A Better Next Time

It's strange to look in the mirror and realize that maybe you are not the person you thought you were...To look into your own eyes and see a stranger. Who is this person looking back at me? I thought I was someone else - I thought I was brave! I thought I had perseverance! I thought I was true, real, strong, honest...who is this person I see in front of me?

When I face the things I dislike most about myself, such as my frenetic and uncontrollable style, my poor filter between thought and voice, my fear of conflict - when I have to face these things, it feels like I'm looking at another person...but I'm not - not at all! This is the me that I would rather ignore.

We all make mistakes and sometimes allow things important to float away or get lost in life's shuffle, and it's hard to stop and look closely at those mistakes. Why did they come and where do they come from? Is it simply thoughtlessness, or deeper - dark feelings hidden that emerge with an ugly head. Mistakes, like accomplishments, have incredible value because they teach so much. Mistakes sting the memory like poison ivy, creating a constant reminder that we can improve. Imagination is the artist painting the picture - showing how that improvement can come. Imagination changes the scenario in the mind, so one can do it better next time.

Will there be a next time to do it better? Maybe - or maybe imagination will help a novel situation. Regardless of whether it is the same situation or a new one, mistakes create the drive and imagination carves the picture for some kind of better next time.

Matter and Anti-matter

Confusion – what an utter disarray of an emotion! This is the emotion I’m associating myself with today – absolute, utter confusion. I don’t know when I walk forward, whether I’m traveling forward or backward. When I turn to look behind me, am I leaving my destination or my origin? All paths to the sides of me seem equally tempting, but off the goal path…which way is the right way to go and where on earth am I going, anyway?? It’s like being lost in an unfamiliar city in the fog, but a city I should be more familiar with. Each image seems almost familiar, but yet, not and the fog hides each detail so every sight looks the same, even though I know it isn’t the same as the last. I’m lost in a dream land.

This is also how I view my depression. When depression and anxiety come, in such a wave of intensity, I can't tell the difference between a rational and an irrational thought. They all seem equally valid, logical, and important enough to require immediate action...but since all thoughts are fleeting, flying, and spinning, they are all out of reach, unable to be inspected and action comes as illogically as the thoughts do. The net effect is complete confusion. Which thought was the logical one? I'm not even sure, myself. Which action was the logical one? Well, at least actions have effects and the answer is sure to follow, once action has been taken.

Depression hits with no warning and it consumes me completely with fog. In this fog comes confusion, since I feel my emotions are like my movements in the dark...bumping into furniture and walls and leaving a stinging bruise because I couldn't see where I am going. And, in the dark, I can't see where to go to next...I just keep continuing forward, albeit cautiously, but without direction so, inevitably, I bump into something again and bruise myself...like living in anti-matter, but in constant (and unintentional) contact with matter as I hurt myself on it.

How ironic that my last post was on happiness, and this one on the opposite side of the spectrum - depression...Depression is feeling broken - I feel like the posted picture - cut in pieces without the glue holding all the pieces together. I now know that depression does not equal sadness. Depression is completely different - depression is confusion in the dark...the effect of being matter, and crashing into matter, but living in anti-matter.

The Many Roads to Happy

I used to think that the route to happy was like the twisted walk up a mountain to the peak. The trail - beaten, sometimes invisible. Only a few paths would make it to the peak, and each path a different length. Some steep paths shoot straight up to the top, with every step painful and every breath heavy, but with the shortest steps possible, the shortest time, the shortest distance. Other paths may zig-zag up the side of the mountain at a leisurely incline, and may double or triple the distance, but with less pressure on the system,and may get the hiker to the same peak with less energy. Then, I thought, some paths could wind endlessly in the woods with no progression to the peak, only to leave the hiker lost and unsuccessful in his or her quest.

This analogy, although flexible in theory with different paths, woods, rocks and cliffs, denies the seeker much choice. There are only choices in a few forks in a hiking path. For the most part, a hiker makes a choice in a path and follows the path to the end. Once the choice has been made to take the wooded route, the zig-zag route, or the steep route, the hiker is inevitably bound to the trail until the end.

I now see the road to happy with much more flexibility and choice. I see it now, more like the winding roads of Paris leading to the Eiffel Tower. There are probably a million combinations of roads which could be used to get there, depending on what a person wants to see on the way. There is the direct route, the meandering route, the lost route, and the "oh, never mind - I'd rather go shopping anyway" route. But, if a person walks long enough, and continues to make turns within the city limits, the odds are in the person's favor that, eventually, that person will pass the Eiffel tower. When I was in Paris, I preferred aimless wandering in the streets to fanatical site-seeing, so you might find me on the meandering route - stopping for croissants and coffee, a nap in the park, and maybe eavesdropping on some one's dinner party before finally reaching the destination of the Eiffel Tower, or reaching happy, because I enjoyed the trip along the way as much as the final destination!

I see happy as something you find maybe when you are not even looking for it, because one day you notice that you just feel good. This week I heard the birds for the first time this season, and after such a bitter, cold, icy, snowy winter - the song of the bird most definitely sang "happy".

A Place to Lose Fear

No emotion has overtaken my spirit in the last 7 days with the same force as fear. Fear...such a ubiquitous, stealthy, hidden emotion! Even in it's disguise, it can color every thought and action. We all have fears, and yet we so rarely are willing to share our fears with the world. Few hesitate to announce with passionate intensity "I love you!"... "I hate you!"... "I need you!"... "I admire you!"...but the picture seems almost inhuman to see a person announce with the same intensity "I fear you!"...almost as if the pure acknowledgment of fear is acceptance of weakness and inequality, but it should not be so. Fear is a real emotion, and deserves as much attention and respect as love, anger, sadness, and elation.

It's an impossible feat to create a picture that can describe fear - the emotion is so malleable, it fits in every pocket of emotional void. It can grow from the smallest speck of minimalism to an intensive explosion of a supernova with a fleeting thought brushing through the mind in a split second. It can remain small, seemingly benign, for years only to invisibly grow and control the mind, heart, arms and legs without one even knowing their own self-control is gone. Fear can be like a chameleon, changing it's color to match the surroundings and seemingly invisible. It's so easy to let our attention brush over fear and move on, to fail to acknowledge it's existence...and, yet, it may control so much of our decisions, of our life.

I felt fear grip me with it's icy claws on several occasions this week, and I think it is only my steadily increasing self-awareness that has led me to see that fear is in almost my every thought. Fear pumps my blood from only the imagination of a dreaded outcome...even outcomes that are within my control - fearing the worst can make me run away from any outcome at all, just in case the outcome is the one I'm afraid of.

I'm still learning what I fear most, and how to challenge, attack, and conquer it. I'm still surprised when I notice it - and just now feel it's weight on my life. But here, with these keys and this computer - I've found a place where I can feel free without fear - there is no anger in a computer screen, no irritation, no tension. I can let my feelings run free like gazelle in the African plains and no tiger is hiding to attack them and drag them under water as invalid, trivial, unimportant, dead. This place in my mind where I go, and this feeling I'm looking for when I'm writing here - this place is one of the places where I lose fear.