Alpha

Spent the weekend at my sister’s place for her birthday. The baby is about six weeks old now, and I was excited to see her again. Not so excited about coming home. I had an inkling of how things were before I left – I keep up with my sister through texts and facebook – I could tell she was slipping again into depression. Post-partem depression. She had it with the other kids. When my first niece was born, I ended up keeping her while my sister was hospitalized and recovered. And when my nephew was born, I came home from Virginia in part to help out again as she got through it again. Despite her history, the doctor at the hospital refused to prescribe medication (apparently a graduate of the Tom Cruise school on psychiatric care), and sent her on her way. So, after sinking into despair while her body recovered from the trauma of having grown and expelled another human being, she finally saw her family practitioner (a woman) and started an antidepressant the day I arrived.

I am myself just starting to feel strong again. Wounded maybe. Maybe always will be. But I am finally starting to come out of the cloud I’ve been wandering through. Still making mistakes. Bad decisions that seem right at the time. Then I try to fix them. Make things worse. But I’m trying not to beat myself up about them so much. Trying to make peace with myself. Be at peace with myself (which is hard since the factions have been warring for almost four decades now).

I’ve been writing. Well, I was writing. Getting into a pattern. I submitted a story last week. It’s been years since I’ve submitted anything. Years since I’ve been willing to take a chance that I might actually be a talented writer. So I decided that I was being a coward. And that I was holding myself back in some combination of fear and punishment (for being such a coward).

I’ve been working really hard on forgiving myself lately. It’s been tough since I really betrayed  both myself and someone I love very much. And I thought I was done with betrayal. I haven’t been able to fix it or make up for it. I haven’t even known where to start. So I’ve just been rambling forward, one misstep at a time, trying to find the path in this fucking fog.

My sister is coming along, but the first few days were rough. A year ago, I sat in this same apartment, crying my own eyes out, so I understand far too well what she is going through. It looks different from this side. Other people call and stop by to talk to her, tell her to buck up, just shake it, just stop being depressed. I want to say it too. It seems so easy to just choose happiness, just choose not to be sad. It seems so easy.

It’s hard watching her go through this (not to mention exhausting helping to care for a newborn again). Made harder by the reflection of my own behavior over the last year. I know how badly she wants to feel better. I recognize how much she just wants that demon cloud to lift. I remember how it feels to think it never will end. So I am trying to remain strong. Be positive. Be happy, so I can show her how, even if I don’t entirely feel it on the inside. It’s a high, tight rope for me to walk helping her get through this. Last time I tried to help someone through, I ended up falling and made a complete mess of everything. I ended up crying in this apartment.

I'm not so good at this part. I don't want to have to be the strong one, all this weight on ny shoulders. Okay, it isn't that I'm not good at it. I am, sometimes, a little too take-charge. Which is the problem. I take on too much. More than my share. More than I am capable of doing sometimes. Because I think I owe the world. But then I start to turn into a bitch when I think I have to be in charge. Like the worst kind of bitch. The Alpha bitch.

I'm also not good at letting someone else take care of me. Terrible at asking for help and then just unglued when I feel like I have to depend on someone else. I start justifying it. Just to make myself feel better. And I also become a bitch.

But I can’t walk away. I have to be better than that. I've kept my footing before. Balanced between taking over and rolling over. I can’t keep walking away from the people I love, just because I think it will preserve my sanity. For one thing, I think the sanity ship has done sailed. For another, it gets lonely being sane.

Singing With the Dead

 Except for the random walks and a short trip out with a friend, I’ve spent most of the past two weeks hunkered over the laptop or my notebook (paper – they still make those). I’ve squeezed out a little over a hundred and twenty pages in the last month and a half. Plus done a revision (more like a complete overhaul) of a short story I wrote several years back. I’m writing again. It’s like the blood just started pumping through my veins. I am among the living again. It feels good.

The downside to this is that, well . . . I am among the living again. Before, my zombie corpse was overwhelmed by the fact that, you know, I was dead. Now, as the blood starts moving through, I feel it moving through. I feel every little pain, every ache. Too much metaphor?

Anyway, I am using this regeneration to do what I’m supposed to do in this world, what I do best. One hundred and twenty pages worth. The more I write, the more confident I become. And not just on the page, but in everything else. I assert myself on the page, and life just follows.

Others are still giving me advice. Talking. Telling me what I should do. Find a job. Make lots of money. Get a car. Move here. Move there. Don’t move at all. Change this or that or all of it. Stop being who you are. I know they are trying to be helpful (and I did seem pretty helpless there for a while), and it’s not that I don’t appreciate the help – at least the thought behind the help – but I don’t want it. I’ve stopped listening.

