schism.ca

I’m going to write this down even though it’s pretty personal and thus won’t matter to anyone, and pretty hard to tack down and so likely won’t make any sense. It just feels like this particular emotional space is a little like the polkaroo, and you better engage it while it’s there, or damn, you’ll miss it again.

I started down this negative slope yesterday. I guess the reasons are known, but not really important. Let’s just say that I was in a very familiar place–the place where I’m just negative. The silly stressed, angry, confused, self-deprecating, vindictive, hopeless cocktail that I drink as though it were the sweetest nectar, because its taste seems to validate the ideas that I have about myself. I get that part. While I’ve never really understood how it came to be that my current resting state is so negative, that’s the thing that is most familiar to me. It feels like it’s the way to be, like it’s safe. As has been stated today in an article over at Dumb Little Man,  “if we ever feel that we have to choose between safe and happy, we’ll usually move towards what’s safe”. To that end, I suppose that I also want to feed and validate what is safe, so that I don’t move away from it. That’s likely why the cocktail tastes so sweet, even though it’s comprised of nothing but shit, and ultimately serves to make me quite unhappy.

That said, apparently I’m pretty self-aware about this sort of stuff. I have it on good faith that most people who are depressed do not see this little dance play out and cannot identify the reasons for it. They drink the cocktail without ever turning it into the semiotic analysis that I do. If that’s true, then I have a leg up. Indeed, I think I do have that leg up–I have the ability to counter all that stuff with thoughts that go more toward the outcome I want as opposed to the outcome that makes me feel safe. I can make the leap to self mastery in this regard. I can know, intellectually, exactly the way out of the woods. There’s lots of allegories to help out with this, the most recent of which, to lean on Dumb Little Man again, is the whole Cherokee wolf story. God only knows if it’s originally a Cherokee story or just some appropriated myth from somewhere, but the idea is sound regardless of the poetic imagery: the thing you focus on is the thing that’s important, and ergo gets the most energy and time, and ergo will ‘win’. It is the “one you feed”. If I focus on the negative, then that’s exactly how I’ll feel–exactly how I do feel. If I wanted to, I could be the Adytum builder and wrap this god I am in good stuff as opposed to the stuff I do wrap it in. I have absolutely no shortage of materials, quite the opposite. If I took the time to count my blessings and then to count all the great things in the world that I live, I’d have enough material to build an entire city of god in my little existence. So whay don’t I do it already?

And here comes the polkaroo.

I realized this polkaroo this morning as I walked out to the garage to get on my motorcycle to come to work. Today was a lovely, beautiful, wonderful late summer day. I mean, this is the weather that you pray for on every day where the weather is anything but perfect. Sun, dew on green, crisp morning air. Birds singing, geese overhead. A veritable paradise. I saw all this. I was immersed in it. I completely love all of it. The pagan in me rejoices at everything this morning was caressing me, its special son, with. But I pushed it away… somehow.

I want this to make sense, because the key here is that it has nothing to do with my logical thinking self–the part of me that knows I should just focus on this stuff because it will turn around my mood. It’s something else–something that feels decidedly out of my control, and out of the realm of my logical thinking self. It feels like some primal superpower in me repelled all that blessing as though both it and I were north poles of two magnets. It was like I couldn’t choose to take it in, even if I wanted to. It was as though I was incompatible.

Aha.

I didn’t think that until just now when I wrote it. Maybe it goes to the notion that you can’t fill a full cup. If I’m already full of negative, no positive can enter. If I am a conduit only for negative, then only negative can enter… positives are incompatible. In that case, what I’d need to work on is becoming a sort of semiconductor that can accept good and bad.

Arg. But dammit, how do I do that? Again, it comes down to being unable to concentrate on the good if you’re fixated on the bad. Maybe this is the hard part of brain plasticity. Neurochemically, I know I’m wired for this negative thing, and so when I’m just engaged in the day to day, that’s the default conduit, and so it repels the good stuff, allowing me to remain the comfortable miserable bastard that I currently am. If I take out the time to meditate, however, that might aid in the rewiring. Damn, that’s hard though.

It is Herculian hard.

I guess perhaps it’s about taking it a step at a time, like any huge, difficult undertaking. All right then. I’m going to take this as the first step: I’m going to go outside, feel the sun and acknowledge it, breathe the air and acknowledge it, touch the grass and acknowledge it. I am going to go out there and know I’m blessed. That is the want, and furthermore it is the truth… it’s simply not the case that I am doomed to be forgotten, or that people don’t care, or that my life is any less special today than it was the last time I actually was compatible with the good that surrounds me.

May the cocktail taste repugnant, and fuck you, polkaroo.

How’s that for a catch phrase?

Tags: depression, self-analysis

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 11:12 am and is filed under musing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.