Wednesday, March 24, 2010

A response to a friend

Oh the joys of the depressive fun.... I find that those of us who battle the Depression monster share tips like moms share cookie recipes - you never know what flavor your monster will love. A good friend posted the above (see link) on her blog, and here's my shared bits from my similar battles...

During my counselling for depression, I too found the "one thing I like about myself" task to be a royal pain. In my usual efficient manner, I reveled in my consistent ability to make a mess of everything, lack of useful talents (I did mention this was my inner voice, right?) and the special joys of my genetic makeup which made ballet less than graceful(think hippos, a la Fantasia). Wheee, wasn't that fun thinking about all my fabulous traits??! Basically, this exercise fed into the pain, not a help. But as usual, my brain pushed it to the limit, looking for a way to take on the crappy inner talk, while acknowledging what it is. The thing I found many counselors unwilling to admit was that, even at its suckiest, there is an ounce of truth to self talk usually. It may be distorted out of proportion, but it's there. I found that I had to acknowledge that truth in order to take control of that piece in my head. Sounds simple, but it is difficult to admit to my ego that these sorts of things have some truth to them. Now to avoid the spiral, that bit of talk cannot be allowed to dwarf out the rest of what's in your head. It's about control, not changing the words.

The problem with sunnily tossing around your inner thoughts as false and untrue, is that you start to question what can be true in your head. These are usually things we've been lugging around for a while, they're ingrained like barnacles. Or they're weighed down with some huge emotional experience. This is mental baggage at its finest. It's there for a reason, however flawed, and gumming up the works like bad taffy. But it does mean that pulling them apart, seeing what spawned them, or just accepting the fact underlying it, and trying out what that acceptance feels like. Oh, the places this took me....

No, life wasn't anything like the brochure said it would be. Yes, it's a pain in the ass to be thin and in shape, and the uphill grade gets steeper the older you get. Yes, its easy to get bogged down in the minutia of life, and one day you wake up and realize you're staggeringly average. Or not. Or your raging against the machine has only gotten you running in place, acquiring scars. Sigh. Things were supposed to be, were planned different, looked closer in the rear view mirror, whatever. I concentrated on seeing, really seeing, where I was right in that moment. What I had, what I was, what I believed in right then.

As for the "writing crap" part, perhaps I'm overly harsh, but a lot of what is published is crap. At least on one level or another. I cherish my Rumi compilations for not being crap to me, but to others, Rumi poetry is toilet paper. The point of writing isn't to be "the best". It's expression. It's your words, your thoughts put to paper and shared. And while I may not believe in the worth of any one piece, that action of putting thoughts and ideas to paper is what's precious. It's my personal image I get for not going quietly into the darkness. Rage against that machine, memorialize that image from your head. That's all that it needs to be. I think many of us treat our writing like we do our children - it can accomplish so much, if only it were perfect.

To me running and writing are siblings cut from the same cloth. You don't get better at either without just doing it, and frankly, neither is normally a rip roaring good time. Writer's and runner's highs only come after you've been engaged for a bit, feeling the flow. Much like pulling your inner talk apart to find what's hidden under those rocks, the fun is in the process, finding out where it's going and how it ticks.

Perhaps I have an overly stubborn intellect (dammit, you will not dismiss me, illogical crap!) or I'm just a bit more twisted than my inner scars are, but I find that that mental journey was rather interesting once I started treating it as such. I'm not in charge all the time, but I am holding onto the reigns and driving most of the time. Or so I think... It's like dealing with large amounts of flowing water. Most of the time it goes where you expect it to. And then it doesn't. But if not, you just get wet. And you can still go dry off and try again. After a martini :-P

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