Tag: Mental health

Spectre

A phantom lives in me, a ghost you cannot see Ignore her and she’ll catch you unaware.

The shadow in my sight, the darkness in the night, the demon who resides under the stair.

This thief unto the day, she robs me of my way awareness of my inner self betrayed.

I cannot keep her still, by effort, hope or will she wants to rise and shatter all I’ve made.

Who will win, she or I? Who’s the truth? Who’s the lie? The monarch of this body that we share?

We both want to be left, the other self bereft, of everything inside that’s good and fair.

We have been here before, her scratching at the door illusions that I try so hard to fight.

Of course I don’t give in and let the spectre win I banish her and thus she haunts the night.

Nature Girl….Or Not….?

It’s made me wonder who I am, is what spring did.

As we go through life, we acquire ways of identifying ourselves, ways to relate our individual being to the world outside. If we have an affinity for music, we may labels ourselves musicians. If we’re drawn to drawing, we might say we’re graphic artists. If we are, inexplicably, excited by algebraic equations we could proclaim ourselves rocket scientists or mechanical engineers or at the very least math brainiacs. We have boundless external identifiers to choose from and it is the combination of natural inclination and environmental influence that leads us to conclusions about who we are and guide us into who we become.

Throughout my life, I have always thought of myself a ‘nature girl.’ If I made a list of my top ten personal identifiers and named them in order of dominance, ‘nature girl’ would be in the top three—right after ‘writer’ and before ‘dancer.’ An inherent curiosity combined with a childhood that included a horse ranch, a three hundred acre preparatory school, a thousand acre Ashram, and countless hours allowed to roam cultivated the nature girl within me. My favorite pastime was wandering through the woods or over fields with the birds and butterflies for company. I grew to love all of nature; rain, snow, sunshine, mountain tops, valleys, rivers, lakes, and streams. My love of the natural world also influenced my development as a person, I’m conscious of the environment and even my consumerism became naturally oriented, all my hair and cleaning products are biodegradable, my perfume is from natural essential oils, and even my diet is free from chemical influences.

This thing—nature—overwhelming and beautiful, inspiring and terrible, fascinating and dominating, became a part of who I believed myself to be.

Until recently.

Suddenly, without alteration of my inner self, without a mutation of my natural inclinations or a decline in my usual tastes, I cannot go outside! I have allergies, bad ones, thus the natural world I have long loved is now lost to me. If I should hope to refrain from being dreadfully ill, if I should hope to be able to continue to breathe—no longer can I roam the wilds.

It’s been a shock and has taken adjustment. You may imagine I would feel sad thinking on this—but as it happens I don’t anymore. Over the long course of our lives, we are constantly in flux, who we think of as ourselves today will be just a shadow come tomorrow. Change is the only certainty in this world but even through the course of change the essence of things remain. I am no longer able to go out into the wild to roam, but the fine seeds of that world were planted in my psyche and laid roots that extend beyond the physical. From the safety of my allergy-proof home, I remain a part of that brash wind, those groaning oaks, that amorous frog, and those earnest saplings, that optimistic grass, and the furious sunshine. I may no longer be able to justify the label ‘nature girl’ through my lifestyle but the way I see it is this:

You can take the girl out of the nature, but you can’t take the nature out of the girl.

And so, Nature Girl, I will remain—albeit an unusual one.

Spring = Depression

No season is waited for with such longing as is Spring. Shaking off the cold of winter, the entire world bursts forth. Trees pollinate, plants propagate, and all variety of animals bring their own fierce joy to the season by mating. Baby everything’s are born, flowers, calves, sheep, horses. After that quiet dead of winter, all is renewed, alive, awake and ready to play. All, that is, except the allergy sufferer.

I found out I had allergies last year after developing asthma; prior to that my mysterious ill-health wore many cloaks: IBS, CFS, MCS, MDI, Fibromyalgia. Because I have a-typical symptoms, not the classic rhinitis, no one was looking at my collection of symptoms as being related to allergies. It took asthma to connect the dots. My lack of ability to breathe had to come from somewhere. We looked around and found, through allergy testing, that I am allergic. I am not violently allergic to any one thing, for which I am grateful. Instead, I am low-level allergic to many things; 43 things out of the 70 tested for, to be exact. After a lifetime of mystery illness, suddenly I have a name: allergies. I have indoor allergies, outdoor allergies, pet allergies, allergies to mold, food allergies, and early, mid and late season allergies to trees, weeds, and grasses. In short, the entire blooming world is making me feel sick! Faced with those kinds of odds, late last year, I began a regime of anti-histamines. Anti-histamines are wonderful. I no longer itch twenty times a day; I do not have repeated violent bouts of abdominal pain, my knees are not swelling, my joints don’t ache and, best of all, I can breathe.

My anti-histamines brought me relief over the winter months, while closed up with dogs and dust-mites, and so I headed into Spring with optimism and good cheer, believing I would manage to skip by, unscathed, through pollen season and into the heady summer.

