lookfar

Yesterday I talked to Dr. Quinn about this dream:

( Cut for dream-hatersCollapse )

The thing is, I've been having a lot of hot flashes during the night and waking up. This dream took place in the middle of the night and I wrote it down when I woke up in the morning. That's unusual; dreams we remember are mostly the ones we have just before getting up. I wonder if I'd pushed off the blankets and then gotten cold again ( a lovely feature of night-sweats: the subsequent clammy coldness); thus the feeling of dream-coldness.

Somehow we got to talking about the seal wife. Jungian therapy has a lot of mythology and folk tales in it, if you wish. I find it easier somehow to talk about my inner life in this way; ironically, it's both indirect and enriched. I got to thinking about why I love the shore. It's the way it's half-and-half; to me, it represents the place where the inner world meets the outer one. Way out in the depths, there are things we don't know. They affect the surface but we can't see them directly. That's the unconscious. Here on land, everything is visible and quotidian. But I also understand that what is visible isn't real; it's only the internal representation of reality, highly colored by emotion and interpretation. So the land is also part of the water.

What's great about stories and dreams is that the smallest detail can be the most important. I was thinking of the moment when, after years of marriage, and children, the selkie finds her rolled up seal skin that the husband had hidden, and in a flash she's gone, back to the sea. I suppose I'm contemplating how the truth about yourself can be one thing, and then, instantly, you can recognize another truth and throw yourself into it completely.

Gee, it's great to be undepressed when you've been depressed. It's like getting your appetite back, or a new prescription for your glasses or a really good night's sleep. Everything is appealing. At my happiest I have a feeling of romance about my life, as if the very ordinariness of it makes it magical, as if I'm turning to someone (who?) and saying, Shh, I have a secret --

I wonder where that came from, the feeling of something wonderful just below the surface of the world. Possibly a subtle brain disorder, lesions in the cerebral cortex or some such.

Tonight was Toby's birthday party. His family are big birthday-acknowledgers and there's a party for every birthday. Since both his sisters live nearby, and have husbands and sons, that makes for a regular circle of year round parties. I've made the same menu for many of Toby's birthdays, though not all of them -- cajun gumbo with chicken and andouille sausage, corn bread, dry white wine or cider, chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. Everything came out well, or maybe I'm in an exceptionally good mood.

I gave Toby a brown leather jacket that I fortuitously found on sale (the one he'd pointed out in a catalog as the ideal type cost $500.), and he seemed very pleased.

I cut this recipe from the Washington Post ten or fifteen years ago. It's not a soup kind of gumbo, but more like a cassarole.

Cajun Gumbo

3 chicken breasts, cubed
2 T olive oil
2 lg onions, chopped
1 C chopped celery
1 C chopped red pepper
1 C chopped green pepper
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 C uncooked rice
3 C chicken stock
salt
1/4 T red pepper, or to taste. The recipe suggests 1 T, but this is very hot.
1 T black pepper or to taste
2 t thyme
2 links cooked andouille sausage or kielbasa sliced 1/2" thick then quartered (I just slice, don't quarter)

Brown chicken in olive oil in heavy pot or deep skillet with lid. Reserve. Brown onion, celery and peppers until almost caramelized (important). Add garlic. Add rice, stock, salt and spices. Stir and cover. When you hear it bubble, turn to low. Rice should absorb all moisture, about 20 min. Add chicken and sausage and heat to serve.

The sweetness and crispy top of traditional corn bread offset the texture and spice of this very nicely.

I think I must be starting to feel better. I know that sounds strange; why can't I just tell you that I feel better? Sometimes I don't know how I feel until I see how I act, maybe because I'm wandering around in my head so much.

Yesterday at the Safeway I had a vivacious conversation with the big bearded man next to me in line about his new tattoos. Then after dinner I got a market survey call -- the kind where the person introduces himself by name and asks questions about how you shop.

"So, Porter, can I ask you a question now?" I said. "Do you do something else? I'll bet this isn't your main job. I'll bet you're a writer."

