Since I was diagnosed with depression decades ago (age 15), I have had some time to discover a few things that do help me. Some of those things are the usual sort of things: going for walks, taking medication, having a good support system, knowing that my diagnosis is a medical one — that I’m…
Let me be a jellyfish Brainless and glowing My beauty innate– Unquestionable, even, Since I’ve no amygdala for Shouting orders, no hippocampus Busily collecting Potential threats. Let me be a jellyfish, One of a tribe of Transluscent pancakes Mindlessly ganged around Jews cutting the Red Sea waves or Rubber-tubed tourists — Either way.
Here is the look of the Midwest in a summer storm. To me, this landscape is not only the most familiar, it is the most comforting. How can a sky look so forbidding — so menacing and beautiful — but we are not allowed to do so? I was 14 and in my first year…
Why I Changed My Mind and Took the PillsWhen I got to the point where I really truly thought “hey yeah… maybe I should take pills for depression,” I felt a lot of things. Failure Yep. I failed. I just could not “get over” my excess “emotionalness.” Here, there and everywhere I went, feeling anxious…
You’re not happy. You’re still all-you.Dear You, Hey. Are you feeling a little “over-seen” in these past few weeks? Yeah, I know how you feel. When “public” suicide happens, it’s so substantially private — so completely hidden inside the person who has departed — that it’s hard not to feel an equal sense of horror and…
— Part of the December “If Only in My Dreams” series. Thanks.
All the things I am not saying are sitting there, on the sofa, an elephant knitting from an endless ball of yarn. All the things I am not saying are molding in a plastic container, because I refused to eat them, or to throw them out, and I would not wash it out, or even…
Occasionally I ask myself “What are you writing?!?? Pelting squirrels and fuzzy cat buses?!?” That is usually when I can feel myself “filling in”– you know, writing something that isn’t exactly the truth of what is on my mind. I guess I “fill-in” on the days when I need to talk, to spill it, but…
