Hey everyone! It's been so long since we've been together. I apologize for the hiatus, but I've been teaching a fair amount, and generally feeling lost and confused about what I want in life. And about that. It's winter here in the barren wasteland that is January Chicagoland, and I'll tell you that the grey, darkened sky, the spittle and mist that smarts one with unshakable shivers, well: it all feels very fitting for my mood.
To be fair, I'm a melancholy person. I have always been this way, from as far back as memory will reach. Why? Who can say, with certainty. Chalk it up to science of the brain, chemistry as we call it. Blame it on personality. On modeling, environment, a low-income household, a melancholy mother, a passive father who wasn't around a great deal.* Maybe it's the sensitive nature of my soul, the fact that when people suffer, I do in kind. Maybe it has to do with that I pick up negative energy in others like a stud finder detects a stud behind a plastered wall. To be sure, we all have our own conditions for remaining sad types.
Being sad sort of sucks, but then again: aren't we all kind of sad? Don't we all have our own little islands of suffering? Those quiet places we go after a long day, a hard day, a day of general fatigue or disappointment? These days, when technology is ever present, and digitization complicates the way we communicate (see my upcoming post on technology and communication), we are saddened by feelings of rejection, by feelings of loneliness, by feelings of not quite satisfied with our personal connections, so on, so forth. But listen, reader: I don't want you to feel alone. You're not alone. Others feel like crap, too. All the time. They may just do a bang up job of hiding it. Many people are master hiders of generally shitty and sad feelings.
Have you asked yourself lately: what is the solely responsible circumstance, or reality, for my suffering? What is it that's really making me sad? Can it be minimized? Am I doomed to be sad forever? I'm pretty sure you're not doomed to be sad forever. My suggestion for you, is to embrace the sadness. Stay inside. Have a good cry. Get a hot bath going. Call a friend. Make some fresh, stovetop popcorn with melted butter, salt, and perhaps a fine hot sauce like Sriracha. Look at something that's colorful, like a 'wonders of the world' book or an African violet plant or hell, just get on the ole internet and Google anything like 'koalas in the jungle' (I'm pretty sure that's not where koalas live, but email me and tell me what you find). Anything to get pictures in your mind that might peak your imagination or general entertainment.
I'm not saying you shouldn't feel sad. Feeling sad can be grand. In my experience, the next day after a particularly crap day is aces; I might feel cleansed and 'reset' (particularly true if I allow myself to cry). What I am saying, is that you should allow yourself to be distracted from your sadness, if you've got it in you to do so. What I like to do when I'm sad, and even when I'm not, is turn on a candle, stare at its flame and generally zone out. It's fun for sure. It helps me think of my past and my future, and how breathing in the moment is actually pretty damn miraculous. Imagine! Some people actually strain to breathe--like old(er) people and people with heart or lung conditions. But if you can breathe without incident, well that's a marvel! Stare at the candle and celebrate.
What I could do in this post, is turn sadness into a common occurrence, and slap a bunch of labels on it like 'depression' or 'anti-social disorder' or 'acute anxiety.' Who knows, if you're looking for a label, they're everywhere. You might peruse the web for 'psychology and depression,' or 'how to treat my depression.' I'm not interested in labels, to be honest with you. They don't serve me. Melancholy behavior isn't so bad. And look, I feel way less melancholy now, after writing this blog post, than I did when I started it. Get your mind active, that helps, too.
Last weekend, I listened to a talk show on NPR that featured an accomplished, old(er) Austrian mystic. His voice was rasping and he rambled, but he was awesome. He maintains that the best way to handle anxiety, is to observe it, to yield to it (feel it), and then to move through it (act despite the discomfort). Sort of like a portal that has a sci-fiish bubble-like membrane over it. When you stick your fist through the portal, your fist gets taken into the membrane, until it pops, and if you move through it, you come out on another side. The mystic likened the anxiety experience to birth for a newborn. The little soon-to-be-person travels through that terrifying canal into this crazy-ass world, daunting and cold as it must be for a frail, vulnerable creature. When he gets here, situations commence, and the anxiety is behind him. Until a new anxiety begins, and such is the circle of life.
Not that anxiety and sadness are exactly the same thing, but typically, we feel sad because we're anxious about something. For example, yesterday, I broke up with this guy I had been seeing on and off for some months. Well, he sort of 'broke up' with me, as he declared that we were at an impasse, which we were, had been for some time. But my anxiety over dying alone seems to hang over me, a cloak that can't be doffed--like the black spider on the good spider in Spiderman 3. What if I die alone, because there really aren't good guys out there? Scary, indeed. But as a result of this anxiety, comes general feelings of sadness, and so it goes. If I apply the mystic's idea of the baby, or my updated version of the membrane, well, I learn a lot if I yield to the anxiety, but carefully push through it.
Who cares if I die alone? Weren't we alone when we came through that canal? Aren't we always alone? And isn't it sometimes the cases when we're with others, that we end up feeling most isolated and sad? Maybe that's just me. Point is, embrace the sadness, however you can. It could be a new birth, or at least, a really cool membrane journey into some other territory where jungle-dwelling koalas live with African violets all around them, and spiders as people to remind you of how good you actually have it.
*footnote: I'd like to add that each of my parents has offered an unyielding amount of support, and if it seems I'm doing them an injustice, it's simply to add context to my claim. They will always be acknowledged in the bigger body of my works.
