going on retreat
So OK. I am going to a ten day vipassana retreat. I'm a bit anxious about it. I've sat three and served three since September. Maybe this one will be too many? I haven't sat one since December so it's been awhile.

Why do I do it?

If I stay here, my life will stay its tiny nothing existence. Obsessing over the news on the net, going to the grocery store and an occasional movie.

What I long for is friendship and family. Human interaction. When I am reallyl depressed, I tend to think my current loneliness and isolation is the worst its ever been but the truth is I am enjoying a bit of a nadir in social connects. I spoke to Mark last week and I exchanged emails with Peggy and Kimberly. Each of these folks know me and love me and even maybe like me. Mark and Peggy do for sure. That's more friends than I usually have.

Raising Katie, during the Waldorf years, I never had friends but taking care of her, reading, movies and art were enough. Reading, movies and art are enough now but I need a bit of humanity.

In my crap hole apartment, on the ground floor flush with kids playing and cars drdiving by (people in cars are right at my eye level. On a hot night I can't sleep with the window open because people in cars are right at my level as I lay on the bed and it feels like they are watching me sleep. Not only can I not open the window, I can't open the blinds. I am terrified someone will see my computer and break in. Also, when I am here, I can't sit here with the blinds open knowing people often walk a foot or two away in front of my window and can see me. I feel like I live on the street.

Anyway. If I don't leave the apartment, I don't see the sky for days at a time. I understand how a person in prison could miss the sky. And miss the sunshine. And miss natural light.

I am living real unhealthy and I have all this knee jerk liberal thoughts. . . that people shouldn't live like this and people shouldn't live in such isolation and unhappiness and there should be better support for someone with mental illness and boy does that line of thinking piss me off. In theory, most liberals would agree that pathetic little me should have a better life. But in practice, no one is going to reach out and let me into their life so mine can be more bearable. Even Peggy and Mark, who know how lonely I am, don't draw me in. They have lives and they live them and I get to intersect for a few moments maybe once a month.

I want to be with people a few hours a day. I am anxious that I am only going to retreat just to break my routine but sitting a course is pure isolation in silence. I don't crave the silence. I crave companionship.

But I didn't cancel the retreat and my ride is due any minute so it looks like I'm going.

To bring a pillow or not?

So OK
So OK, right after I wrote my last post I did this sound meditation and I guess I didn't think it was pure baloney because I actually did it but after I did it I thought it was pure crap but then I had a couple of halfway decent days.

My standards of what it takes to declare a day halfway decent are, admittedly, very low. If I have just a few moments in which I am not in an excrutiating, existential angst wishing I could stop being alive, then it is a halfway decent day.

The rest of Friday, which was the day of my last post and all of Saturday and even today have been half way decent. I am believing this sound meditation crap will help me. I am believing I will finish some fiction and send it out. I am believing someone will ove me again and I won't be alone for the rest of my life or twenty years or more or whatever.

It doesn't take very much to make me not miserable. Hope has returned. I am feeling half way good enough so I am pretending hope is not a curse, which I know it is. The lows are lower when one has soared with the crap of hope. But we'll see.

What did I do differently on Friday? I went shopping. I had found a summer t-shirt in a nice soft pink that I wanted but they didn't have my size. the salesperson found it at another store and said she would call me when it arrived. That was two weeks ago and I figured I was never going to get the shirt, which was ok because I didn't have the $30 anyway and since I never see other human beings except strangers on the bus what the fuck is the dif what I wear.

But on Friday another salesperson called to tell me the shirt had been sitting there a long time and she couldn't keep holding it, did I want it?

Well, yes, yes I did. I got on the bus and went over there. And as long as I was there, I determined to buy a new pair or two of pants.

I haven't bought any new clothing in about three years. I have plenty of work clothes, which I don't need because I don't work but my knock around wardrobe has gotten really limited. I only own two pairs of knockaound pants which is not enough because I don't do laundry that often. I am going off on a two week retreat and I need to bring more than two pairs of pants since I can't do laundry at the retreat.

I hate to shop. I had gained a lot of weight and I am just about so fat that the fat clothes in the department stores won't fit and I will be forced to. . . well, where do the size 26's shop?! So. The biggest department store pants are 24 and most of them don't fit me. But I needed pants.

True, I am empoverished but it is not the real reason I don't own clothes. It is because I am fat and I hate to shop and I look like a fat pig no matter what I wear so what is the difference? I have been so sick depressed the last couple of years that I have scarcely looked in a mirror and I give almost no thought to my appearance other than to make sure I am clothed. The clothes don't always have to be clean if I have been too depressed to do laundry.

