You might have noticed I haven’t posted for a while.  I’m not any less cranky.  I have been in a bit of a funk.  Which is a minimizing way of saying I’ve been depressed.  I’ve been finding it difficult to just get through my usual day, let alone sitting down and writing anything.  This isn’t anything I haven’t experienced before and I am currently not in any danger of self-harm.  I have a fantastic therapist who has done a stalwart job of shepherding me through these times.  However, this is the longest and deepest it’s ever been.  Only one or two people know and I’ve been thinking about that.  How we hide the vulnerable parts of ourselves.  Why we feel we need to.

I quite aware of why I do.  I had a mother who didn’t encourage weakness of any kind and a father who while, loving, was emotionally distant.  ” No one wants to hear about your problems.” my Mom would tell me.  You learn to keep your feelings, your pain, pretty much all those messy feelings inside.  So, I never learned how to cope with negative thoughts. I denied my pain. I drank…a lot. I told myself that so many people had it so much worse than me.  Who was I to complain?? However, when you don’t tend to your emotional wounds they never heal.  You can ignore them. You can deny you have them but they never really go away.

They manifest in other ways.  In my case, it’s a feeling of never being good enough or worthy of happiness.  That is a tough narrative to break as it is constantly reinforced, well, by life.  Every single uncomfortable or painful experience can be explained by my deserving what I get.  Of course, my marriage dissolved…I wasn’t a good or caring enough partner to keep it together.  Laid off?  Maybe if I wasn’t such a loser it wouldn’t have happened. See? Everything bad can be explained away as an inherent flaw in my being.  Everything good is temporary, how could it last if I am undeserving of joy?

Now, if you’ve read my blogs you know that life has ups and downs.  I understand that and have always been open to experiencing and sitting with the bad.  I’ve often said being a Buddhist is like being an archeologist.  You’re always digging to find the “underneath”.  You’re always peeling back the layers to see who you truly are.  I am usually adept at doing this.  The problem is when I’m depressed, “in my feelings” so to speak, my reality is distorted.  Everything gets filtered through that old festering trauma I’ve done my very best to bury. It makes self-reflection hard…the lens is too blurred to see clearly.  I keep trying to dig my way out and the dirt keeps being thrown back into my hole.  It’s fucking exhausting.  It is hard emotional labor and I just don’t have any energy for much else beyond basic living at the moment.

I don’t have any uplifting thoughts to end this with. I’m safe and will be okay.  If I need to there are people I can reach out to for help and will if I need to.  This won’t last forever, nothing ever does. I will dig my way out.  If you, or someone you love, needs help please reach out.  There are some of us out there who can’t shovel on our own.