"Well, I used to write papers," he said.

"About what?"

"Programming, mostly."

"Were you in grad school?"

"Yes."

Then we did some more of the shopping questions. Then he said, "Can I ask why you asked me that?"

"Oh," I said. "I sort of thought, by the way you speak, that you're smarter than this job requires you to be. To be utterly tactless about it."

Then we did the rest of the shopping questions and talked about where he comes from, then he said, "You really made my day when you said that. Thank you."

I was so tickled by this conversation that I called Ellie and told her about it (also because it was so much the kind of thing that she does herself). And as I told her, I remembered the new-tattoo guy and that when I got off the elevator at work that morning I was smiling, and I thought, oh, this is the way I used to be. *This* is what I've missed in the last four months, that joyful engagement with other people, the sense of using my personality to connect. I thought I might never feel cute and engaging again.

Actually, I thought I'd gotten too fat to ever feel cute again, but this is ridiculous because cuteness is entirely in your head. Feel cute=act cute&reach out=feel cute. Okay, maybe not in a singles bar, but certainly in the world of the suburban housewife, where everyone is glad of a kind word.

I don't think I've ever noticed something like this before, the way you notice the rain stopping or a sudden rise in the temperature and humidity. I know when people stop being depressed they regain their enjoyment of old pleasures; I suppose it makes sense I would get back my enjoyment of personality. I experience my personality as a sort of toy or fancy tool, something I can have fun with. It's not the same thing as *me,* but it represents me, like a symbol does an idea.

Will this last? I don't know. I didn't notice it was missing. I must make a mental note that working out and yoga seem to help me stay happy, and not let them slip away next summer like I did this past.

I even had Ellie and Kay to lunch today, and cooked pumpkin soup and made dessert -- ripe pears with chocolate sorbet. During the coffee, Midnight the cat came to the door with what I thought was a dead mouse so I let him in. It turned out to be a live mouse and my sissy friends had to run from the room. Middy got all incompetent and refused to catch the thing again so I had to underhand it like a tennis ball out the back door. Middy went too, then kept returning with the increasingly faint mouse in his mouth. He seemed outraged that I would not let him bring his toy inside.

The mousie was dead by the time Honor got home and she buried it in a box with a tissue shroud and a small amount of shredded cheese.

Driving home from work today I had that sad thing come over me again. *Nothing's wrong.* I don't think I've ever been so clear about depression being separate from circumstances. Toby and I are feeling pretty close these days, so that's not it. Kids doing well and I'm enjoying them, mostly. Love my job. There is that 25 lbs., but is that a reason to want to cry in the car? More like a result of it. I'm really counting on Susan, though we haven't been working together long, to lead me out of this. What's so funny about it is that there are a few people leaning on me in the same way, and I absolutely know I can help them.

Actually I'm feeling very good about Toby. He's been a brick about my sadness and tears, my upset about my weight and my general shaky self-esteem -- just consistently kind and warm. I think he might really love me, and all this time I thought it was my good looks and charm.

So the new therapist, Susan, says that she's had good results with depressed women when they deal with their grief.

"Do you think you have grief?" she said.

"Shit yeah," I said inelegantly. "And I don't just mean around my mom's death."

"Yes," she said. "I meant more than that."

So, note to self: deal with grief.

I can't stand it, that I'm going to go over all that again, but I've pretty much seen it coming for a couple of years. And the truth is, every time you circle around the same wounds, they are different. You stand a chance of resolving them a bit more, now that they mean something else. It meant one thing to grieve about having such inadequate parents when they were living -- it was a way of separating myself so I could get married and live a life. It means something else now that my mother is dead and my dad gets more demented all the time. No need to get away from them anymore, but great sadness somehow that even the *context* of my childhood unhappiness is dissolving. No reparations yet? My, I guess the universe really IS indifferent.

I'm bitching about this, but I have never, never been sorry about any therapeutic work I've done. Sometimes it has changed me in positive ways I couldn't even imagine before