The February Blues revisited

I have been talking about the February Blues for years. I noticed over the last few years that they don’t really get me when something new and exciting and different is happening in my life. For example, three years ago I didn’t get them because Kean and I went on that big train trip. I didn’t get them last year because I was all wrapped up in my new relationship with Jeremy.

In a book I read recentlya priest said that “spring could be the most depressing time of year if you weren’t experiencing renewal along with everyone and everything else.” Based on my own experience this makes a lot of sense.

I have been having periods of depression, on and off, for most of my life. Historically, I have been going through a more significant one once every few years, the last one having been four years ago. Maybe each period of depression is just my soul craving change, crying out for renewal. It’s natural to go through cycles of change. And it’s probably even natural for this process to be painful and uncomfortable.

Years ago my friend Robin said wisely to me, “Maybe you should figure out why you get depressed,” the emphasis being on why. I think I finally figured it out. I think it’s a desire for change combined with lack of self-love and compassion for my current circumstances.

I know it’s so obvious that you should love yourself, and when asked “Do you love yourself?” most people would probably respond “Of course!” I know I always did even though I often acted as if I didn’t love myself, such as investing energy into a relationship that didn’t nurture me, or doing things I didn’t want to do because I felt that it was expected of me, or not asserting myself when somebody had hurt or wronged me.

I have been working on loving myself more, in my thoughts, feelings and actions, for over six years now, and I have been making steady progress. I think it’s not a coincidence that this year self-love was my only new year’s resolution. I honestly think that in past years I simply didn’t love myself enough to make such a commitment. My love for myself was still more conditional and dependent on external things, such as having a fulfilling career or maintaining a great relationship.

This year I have definitely been feeling the February blues. I am experiencing growing pains and I can taste the need for change. I want to relate to people differently, and I want to redistribute some of my working hours. This is what it always seems to be about for me, where I am experiencing the most desire for change and also the most pain: career and relationships. They are and continue to be indicators of not only how I want to change but also of what I don’t love enough about myself.

And this year, even though I am going through the transformation and am feeling the pain, I seem to love myself enough to not sink into a depression.

I think the construction is done

On my intersection there has been loud and constant construction going on since just before Kean and I broke up in October. I have no idea what they have been working on. All I know that is there they have been “No parking” signs up and down my street, ripped-open asphalt, boarded-up holes, and constant unbearable noise, for months. Sometime in early January, when I kept waking up too early with panicked thoughts about Kean and then couldn’t go back to sleep due to the hammering on the street, it occurred to me that perhaps the construction site on Dolores Street was a reflection of my internal construction in the aftermath of the break-up.

My ego has been hammering at me, for sure. My heart has been punching me from the inside. I had felt full of hope and optimism at first. I felt a sense of relief. I felt proud of myself for saying no to something I had outgrown. I loved Kean dearly and was sure that we would remain close friends, if not lovers, perhaps for a long time since we are both polyamorous. I felt that neither of us had been wronged or hurt badly, which is why I expected us to move on in love and peace.

And then Kean started a new relationship two weeks after we broke up. It started out casual, then it became a thing, then he said he was in love. And slowly, I started feeling wronged and hurt badly. And I started making him wrong, I started making his new relationship wrong. I felt the opposite of love and the opposite of peace. I didn’t want him back but I also didn’t want him to be with someone else. I wanted him to feel what I was feeling: pain, grief, regret, sadness. I wanted him to take some time for himself and to honor our connection instead of running away from it as far and as fast as he could.

I felt such complete resistance and intolerance for his new relationship that I myself didn’t quite understand. For most of December and January I had trouble sleeping and felt completely tortured. What did I need?

All the while the construction workers on my street were hammering away, distracting me from myself, reminding me that I was going through something. When I thought about Kean, I felt angry, resentful, bitter. What was I working on? What could I not let go of?

This is humbling to admit: The entire time we were together I felt that he meant more to me than I did to him. Sometimes we were able to create the illusion that that wasn’t the case. But I still felt it. I never wanted it to be true.

