Depression

I am discouraged. It occurs to me that how I see the world doesn’t generally match up with how other people see the world. My response to supremacy culture isn’t working for me, and doesn’t seem to be effective. Refusing to play the game doesn’t change anything, but neither does playing the game entirely for self-aggrandizement. I have done both, and neither response yields a satisfactory result for me. What to do, what to do? At the moment, I feel largely stupid, and somewhat paralyzed.

This has happened before. I have what amounts to a plan in my head that seems plausible, and I have faith in it. I am going to be alright, I tell myself. Have faith. You have something to offer, you have a story worth hearing. I feel somewhat motivated, and have a fair amount of clarity. I’m moving, albeit slowly and have some modicum of confidence.

Then, like a lightning bolt, it all shifts to despair. I have no marketable skills, I will run out of money sooner rather than later, and I will have failed at life. I’ve been in la-la land, as my mother would say, and why in the world did I think I would be granted some kind of mystical salvation and a fairy tale ending to a life of bad behavior.

There is no game, there are rules to life that even 8-year-olds can grasp. Why do I believe the rules are different for me? I am no the prodigal daughter – there is no home awaiting my return, penitent or not. I have learned nothing on my journey, searching for non-existent treasure and the elusive adulation of a hero. There is no hero in this vessel, there may not be vessel at all. I am formless, and I have failed to conform.

I have rebelled against form over substance for most of my life, and it has gotten me nothing. I have rebelled against conformity, authority, repression all my life, and that has gotten me even less. In the final analysis, I have nothing, and time is running short. The clock ticks, the 2-minute warning has been issued, and still I run headlong toward some non-existent goal.

I should leave my brain to science, in the hope they can figure out what caused my brain to produce such circuitous and meaningless thought processes. Maybe there is an answer to what happened to all the hopes and dreams of someone like me, who saw it all slip through her fingers over more than half a century of trying desperately to hold on to it all. I tried holding on, and I tried letting go, but the result was the same – I was left with nothing but the war going on in my cerebellum, and I was losing.

It’s not enough that I can be a friend. It’s not enough that I care about people. It’s not enough that I treat my dog reasonably well, or that I have reconstructed my life enough over the past 35 years to no longer cause harm to people. Nothing seems to be enough, unless it is that which is provided to other people. What is provided to me is not enough, never was enough, never will be enough. I don’t understand how this life works, how this body works, how my brain works and it seems to be too late to change that.

I have been doing a lot of writing lately, and that plus $1 will get you a share of nothing. When I started doing that in December, I foolishly thought it might lead to something I could publish. I’m just not that good. Writing is a dangerously mediocre skill that I possess, like the guitar and the flute. I will never be considered good at it, although I can make a pleasant noise from time to time. It would have been nice if I was actually good at something, anything, but mediocre is my niche. That frustrates me enormously.

So what is there to do with frustration, and discouragement? Do you simply live with it, suck it up as they say, and keep walking? That is mostly the only solution I have ever found, and those feelings have been life long. There have been short intervals where things appeared to be looking upward, but those have not been anything close to the dominant trend.

In some ways I have given up. I no longer entertain even the possibility of a life partner, or financial stability, or a body that cooperates with me. There is no dream of offering something that I have created to a receptive audience, because I do not have any product that is marketable. I’m not sure if my obsession with having that is a function of an oversized ego, or just the result of not finding true purpose. Whatever the answer, I wish that giving up would release me from the discouragement, but it has not.

Does it even matter? I don’t think it does, actually. There is nothing in the world that will be changed because I find purpose, or create something that is better than mediocre. When I am no longer here, will I have left anything that matters to anyone? I don’t know, but I suspect not. Perhaps legacy is a false notion anyway, and ultimately not something that should be desired. I won’t have one, so I really don’t need to spend time on figuring out how to navigate it.

I want to know why, why it has to be this way. I want to know what I failed to do, but in some ways I know. I swallowed what meant the most to me, I chose to please everyone else but myself. I did not have the courage to stop people when they trampled me, ran over me, abused me. I did not have the courage. I may still not have the courage, and that makes me sad. You never envision that your life will turn out to be one that almost was, that was never quite realized, that was full of so many twists and turns that you have travelled thousands of miles inside a 10-foot radius, and gotten nowhere.

This too shall pass, and I will walk the walk again tomorrow. And the next day. The rock will be heavier, but that is the way of it. If I come here again, I pray, quite literally, that I can remember some of this on some esoteric level. I feel as though I have been here before, but came back with spiritual amnesia. That was a low blow. I’m trying to leave bread crumbs in the corners I’ve passed and dry wells I’ve visited. There’s no reason to do this again, but who am I to say? I do say, however, that I want something better next time, something beyond my wildest dreams this time. Laissez les bon temps rouler, cher.