Monday
Jul022012
Picking Through Pocket Lint Looking For My Lucky Penny
Monday, July 2, 2012
I am drawn to the past lately. I am pulled by it.
A friend told me recently that there is a particular planet that is in retrograde or transit or some such form of movement in its chorus with the other planets that is causing the past to rise up for everyone, and so we're all looking back at the past and turning it over and dredging up old feelings. There may be some truth in this.
I don't just remember the closet under my grandmother's stairs, the one that I used to crawl into so I could listen to the muffled voices of adults playing dominoes well past my bedtime. I can feel the rough synthetic chenille of the blue and white bedspread and the aged softness of the old cotton quilt whose stuffing always fell to one end. I can hear the amplification of my own breath against the wood panelling.
I am alive inside the memories that come back to me. I could write books detailing them. There would be no story, just a long string of vignettes, but maybe I could expunge them all, put them somewhere where they wouldn't keep popping up in front of me.
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I said out loud tonight that I think I'm depressed. I've been thinking it for a while, but it seemed like a good idea to lay that one down with some weight out in the world.
I spoke in front of a room full of people all by myself recently. This was something I had on my life list, and it was something that I never really believed I would have the opportunity to do let alone be able to do it. I surprised myself, though, and pleasantly at that.
I was expecting to be a little bummed afterwards, because this is how success works with me. I reach a height, and then I stupidly lose faith for a while when a set of stairs to the next high doesn't immediately present itself. What I didn't expect, though, was to fall into the trap of self-doubt I used my TEDx talk to talk about.
I feel like I'm wasting time picking through pocket lint looking for my lucky penny.
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None of this is to make you worry. It's a phase. I'm going through a phase.
We wake up cyclically. We wake up to things, we break a bit out of the monotony, the sameness of our lives and our thinking, occasionally, and it's not always fun. Sometimes it's bright and fresh and enlivening like breathing in crisp air on a spring morning, but sometimes it's really inconvenient and discomfiting and shakes our faith in everything just enough that it feels like our lives are held together with little more than papery, dollar-store tape and leftover yarn.
I'm at the papery tape and leftover yarn end of the spectrum right now. It doesn't mean that this is how things actually are; it just means that this is how things feel, which is why I am here in the middle of the night telling you all about it.
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As a kind of comfort, I have been digging up small memories of things I particularly liked as a child. Here's one of them:
My father kept hockey sticks up in the rafters of the garage. He would lay them side by side across two unpainted beams. When no one was home, I would drag the folding ladder over and climb up just high enough reach the hockey sticks' blades. I used the blades to shuffle the sticks side to side just enough so that bits of wood and sweet, fine, winter dust would drift down to where I could smell them in the air. The dust hung there in brief puffs and made me feel like there was a mysterious history to discover in the world.
This memory just reminded me that I need more rituals that help me remember the feeling of mystery.
Now you with a small, good memory. Tell me one.
A friend told me recently that there is a particular planet that is in retrograde or transit or some such form of movement in its chorus with the other planets that is causing the past to rise up for everyone, and so we're all looking back at the past and turning it over and dredging up old feelings. There may be some truth in this.
I don't just remember the closet under my grandmother's stairs, the one that I used to crawl into so I could listen to the muffled voices of adults playing dominoes well past my bedtime. I can feel the rough synthetic chenille of the blue and white bedspread and the aged softness of the old cotton quilt whose stuffing always fell to one end. I can hear the amplification of my own breath against the wood panelling.
I am alive inside the memories that come back to me. I could write books detailing them. There would be no story, just a long string of vignettes, but maybe I could expunge them all, put them somewhere where they wouldn't keep popping up in front of me.
----------------------------
I said out loud tonight that I think I'm depressed. I've been thinking it for a while, but it seemed like a good idea to lay that one down with some weight out in the world.
