Minor melancholy thoughts

Better out than in, I guess:

* The most minor: Apparently "excluding" kids is now considered bullying them, as per Cartoon Network's anti-bullying programming.

Okay, where do I turn in the receipts for the exclusion I dealt with on a regular basis in middle school for a refund or something?

Though yeah, I will say being ignored/excluded was less awful than actually being teased or harassed or having people say rude things to me.

* This weekend is the two-years anniversary of my friend Steve's death. I remember that because I found out right after getting home after the Science Olympiad, which was itself enough unpleasant and taxing. And I had to go and do announcements at church the next morning, and announce it for those who hadn't heard, and wow was that hard.

* Transfiguration Sunday (which is what this is - this is one of the "movable feasts," I guess, because it's the Sunday before Lent begins) always makes me a little bit melancholy. I've never had that kind of "mountaintop experience" in my life; I have to try to find God in the valleys (ruts? maybe that's more like it) of day-to-day life and sometimes that's hard.

It's extra hard when you feel like you're going through a valley yourself, which is what this just is right now.

Also, as what is sometimes called a "cradle Christian" (that is: raised in a family that was practicing Christian, rather than being someone who had a conversion experience sort of thing where your life changed), sometimes I wonder how different things would be otherwise. Maybe I wouldn't have the doubts I have right now? I don't know. Maybe if I had seen a rougher side of life I'd be able to be more grateful right now.

* Usually I do something for Lent. One year, I set aside a half hour a day for devotional reading. Another year, I cut out sugary things. Last year I cut sharply back on spending and donated the money I didn't spend to our Week of Compassion. But I don't know. This year I'm not feeling it - finding an extra half-hour per day for more reading would be hard, I'm not sure I'm inclined to cut out sugar again (sometimes a little golden syrup in a cup of hot tea makes the day a little better), and I don't want to cut out spending....especially not since my birthday falls the day after Ash Wednesday this year.

I don't feel capable of taking on anything more right now, and cutting out things that I enjoy - even if cutting out/cutting back might be good for me (or good for the world, in the sense of donating money to disaster relief) - feels too much like inflicting pain on myself and for what end? And something like "give up being sad over the people you've lost" is probably not something I can do, not without screaming at myself about it every day. So I don't know. Maybe I sit Lent out this year....

* Also, reading through a MetaFilter thread (it was about this Twitter story, which is sort of a heartbreaking one: a man drives himself to the hospital, dies there, and it isn't until months later that his dusty car sitting in the parking lot is recovered, I guess as his kids are breaking up his household - they expected his car was going to be in the garage, assuming he'd called for an ambulance.

And a tangential comment, by someone who calls themselves Captain Afab, really really struck me, because it puts into words (that I could not) something I have noticed and been feeling:

"I tend to start feeling glum around the anniversary of his death. I've found enormous peace in telling stories about the good times with him. But I feel like I'm always bracing for losses to come. Spending time with the people I love has become subconsciously painful as I wonder how much time I have left with them, and yet I'm filled with regret for every second I'm not fully present with them.

How do you learn to trust the flow of time again?"

And man, is that it. Is that ever it. I catch myself, on the phone with my mom, feeling slightly impatient when she goes off in the weeds of something someone she knows far better than I do said, or is telling a story about something that happened that seems to be told in a longer and more convoluted way than I would tell it, and then I immediately feel guilty and tell myself: there will be a day, probably far too soon for you, when you won't be getting calls from her any more, and you will wish she could tell you some 10 minute story about how the car wouldn't start and she had to get someone out to charge it up so she could pull it out of the garage....

And also, yeah. Sometimes there IS that pall of "what if this is the last-ever experience of (whatever) I have with this person" - not just her, but with other people around me, even people younger than I am, but of course you never know. You never know what's going to happen.

I'll hasten to say it's not incapacitating and most of the time if I notice it it's a slight twinge at the most, but when I'm already inclined to be a little sad, I do notice it.

And I don't know. I don't know how you fix that, other than maybe just giving it time. (I know, people have suggested talk therapy, but honestly right now I have so much on my plate that unless I were non-functional, adding in another thing every few weeks to do is probably more than I can handle. And I doubt this is something medication would do a lot for; I think I just have to figure out how to make my peace with that and again, it may just be a matter of giving it more time: someone else, in response, quoted Aeschylus:

"...... drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

(I wonder which play that came from. In my high-school English classes we read some of the Greek tragedies, and also in Great Books in college, but I can't remember if we read any Aeschylus. We MIGHT have read the Orestia, but I don't remember for sure)


And yeah, that's probably true. I don't know, I've not gained a whole lot of wisdom from the last several years (and yes, I am counting Steve's death and Margaret's death in with the other losses: Steve's was SO unexpected, and it was literally a week and a half after he gave me his cell phone number and said "I'm just up the street, call me any time you need help, like if you need someone to steady a ladder for you when you have to go up on it, or if you have something too heavy to carry" and Margaret had been part of the "old guard" who was at church when I joined church....)


I do have a copy of Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" on my to-be-read pile but I'm not sure if I'm emotionally ready to tackle it yet.


Right now, what seems to work the best is to engage heavily with work (or with projects at home), or read diverting books (I recently started Willa Cather's "The Professor's House" and I admit the family drama is a nice relief from all the mystery novels I had been reading - too much death and mayhem in those for me right now)


I will say - and don't worry about me, I am NOT tempted to follow this path - but for the first time in my life I think I understand why some people seek the temporary oblivion of drink or drugs. My grief counselor did say that things like watching cartoons or going shopping or any of the "dumb fun" things I do were not a distraction so much as a necessary "break" from the mental work I was doing and she was probably right. Though I admit I wish that mental work was done, or at least I was farther along on it (in the sense of feeling like I had some kind of answer) by now.


*I do need to get up and put the rollcart out, and figure out something for dinner, and wash my hair. One of the odd things about being a human is the life maintenance tasks are still there. Just as there is a book entitled "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry" (and also the old saying about the Buddhist monk who was asked by a novice what he did before enlightenment, and he said "Chopped wood and carried water" and then the novice asked what he did *after* enlightenment and he replied again, "Chopped wood and carried water), even when you're dealing with something like heartbreak and trying to figure out how you go on living your life as a mortal human when you've had it very heavily thrown in your face that you - and everyone you love - is mortal, you still  have to do laundry and cook food and put the trash out and all of that.