Kind of like lather, rinse...

I am breathing.

In the physical sense, that is obvious.  If I stop, I will pass out.  My body, relieved of the burden of my consciousness, will then take over and resume breathing because it is smart.  I can certainly help with the breathing by choosing to inhale deeply and exhale as much of my lung contents as I can.  I can do cardio exercise to increase my lung capacity and my heart’s ability to move the oxygen around to all my happy little cells.  But, in general, physical breathing takes care of itself.

More challenging:  I am breathing, metaphorically.  No, I don’t mean that I am using metaphors because I am breathing, although that is true.  I tend to rush through everything, full bore, until I collapse.  It’s great until the collapse part.  It works better if I allow for pauses, if I let myself inhale to refresh and exhale to get rid of the garbage.

So today’s directions:  in, out, repeat.

Depression is Bad. What else is new?

I am probably dreadfully boring on the subject of depression.  However, I am writing about it anyway because it is all around us.  Silence does not help.  I’m not sure that not-silence helps, either, but at least it could potentially raise consciousness.  (I am allowed to say “raise consciousness” because I am from Berkeley.)

Depression is not the same as being sad.  It is not something from which one can buck up.  In my experience, it is a persistent inner sense that I am worthless, useless, and stupid.  It tells me that everything wrong is my fault and that most problems would be solved if I simply did not exist to screw things up.

I do the things I am supposed to do to cope with my depression.  I take my medications.  I exercise.  I try not to hide in bed and avoid people.  I practice meditating.  I would like to say I actually meditate, but I’ll be needing those meditation training wheels for approximately forever.  I make dark jokes.  I count my blessings, although that sometimes backfires:  how the hell can I be depressed when I have so many blessings?  Something must be wrong with me!

This week has been a bad one for depression.  I am having trouble sleeping.  Then I have trouble getting out of bed after I sleep.  I have no energy.  My heart races and I panic a lot.  I am coping the best I can.

Yesterday, my new light thingie came.  There is a certain amount of research that suggests light therapy might help.  It can’t hurt, unless you look straight at the lamp, in which case it is pretty blinding.  I may be grasping at straws, but I really want it to work, or else some other miracle to occur that makes the depression monster go away.

Please think good thoughts for me.

Book Report Friday: John Adams

I came refreshingly ignorant to David McCullough’s biography John Adams.  I now feel refreshingly more informed.

The man who emerges from McCullough’s work is a solid, smart, responsible person.  Adams had the courage of his convictions and the diligence to turn convictions into actions.  He also married an amazing woman.  I would have voted for Abigail Adams, given the opportunity.

I particularly enjoyed the section of the constitution of Massachusetts on the benefits of public education that he wrote:

“Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.”

And he was also a proponent of exercise, as he wrote to his son, “Move or die is the language of our Maker in the constitution of our bodies… When you cannot walk abroad, walk in your room… Rise up and then open your windows and walk about your room a few times, then sit down again to your books or your pen.”

My kind of fellow.

Schooled

One of the things I like about picking up T. from school is the time to talk.  The stereotype of the silent teen was clearly not based on either of my kids; the challenge is getting a word in edgewise sometimes, particularly when they are together.  (Yes, Syd is not a teen anymore, but the point stands.)

I learn things.  They have invented a lot of physics since I took it last.  I have forgotten a lot of math.  And a lot of adults remain stupid.  (I just heard the voice of one of my younger friends admonishing me that stupid is not a nice word.  Sorry, Sofia.  It is the true word.)

This week is C.A.R.E. week at school.  I don’t know what the acronym stands for, but it is supposed to be a tolerance-promoting, bullying-prevention kind of thing.  They held an assembly yesterday.  T. came home furious, “ready to spit bile,” as he said.

At the assembly, students had the opportunity to share about experiences of bullying.  Someone talked about seeing someone repeatedly pick on another person and finally deciding to say something.  The facilitators said that that might not have been the best way to handle the situation.  They said that the student in question would have to consider the cost of stepping in.

What?

All actions have costs.  Presumably, the student spent time considering the cost before realizing that he or she couldn’t just stand by and watch anymore.  That person made a decision to stand up.  That decision is the one I personally would like to see more people choose.  That is what I want to see students, teachers, parents, friends, community members, and everyone else choose.  I want the cultural shift to occur that makes picking on people something no one can get away with and keep their friends.

None of us needs to be encouraged to go along.  We have plenty of pressure on all of us to put up with bad behavior, to tolerate abuses of power or plays for power.  I’m not saying we should throw a parade for the student who did the right thing—that’s what we’re supposed to do—but some encouragement for choosing well seems like what a program with the aims of C.A.R.E. should do.

On Thursday...

Thursday, I have decided, is the Official Day of Getting Nothing Done.  The declaration came as an acknowledgment of the facts rather than as some sort of manifesto on the desire to slack.  Somehow, by Thursday, the week spins out of control and the forces of chaos win.

