Thank God For Apathy

Some days you feel like that last, tiny spring in the middle of you, the last coil of you still left unfrayed, is going to give way. You can feel it twig to the right in your chest and away from your heart, and you are certain, you are absolutely confident, that this is it.

You imagine stripping off all your clothes and running barefoot into the middle of the street nearly frozen over with the last autumn rain and screaming something that might really piss off your neighbours.

THERE IS NO GOD, MOTHERFUCKERS! or YOUR CHILDREN WILL NEVER BE ANY BETTER THAN YOU ARE RIGHT NOW!

You don't strip yourself naked and run into the street, though. You sit inside and order takeout and hold on for texts from the Palinode and obsess over making this tree:



It's all you can do, really. You don't like the cold. And you'd like to keep your 38-year-old hindquarters out of public view. And there's a pizza with your name on it that won't order itself.

Sometimes a little touch of apathy can do your neighbourhood a world of good.

I Am Not Allowed Detachment Now

For the last two days, I have had a tightness in my chest. I'm distracted. I'm depressed with a twist of unplaced worry.



I thought this was my usual fall weirdness, the kind I feel every year that translates the skittering of leaves outside as a death knell for all that is well and good in the world. Something about that self-diagnosis didn't sit right, though, and then the inside of my mouth began to ache.

The inside of my mouth nags at me when I am feeling some kind of non-physical pain to which I am not paying the proper attention. I am the local queen of denial around these parts. I often won't notice that something is up with me until my anxiety has inflicted me with numbness in my extremities, apocalyptic dreams, and painful outbreaks.

It's not like the reason for my anxiety was hiding under any rocks. I am travelling to my hometown over the weekend to spend time with family and attend my grandfather's memorial service. He died, he's dead, and I obviously have feelings about that which I am not expressing. I know this, because the roof of my mouth just ahead of my throat is raw and red.

This used to happen to my throat at church every Sunday when we sang hymns. Hymns fester the sorrow out of me, and there will be more than a few of them this weekend. Goddamn.

I used to be able to avoid everything all the time by chasing down the bottoms of pint glasses, but now that I can't do that anymore, my body won't let me get away with the avoidance. It sent me a rash of canker sores when he died. They bloomed into broad, white heads that bled when I sucked at them in my sleep.

I am not allowed detachment now, if my actual, flesh-and-blood mouth has anything to say about it. Goddamn.

This Is How I Become More Than I Was

Fall is a tough time of year for me. I feel like a butterfly in reverse, receding into a sticky and slow chrysalis. When you have a seasonal depression problem, it can feel like a regression, a backwards slide. It feels like failure.



This isn't the truth, though. I just have an illness. I can feel like things are backsliding when they are, in fact, moving forward quite tickety boo. I can't feel it, though, at the moment.



It'll come back to me. It always does. Those of you with seasonal depression know what I'm talking about.



This year is harder than other years, though. One year, one month, and ten days ago, I quit drinking.

I spent most of the first year dealing with sweeping lifestyle changes and not getting high. Other emotions? The hard emotions coming out of my real self, the self not numbed by alcohol, were so distant behind the noise of not drinking that I barely felt them. I can see that now.



Upon the first anniversary of my sobriety, a handful of people congratulated me by saying Now you can begin the real work of being sober. I nodded to myself and smiled and hoped that they were wrong.

They were not wrong.

I'm over the hard beginning stages of kicking my old habit of drinking myself into a black hole every other night, but now I'm a raw nerve. I'm all vulnerable and frayed and tired and overwraught and naked and uncomfortable.

It turns out that if you spend over twenty years drinking every time you have a strong emotion, good or bad, there is a lot of stuff to get through at the end of it all. Nothing goes away just because you got drunk enough to forget most of it.



It's still brilliant, though, this having a life I've chosen over one that lead me by the nose, despite the tears and the bad dreams and the urge to smoke every cigarette I see and imagine and remember smoking back to when I was fifteen and learned how to french inhale.

I have to remember that this is how I learn to be free, or at least more free. This is how I become more than I was and more than I am.

Despite these moments of self-doubt and heaviness, I am living a life I love. I get to tell, hear, and help mould stories for a living. This is the seed of fantastic.



I just need to remember that these difficult feelings do not mean that I'm sinking.

This is swimming.

It's just that sometimes swimming is lazily floating around a lake on an inflatable tube with tropical fish printed on it, and sometimes swimming is slogging your way back to hide under an overturned boat in a sudden storm.

In either case, the next day looks pretty good from where you are, as long as you don't drown, and we all know that I suck at drowning.