But I can't go to these silent retreats without enough clothes. The last time I was there I had four pairs of knock around pants but I had to throw two of them out right there at the retreat after I saw that the crotch area had literally worn right through on the jean pair and the inseam of my right leg has disintegrated. I still wore each pair for two days so I didn't smell at the retreat but I threw them out right there at the retreat because there was no point in doing anything else.

So. I ignored pants for a few years and all of a sudden I find myself sans enough pants. Two pairs is not enough.

so the stupid pink t-shirt thing almost felt like a miracle last Friday because it got me to actually go to a store. And everything was on sale although it seems to me everything is always on sale? anyway. I shopped. I bought a pair of navy dockers and a pair of elizabeth black cotton crop pants with 10% lycra. The Elizabeths are my favorite because they are size 22. I have no illulsions. Elizabeth just makes her sizes big which is very very smart.

I spent several hours shopping in two stores for those clothes. I also bought a blue sweater to replace my wear-all-the-time cashmere one that has a couple of moth holes and is just plain wore out but I love it but it is black and I prefer blue. The blue sweater is a perfect color and one of those cotton with tiny bit of lycra blends.

That blue sweater amazed me. I found it on one of those great clearance racks that say at least 50% marked down and then 30% off the last marked down price. I got the sweater for like $13 because I had also gotten a mall gift card in a promotion in the mall for which I had to fill out a five minute survey. It originally cost like $100.

The blue sweater really cheered me up. As soon as I saw it on the rack, I started to imagine myself spending time with other human beings. I saw myself having fun. I saw myself feeling good in the color and I saw people loving me. Even when I tried to remind myself that I don't have any friends or any one to socialize with and even when thoughts of my daughter tried to rear their head and remember that I have lost her and she will never see me in that sweater and even when I thought the only person I really care about is her even then I felt lighter. Human.

And don't get me wrong. It is sick that a consumer item can be so satisfying. And it is really sad that such a little thing can give me so much pleasure. And it is really depressing that no one that I actually know will love me when they see me in it because I don't actually know anyone.

But for a little while, I felt better.

The next day, Saturday, I went to a movie. And then after the movie, I took the bus downtown and shopped a bit more. I wanted to find another high like the blue sweater.

but I don't have any money to spend. Especially since I am thinking of going to a writers retreat in July that will cost every single cent in my checking account. I am feeling so cheerful that I am thinking i would like to be cheered up some more.

I am questioning whether I should go to the retreat. Ten days of silence is not socializing. I have yet to hook up with a retreat friend. But I need to do something to shift myself and the retreats seem to work. I hope. I pray.

And I am pretty sure I am going to buy the soundmeditation program when I get back. It has a one year money back guarantee so I literally have nothing to lose.

I am daring to believe, again, hope be damned, that I might be happy again, even without my daughter.

looking for a way out
OK. I am going to experiment with doing my journal in a blog. We'll see. I don't know what to do about anything. I am surprised that I found the initiative it took to start a blog, although it was admittedly very easy to get this far.

I am really sick these days. I am growing more aware of the extent of my mental illness. I have never read anything that really mirrored what my own experience of depression has been like except The Golden Notebook, which I read thirty years ago in college. That book blew me away. I didn't get at the time that it was about depression. It blew me away because it was the first time a book had captured what I thought reality was like for everyone. It took many years for me to learn that the reality portrayed in the book is called major depression and that not everyone lives like that.

My experience of my illness changes all the time, of course, but most days my illness attracts my first thoughts of the day. Back in college (guess I am lost in the olden days) I had a phase where my first waking thoughts were to check out how hung over my body was. Now my first thoughts are to check out how sick I am.

I almost wrote 'how depressed I am" but what I am struggling with is more thana depression. Although maybe major debilitating depression pretty much covers all emotional and mental suffering? Who knows.

I am wiped out when I have my first thoughts of the day. I don't want to be awake. I don't want to be alive. I don't want to be conscious of my thoughts. I just want to stop being. I don't wish to be.

Which is not the same thing as suicidal. I have been suicidal. In the olden days when I used to believe suicide was a way out, suicidal ideation was like play time. If my first thoughts of the day were about how deep is my depression, then my next thoughts, in these halcyon days (sp?) used to be about my suicide. I could distract myself from my existential angst by planning my suicide.

My suicide ideation could take all kinds of paths but mostly I focussed on drug overdoses. But then I actually tried a few drug overdoses and I found out it is not as easy to kill myself as I would have hoped. At least none of the drugs I had access to did the trick.

anyway, I have had a suicidal ideation epiphany. Suicide will just fuck me up for future lifetimes. Not gonna do it. At least not in my current frame of mind, which is a frame of mind I have been in for quite some time.

I don't want to bum myself or a reader out but I mention the suicidal ideation crap to illustrate that having given up on my dream that I could end this suffering with my own hands means I have committed to endure this lifetime until nature ends it for me. This position might sound like a good think to shrink types but I find myself more unhappy than ever I was when I lived the good life of suicidal ideation.