And now that we are broken up, I still don’t want it to be true. That’s where I am resisting: I want to mean as much to him as he does to me, now and then. But that’s just not the case, and I need to stop fighting for it. I need to give up. He meant the world to me. And I have to accept that I meant a lot to him, but not the world.

Last night I decided to give up. When I left my house shortly thereafter to meet a friend, I noticed that there was fresh asphalt on the entire intersection, and even the yellow crosswalk lines had been painted on.

When I woke up this morning, it was quiet.

Noted

When I started drinking alcohol as a teenager, I also started sometimes crying at parties. I think it was pent-up sadness and disappointment coming up, combined with lack of self-esteem and self-love. I was able to keep these feelings controlled for the most part, but when I got a little too drunk, I couldn’t control them anymore. They just came out.

One night I was crying because I was becoming aware that things with a certain boy weren’t going to go anywhere. I was disappointed. I think I may have talked to my friend Patrick about it.

Shortly after this I started crying at another party. It was brought on by watching this girl from my school dance and joke around really unselfconsciously with a cute guy. They looked like they were having fun, and that made me sad because I wasn’t. I felt intimidated by people at this party, and I was having a hard time even talking to people and couldn’t imagine dancing or joking around, especially not with a cute boy. My friend Patrick was there again, and he saw me crying, again. He said maliciously “Who rejected you today, Vera?”

That really hurt. His comment may have suggested a lot of things to me, maybe even something as fundamental as that it is not okay to show emotion, but more specifically the messages I got were:

It is not okay to cry when you have been rejected.
It is not okay to be sad over a boy.
It is not okay to cry at a party.
It is not okay to show weakness.
It is not okay to show your sadness.
It is not okay to have a crush on one boy this week and another boy the next.
It is embarrassing when other people know that you have been rejected.
It is embarrassing when friends see you crying and they don’t comfort you.
You have to put on a brave face.
You have to be strong.
You have to get over things quickly.
You have to pretend that you don’t care.

But what I would really like to know is why Patrick was so annoyed with my crying that it made him malicious towards me. Did he just think I was pathetic and feel embarrassed for me? Did he secretly like me and was upset that I was crying over other people when I could have had him? Did he see an opportunity for mean-spirited humor and decide to seize it? Did he recognize his own weakness, sadness, loneliness and frustration in me and hate me for it?

The fairy tale of my love life

Once upon a time there was a beautiful little girl named Vera. She had glasses and curly hair. She didn’t really understand how beautiful she was because her beautiful friends didn’t have glasses or curly hair. But she did know that she was special, and that she was going to have a special life.

All she wanted was to be happy and free, to wear beautiful clothes and drink tea and talk for hours with her friends. But it wasn’t that easy. Starting from an early age, Vera experienced dark forces getting in the way of her dream. Her parents, for example, didn’t let her express herself the way she wanted, and it made her very sad. She just wanted to be loved for who she was. Her friends sometimes turned on her too. They told her that she was not okay and needed to change. Vera believed it and tried to change, but it didn’t make her happy.

When she was 17, she got to go to a place far, far away from all her family and friends. She was going to come back but decided not to after all. She liked the new place better. She felt that it was easier to be herself there; she wasn’t criticized as much. She even met a beautiful, beautiful price there who thought she was the greatest. She had met beautiful princes before but they had never thought that Vera was beautiful even though she was. She spent many joyful days with the prince and was happier than she had ever been. But after a while she realized that she was too young to dedicate the rest of her life to one person. There were other things she still wanted to experience. With sadness in her heart she pushed forward.

She learned many new things and made many new friends in reverberating rainbow caves. Soon she met another sparkly prince. He really loved her spirit but he had pain in his heart and couldn’t express his love. He also sometimes locked her in a cage so she couldn’t go dance with her friends because he didn’t want her to enjoy herself with anyone but him. She pushed him away so she could do more dancing.

