Profound Mundania

For some reason, okay from a total funk due to the proverbial wrench, I spent some time Saturday morning reading through past posts. About this time last year, I was coming out of the tail end of a pretty bad depression. I realized that H might have a point that my depression is linked to the seasons. Now that things are lightening up here (yes yet another reason to love the South), I am finding myself not so mournful. In fact, I have taken my meds for a few days....

Which no doubt calls for an explanation. I do have some left in the cupboard, I didn't just stop without a fall back. I forgot to take them on Friday. I woke up Saturday feelings with a sharpness, a color a vivid intensity that had been lacking....a lack that I didn't notice until it came back. And yes not all the feelings were positive (due to the above mentioned wrench) but the intensity was nice, and of course at this point, I felt a bit more capable of mucking through the crap. And I did. Instead of sulking all day which I wanted to do, I spend some quality time with H, picked up repaired cars, brought the kids on a bike ride, and had a spontaneous gathering with copious amounts of red wine, hummus, and pita chips and best of all friends.

Thus I am left with wondering about the meds. Did they help? Yes, they actually did, and I wished I had started them in October when things were getting really yucky. Do they numb me? Why yes, and I suppose that in some ways that is why they help. Where I am now? I don't know. I haven't had any meds since Friday, and right now I don't plan on taking any. I have some ideas about therapy (I'm trying to figure out a way to afford a cognitive therapist). I suspect I have a seasonal thing, and am looking into ways to combat that come next year. Yes I am dreadfully fucked up. I know this but I am not sure if I want to keep taking drugs....perhaps if I could for a part of the year? I just don't know at this point where I will go with this decision. I'll keep you updated.

Last night as H and I were attempting to go to sleep....H felt a need to launch into a discussion about memory. I hate it when he does this...he picks the most inopportune times to think about these profound topics. I was at that point when I knew if I didn't sleep soon, I'd be in the grip of insomnia. But he was off, and there wasn't much I could do because of course it was fascinating. H finds himself troubled by memories in ways that I am not. He sees them as unwanted experiences for reasons I'll let him expound on in his own blog.

But what I was thinking about as he talked is how memory works in two ways (at least for me). There is a fictional aspect to memory that is obviously created. When I tell stories here about my past, it is a literary engagement. It is a creation that perhaps at one point may have had a foundation in some kind of notion of reality...but through the telling it is embellished. The memories I create stories of are memories tinged with the memories of others, photographs, and the ever present present in the past. But then there are these other memories that i think of has being much more primordial. They are body memories that surface unexpectedly because of some kind of physical stimuli. The smell of Mexico City in the early afternoon, slammed me with a fragmentary slew of images from an earlier visit to the D.F. The way that a APTBS' song left me with the unsettled feeling that I was once again 20, at Astor Cafe on Monroe Ave in Rochester...the way that a certain shirt feels against my skin, or the way that someone else's body touching mine brings a physical experience of images from the past. These glimpses are fast, fleeting, and not linear. There are no stories to them as they come. They are physical in ways that my memory creations are not.

And lastly, H and I talked about being older and death. H is always agitated that people don't

find the time before being born as freaky. He finds it confusing that the nothingness of death is more frightening the nothingness of beginning. But for me I argue, I have felt that beginning. I have carried that beginning in my body. While I may not remember my own beginning, nor will my beasties remember their beginnings, I do have a physical experience of such a thing. I have not, I argued with him, carried death. H says that we all carry death.

Finally a picture of my wine drenched Saturday evening...solely because I need some lightness after carrying death, and also because I promised (threatened) D that I would post the evidence on my blog...

OMG...D drinking wine? I am such a dreadful influence.

My beautiful profound husband.

D and I both a slight bit tipsy at this point. Note how old I look. Sigh.