I did not know then what I know now. The uncomfortable physical symptoms that had plagued me all of my grown life are not the greatest burden of an allergy sufferer. My anti-histamines, gallant though they are, cannot completely quell the itching, swelling, sneezing, wheezing, coughing, and aching joints that accompany my allergic reactions to the most pollinated spring in known memory. They did a pretty good job of it. Had it been only for those, I would not complain. But, allergies have an undertow, a hidden foe that lives beneath the radar, a shadow condition that no one talks about and that is Allergy-Induced Depression.

I have always hated the Spring. Each April, as the world around me bursts forth in plant life and song, I want to crawl into bed, pull the covers over my head and sleep and until I somehow feel well enough to be alive. Over time, I came to accept this aberration of my mood unique to spring. I identified this time of year as one where I, in contrast to all else around me, wanted to go into hibernation while everything else was coming out. What I did not fully realize until this very Spring was the reason behind my desire to hibernate. My anti-histamines do a very nice job of keeping the other symptoms at bay; they do nothing for the lead-headed, mind-numbed, slowed-way-down, utterly exhausted feelings arising from allergy-induced depression. I know it is not my life. I love my husband, my children, my community, and my place of employment. I have a multitude of good things going on I wish to continue. My life is not to blame. The problem is in my brain, my broken brain, like a clock that has seasonally stopped ticking, even now, I cannot say when my brain will begin to tick again.

The Lake

The Lake

I stand with a vast lake behind me, my feet at the shore, facing away into the dawn. It is wide and deep, with a surface smooth as glass. The light falls just so, you can’t see into the depths but you know the vast waters are waiting. Sunlight slicks the surface and casts the world back into itself.

There are things dwelling in the depths; sometimes the surface rolls as a heavy mass moves beneath it and ripples reach far and wide.

This lake also holds knowledge and tells me much about myself, about the ones around me, about this world in which I live. I do swim in this lake, immersing myself completely in the cold, cold water, loosing sight and sound as I sink into myself.

When I emerge, it is as if every pore, every tender nerve point on my skin, is vibrantly alive, pulsing. I bring with me the sheen of dark waters, dripping from my skin.

I stand to face a new day, more alive.

But I know, there are demons in the depths. They can wrap their tentacles around me. If I am not careful, I could never reemerge.

Yesterday, I Wanted Not to be Me

Yesterday, I wanted not to be myself, I wanted to escape from me for the afternoon or even just a few hours. The intensity of me was too great, the weird, oddness of who I am too convoluted. I couldn’t make it out and was left with the bright burning of what I feel and nothing else. I wanted to escape, step out of my own experience for a time.

I often feel as if I am standing at the edge of a fire, a deep red-gold burning within me. I press myself closer and closer to the flame to see how long I can stand the heat before it starts to burn. It is a strange kind of game, to see how far into that brightness I will allow myself to fall.

I know I am not alone in my way. All over the world and throughout the history of humankind, there has been this cusp group of people like me: writers, musicians, actors, dancers, painters, composers. We have always existed on the outskirts, the ones for whom a ‘normal’ life is an intolerable one. The sports stars, the inventors, the religious zealots and the explorers who wander the globe, even those bizarre men who fish the bearing sea, we are the ones who left the crowd, broke away from the social norm, went our own way for no other reason than that we feel this hungry longing. At times, on the edge of the fire-pit, I wish I could lose myself completely, be burned to ash so only the cinders remain. I imagine then, I would have peace.

Instead, I stand with a great black lake behind me, that whispers things I could never know, and the bright, bright burning within. Poised between two poles, I navigate each moment, never knowing will it be the bright burning, or the deep of the lake that will eventually consume me.

Who is that Girl, Again?

It’s funny how life likes to throw a curve ball, just to make sure you’re still paying attention in the game. This winter has been one of many challenges, beginning with hitting that tree in December and then just rolling from there. Whole weeks went by where I lived moment to moment because, quite frankly, I wasn’t sure if I would be easy breathing in the next. Asthma has a sneaky way of making a person come completely into the present. I stopped thinking ahead, stopped planning. I tagged the line, “…if I can breathe” to the end of every sentence, “Yes, we can go shopping on Sunday, if I can breathe.”

It came on me suddenly, even though the propensity had apparently always been there, lurking, for years. Asthma and Allergies, completely new, utterly unwelcome ways in which to define myself.

The trouble is, I do sit well with definitions I don’t like. If I have Allergies and am as highly allergenic as they say, my whole life could be cast in shadow: no more long walks through rippling fields, no more laying in the grass chewing on the long end of a stem, no more romping with the dogs, hauling hay for the horses, no more running over wooded paths unless the mold count is down. Stretched out before me, my new life looked like a desert, vast and wide and utterly empty of all the things green and beautiful, things I truly loved.

Indeed, it didn’t sit well. I had to ask, if not that wild nature girl, then who am I? If I can’t do those things I love, what can I do?

