Hmmm. Crawling into bed after midnight. Just came home from a potluck/party at a local farm where folks from 5 different farming communities across our region converged to share food, talk, play music, network, and enjoy the beginning of Spring. It was so good to be around people and particularly to be around music, and to do a lot of singing. I love singing so much, and always have, but it was yet another one of those things that my nasty mother told me I was bad at and should let other people do instead, so for years I wouldn't sing in front of anyone, and only in the last few years have I been starting to emerge from my cocoon and claim a space as someone who sings.

Anyway. I digress. It turned out that one of the women wielding an instrument was an incredibly inspiring political folk singer named Lizzie. Her incantations and the spirit with which she delivered them reminded me why life is worth living and how much we can actually touch each other if we put ourselves on the line. You can find out more about her at http://www.lizziewestlife.com/

It was good to be reminded because in the last month or two I've been struggling off and on with the kind of depression/anxiety/despair/dissociation that makes you forget why people bother being alive, and makes it seem impossible to remember that you were ever happy, that you were ever interesting, that you ever created anything or enjoyed staying up late or connecting with strangers or going anywhere,  that you ever had any sense of purpose in your life, that you have any connection with the human race, that you or anyone else is capable of anything inspiring, etc etc etc. At several points over the last few weeks I've actually been caught saying "I feel like I've forgotten everything I ever knew" and dissolving into tears and various episodes like that... and then the endless hysterical grasping for a reason, a solution, what you can change in your life to make it go away, and on and on...

It's been a really hard period of time. Not all day, every single day, but enough to really shake me to my core and periodically scare up the intensely self-destructive voices and the insistent despair that I just do not belong on this planet.

Today felt like it might be a turning point on a number of levels. The first level came from some reading I did. A book I've been wanting to read for months appeared in the mail last night, and I started to read it this morning. It's called The Depression Book: Depression as an Opportunity for Spiritual Growth, by Cheri Huber, and she offers a lot of really helpful perspectives on accepting our turbulence and staying present for what happens next rather than hating it and hating ourselves and trying to apply force to kill it. One of the things she writes about is the way that we lump our sensations into the label "depression," then attach a whole story line to it: this is bad, it must stop, I am doing something wrong to feel like this, i was never supposed to feel like this again, if I continue feeling like this I will die, so on and so forth, and then we start desperately feeling like we have to change our lives to eliminate it... so true for me and my patterns... and then she also talks about depression as a way that we depress our feelings, and can get so numbed out that we don't even know what we feel... this is definitely true for me. so one of the things she encourages you to do is stop, sit still, and try to investigate what you're actually feeling rather than what you're thinking. This was really hard for me. I was sitting in there in bed and I couldn't identify any feelings. Intellectual attitudes and moods, yes, like curiousity, rationalizing, trying to understand, etc... but actual feelings? Eventually in the shower I realized that I was actually very sad and afraid. I do not handle sadness well. I try to paste over it or move past it. It's very hard for me to allow it. But when I don't...

Anyway. Enough about that. There was useful information in there for me. The next level that felt like a turning point was then when I was trying to force myself to do computer work, and my head was a total despairing mess, I stopped applying force and decided to change my pattern and do something totally different. So I went for a long walk in the sunshine and called some people I never call and ended up running into some people I know and got a bunch of different perspectives. I'm making a commitment to try getting more exercise and see if that helps with this whole depression thing. So that was good.

Then my brain tried to eat me again for a while. But then I got a return phone call from this local "holistic psychiatrist" who I'm going to see next week. She used to be a regular psychiatrist, but got very disillusioned with being turned into a pill pusher, and then when her own son starting having mental health problems she did not want to give him meds and started doing a lot of research into alternatives. Now she's turned her whole practice around, and helps people get off meds, and uses a variety of supplements and therapies like biofeedback to help people stabilize. I have been feeling very strongly that I am ready for a second opinion and help in some form that I have not yet tried, so I'm excited to go see her and see if she can suggest some new ideas.

Then I harvested wild greens and made a lovely salad and some eggs from my chickens for lunch. Which was delicious. Then my brain started trying to eat me again (it really can be astonishingly relentless sometimes), but I changed rooms, did a little drawing, and managed to get a small amount of work done. Then it really tried to eat me and I finally succumbed and got in bed and slept for a while. I woke up feeling absolutely horrible, with all the self-destructive hopeless voices ranting and raving in my head... but it was time for my appointment with my shaman. We talked for a little bit about all the dark crap that has been trying to take over my system lately, and when it started in my life (when I was 11 and my drunk mom was hunting me down and terrorizing me with these unbelievably horrible fights), and then she performed a ritual called a soul retrieval to close the doors to the underworld and bring back the part of me  that left when my life was not safe for sticking around. I don't really know how to talk about it or explain it, to myself or to anyone else. On a lot of levels it sounds crazy to me. But what is clear is that when I walked in there, I was crying , freezing cold, avoiding eye contact,  totally hopelessly despairing, talking in a tiny little kid voice, and convinced that I would never be able to handle life and should just give up, and after she finished the ritual my voice was clear and grounded, my eyes were clear and direct, I was laughing, telling stories, and feeling like I wasn't  in danger anymore. It's been very intersting since I left. the depression is still there -- I still feel I bit like I'm perceiving the world from behind a screen, and like only half of me is there, and I just don't have access to the visionary, exuberant side of me at all -- but I feel patient with it. I don't feel despair and hysteria, and it doesn't feel dangerous. It feels like maybe I can accept that it's here, and keep moving slowly forward with my life until it lifts. This is a quantum shift in my attitude. I have some faith that it will gradually get better and my self who loves the world will return.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring.

After leaving Patricia I called my friends at the farm and found out that 2 new baby goats had just been born!!! So exciting. So despite my somewhat anxious deliberating head,  I drove up there anyway and sat in the pen with them and this tiny jet-black baby goat, who was only 2 hours old, crawled into my lap like a cat and licked my chin. I just about died. He kept crawling back into my lap. I helped the other little one find the teat so he could nurse... it was just amazing. these tiny brand-new life forms...

and then i went to the potluck, where people ended up asking a bunch of questions about The Icarus Project, and I remembered how amazing this whole network of Icaristas is, and felt some shock that I had some part in planting the original seeds... and remembered that I actually am a good person who does worthwhile things...

oh we'll see what tomorrow brings. wish me patience to get through one more day.

-A