I spoke in front of a room full of people all by myself recently. This was something I had on my life list, and it was something that I never really believed I would have the opportunity to do let alone be able to do it. I surprised myself, though, and pleasantly at that.
I was expecting to be a little bummed afterwards, because this is how success works with me. I reach a height, and then I stupidly lose faith for a while when a set of stairs to the next high doesn't immediately present itself. What I didn't expect, though, was to fall into the trap of self-doubt I used my TEDx talk to talk about.
I feel like I'm wasting time picking through pocket lint looking for my lucky penny.
----------------------------
None of this is to make you worry. It's a phase. I'm going through a phase.
We wake up cyclically. We wake up to things, we break a bit out of the monotony, the sameness of our lives and our thinking, occasionally, and it's not always fun. Sometimes it's bright and fresh and enlivening like breathing in crisp air on a spring morning, but sometimes it's really inconvenient and discomfiting and shakes our faith in everything just enough that it feels like our lives are held together with little more than papery, dollar-store tape and leftover yarn.
I'm at the papery tape and leftover yarn end of the spectrum right now. It doesn't mean that this is how things actually are; it just means that this is how things feel, which is why I am here in the middle of the night telling you all about it.
----------------------------
As a kind of comfort, I have been digging up small memories of things I particularly liked as a child. Here's one of them:
My father kept hockey sticks up in the rafters of the garage. He would lay them side by side across two unpainted beams. When no one was home, I would drag the folding ladder over and climb up just high enough reach the hockey sticks' blades. I used the blades to shuffle the sticks side to side just enough so that bits of wood and sweet, fine, winter dust would drift down to where I could smell them in the air. The dust hung there in brief puffs and made me feel like there was a mysterious history to discover in the world.
This memory just reminded me that I need more rituals that help me remember the feeling of mystery.
Now you with a small, good memory. Tell me one.
categorized in general and tagged in TED, TED Talks, TEDx, TEDxRegina, depression
general and tagged in TED, TED Talks, TEDx, TEDxRegina, depression 
Reader Comments (22)
I am tumbling through the past constantly these days, retrograde planets or not. Between my mother entering the endgame of her life and this parenting gig which causes me to riffle through my childhood trying to remember what I did and why and what my parents did and how I felt about that, plus being a ruminative person to start with... whew!
OK, one small good memory: Being in the crawlspace eaves of our house with my best seventh grade friend. It smells of sun-baked wood, and the blanket we've brought in to make our secret lair softer and comfier is wool and adds its own scent to the mix. We are filling in mad-libs with what to our eleven year-old minds are naughty answers: body parts and words for acts we cannot yet even imagine but know are "dirty." Our flashlight batteries are staring to wane and so we turn them off and just sit together in the musty dark for a moment, naming boys we think are “cute.”
We sense, without really knowing, that we are on the precipice, the knife-edge of turning from child to teen, and this feels like a safe refuge, the calm before the storm.
This is a small but wonderful memory. In the early weeks after the birth of one of my daughters when she was getting up at 2 am for the feedings, I would get up and change her and take her to the rocking chair and sit quietly in the near dark and nurse her. It was quiet but for the squeaking of the chair and the suckling noises. I'd look down in awe at this creature and wish on all the stars in the night that she would have a good life. We'd sit like that for about an hour. I'd sing quietly and she'd drift back to sleep. Best part of my day.
I used to slip into Sunday School late at the church across the street, trolling for punch and cookies.
I've never been a sound sleeper. As a child, I was envious of those other kids who could sleep on lawn or on a bus, because even a little breeze or noise would keep me awake.
In my combined kindergarten/first grade glass, we had to lay on mats to take a "nap" every afternoon. It was probably just 20 minutes or so, but it felt like an eternity to lay there and do nothing while the other children slept.
Fortunately, I was saved by my soft yellow sweater that had tiny rhinestones down the front. I would hold up a rhinestone right in front of my eye and spend the quiet time immersed in a world of shifting doubled reflections and rainbows.