Not that I don’t TRY to do things on Thursdays.  Sometimes I even succeed.  I just find it useful to consider anything accomplished on a Thursday as extra bonus points, a fluke, a victory against enormous odds.

Some weeks, Thursday falls on a different day.  That is allowed.  The point in having an Official Day of Getting Nothing Done is to make space for imperfection, for breathing, for regrouping from the inevitable ravages of the second law of thermodynamics.

One day a week, it is good to let things just be as they are, no judgment, no expectation.

Prompted to think...

T. is in the process of writing his college application essays.  He writes well.  When he asked me to look the essays over, I was impressed.

I was also poleaxed.

The first prompt is this:

Describe the world you come from — for example, your family, community or school — and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.

T. wrote about what it was like to grow up in two households, one in Berkeley and one in Lafayette.  He acknowledged the benefits of both, enjoying the privileges of Lafayette with the rigors of Berkeley.  Perhaps his understanding of the differences between the two places is not as nuanced as it might be if he were older, but he grasps the essentials.  Intellectually, I can say it is well done. 

But he described our household in Berkeley as one in which money was tight and emotions were high.  I wish I could remember the actual word he used instead of high; it was more loaded than that, at least to my poor heart.  I failed.  It was my job to protect and care for him, and I didn’t.  He felt the struggle.  He suffered from the turmoil.

I’m a depressive.  I take everything as a sign of my failure.  I know.  My rational mind tells me that T. is no more screwed up than any of us and better off than many.  I just hoped that the two-phrase version of life at my house when he was little was better than not much money and too much drama.  I need to remember that not everything is about me.

The second prompt is this:

Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?

He wrote about his experience last summer when he went to the Pirate Festival with his dad.  Rick got so drunk that he ended up in the hospital.  T. had to take the car keys away from him and get help from festival staff and Brent and me.  T. wrote about how he realized he could be resourceful and responsible, about how he now knows he can deal with crisis.  The writing is a little raw yet.  I think he needs to consider the context and choose wisely how to describe the aftermath.

And it breaks my heart.  That he had to have the experience in the first place hurts.  As wonderful as it is that he has found strength in it, I hate it that T. lost one of his heroes that day.  There is no hiding from the brokenness.

That, I suppose, is the message of T.’s essays, taken together.  There is no hiding from the brokenness, but that is okay.  We can live with the brokenness and still grow and love and prosper.  At least I hope so.

(This is an old photo of T. in his Napoleon hat; I don't have any pirate pictures in digital for some reason.)

Book Report Tuesday: The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Patrick Rothfuss makes me happy.  My copy of The Slow Regard of Silent Things came yesterday, so I dropped everything to read.  (It’s okay; I wasn’t holding anything heavy at the time.)

While I am waiting as patiently as possible for the next book in his series, I will console myself with this novella about Auri, a character in the larger work.  Consolation is a good word for this book because it is about, among other things, the rituals that make sense out of senseless life, difficulty, heartache.  I will read it again, savoring.

The language, as I would have expected, rises to all occasions.  The man has a gift for lyrical, playful prose.  In some ways, it might work better to think of the story as a poem, full of image, idea, and rhythm, but not so much plot.  It is a beautiful journey to nowhere in particular and yet almost everywhere.

Nobobdy expects...

When the kids were little, we invented a game called Rugby Is Not.  Rugby was our dog, a Boston terrier runt with a curmudgeonly personality.  We would take turns imagining all the crazy things Rugby was not doing, like tightrope walking, eating sushi, skiing, wearing a tutu, reading Harry Potter, taking a bubble bath, toilet papering the house, and so on.  We did this when we were not at home, so we did not, in fact, know what Rugby was doing.  Most likely, he was sleeping on the bed, which was against the rules.  The point of the game, obviously, was to make each other laugh rather than to construct some sort of probability model in which Rugby was more likely to be paw-painting than speaking Hindi.

This morning, I was thinking about predictions.  I get up with a general idea about what I expect to happen during the day.  It’s a good bet that on any given day I will do laundry, at least until such time as I convince the household that clothes are useless markers of conspicuous consumption, which I am unlikely to do since I like wearing clothes to stay warm, among other things.  But I didn’t think that today I would spend a chunk of time on the phone with the doctor’s office about T.’s back (his back is going to be fine; he overexerted himself at the food bank over the weekend and needs to rest, ice, etc.).  I did not write down that I would spend way too long trying to figure out how to make the online component of my CPR recertification function before giving up and emailing Brent for help since I’d already talked to the lovely people at the Red Cross several times.

So far, today’s unpredictable events have been not what I would have chosen.  I will hold out hope that maybe later on some kind of pleasant surprise will occur.  Maybe I will be wearing a tutu.