The Burdens of Being Upright

Mar 16, 2009

there are two things i will carry in my pockets at the end. oh, my darling, you are one of them

i had a dream that i was back in maryland, back in the past. it was so.. vivid. i thought i was there. i woke up and didn't know where i was. its as if i blinked in 2007 and when i opened my eyes i was in a strange apartment, unsure how i got here.

why don't i say the things i'm thinking? because its in my nature to be accommodating.
posted by sarah 12:02 PM

Mar 11, 2009

depression is not sadness. or grief. or boredom.
depression is not emotive.
to react to a troubling or trying time is sadness.
depression is not that.

depression is to feel hopeless without cause and seemingly without end.
your body exausted and your mind restless.
when every movement, every conversation is a struggle.
and always the wish to sleep without waking. not to die. just to sleep, disappearing into blankets.
when every former joy or passion offers no relief.
it is the fear that this depression will never lift.
it is incapacitating.

anxiety is not just nervousness.
nerves settle when an ordeal is over, anxiety persists.. worsens.
i liken agoraphobia to stage fright.
that feeling of terror of having all eyes on you. then the regret and self-loathing that can follow.
agoraphobia is like stage fright, without the stage.
every interaction, no matter how small, no matter who with, takes energy to overcome.

>>2 years ago i got glasses for the first time. i had never had an eye exam before because i assumed that my sight was the same as everyone else's. when i put on my glasses for the first time i was amazed that i could see the individual leaves on the trees. i feel like the same applies with my depression. i never realized i was depressed, because i thought everyone else must feel the same way. in hindsight, knowing now the difference between feeling sad and being depressed, the first time i remember feeling it was in 2nd grade, and pretty consistently there after.
it's so hard to communicate the ways in which we feel and experience things. i blame my own generation for this. we misuse words in an effort to exaggerate our feelings or drain the words of their meaning. (the boy who cried wolf?) actual depression is hard to validate when minor inconveniences lead us to say "i'm so depressed". when every talent is labeled a genius. starving means you've skipped a meal. and nigger, a vile word, means friend.
i say this because i often feel the need to validate the ways in which i feel. partly because i never trust my own perception of things. and because of this i save little compassion for myself. i still, years later and miles away, blame myself solely for failing college. i try to justify to myself that under normal circumstances, i would have succeeded. but under the overwhelming influence of depression, anxiety, and grief, i did the best i could. but my mind won't accept it's own logic. to see a 0.0 GPA in print, to have the dean enumerate all the things you should have done say squarely to your face "i am very disappointed in you.", then to be cut off financially as a punishment for your failure.... all of those things weigh on me so much more than my own experience. and it shouldn't.
this is bothering me now, because i feel like i'm at risk to fail again. every assignment i attempt, i just get paralyzed by fear. i feel immense guilt for having failed before, fear that i'll fail again, and shame that people make accommodations for me and i still can't seem to get it together. what i need is to treat myself with more compassion so i can move forward, but i can't seem to put that theory into action. it doesn't help that when i went home in december, i was told that if i get another B- my dad would not cosign my loans anymore. and if that were the case, not to bother coming home. and as ludicrous as that sounds, i know my dad well enough to know this is not an empty threat. i'd like to have moved passed this feeling, and be able to separate my present from my past. but i'm just not there yet. there's plenty more i could say on this, but i've been putting off my homework long enough.
posted by sarah 7:35 PM

Mar 8, 2009

something i wrote this summer:

The rain pounded down on the patch of dead grass that was a backyard, like tiny meteors leaving craters in the dirt. The wind was busy ripping leaves off the European weeping beech that dominated the tiny yard. It had been a dry summer, a shit summer. But this rain didn’t fall like the nourishment of sun showers she used to love; it attacked, assaulting the yard with each heavy drop.

Aggie was watching the rain drops as they trickled down the window pane. A tense race was occurring between the drops. Aggie picked a favorite and bet on it, the way her dad used to bet on horses. She traced the drop with her finger as it slid down the glass pane toward the window sill. It picked up speed when it collided and combined with another drop. Aggie was winning. But the drop became too bloated and split at the last second into two smaller droplets, which lost. There was a lesson there.

