  So there’s no immediate benefit, which makes them harder to do when I’m feeling tired and discouraged.  Why bother?  So here I am perversely refusing to do things that don’t make me better except that they support my life in the long run.  Is that holding on to my misery?
Fortunately, my cleaning lady was here and she brought in extra firewood.  And my friend Randi came for lunch.  I had warned her that I was depressed, so she brought lunch, bless her heart.  Without that I might not have eaten.
What people don’t understand about depression is that it can’t be banished by willpower.  Sometimes it responds to surrender as in step one: Discovered I was powerless over depression.  Sometimes it responds to a softening of compassion that I extend to my depressed self. Sometimes it responds to a recognition that I am angry at myself for being depressed and softening with the idiocy of it.  But none of these works every time.  Medication makes a big difference, but there’s a limit to how much I can take.  Medication, as I’ve discovered after struggling over many years, creates a kind of stable platform that keeps me from going dangerously down, and allows me to make good use of therapy.  Therapy works, but again, not every session.  It’s something I just keep doing to survive.  Anything that implies that I’m somehow choosing to be in this pain, or that I’m not doing something easy that would lift me out of it, is totally toxic, about the cruelest and most devastating thing any one could say to someone who’s depressed.