You know how you get those days when all you want to do is get in the car and drive? Go nowhere, really, but just go? Listen to the music pour from the speakers and wash over you as you let everything weighing you down just empty out of you?
I'm having one of those days.
I thought about Grey today when I heard some Kenny Wayne Shepard pop up on my mp3 player. I texted him and we chatted a bit. Just touching base with him made me smile and feel better. I've been wondering if I'm not sinking a little bit again; dipping my toes in and breaking through the surface of a tiny depression. All the symptoms are there again. By now you'd think I'd know to anticipate that my moods will ebb and flow, but it concerns me that it seems the ebbs are coming closer and closer together as I am growing older.
Am I happy? Well, that's the million dollar question, isn't it? When my thoughts turn to escape -- even if I'm not really sure what it is that I'm trying to escape FROM -- it usually means no, or at least an "I don't think so."
When I first got divorced I went through a "celebratory" period, for lack of a better term. Going over to friend's houses, listening to music, dancing and singing and laughing. It wasn't that I hadn't done that before -- I had -- but it no longer carried the underlying frisson of "reporting" in to someone. Feeling that freedom was a wonderful antidote.
That celebratory feeling is gone now. I don't spend as much time with my friends and haven't because I'd rather spend more and more of my time in my room, alone. I don't feel the desire to go out and I don't feel as connected to my friends as I did then. I just feel very alone in a way that my friends can't fill.
I'm also frustrated at some health issues. More than each one independently, all together they make me feel helpess and useless and have made me look at my own mortality and the faster and faster passing of all-too-important years. It's one thing to think abstractly of your own finiteness and quite another to get old enough to really grasp its totality. I know that I'm in the midst of working through some existential issues and I won't get them sorted out until I reach an acceptance of both the inevitability of my own ending and my inability to prevent it from occurring. Right now I get angry and scared and feel indignation, injustice, desperation and futility instead of that place of calm acceptance.
This is a really hard battle for me. I'm a natural half-empty girl. Pessimism is my drink of choice. Maybe I'm just exhausted with the battle -- mentally, that is. When I'm in good health I'm a lot more upbeat and social and don't dwell on all these sorts of things. I need to remind myself that I won't always be in picture perfect health. I simply have to find way to enjoy life no matter what, instead of spending what years I have (and they could be a very many yet) in a funk fueled by my anger at losing what is, in actuality, only an illusionary control. After all, when my time does come, I want to be able to handle it with dignity and acceptance and not despair.
So anyway, these feelings, which I've experienced in the past, are back with a vengeance. That's why I think I've been dipping my toes into the waters of sadness again. Such is my lot. I comfort myself with the fact that after I forge through these issues I'll be in a better frame of mind. My mom tells me her 50s were much better than her 40s. I suspect that's because these sorts of things had been resolved. At least I hope so.
((Song: "Grey Room" by Damien Rice. Lyrics here: http://www.eskimofriends.com/lyrics.asp#grey ))
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