Worth Writing

The Legacy

Leaving is my legacy, leaving and being left behind, as well as isolation and self-silencing.  I began my study for the aforementioned at the age of four when Mother gave me half a little white pill with the instructions to ‘take it and disappear’, Alice down the rabbit hole.  Many tears, fears, and years later I don’t need any magic or potions to make like Alice and skedaddle. A few doctors have labeled it “depression” and treated it as such, and some others still wonder if it is something more than that; what remains obvious to all is that I spend most of my life with my feet permanently dangling down the rabbit hole ready to leap or fall in for a ‘time out’ of sorts, a frequent ‘disappearing’. 

So there you go.  Now you know where I’ve been since my last post: I tumbled down the bunny chute again.  Usually I’m simply inactive, both creatively and emotionally disconnected while in there, but it doesn’t feel particularly bad, nor like much of anything at all unless my mind decides to ‘ride me’ for not being and active, life-loving member of society.  This last time was just awful because on some level I was enjoying the freedom of the daily writing about my childhood; a story long overdue for the telling.  When I fell in the familiar dark hole where the words won’t come or go, and all I could do was sit and stare up, way, way up the tunnel to the patch of blue where the words and willingness fly I found myself still attached enough to suffer deeply with regret for my consistent loss of energy, of life, of self.  It is like a temporary death, one that I am tired of mourning. 

And so I am on one last great search for a way out, a way up, something more than this constant lessening of myself before I give up entirely on having a life and eating it too.  Yes, “eating it too.”  I’ll mix any damn metaphor I want here!  A woman’s life is supposed to nourish her, fill her up, sustain her, and make her strong!  It can’t do all that if she just stands back and stares at it, for god’s sake.  She’s got to gorge herself on it.  That said; no I don’t.  But I did. 

My life has been chaos to chaos to chaos…you get the picture.  My childhood was mental and emotional chaos.  My teenage years were more of the same kind of chaos with behavioral insanity thrown in.  In my twenties I enjoyed the chaos of breaking free fro active abuse in my life and learning to love being alive.  It was wonderful, but it was high chaos no less.  Then…oh then…came the love of my life and two children of the wildest variety.  Oh my!  Need I label it?  Then very wild years!  Those years were capped off by two of the most heartbreaking and devastating imaginable and my life was totaled.  It has been a while now since the tragic ending of my motherhood, and though I still feel as though I have fallen off the face of the earth and not yet returned, I am beginning to suspect my undoing may turn out to lead to my final salvation from this endless maddening disappearing-down-the-rabbit-hole trick.

My last years with those wild girls in our wild and incredible life together are unmatchable, so totally irreplaceable, that I have not been able to move on with my life since then, since them.  The result is what seems like a terrible depression, but it is also the absence of chaos.  The pattern has finally been broken.  Perhaps now, if someone can de-condition my seemingly permanent Alice-hood, I will be able to choose what life to live next. 

Speaking of de-conditioning, I recall one person suggesting in a comment on an earlier post using the art of distraction as a way of sort of tricking myself out of my frequent forays into rabbit-hole reveries and regretful idleness.  And an “art” it is because having tried it over the last couple of weeks I’ve found it very difficult, often beyond my ability at the time, but worth practicing.  The poor dear took some flak for the mention of it as it accompanied a comment that included the term “self-pitying”, and I am still considering her words.  It isn’t the distant past I feel sorry for myself about, but for this fatigue that won’t let me be, jut be, won’t let me just live my life with enough energy to enjoy it.  But she got me, didn’t she?  She saw it.  She named it.  Smart, brave cookie.

And for my real big trick…!  I don’t have one.  Sorry.  I would have pulled it off LONG ago if I had one.  I’m still working my way out of the hole.  I walked a few blocks over yonder to get a new haircut, baked a meatloaf, and walked the dog.  That constitutes a resoundingly successful day of late, but no ‘real big tricks’ to amuse and delight an audience.  All I can do today is survive some more and keep up the search for something that will spin the magic I need to make it possible for me to once again be able to do more than merely survive my life.  Life with my Love and my girls was chaos and it was painful and it was scary and it was difficult, but it was also hilarious and exhilarating and it made me feel extremely alive.  Is it too much to ask to want to be returned to Life?