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?

Big-Hairy-Deal Hard

Sometimes You Have to Weep Under a Sesame Street Grover Hat at the Mall

Jeather. Seriously. I came across it while I was Christmas shopping today.



I thought I was maybe having a moody kind of day, that kind of day where you think bad thoughts but then eat ice cream and feel better until you realize how fat you are and oh shit you have PMS, but then I ran into the reality of jeather, a noncommital hybrid that is neither like jeans nor leather and inspires the phrase stylistically flaccid. My eyes spontaneously spurted tears onto this new material, and I knew that I had veered into a much more serious stretch of the emotional spectrum than I had at first suspected.

I really cried on jeather today at the mall. Jeather was my tipping point.



I didn't want jeather to be my tipping point, though, and, because I was experiencing that particular kind of crazy that lets me think I can dig my way out of sadness by being quirky and a little spontaneous, I compounded jeather tears with public shame by ending up in the back of a Boe's fighting back sobs while wearing a Sesame Street Grover hat.

One minute I was sure that all I needed to do was try on the most googly-eyed hat I could find, and the next minute I was barely through the first line of C Is for Cookie — silently in my head, of course — before I was sniffling and dripping tears on a patch of ugly shopping mall Berber with a big pink nose sticking out of my forehead.

Who knew that ludicrous consumer goods could be so heartbreaking?



In an effort to lead a life less weepy, I went home, put on my favourite comfort sweater, and settled down for a long, distracting evening of Happy Endings and chicken fingers. Life still had some tears in store for me, though, because a train of not one, not two, but three cats tromped across my stomach, bent down to sniff, and came up with Stink Face, that tell-tale, mouth-breathing, dropped-jaw look cats have when they smell something particularly disgusting that they love, because they love nothing more than each other's misplaced biological waste, it seems.

Curious about what on my person could be causing such a rash of Stink Face, I sniffed the bottom of my sweater, and it was cat urine, people. My favourite comfort sweater was rank with the stank of male cat urine.

And then I remembered something so terrible that I continue to shudder when I think about it: earlier in the evening, I actually picked mystery food off that sweater and ATE IT.



Winter is hard enough on me even without the clusterfrack of seasonal whatnot, jeather, crying under a Cookie Monster hat in public, and eating off a cat pee sweater, but now I have to find myself at the end of this blog entry with nothing pithy to say? I'm done. Done!

THIS IS ALL TOO DAMN MUCH.

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PS. The Palinode can attest to my state of mind.