I’ve heard it said that you can wake up and decide what kind of day you are going to have. On the heels of a dreary and chilly and melancholy day, I am waking up with trepidation.
My energy has been sapped. I woke up to the sun streaming through my window and I want to be happy.
I want to shake off the sluggish feeling that is seeping into my body at this moment, but I don’t know if I can.
I hit a wall.
I am in a job with rampant disregard for its employees well-being with a trainer who pretty much hates me and I feel like they are doing things that will force me to quit. I had this suspicion confirmed by a co-worker (they tend to force the good employees out and only keep the ones willing to put up with crap).
Sometimes I have very good, cooperative days with John since he moved out, other days, the conflict is unbelievably wretched. I was called a bitch one day, and then allowed to cry in his arms another day. The alternating softness and hardness of his behavior is perplexing and painful.
I haven’t talked to my mother in about 6 months or more. She has cut off emotional support and told me I could not turn to her if I have financial problems either.
I was told by my youngest sister that if I’m at any family function that she’s in attendance, she’d call the police on me. She hates me that much.
I don’t know where I’m going for the holidays this year. I’ll send the girls to my in-laws for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I am thinking of just staying home by myself. I really probably won’t be much good company.
I have precisely two people I can count on to make time to see me face to face, to let me unload my burden and to cheer me up when I cry and one of them is recovering from knee surgery in the hospital.
I don’t know what this beautiful, sunny day will bring.
Will I have to fight back the urge to cry and lose the battle again?
Will I, despite my best intentions, express disappointment that my girls aren’t helping me keep the house clean and hurt their feelings while doing so?
Will I feel unbearably lonely today, even though in the past few days, I’ve spoken to a few acquaintances and made a new one? Even though I’m going to a black tie event tonight, complete with a beautiful brown and copper gown and with a wonderful and handsome man by my side?
There’s been a lot of life-changing events in the past couple of years. A lot heaped upon my plate.
I am not, generally, a negative or weak person. In fact, I believe I do have strength to cope with lots of things that would cause other people to fold.
It’s been nearly two years since I’ve slid into melancholy.
I know it’s been time…perhaps past due…for me to go through this.
Carl Jung has said:
“‘Depression’ means literally ‘being forced downwards.’ This can happen even when you don’t consciously have any feeling at all of being ‘on top.’ “
He said we have some choices when the depression hits:
1. become useful to someone
2. surround yourself with beauty
But another alternative exists,
3. to move inward and learn from the depression. To learn from the depression, though this is the more difficult path:
“When the darkness grows denser, I would penetrate to its very core and ground, and would not rest until amid the pain a light appeared to me, for ‘in excessu affectus’ [in an excess of affect or passion] Nature reverses herself. “
Kazmirez Dabrowski would tend to agree. We have much to learn from our neuroses and depressions if we let them teach us.
So…while I really don’t want to be going through this, I think I have to, to get to the other side of it.
The Sprightly Writer 