I looked deep into the darkest corner of my soul and found me sitting there, just as calm and peaceful as you please, sitting still and quiet in that close, cool darkness, all soaked up with the essence of me. That was when I knew, I can never be other than what I am. I’ve lived for forty years with all these things they now call Allergies and Asthma. Yes, I have had moments of highly atypical skin conditions, random joint swelling, abdominal irritability, headaches, pain, general irritability, and exhaustion. When the doctor asked my symptoms and I told him, he wondered why I hadn’t mentioned them to other doctors before. I had but they couldn’t find what was wrong with me and anyway, over time, “sick” became my normal.

Now, I have gone full circle, through normalcy, into pain, illness, diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and now back to what I know as normal. I have a lot of allergies, according to my very reliable forearms. I could take that information and no one would blame me if I opted out off the natural world and chose instead to lock myself away in a plastic bubble. I might attain something like wellness if I did that, but what kind of a well would it be? Would I be happy? Would I have a life I actually wanted to live? Would I have love?

A recent study has proven vitamin D is highly effective in mitigating asthma and allergy symptoms. So effective, in fact, they are now recommending we allergenics not stay inside, theoretically safe in our plastic houses, but that we get outside, strip down as much as we dare, and let that hot sun soak into all the surfaces of our skin. When you haven’t been out in a while, the sun is like warm honey pouring over you. It is sensuously wonderful; it feels so good. And the soft murmuring of the leaves sounds like an endearment, as if they are rustling just for you.

I sat on my deck, having gotten the unofficial go-ahead to get out there and soak up some D and just looked at my natural world, the squirrels chasing each other irately through the branches, the butterflies drifting wonkily around the lilacs, those bright green leaves, bending and tipping waving at me in the breeze. I fell in love, in that punch-drunk kind of way that hits you sometimes. I could feel that thick, warm emotion coursing through me. All my aching muscles and even the blood in my veins relaxed. I settled deeper in my chair, and fell back in to wonder.

As every asthmatic will likely tell you, things trigger an attack. Once you learn what your triggers are, you can begin to get a grip on a very uncontrollable, often terrifying situation. One of my triggers is stress, if I get freaked out enough, you can bet I’m going to end of having trouble breathing. This was perfectly apparent during the day we took my daughter in for an emergency appendectomy. That’s some stress, I can tell you, having your daughter become violently ill, then rushing her to the hospital–one hour away– then having her operated on all within an eight hour period. This adventure began at eight in the morning, I stopped breathing normally by about two o’clock.

It makes you wonder, though, if you stop and think about it. If stress can have this great physiological impact, could not the opposite of stress work in reverse? Could sitting still, perfectly relaxed and deeply in love with anything at all make your lungs, as well as your heart, expand? It made me wonder and it made me make some solid decisions.

None of us ever know exactly how long we will have on earth and we are all given the glorious freedom to do what we wish with the time we do have. I could hole myself up in my house, make every person entering wash the pollen and dander and mold spores and dust mites off their bodies before hugging me, and keep my life pritinely sterile.

Or I could live, just as I always have, embracing every part of my world with two arms wide. I could inhale every moment of my life deeply. I could work myself to the bone in my garden and then sit, tipsy-in-love, letting all those good hormones work their magic.

In the end, in the very, very end, I have found, I’m just still me, same as I always was and I will do what comes naturally to me, what lets me remember deep peace and thick love.

I am wishing the same for you.

Peace, Love, and Blessings,

La

Put the Book Down

I have a very dear friend who has been under attack recently by chickenheads who didn’t like what he had to say on immigration. While deeply sad for him, I could not understand what it was that was making these attackers so upset. If they didn’t like what they were reading, simply put down the book. Don’t read that one, then another one, and another, working yourself into a hateful frenzy, looking for more reasons to despise someone you barely know.

Put the book down.

We have freedom to avoid anything that causes us distress. We don’t even have to think thoughts that are worrisome, anxiety-producing, or anger-building. If you don’t like what you are reading, put the book down. Not every word was written to reach all ears. In the same way that I have faith that the words I am writing were meant to be written, I have equal faith that the ones who are meant to read them will find access. In this world view, I suppose the attackers were meant to feel angry, hurt, or out-of-control. He got some pretty nasty e-mails. I know because I read them. They accused him of being exactly the opposite of what I had found him to be. They said he lied. He is one the most honest writers I have ever read. They said he had the story all wrong. He was there, he lived it from both sides of the angry border. For him, these words gave him strength, made him stronger. Through fire, they honed him and made him more into what he was meant to be. For the chickenheads? Who knows?

Life lessons like this are not painless, but my friend, in his honest wisdom, sent this quote to me and I think it says it best:

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything and anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you

–David Whyte

We may not like the chickenheads, the ones who would attack us for who we are, but even this bright burning brings with it a gift. For me, on this day when I was attacked (possibly with justification) it has made me into something stronger, more determined to speak my mind, to stand tall and clear, flawed and flawless, as I am.