table scraps

I don't really want to write today, but the yawning emptiness on my blog bothers me too, so I'm in something of a dilemma.

What can I tell you? I want to tell you that everything is great, and everything probably is, but everything doesn't feel great, except in small momentary flashes that buoy me up enough to catch my breath and grin at the sun before I "slide back down to the bottom" and look at a world where "all the color drains out of the frame."

I'm at the easily-moved-to-tears stage of whatever this cycle is -- it's been a few years since anxiety compounded the depression (wheeee), so I'm remembering hazily how the last time went and trying to compare my own notes. Hard to do, really, when I'm tipping my head back to dam in the tears a lot of the time. I'm generally pretty self-controlled about crying -- the only places I really allow myself the luxury are church and the car -- but the dam is leaky and I only have so many fingers. So this weekend I cried through the trailer of Where the Wild Things Are (I am ecstatic that they're making this wonderful book into a movie. I knew I loved the movie before I even knew what it was, when I saw the sad, luminous eyes of the lonely, imaginative, neglected and ostracized little boy staring at his parents from around a doorjamb, watching them absorbed in their own conversation without noticing him; and then the screen flashed to him running, and then everything went to silhouette and that costume appeared -- the tail, and the claws, and the crown, and the sceptre -- and I gripped Leigh Ann's arm and whisper-shouted, "It's Where the Wild Things Are!" and burst into tears). I cried through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. And Sunday in church I cried all through the Mass, because six rows ahead of me the cutest baby boy I have ever seen, bar none, was bouncing in his father's arms and staring around him and smiling at everyone and everything, and he was obviously deeply loved, and beautiful, and I'm not perfect but I'm going to be a great mom.

Sometimes I think part of the depression is akin to the infection surrounding an ingrown hair. There's no outlet for all this love that I'm not only capable of giving, but have, and it turns in on itself and goes sour. So I have to figure out how to put it to other uses; and to do that I have to figure out how to view myself properly, with love, and hopefully how to trust, because I don't.

Good lessons. But difficult ones, too, and my head aches, and I'm tired.

At least my room is really clean. And my toenails have never been so carefully maintained. (One of these days I'm going to compile a Tips for Coping list.)

On a tangential aside, I was thinking the other day about something Leigh Ann pointed out about our generation -- that we're pretty pluralist, even a lot of the evangelicals -- and I thought that it's not as naive and silly a position as others might think. We live in a globalized culture now, where many different perspectives must learn to coexist, or destroy everything. In the Cold War only a few countries had nuclear weapons; now dozens have them, from many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds (whereas in the Cold War it was mostly the West vs. the West), and misunderstandings can lead to a lot of death. I'm not saying that we shouldn't take a stand for what we believe in most deeply -- au contraire -- but I think people our age understand the tenuous nature of peace, and in emphasizing the necessity of accepting difference, we're doing what we can to add a little mortar between the bricks.

At the same time I don't think we have any faith that the peace will hold, and we're waiting for all hell to break loose. Oddly -- or not oddly at all -- I think that moment when everything falls apart is what our generation is looking to, to give our lives, and the world, some kind of meaning.