They exhaust me. Droning on and on. I tire of trying to convince them of the universal value of art, even as we sit watching television or listening to a band play. As if it’s somehow okay for other people to be artists, yet it’s beneath me. As if my higher calling is earning seventy-five grand a year and driving a glorified station wagon back to my house in the suburbs where I can watch art made by other people on my big screen tv, just to unwind from selling all those widgets and earning all that money. And doing it again tomorrow.

I don’t want to explain myself anymore. And I’m not going to. Okay, maybe here on the page. I’m just going to keep going. Pour as much of myself into writing as they do into their trinket-earning. If I can’t make a living at it, well I’ll find something to pay the bills, but if I never try, if I never put my art first, how will I know?

One hundred twenty pages. And I'm not a zombie.

What if?

Been up for hours. Wandering the house. Wandered out for a pack of smokes. I need to quit. Still feeling the restlessness. Wish I could keep more of it focused on the work, concentrate on the writing. My mind is cluttered. Too many thoughts bumping around in there at once, and at last they are not the thoughts of others, the suggestions from others, the doubts of other people creeping in and taking over. Just my own doubts. I try to pay them no mind, stopping the thought before it gets too far. You don’t have to follow it, a counselor once told me as I stared at the shabby gold curtains in her office. It’s not advice to which I’ve always adhered, but it works. Almost all of the time.

Still, the thoughts – the what if thoughts – don’t just go away. They still show up, knock around in my head a little while, trying to get my attention. Those days, like this morning, it is all I can do to shake those thoughts loose, focus on the positive ones, follow the trail that will lead me far away from the doubt.

I read recently that the difference between people with high anxiety and stress levels and people without them is the question of if. People with normal stress levels go about their lives telling themselves, if I do this, then that will happen. And most of the time they are right, so they keep going about their lives. People with higher stress and anxiety are more likely to ask themselves one question. What if? What might happen if I do this? Sometimes, the question and the infinite possibilities become too much, overwhelming a person into a point of immobility.

The counselor with the gold curtains once told me to let go of that question. I understood what she meant. I knew I couldn’t continue obsessing, fearing the worst possible outcome at any given moment. But I know now that I can’t ever let it go completely, not without sacrificing who I am at my core. Without the what if – I wouldn’t be much of a writer. The more they try to counsel and medicate into no longer asking the questions, the less I’m able to write. Writing is itself therapy. On the page, it is safe to work out the what ifs, let them out, let them move through me without making me paranoid. On the page, they cannot hurt me. When I am writing, I forget all the other questions. I eventually forget to even ask them.

A Clear Day

 I went on a major cleaning spree this morning. Brought my desk upstairs. Rearranged my bedroom so it would fit and I could look out the window as I sit writing. I also hung some curtains as I have been awakened each day since my return by the sunlight flooding my empty, white-walled room. I’m not much for going back to sleep. I have weird, Prozac-infused dreams when I try to go back to sleep.

This morning I woke on schedule, but managed to sort of doze until shortly after my roommate left for his job. After the zombie-lion chased me into the spooky old house on the hill and I woke up, I was still tired. Am still tired. Thinking about a nap, but I need to write a little. That’s what started it all this morning. I sat down to write, several times in fact, but found myself instead fumbling through the cable channels, smoking yet another cigarette, and just generally wandering about the house and yard. I even went for a walk through the neighborhood. I am restless. Something slightly beyond restless. And all the walking and not-writing didn’t cure it.

So I brought my desk upstairs to the bedroom and hung some curtains (I’ve heard this is an old folk remedy for getting over restlessness and writer’s block). Since we aren’t really sure how long we’re going to be here, I never really bothered unpacking anything other than my clothes. Not that I own much else. Not that I possess. The room has been sterile – white walls, a bookcase, a bed, my dirty laundry, miniblinds that let in far too much sunlight – and I haven’t done anything to change that. Like I’ve been waiting.

I guess it seemed strange to me to start now. You know, start living in the house I live in. When I moved in with Manny, I knew this space wasn’t permanent. Not even long term. Even if we continue living together, this space is temporary. But I must have figured out that it’s all temporary – even the stuff we are foolish enough to let ourselves think is forever – and I can’t go on another day, waiting. Waiting for the future to come through. Waiting for the past to fade away. If it’s for another day or another month, I’m not going to wake up again staring at stark white walls, like I’m in a hospital room or a Stanley Kubrick film.