So. I wake up and try to sleep more. There are many ways to measure my daily depression levels but the first clue of the day is how long I am able to oversleep. My body wakes up a few hours before I am ready to face being alive another day but when I am really depressed, I am usually able to sleep a few hours extra. These extra hours are not restful. My eyes often begin to hurt from, apparently, being closed too long. On the days when I become aware that my eyes hurt but I still persist in keeping them closed and I still persist in sqeezing more day-avoidance out of my attempts to sleep. well, those are my darkest days. There really isn't any point in getting out of bed on a day when I force oversleep past the point when my eyesballs hurt from being shut too long. It is going to be a day spent in hell. But I have to get up because I just flat out can't sleep anymore. Maybe I have to pee. Besides, if I don't get up and do something, I'll never get back to sleep again.

It is the doing something that I must avoid. It is facing the fact that I don't have anything to do that keeps me force sleeping.

I don't have anything to do.

Well, I do have a couple of things to do but I don't have to do them today. If I do them today, then I will have nothing to do. so I put them off. There have been times in my life when there were people in my daily life, people who knew I was not doing things I was supposed to be doing and they would wonder "she complains that she has nothing to do but even when she has nothing to do she doesn't do them? What is wrong with her?"

I put things off to save them up.

I have two phone calls to make. Once I make them, I will have nothing to do. Today is Friday. If I don't make the calls today, I can pretend all weekend that I have something to do on Monday.

Does this sound crazy? Duh. . . this is what crazy looks like.

My family hates me, they think I am lazy, they think I don't want to work. I don't want to spend my days thinking about nothing and doing nothing. Heck, I am perfectly capable of spending days and weeks and months sitting around yearning to do something and planning to do something and maybe even taking tentative steps to do something but I basically never get to the doing part. My mind gets stuck in the thinking, like a broken record used to be stuck. I can watch my mind replay like a broken record and I can wish I could reach in there and give the needle a little shove so the record playinjg will skip past the broken part but I haven't figured out how to give my mind a shove like I could give the needle on an old record player.

Do CD's get stuck like records? I wonder because a person can't reach over and nudge the needle for a CD. When CD's get stuck, are they permanently damaged?

I wonder about CD's because I wonder about how permanently damaged I am. I think we can safely assume I am not going to get well. I am fifty, I have a doctorate, I am brilliant and I have never been able to work. I have no family that will interact with me. I have no friends that know about how sick I am. I have a few acqaintances but it is my experience that if people ever really get how sick I am they can't get me out of their lives fast enough so I try to hide my full self from others. I am desperately lonely and I will take the most pathetic snippets of human interaction and fuck no one has ever wanted to love me when they saw the whole of me so how the fuck can i believe someone ever will.

This is another crazy thing. It is crazy to be permanently committed to hiding my real self from other human abeings but over my fifty years I have experimented with all kinds of ways of being my self with people and as soon as they get a glimpmse of the sick they are gone.

I am really really really sick. I sound OK most of the time. I always sound brilliant. I can usually pull off some initial positive interaction but I can't sustain it. People have their own lives.

I am so sick of the crap about unconditional love. I have this one acqaintance who would surely tell the world she is a friend of mine. She tells me she loves me and that I am deeply loved by the loving consciousness of the universe but if I show her a moment of my despair she grows angry at me and tells me to stop pitying myself and to buck up. I am sitting here thinking that if she really loved me like she likes to say she does, couldn't she, maybe, just tell me she loves me when I share that I am having a crap day?! She wouldn't slap me upside the head if I said I am miserable but she figuratively slaps me upside the head if I simply reveal my inner reality. What the fuck kind of love is that?

Other people tell me they love me. They ask me "how are you?" and sometimes I tell the truth and say I am not having a good day. One 'friend' will launch into a lecture on positive affirmations. The last time I fell for this, she did try to draw me out a bit. I told her that I was so lonely I couldn't stand it, that sometimes several weeks go by and I don't have a single person to talk to and she gave me the positivie affirmations talk. That conversation took place three weeks ago. I am the first person to admit that I don't know fuck about what friendship looks like to emotionally normal people but if someone told me they were so lonely that they couldn't stand it I would pick up the phone and give them a call. As a matter of fact, that is just the kind of thing I did for this friend. This past winter, while her mother was dying, I stayed in steady contact with her, offering to help and reminding her that I loved her and that I cared. I know if I asked this friend to do this she would do it but I need to understand why I don't attract friendly overtures like she does. Why do people love her enough to support her dudring a rough time but no one loves me like that?

I know why. Because I am human excrement. I am too much misery. I am scum.