Even more than dance she wanted to be loved and accepted. She met a couple of very young princes who liked to dance. One of them hurt her a little, another one a lot. He hurt her so much that she felt unhappy for almost a whole year even while she danced. She didn’t know if she would ever find anybody who could love her but also let her be herself and do the things she wanted to do.

Vera started learning a lot about intuition and meditation, and that made her feel better. Soon after she started developing these new skills, she met a beautiful prince from a faraway land. Like her, he had left home for a better life. He was very, very sweet to her and adored her. He had baby twin nieces whom she absolutely loved, which made her want baby twins of her own. She and the prince spent many cozy, quiet days together. But he enjoyed consumption more than expression and never wanted to dance or play, so Vera got bored and ran away. She felt good about herself, and her heart was open and full of love because at least the prince had been good to her and not hurt her. She was excited about meeting her new prince, and just a short while later she did.

He was the most beautiful and fascinating prince she had ever met, so tall and exotic. She fell in love instantly and started dreaming about a long, happy future with him. But unfortunately this beautiful prince didn’t want a long, happy future with Vera; he only wanted a very short future. When Vera learned of their differences in desires, she was devastated. For a while she thought she could pretend that she wanted a short future too but it didn’t work. The prince could tell that she was lying and banished her from his castle.

Vera was alone again and more heart-broken than ever. But she had learned an important lesson: She couldn’t pretend anymore, not to anyone, ever. So she stopped pretending anything and started feeling much better. She stopped wearing clothes that had helped her pretend things and started wearing other things. She made new friends. She met some lovely princes but none of them were available.

She started dancing in this dark cave at night because it made her feel something new and exciting. In this cave she finally met another prince, a very dashing one, who loved dancing in the dark cave but whose heart was full of light and love. He was wonderful, and they spent many days and nights laughing, dancing and playing but it got tiring. Vera needed some sleep. Also, even though he was beautiful and powerful, he didn’t understand that he was a prince. He thought he was a court jester.

While Vera was still hoping that he would realize what a prince he was and become her king, she met another handsome prince. He was troubled but Vera got him out of trouble with her love. He was also a cave dancer, and like the previous one was very, very generous. The two shared Vera for a while because she loved them both. But after a while she left the first one because the second one offered her more love and a longer future. He wanted to have babies with her. She wanted to have babies with him too but she was worried. She was afraid that his troubles from the past would catch up with them in the future. She didn’t know if her love was strong enough to overcome the fear of the dragons this prince had fought in the past.

To be continued in the future..

Inspired by the book Mutant Message From Forever

I love the feeling of being pulled by an invisible magnet to take action. I love the feeling of a smile that spreads as naturally across my face as butter melting on warm bread. I love the feeling of such contentment in the moment that none of the things I’m addicted to even cross my mind.

From my journal four years ago

10/24/2006

And if he doesn’t choose me the same way I choose him, then I can just listen to PJ Harvey for a while, and soon I’ll meet somebody even more perfect.

I think the PJ Harvey reference stems from a period in early 2000 where I was feeling depressed and PJ Harvey and a good book got me through it.

Further openings

My mom and I had an amazing conversation the other day. It was the kind of conversation I wish we had had more of when she visited me a few months ago.

In the emotional aftermath of Burning Man I am finding myself more honest and quick to express things that have a charge and that I otherwise might have kept to myself. So I told my mom that I am struggling because I feel very bitter and angry and just altogether negative about the way I was raised and educated. I told her that I feel that I was raised to try to control the world and to beat myself up constantly in the effort because if I didn’t control everything and control myself by beating myself up, things were going to fall apart and I was going to fail. I told her that I felt that the constant pressure to achieve and the formula of go to school/work all your life/retire were just not working for me and that I felt bitter for ever having been suggested them as mottos to live by.

My mom said that she was taken aback and that she had thought that, aside from my time as a diagnosed mentally ill child, I had had a happy childhood and youth. And this is when I started crying and saying that I didn’t even really know what was the truth anymore and how happy I actually used to be; all I knew was that right now I was feeling bitter and angry; and that I felt really guilty for this and was trying really hard to be appreciative of what my parents had given me and lovingly accept my past, and that I really wanted to find a middle ground between embracing new ideas and chucking old ones that no longer work for me, without feeling so bitter about them. She said it sounded like I was on my way there.

