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December 5, 2010
'Tis the season
A funny thing happened here in Eastern North Carolina yesterday. Snow. Just in time for the holidays, wet, sticky, pretty snow. It should have made me joyful and, I'll admit, at first I was pretty excited. Later, though, as I went to pick up my daughter from a friend's house, it turned into something much worse ... familiar and unbidden.
There I was, driving, cold and tense, not noticing so much how pretty it
was but more how dangerous the roads were (I should have known then
this was not going to end well but I was distracted) and it started. A
simple light display on the side of a barn. Colored lights strung from
the ground to the peak of the building with a brighter white light at
the top as a star, resembling a Christmas tree, and my mind was busily
trying to figure out how it was done.
Not unusual, as I was driving alone and without music, which is how I usually get into trouble. SIlence is a bad thing for my brain.
A block or two later, I turned into her friend's neighborhood, an older established upper-middle-class subdivision filled with 2-story homes, the type I realized quickly that I could never afford when I was house hunting, the type that I have only seen the inside of because I was working for the people that lived there. I had to drive slowly, being off the main drag and in their traffic controlled area, and this gave me a chance to lower my shoulders a bit and look at some of the light displays twinkling prettily in the fresh snow. Just about every house at least had a tree up in a window, many had decorated their porches and some the trees surrounding the house.
The thoughts started again. How do they do that? That seems like a lot of work. I wonder how much time that took. And money. Who has that kind of time and money? I know who does, they do. Those people that live in those houses, the houses I'm not invited into. They have time and money and husbands and families and joy and happiness and everything I've always wanted. Why would they spend so much time putting up decorations? It all seems so pointless. What a waste of time and money. I would rather just stay in bed and sleep the season away. God, how am I ever going to make it through this season?
And in the span of a block, it had happened. I slid full on into the depressive episode that has been threatening to swallow me whole for the past few weeks. By the time I got to the house where my daughter was happily waiting for me with her friend who has the perfect family, whose house is perfectly decorated, where she always goes to do anything fun or the least bit holiday related, I was full of resentment and sadness and futility, my throat had tightened and a wave of tears was threatening to drown me.
Happy Holidays, indeed.
I'm struggling ... but it's not often that I will admit it. That's a step in the right direction, right?
In an effort to fight this (starve a depression, feed an obsession, I always say), I am going to have to take action. Put up the tree. Clean. Something. I need to feel accomplished. Because frankly, this bed could become my home for the next month and I would be perfectly happy. But I have people depending on me and I can't let that happen, not right now.
Dammit.
Not unusual, as I was driving alone and without music, which is how I usually get into trouble. SIlence is a bad thing for my brain.
A block or two later, I turned into her friend's neighborhood, an older established upper-middle-class subdivision filled with 2-story homes, the type I realized quickly that I could never afford when I was house hunting, the type that I have only seen the inside of because I was working for the people that lived there. I had to drive slowly, being off the main drag and in their traffic controlled area, and this gave me a chance to lower my shoulders a bit and look at some of the light displays twinkling prettily in the fresh snow. Just about every house at least had a tree up in a window, many had decorated their porches and some the trees surrounding the house.
The thoughts started again. How do they do that? That seems like a lot of work. I wonder how much time that took. And money. Who has that kind of time and money? I know who does, they do. Those people that live in those houses, the houses I'm not invited into. They have time and money and husbands and families and joy and happiness and everything I've always wanted. Why would they spend so much time putting up decorations? It all seems so pointless. What a waste of time and money. I would rather just stay in bed and sleep the season away. God, how am I ever going to make it through this season?
And in the span of a block, it had happened. I slid full on into the depressive episode that has been threatening to swallow me whole for the past few weeks. By the time I got to the house where my daughter was happily waiting for me with her friend who has the perfect family, whose house is perfectly decorated, where she always goes to do anything fun or the least bit holiday related, I was full of resentment and sadness and futility, my throat had tightened and a wave of tears was threatening to drown me.
Happy Holidays, indeed.
I'm struggling ... but it's not often that I will admit it. That's a step in the right direction, right?
In an effort to fight this (starve a depression, feed an obsession, I always say), I am going to have to take action. Put up the tree. Clean. Something. I need to feel accomplished. Because frankly, this bed could become my home for the next month and I would be perfectly happy. But I have people depending on me and I can't let that happen, not right now.
Dammit.
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