Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Root hog


Brodt!

I suppose I just have to keep on digging. Somewhere somehow some way.
The other side of the river and the valley. I do not know what is there.
I hear the platitudes. I hear the well wishes. I sense the compassion and care.
I have to do it myself. And I get a lot of help.

Bad recordings of things we tell ourselves and others have to show us

the silliness of what we believed. perception of us as we saw ourselves in another
it is like the man said to me about all manner of therapy
when we have been wounded
the ultimate answer and final resolution after we have cried our tears
and been consoled in our misery
is to pick yourself up and get going again
Get up and go out the door out on the street all alone. Busted if need be

Saturday, August 07, 2010

Crushing Depression

I have heard the term before. I have probably seen it in other people. Now, I get to experience it for myself.

I suppose I can go copy and paste some clinical checkmarks to describe how I feel right now, but even that seems like a waste of time. I know them by heart anyhow.
1) nothing seems to matter. what I do seems to have no positive impact on my life. No matter how many resumes I send out or how much I polish my resume, there is no response. The things that I do seem to have no importance.
2)It is hard to be around other people. If I could lock myself away or walk off into the wilderness and abandon it all, I would be sorely tempted to do so. I can't because I am a dad and a member of a family that would break down the door or send bloodhounds to find me.
3)I have no desire to do anything. When I can muster up the energy to do things they have lost flavor and any impetus for me to continue doing them.

Ok, I am rapidly losing the desire to even write this down. Nobody will read this besides me and it sounds too much like whining. It is so hard to go out and look for a job that I know is not there. It is hard to see people that do nothing and have more money than they know what to do with. It makes me jealous and angry. I can understand why people would eat a bullet or down a bottle of pills or drive off a cliff. It feels like God has set me adrift. I can understand why someone would become agnostic or actively dismiss God entirely. Yeah, I might be saved into the Bosom of Abraham, but I might also be the starving leper outside the gate of the rich man destined to poverty my entire natural life and only after dying experience my basic needs of existence met. That prospect does not engender hope in me. The fact is that even Jesus himself said that the poor would always be with us. Perhaps the "us" is me. I do not think he was referring to the poverty of the soul. I think he meant what we generally understand as poor; broke, unemployed and without visible means of support. Elijah got sent to the poorest widow in town and her one son and then asked them to bake the last bit of meal they had and feed it to him. She has more faith than I do. Abraham was told to sacrifice his son and got held back at the last second. Job sat there and pondered his fate, argued with his friends and even was so bold to ask God "why". The answer he got was simply, sit there and take it, you're man and I am God. Not telling you why I do what I do or when I am going to do it. Gee, that makes me feel SO MUCH BETTER. Random chance is even more impersonal. At least the despondent believer can still cling to the idea that he might be saved from himself. The atheist believer in random chance has resigned themselves to the idea that very little in this life time is at our control or that things happen for any reason whatsoever.

Gone by the point of caring. some old bed i'll soon be sharing
Gloom, despair and agony on me. If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all.

It is so tempting to curl up on the couch and shut out this day, but I have to come to grips with the failure of my life and continue packing up my stuff as evidence of it. I hate moving, even under the best of circumstances and these are decidedly not that.