I Can Do This One

Giant snowbanks are starting to melt. I want to feel rising hope or something akin to happiness, but that's not in the offing. I'm an early spring depression junkie.



Goddamned seasonal depression.



This time of year always finds me depressed and reflective and stressed out and trying to figure out how to exist and accept my humanity and feel okay about that. I was doing it on this same day last year, and I was doing it two years and one day ago, and I was doing it three years and thirteen days ago, and I think you get the picture.

March is a bastard every year.



I am so hard on myself when this time of year comes along, and I think that's why I have to write this entry on an annual basis. I remind myself that I'm human and that this, too, shall pass. I will move through this part and remember why I am here again, why I do what I do again, who I am again.

I am human. This will be okay.



I was asking myself questions earlier today to try to dig into a better pattern of thinking, and I asked myself this:

What if the thing I think will be my downfall is actually the key to opening up my greatest gifts?

And I knew immediately that this is true.



There was a time when I would have pointed at my alcoholism and said that it was clearly a terrible weakness that destroyed all good things for me, but I would have been wrong, because I was only in the middle of my journey with it. Coming through drinking to a place of sobriety has brought me into a greater place of power. Given the choice, I doubt I would write that part of my story the same way, because there is and was some hard stuff bound up in it, but damn it if it hasn't brought about some incomparable joy.

I beat myself up hard and long for my drinking, but now I know that I needn't have wasted the energy just to drive myself deeper under. I was on my way. I just couldn't quite see around the corner yet.



It's the same with my tendency towards heartache and sadness. I cursed it as a child. I thought it would kill me, but the truth is that it pushed me to use my words. I had to write it out, figure out my own head, to survive, and I became a writer.

My best has almost always come from my worst.



And I guess this is what March is, maybe. I go down under, below the waterline. I wait. I hide out. I drag myself around like the wet muck after a fire.

I come out more grown, though, every year. I come out deeper and stronger and more worn in.



I will come through, I will come through, I will come through.



I'm good at crossing rivers. I can do this one.

So, ask yourself the question:

What if the thing you think will be your downfall is actually the key to opening up your greatest gifts?

What My New Journaling Habit Is Teaching Me

I've been taking Karen Walrond's Create.2013 journaling course since the 7th of this month. I had an inkling when I started that constructively working through my thoughts out of the public eye was something I needed to do more of, and so far journaling has proven me 100% correct.



I barely kept a journal, let alone wrote, before I started blogging back in 2003. In my heart, I still classified myself as a creative, and primarily a writer, but self-doubt kept me from creating any regular work until blogging came along. Somehow, even with all my self-doubt in tow, blogging was the key that opened me right up, and I've been creating out loud ever since.

The problem with blogging being the thing that got my creative ball rolling, though, is this: my creative habit now is to think, make, and do in public online, and I do so much of this that I end up rarely taking the time to work out some of the grittier stuff behind the scenes, the stuff that my brain needs to move through to stay healthy psychologically, emotionally, and creatively.

Working almost solely in public has become a way of avoiding the stuff I don't want to look at and of ignoring the things that I can't easily pin down, which I didn't fully and honestly realize until I spent the last two weeks detailing heavier self-doubt and anxiety on paper than I knew I had. If my journal were a new romantic partner, it would have hooked me up with a good therapy group and gotten the hell out of Dodge already.



Karen had us break out our art supplies yesterday — in my case, this means a box of wax crayons — and illustrate our word of the year for 2013. This word of the year is a concept from Ali Edwards' One Little Word, which she describes as "...a word that I can focus on, meditate on, and reflect upon as I go about my daily life."

The word I keep coming around to is "focus", which to me involves a number of ideas that involve paying closer attention, clarity, and carrying through, and the quote from Mark Twain that I found to go with my word for the year feels terribly apt:

"You can't depend on your eyes
when your imagination is out of focus."

I have become increasingly less focused and clear as my professional and personal selves have begun to shift, and even imagining clarity of purpose and careful attention to particulars feels delicious.

When you think ahead through 2013, what words come to mind for you?

The Fantastic Trick of Being Alive

I am less interested in happiness these days than I once was.



I suppose you could argue that I am lying, what with my praising the glory that is my SAD lamp, but you would be wrong. There is a difference between no longer wanting to off yourself and feeling happy. There are myriad emotions on the other side of suicidal ideation, and only a narrow spectrum of those are about happiness.

There is a lot of talk now about happiness and how to find it, but I'm less and less inclined to buy what they're selling. We each define our sense of happiness differently, so a seller can say HAPPINESS, and we will each come up with our own product description. Most often, they're only selling us our own assumptions about a transient emotion.



Positive affirmations, a mainstay of the happiness-seeking self-help complex, have always made me feel like absolute shite. It is what they appear to do to a large number of us, (and Danielle LaPorte has interesting things to say about that). [Edited to add: you can find a study that supports the sometimes negative effects of positive affirmations here with a paid membership.]

I think positive affirmations can sometimes wound rather than heal because they act like a question in our brains rather than a statement of belief. Our brains automatically fill in their kneejerk responses, which are often the very opposite of the positive affirmation's goal.

What the positive affirmation says:
You are beautiful, and the world wants your dreams to come true.

What our brain hears:
Am I beautiful? Does the world care about me?

What our brain says in response:
I am a sub-par shit-pile and the world is, at best, ambivalent about my existence.



What I need is practical takeaway. Rather than tell myself I am beautiful — especially when that is something I am not even particularly interested in believing as a grossly oversimplified statement about a complex and far-reaching attribute — it is much more effective to go out and do something beautiful, give to the world.

The universe is both within and without us, and your brain, a finite and rather touchy instrument, is not always the best interpreter of the state of things.

Act outwardly rather than retreat inwardly. If you find affirmations triggering, this'll get you further any day.



I quit drinking two years and three months ago, and my worst struggles have all happened while I was looking for happiness over interestingness, happiness over knowledge, happiness over diversity of thought and feeling.

I had lazily equated loving my life with being happy, when what's true about love is not happiness but love itself. What's true about love is that it exists quite aside from happiness. Love is indivisible.

I loved an ex even as he made me feel lonely, I loved my grandmother even as I grieved her death, and I love writing even when I growl audibly over fussy sentences.

We do not have to see beauty in the mirror to love ourselves. We don't have to believe the world wants anything in particular for us, good or bad. Love happens anyway.

Happiness? It'll fail you every time. It is transient.



I don't know how to describe the steps to love. I'm feeling for them with my feet as I speak. How to get there is the greatest ongoing question of human existence. I do know, though, that it is here, greater than happiness and much more interesting. Love knows more, feels more, and does more than happiness could dream of doing in a month of Sundays.

Happiness feels good when it comes, but Love? It'll tear you apart, build you up, and make you a whole being, even when you think there's nothing left, and that's the fantastic trick of being alive.

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PS. I am not, of course, discounting the positive experiences people have had with positive affirmations. I know people for whom they have worked quite well. The fact is, though, that the opposite is also true for some, and I mentioned them in the above piece to validate those experiences and let people know that it is not some kind of innate failure of the spirit that this negative outcome happened for them.