When I was a little girl my father would be the person who got me ready to leave in the mornings for school. In the winter he would always bundle me up so completely that I could only waddle with both arms sticking out away from my body. I so remember the last step in this dressing ritual was when a scarf was tied around my lower face and neck against the wind. I felt very confined but at the same time so cared for. It is a very sweet memory.
It's the mid-seventies and I spend every day of summer holidays with my grandparents on their farm in the Sand Hills. By August harvest has started and everyone starts early and ends late, when the grain gets too tough to combine. In the afternoons my grandmother and I pack lunch to take the fields. We put hot coffee into canning jars wrapped with tea towels, make sandwiches with cold roast beef and homemade mustard and pack everything into a cardboard box marked 'B.C. Fruit'. We drive out to the field where my two uncles and grandfather are working and park the truck in the shade of the combine. The air smells like grain and coffee. It's hot and sunny and everyone is happy. My grandfather rolls a smoke. It seems to me that farming is one of the few ways left to live where work and life are the same thing. It's a good memory, but I've made myself cry writing about it.
This was lovely.
Driving by myself down a twisty bluff highway in the fall sunshine, tree branches meeting overhead, every single last leaf absolutely golden. Perfect.
I don't know about you guys, but these memories you're sharing are bringing up all kinds of other good memories for me, too. It's like we're serving up a great little feast here.
When I was wee, I spent as much time alone as I did with my best friend and her little sister. We were so enmeshed that we invented a name for the triple-self. When we used it, it reminded us that we loved each other the most of everyone.
Ahh, this was so lovely.
I've been experiencing much of the same lately. I guess it really is the planets. I like it when it's the happy memories that come up. For me, that happens when I'm bathing my daughter. I tilt her head up to rinse the suds from her wispy baby hair, and I think about my own mother; how growing up she would tell me to tilt my head back and count the stars so she could rinse my hair without getting soap in my eyes. I'd look up, close my eyes, and imagine a million stars. When she was done, she'd always ask me how many there were and if I saw any shooting stars. My mother made growing up magical. I hope I can give that to my little girl.
I've never been able to sleep at night with the curtains open. The night is too dark and much too deep, and the idea that someone could be out there watching me is even today still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
But on the nights when the moon is full, I've always opened the curtains wide. The pale light washes ordinary things black, white, and grey, and it strikes me as magical the way everything seems simpler, less complicated. When I was a kid, I'd stay awake for as long as I could on those nights. I felt oddly comforted by the moonlight.
The positioning of my house doesn't let the light from full moons bathe my bedroom in the way that it did when I was little. But it hits the 4 x 4 glass block window in my bathroom just right. Taking a long bath and reading by moonlight sometimes settles me in a way that nothing else can.
My dad laying in a lawn chair, 6 year old me laying on top of his stomach looking up at a sky full of stars. I don't remember why but my dad is softly singing "the lion sleeps tonight" to me. The only part I know is the "wimoweh" chorus and when I sing it, it makes my dad laugh so hard I almost slide off his belly.
Laying under the willow by the creek in the afternoon at the end of a book. Petting my dogs black fur and feeling how warm it was from the sun. That feeling that I always get the moment after I finish a book of being in a bubble. Outside of the rest of the world, preparing for re-entry. Just staying in the bubble, in the warm filtered sunlight.
Dog biscuits in a corduroy jacket pockets, ritz crackers and smooth Skippy peanut butter (Grandpa C), mothballs (Grandpa I), old newspaper and cardboard boxes (Grandma C - an antique dealer we packed up and moved from place to place and show to show), old car leather (my dad a car collector and the smell of my vintage Jag in the sun in summer, Tomato plants (Mom and the summer garden - collecting (and killing) tomato horn worms), Estee Lauder Aliage and certain perfumes on certain skin types (Alison), Night blooming Jasmine (summer), bacon and coffee mixed with pine trees and must (Maine in the summer), puppy bellies....