Bored with the race, Aggie reached for a cigarette. She had bet herself she’d quit smoking, but we all know how that goes. She watched as the rain tore apart the petals of an orange poppy flower. If her dad were here he’d say something stupid like “Well when it rains, it pours!” Then he’d tell her chimneys smoked, not ladies. But her dad wasn’t here. That’s why Aggie was here again in Virginia, the worst place to spend a summer.

Thunder clapped and the power flickered, hesitated, then went out c0mpletely. Aggie was pleased because it would put an end to her brothers watching the Maryland-Duke game in the next room. “It’s no way to mourn a father,” she had scolded them earlier, “by watching a basketball game on the eve of his funeral.” But that showed how little Aggie knew about men.

The sky was deeply purpled and lit by lightning. Lightning always made her think of tree branches, which looked like veins to her. That’s when she felt it first, during that summer gale, the sameness of it all. The way the branches of the old weeping beech stretching upwards, the bark barely masking some unknown internal force, resembled the muscles of her own two arms. She recalled being six, when those men came to prune the lower branches of the beech tree. She had run outside to hug the sawn-off limbs, and was surprised not to find blood on the ground, only sawdust. “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” her dad had said. That’s when Aggie’s anger was born, newly aware how little her dad meant when he spoke.

When a bolt of lightning struck the beech, the trunk split and half of the tree came crashing to the ground in a frenzy of leaves and sparks. She pressed her eyes shut and couldn’t tell if the silhouette burning in her eyelids was that of the lightning or the tree. Aggie knew there was a lesson there. The noise had roused her brother and he came to the window to survey the damage. For a moment both were quiet, transfixed by the half of the weeping beech that was now lying in the yard. “Of course that tree would die today of all days” her brother said with spite infecting his usually mellow tone. “Nature knows nothing of death.” Aggie replied, her eyes still locked on the fallen limbs. She had read that in a Hurston story earlier that summer. The full passage was “The palms murmured noisily of seasons and centuries, mating and birth and the transplanting of life. Nature knows nothing of death.” “Yeah sure” her brother said as he turned to leave but stopped to pluck the cigarette from Aggie’s hand and snuff it out in an empty mug. “Chimneys smoke, Aggie” he said and left.
posted by sarah 12:33 AM

Mar 7, 2009

Having come to this place
I set out once again
on the dark and marvelous way
from where I began:
belief in the love of the world
woman, spirit, and man.

Having failed in all things
I enter a new age
seeing the old ways as toys,
the houses of a stage
painted and long forgot;
and I find love and rage.

Rage for the world as it is
but for what it may be
more love now than last year
and always less self-pity
since I know in a clearer light
the strength of the mystery.

And at this place in the ways
I wait for song.
My poem-hand still, on the paper,
all night long.
Poems in throat and hand, asleep,
and my storm beating strong!

-Muriel Rukeyser

In violet.

after a few years of abandonment, i am resurrecting this blog. something i started when i was 14, lonely and foolish. it's quite a trip to revisit yourself 7 years later. now 21, i have loved and been loved. travelled to countries that used to exist for me only in dreams. failed and failed again. and enjoyed small successes. i've been scared and lonely and heartbroken. but also amazed and enraged and in ecstacy. and happily still foolish. as i untether myself from the careful cacoon of security that was self-made, i've opened myself up to the possibility of feeling again. something i was once too afraid to do.

to be in love is to see yourself in another, and them in you. for so long i have felt very absent from my own experience. my body was a vessel that spoke and moved of its own accord and my self hovered somewhere above. my self was frozen, and unable to intervene. hidden in every person is all the strength you will ever need. when you learn to access it, you begin to really live. that process is where the real work of living is. finding that core gets harder as we age. consider life as a series of russian nesting dolls. each year adding a new shell. while i may be 21, i am also at once 14 (lonely and foolish) and 6 years old, collecting daffodils from my father's garden.
posted by sarah 11:10 PM