This rang true to me, I told her, and that I feel like I am still in the process of filtering out what I want to keep from my past and what I don’t. I told her that hopefully by the time I was done filtering, I would be in a state of balance where I can move forward in creating my own life while at the same time feeling grateful for what my past has provided for me.

I told her that I was feeling ungrateful. (This is interesting because that is actually something of which my parents have accused me a lot as a child and teenager – being ungrateful.) My mom said that, given how hard I was trying to be grateful, I didn’t seem ungrateful to her at all.

Before we hung up, we said this:

“Remember that we love you very much,” my mom said.

“I love you guys very much too.”

“See? Everything is okay then.”

Plop

Last night I went to Ruby Skye to see Crystal Method. I hadn’t been to a Crystal Method concert since 1998, and I had never been to Ruby Skye. I had my judgments about Ruby Skye and didn’t really expect to have a good time. But I had the most fun I have had since the acid foursome four weeks ago. (Oh wait, the pantsless party last week was super fun too. Ah, it’s hard to accurately measure fun.)

Thanks to Kean’s friend Marius, we got to hang out in the VIP area upstairs and drink vodka. At one point I was standing at the railing by myself, looking down at the dance floor. Kean came up to me from behind, plopped a slice of orange into my mouth and disappeared again. That’s when I thought ‘I never knew I could be this happy with somebody.’

Pout and whine

Today is my fourth day working for Adobe. The first two days were horrible and completely drained me. Yesterday was okay, and today was as well. I started making check-ins yesterday, which made me feel productive and was exciting because I had never been a developer at Macromedia or Adobe, and now I get to check in code that
becomes part of a product that will be used by millions. That part feels good.

What doesn’t feel good is walking around in this building and being taking back to three years ago, before I quit my job. Back then, I was unhappy every minute I was in the office and happy every minute I wasn’t. I took frequent breaks to go to the bathroom and to get some water, just to get away from my desk and computer. I stepped with my socked toes into the rectangles of sun that were coming in through the skylights, just to feel a little tiny fraction of nature.

It only took a few hours of being back in this building to feel exactly the way I did three years ago. Things are different now because these people used to be my co-workers, but now they feel like old friends. I have received many hugs
since coming back; I didn’t use to receive hugs in the office. I have had many laugther-filled conversations with people I used to see every day but hadn’t since I left. Things are different now because I am only here part-time and because I am only here temporarily and I get paid a lot more. I sit in a different cube and on a different floor now and I report to a different manager.

But that draining feeling is exactly the same. That feeling of “get me away from here, I shouldn’t be here”, that feeling of wanting to get out and walk around in the sunshine, that feeling of being stuck in a golden cage. I did not expect this feeling to be this acutely present. It alarms me.

I am also a little tired of hearing “You couldn’t stay away, could you?” I guess I couldn’t, and it makes me feel like I failed in some way. I left on a mission, with high hopes to change my life, and I did change my life, and yet, I am back. My consolation is that I am back ON MY TERMS.

While getting tea before work today, I saw a cab driver in the coffee shop. I didn’t know him but I recognized him by his cab driver badge. My eyes trailed after him with a sense of longing and nostalgia. And that shows you that my mind is playing tricks on me right now because hello! I still drive a cab! I drove one on Monday and am going to drive again next Monday! My life as I knew it is not over!

That brings me to another change in my life right now that is bringing me down and making me long for “the way things used to be”: Kean moved into a new place last week. This is very exciting because he hadn’t had a place to live the entire time that we have been together. He had been staying with friends, his mom, and me. Now that he has his own place, he doesn’t depend on us anymore. While that’s definitely a positive change, it also makes me feel unneeded, and that feels worse than I expected. He hasn’t been over to my house once since he moved into his place; I haven’t seen him as much because he is enjoying having his own space and freedom and being able to exhale for the first time in eight months. At the same time he has also been moody, snappy, sick and depressed. All these things together are making me feel underappreciated and neglected. I feel like I am not getting enough attention and love, and like the love and attention I have for him aren’t needed as much right now.