How abrasively matter-of-fact it felt when my mom told me about the birds & the bees, upstairs on her navy bedspread with the full white flowers on it, the lamp light insufficient, the ceiling slanted and me wondering why my dad had stayed downstairs.
I don't know what these green things are called, but my grandma called them helicopters (which she pronounced "hee-lee-copters"):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rubyshoes/6222487524/in/set-72157627659957357
I used to lie under the tree in her backyard and sift them through my hands, hold them up and let them flutter down to the ground in circles (like propellers, hence the name we gave them.) I see them a lot when I walk. I saw them in Seattle a few weeks ago, and I stopped and picked some up, as I have a habit of doing, and putting them in my pocket. I also have a very informal series of iPhone photos of them. Every time I feel better about whatever is upended in my heart or mind, just for a few minutes. It helps me remember my grandmother, which is never unhelpful for me.
As you know I'm in the deep discomfort of a wake-up phase after a long time, and sometimes it's things like this that end up making a day tolerable.
Starting when I was probably 8 or so? Whenever we went camping, we'd get up early in the AM and walk around the campsite picking up aluminum cans. We'd go in groups, one or two kids w/mom or dad, or as we got older my brother and I went alone. After several years of picking up aluminum cans, my dad cashed them all in, and we bought a brand new Canoe for the family.
I remember the quiet of the campgrounds, sunny and dusty with that wonderful warm dusty smel, and a little bit mysterious because we were often the only ones up walking around.
We used the hell out of that canoe, and we got it essentially for free. My parents were a little different in a lot of ways, but they taught me so much, and I am so gratful for the lessons I learned, good, bad, hard, and easy.
Visiting far-flung Indiana and waking up at my grandmother's house "late" at night, hearing all the grown-ups laughing in her living room; slipping down the stairs quietly and sneaking down the hallway into the light; being welcomed by the laughter and smiling faces 0f my parents, aunts and uncles and grandmother -- the "tribe" -- curling up in my father's lap, his arm supporting me, and being allowed to stay up (later than my brothers and sisters!) watching the slide show of their own childhoods back in Atlanta, when "Dad" (Granddad) was still alive -- listening to their stories, being connected by all the stories.
Reading about your sobriety in the past, I've wondered about this part of it, which seems inevitable, because it's just life -- "at the papery tape and leftover yarn end of the spectrum right now" (what a great phrase) -- just so you know, you write like a dream and are a gift to many.
Love. Love. Love. Love. Love.
And it is true - the retrograde stuff. I feel it too. Maybe the Mayans were right???
I dreamed a few nights ago of finding the teeniest little frog in my bathroom... small, like it could fit on the tip of my pointer finger.
And that reminded me of a time when I was really small. Before I started school, when we still lived in Texas, and I was allowed to run free in our backyard which seemed to me at the time to be three million miles long.
I remember seeing the smallest, teeniest little frog sitting on a blade of grass. I'd never seen a frog that small and I wondered if maybe it was a little fairy, disguised so that I wouldn't recognize it. For years I thought I'd imagined that little frog... and then, four years ago, during a really trying time in my life... I wandered, walking and praying on my lunch break, and ran across dozens of these teeny, teeny frogs... newly transformed from tadpoles and venturing for the first time from their small pond.
Those little frogs represent magic, possibility, and hope to me. Little icons of worlds that exist, if I just keep myself open to seeing them.
I love this post. It's not about the happiest topic (depression) but you write so beautifully. I hope that you start to feel more like the bright, vibrant, soft & silky brand new yarn and the super-duper strong duct tape soon.
One of my favourite memories from the past would be opening up the cupboard over our stovetop. It's where Dad kept (and still keeps) all the spices that he cooks with, and I remember it having the most delicious smell in the world. I would always wonder what made the cupboard smell so delicious, whether it was one spice or all of them co-mingling and coming together. It still smells that good :)