This post is not about my German adventures.
It's about the product of the growth I've made in Germany, as well as in my month-long sabbatical in America this past January. Those of you who are friends with me on facebook have been reading about such adventures. Some of you advised me to start blogging.
Here's a start.
Without fail, there is a day of the month where I despair. It's tied to menstruation, but because my cycle keeps on advancing a day I'm inclined to forget this link, and wonder why I feel such impenetrable gloom. Since I started my period no less than three times in January (rooming with different women who are all on their periods at the time of your visit over the course of the month will do that) this one was particularly unexpected. I kept on wondering: why? Was it jet-lag? Was it the change in sleep cycle? The technical woes that separated me from the music that had provided me such soul food? The rain? Withdrawal from the rush-rush-rush and intense social contact and experience that my vacation was flooded with?
Was the rush of being home so rapidly fading?
In the morning I felt joy and pain in exquisite, transcendent balance. Every sad and joyful thing found in my American expedition hung within my mind, the sunrise was easily one of the most intensely beautiful I'd seen all year (365-day style, not 2014-style). But for the six or so hours surrounding mid-day that joy evaporated, leaving an agitated hollow. My heartbeat sped up, I was so tense, too much contextless eye contact just set me further on edge, led to nearly-accusative words that may have caught my coworkers quite off-guard. That dark voice grew louder, whispering things I know are not true: that all intimacy is false, that all love dies, that this hound which haunts me will always win, that the direction I've found is a lie, that my happiness is a story I tell myself instead of the deeply-felt reality permeating day to day. My mind was working hard against me and wouldn't let go. On this day in my menstrual cycle I feel all the darkness in my life, even when it's no longer rooted in my present.
But that's the point. It ISN'T rooted in my present. I don't ever expect to stop feeling it. But I am able to recognize with a factual if not emotional clarity that this day is isolated, that the curtain will lift and I'll find that deep calm and cheerful exuberance before too long, that there is so much good in my life, that I will laugh and embrace all my friends. And while I can hide that pain fairly well -- when I smiled at my kids at the CDC it was with great sincerity and want of their company -- and my ability to hide it can further that day's isolation, I am starting to abandon the shame that leads me to keep it hidden. Because as we live we tend to encounter demons, and surviving them we've learned to fight. What seeks my head will not have it -- I can mount it on my wall, and when others in pain come to me I'll gesture to this dark place and say "we can survive." The pain is not forever. The joy is far more real.
I have baked myself an incredibly delicious chicken with which I will no doubt make soup. I have been on the phone with someone I love deeply. I have been reunited with the music which feeds my soul and danced in my room with abandon, renovated by my loving and deeply compassionate roommates after discovering the walls that weep in its corner. I have flipped through the book filled with pages from people I love -- a book I conceived, a book I will treasure for the rest of my life. I am finally making due on my creative capacity. I have a marvelous candy-apple-red ukulele, and yesterday morning when I woke up with dream-song ringing in my ears I recorded a hum whose notes I will soon learn by name, will soon learn to play. I am not destroyed by my despair. Its chance to destroy me is long, long gone. I have already won.
#realtalk #nojoke #exposition #personalstuff #monthlymentalillness #menstrualcyclesareabitchsometimes #biologicalladiness #catpower #theyaintgotnothingonyou #joy #despair #hope #transendence #dogsareawesome #sequitorsareforotherqueersandsomestraightpeopletoo #selflove #Iwin
#dontthinktagsareathinginblogger #youarentthebossofme
This and other day's lately anthem: Cat Power - Nothin But Time
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