Resurrection
I have no wit, no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numb'd too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
I lift mine eyes, but dimm'd with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is in the falling leaf:
O Jesus, quicken me
I don’t really know what happened, when exactly it started or why. I just stopped writing.
At some point in 2009, I just wasn’t feeling like myself. I had started to have this constant pain in my back that wouldn’t go away and if you touched me anywhere on my arms or legs, it was like you were pushing invisible bruises that covered my body. Parts of my back would seize up and I couldn’t even turn my head. I thought for a while that it was “just stress,” and that it would go away.
It didn’t. It still hasn’t.
I went to doctor after doctor. Neurologists. Physical therapists. Chiropractors. I was poked and prodded and tested and scanned and cracked and crunched. They found nothing. No tumors, no spinal misalignment, no freaky rare condition only recently discovered by modern medicine. Just a lame, bucket diagnosis of “fibromyalgia," happy living!
I wish I could say that I was the type of person to take something like this and move on as a champion for overcoming adversity, but I’m not. I got depressed. Very, very depressed.
On top of that, I hated my job. I hated where I was living. I hated pretty much everything. Instead of using this hatred and misery like a good artist and channeling it into a book of best selling poetry, I shut down. I couldn’t even bring myself to log onto this website, because I knew if I saw my name at the top of the page, I would feel even more pathetic and inadequate for not writing so I avoided the entire thing. Denial, denial, denial.
I haven’t written anything in years. I’ve always struggled with perfection and depression, one sick flaw feeding the other with its right hand and eating the other with the left. What I wanted to write had to be perfect and I knew I didn’t have it in me. The blank screen was like kryptonite and so my inner Clark Kent went into hiding and the longer he hid, the more afraid he became of facing the reality that maybe when he did finally come out, he wouldn’t be super anymore.
I know it’s kind of a lame metaphor, but cut me some slack. I’m a little rusty.
So at some point I went to a painting class, knowing I needed some form of artistic expression, and I fell in love. I fell in love with the beauty of staring at a blank page and slathering it in with crap, because when paint dries, you can paint over it. Even though I could apply this exact principle to writing, I couldn’t do it. I was afraid to do it. I don’t know why, how to explain this without sounding more pathetic. I just couldn’t. Depression….is a fucking bitch.
So a lot of major things have happened. Some amazingly happy things, some really shitty things. Some of them I will share, and others I won’t. I still hurt, every day, and I’m still a mental case. But today I finally logged into my email and read a comment that said, “You’ve clearly stopped having thoughts at all,” and I haven’t. I just stopped feeling the need to express them.
So thank you, Ed, for snapping me out of my blogging coma. I can’t promise anything, but I feel a little better having gotten started.