Coming Out of It

Today, I feel that I am suddenly and finally coming out of the darkness that was last school year.  This summer has been sort of  a bouncing around for me, up and down, back and forth, sleeping too much, sleeping too little, eating not at all or in combinations that can't be healthy, living off Diet Mt. Dew and music and books.

I started this little break with grand plans.  I had a list of things as long as my arm that I was going to get done.  I was going to clean out the back of the house, was going to make at least one big stained glass window for my classroom, was going to do a big overnight trip to Memphis and see Graceland and Sun Studios, maybe feed some ducks at the Peabody.  None of that happened.

Instead, I sort of fell apart.  It happened fairly quietly.  I just got up and instead of starting a project, I wound up on the couch with the laptop in my lap or a book in my hand, and a strange inertia took me.  Sleep became imperative, not optional.  A fatigue like nothing else I've ever felt would come over me, and I'd drag myself back to bed and let it pull me down into a place where all the dreams were terrifying to wake up almost more tired than I was when I went to sleep.

All the things that had been driving me were gone, see.  There was suddenly no need to jump up at 5:30 and push myself for fourteen hours, no endless pile of papers I could never quite get graded, no state test waiting to be given like the accusing finger of a deity to judge and destroy, no endless entanglement, misunderstanding, or Gordian crisis to be sorted through, no stress I was placing on myself (rightfully or wrongfully) to do more than I was capable of doing to make everything work out the way it needed to despite all obstacles.  The financial pressures that are ever-present now pressed themselves to the fore with nothing to distract me. It was as though it was finally okay for me to take everything that had been building up through a year of things so bad that I finally stopped trying to tell anybody about it because words would not express it and let it bleed out of me.  Only, I think I ignored that major wound for too long....

I am not the same person that I was at the beginning of all of this.  I look back at many of blogs I've written over the course of this summer, and indeed, for some time before that, and I do not like them very much, actually.  So few of them are saying anything except that I hurt and that I'm tired of hurting. It's just the same note being struck again and again, endlessly.  Maybe because that is all that there was going on.  Maybe this is the only place I had to say that.  I'm deeply surprised that anybody read them, although the hit counter kept turning over. Maybe it was happening by accident, those people looking for the Beowulf Boast kept turning up on the homepage or some such.  I don't know.   I'm sure some people did get tired of reading it, did sigh impatiently and say, "Well, if you're so tired of it, why don't you do something about it?"  What a fabulously simplistic approach.  Had I been able to do more than sit with my head in my hands and cry, I would have.  All I can say to those people is that until something serious smashes down your own personal little house of cards, maybe you won't understand it.  I'll add to that statement that I most sincerely and profoundly hope that you never, ever do understand it if you don't.  But if you haven't, you'd better get down off your high horse and on your hands and knees and thank your loving God that you don't and be a little patient with the people around you who cannot quite get it together.

Today, something has changed.  I don't know how to express it.  I just want to throw everything away associated with that other period and that other person, even though realistically, I know that hurting person is still inside me.  I'm not foolish enough to think that life from this point is all going to be double rainbows and cupcakes (but how awesome would that be?), but two things crystallized my recognition of the change.  They won't mean anything to anybody but me.  First, I went to Windsor.  See the previous blog for what that is if you don't know.  Standing there looking at those crumbling columns, I felt some of the scattered fragments of my own soul click back into their accustomed order.  I had desired to be in this place.  I had planned the details of this journey.  I had achieved my goal.  The natural order of my life.  Mission accomplished, no assistance required.  Strength returns.  The second thing was seeing a photograph of an old friend at his job.  He is a performance pianist and a professor of music.  Just seeing that photo for some reason reminded me that there are beautiful people who do beautiful things, wonderful things, who create magnificence and chase their dreams, and that I am privileged enough to have met some of them in my time.  Everything is not ashes and stupidity all the time.

I'm fragile as spun glass right now, but I'm not going to be made of glass when I'm done.  To make katana, the swordsmiths of Japan heated, hammered, and folded the steel thousands of times.  When they were done, the blade bore the marks of that, but the blade was supple, not brittle, and strong enough to cut all the way through a human body in a single stroke when wielded by a samurai.  This is what I'm going to be.  I am going to be strong steel.  As to what else has changed in me, I do not know.  I cannot say.  I cannot promise you there will not be more songs of hurt here.  This seems to be the place I sing them.  I hope there will be fewer of them.  I intend for it to be that way as I strive to be able to respect the person I see in these entries and in the mirror more as well.

I wrote a piece of a long poem that I never finished once, a line of which said, "A long depression feels like talking with barbed wire through your tongue."  So it does.  However, it also feels like talking and saying things you have to put behind you later.  Just another fold of the blade.  As the cliche says, "That which does not kill us...."  Well, despite its very best efforts, it has not.  And now it's time to continue moving forward.