It’s been a hard week for me.

The Year of the Tear

Yes, I shed a lot of tears this year. It doesn’t mean that it was a bad year; in many ways this was one of the best years of my life. It doesn’t even mean that I was sad a lot this year; it just means that I did a lot of healing of past emotional injuries.

I used to think that crying was “bad” and had to be stopped. That’s because people had always tried to stop me when I was crying. They did so in pleasant ways, like an ex-boyfriend who held me and softly said “Shhhhh, shhhhh,” or in unpleasant ways, like a girlfriend who said “I hope that NEVER happens again” when I had cried after getting drunk and going to a club together because I was depressed about something. Pleasant or unpleasant, somebody had always tried to stop me, so I had started to stop myself many years ago.

I relearned to let myself cry in my counseling training. Early on, when the teacher counseled sobbing students in front of the class, I thought that that could never be me. I didn’t think that I could let my guard down enough to cry in front of anyone. But by the end of the training I was crying in almost every counseling session I received. And that was a good thing.

Steve, the counseling teacher, said something once that has really settled in with me. He said–I paraphrase: When you cry, it doesn’t mean that you are hurting or that something bad is happening. The hurt or the bad thing have already happened; now you are healing from it by crying. When you force yourself to stop crying, it doesn’t mean that the pain stops. The pain stops when you are DONE crying, when you are done healing.

That’s why I don’t ever inhibit my tears anymore when I feel them coming on. And they come on a lot these days. And every time there is a message for me if I just pay attention closely enough to what exactly is making me cry. Which thought, which words I read or hear, which words I speak are what trigger me and why? Paying attention to that has given me a lot of insight. For instance, when my aunt and I were in Hawaii, she said something like “You have had a pretty difficult life. There was the neurological disease, your mental illness, your body image issues, problems with your girlfriends,…” That’s when I started crying. I started crying when she was talking about my girlfriends. That’s when I knew that I needed to pay attention, and when I paid attention, I realized that this is actually something I have been thinking about a lot lately: girlfriends. I realized that I have a long history of sabotaging friendships by pulling back, running away, “breaking up,” and that as a result I often feel lonely. I have decided to take better care of my girlfriendships and to find balance between freedom and connectedness, outside the extremes of loneliness and claustrophobia, and I have been consciously working on that and reaching out.

Another example is from when I was reading the book There Is Nothing Wrong With You. The following passage totally triggered me and had me sobbing:

I picture this child who doesn’t know whether she wants the red bucket or the blue bucket. The truth is, she wants them both. They’re both really pretty and she likes them equally, and she can’t make up her mind. What she doesn’t know is that in this world, you only get one because getting both makes you selfish.

The message in those tears is manifold, I believe. There is something about the guilt of wanting things, the guilt of not wanting to give something (I can hear my mom’s voice saying “You only want to have, have, have, and you never give”), and also the guilt of having chosen something and then changing my mind (my dad, for example, is disappointed that he spent thousands of dollars so that I could get a degree in economics, and now I’m not really using that degree to make money). What I took away from this trigger is that it’s okay to want things, it’s okay to not want to give something that somebody else is asking for, and it’s okay to recoil on a decision.

Finally, I leave you with a poem by Julia Cameron that made me cry this morning:

WORDS FOR IT

I wish I could take language
And fold it like cool, moist rags.
I would lay words on your forehead.
I would wrap words on your wrists.
“There, there,” my words would say–
Or something better.
I would ask them to murmur,
“Hush” and “Shh, shhh, it’s all right.”
I would ask them to hold you all night.
I wish I could take language
And daub and soothe and cool
Where fever blisters and burns,
Where fever turns yourself against you.
I wish I could take language
And heal the wounds that were the words
You have no names for.

Crying is okay here. May your tears be cleansing in 2007.