(no subject)
Doing pretty fucking great, actually. I feel hopeful, happy, ready to take on more than just getting up everyday and the other essentials to live. I'm down to one therapy appointment a week from two, I've been reading and doing some writing (which I really need to get back to, dammit!), working on the play the fam and I are producing, rebuilding something of a social life.
It sounds silly, maybe, and very cliche, but it really does feel as if a fog has lifted, as if everything has color and brightness and life. I can listen to music again and actually feel that power in my heart and soul. I can READ. I haven't read much of anything in the last two years, and most of that has been fic. And I haven't even read much of that over the last year. I haven't read a book from cover to cover since I was still working almost 2 and a half years ago, and in the last two weeks I've read FOUR, and have started numbers five and six already. I usually read at least two books at once, when I was reading a lot, one for the daytime which is usually some sort of non-fiction, usually history, and fiction at night because it won't make me think like non-fiction does. Simply because I'm happy about having done this, here are the books I've read :)
- A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice, Anne's son. It's so obviously a first novel, and I've read it before, but I really wanted to reread it; it's dark and gothic and sad and has a touch of something I've really only read in fic that for some reason doesn't bother me as much as it usually does (and no, I'm not saying what that is :P )
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I'm an atheist, as nearly anyone who knows me knows, and I've owned this book since shortly after it came out, but hadn't read it yet. Now I have, and while he is kind of a dick, there was little in it, if anything, that I completely disagreed with.
- The Martian Chronicles by Bradbury, in case you didn't know. I THOUGHT I'd read this, years ago in like junior high, but it seemed completely new to me, so maybe I didn't. And damn was it chilling. God I love that kind of sci-fi, so perfect.
- Common Sense and other writings by Thomas Paine. The history geek in me was fascinated. His The Age of Reason was beautiful, and while it's very obviously deist, it's absolutely not atheist, and made me wonder what he would believe in today.
- The First King of Shannara by Terry Brooks, the prequel to his series. My plan is to go back and reread the Sword, Elfstones, and Wishsong of Shannara then move onto the rest of the series. Though not all at once :) I've got way too much other stuff to read.
- American Creation by Joseph J. Ellis, about the, perhaps obviously, the creation of our nation. A customer had praised his works highly, and since I'm in something of a Revolutionary era mood, I thought this would be the best book to keep me going.
It really does feel as if I've been under a cloud for a long time. And I know I've been under that cloud for a lot longer than I realize. I'm beginning to wonder if this isn't actually the first time I've been out from under it in possibly a decade or more. I mean, I've totally had some great moments and periods where I was sort of on track. But I'm coming to the conclusion that maybe I needed to have this complete and utter breakdown before I could actually get to this point. That whole "hitting bottom" thing may in fact be necessary for more than alcoholics and drug addicts. I think I had to get to a point where I was so desperate for help and so completely without hope and dreams and belief in myself before I could actually start to rebuild myself. It sucked, but maybe, in the end, it had to happen for me to be able to get back out of that hole I'd dug for myself and just wanted to stay in until I just couldn't get back out.
I'm nowhere near done with all of this shit. Nowhere near. Thanks to the medications and a lot of therapy, the physical part of my depression may be over. But I still have a lot of personality issues and the like that I need to pick apart and rebuild. I really believe I didn't know who I was for awhile, what I wanted or how other people saw me or if I was worth even knowing, and now I'm beginning to accept that people do like me, that I'm capable of more than I thought I was, and that maybe, very probably, I have a future to look forward to. This might all sound kind of trite, but it's so new to me to feel like a human being again that it almost feels as if I'm a whole new person. In the end I think it's really that I just lost my way a long time ago, thought myself into so many corners that I didn't really know how to find the door back to reality.
Yeah, that kind of does sound corny :) I wish I could explain the feeling I have, of being full and ready and WILLING and ABLE and WANTING. I'm happy. I want to help out on the play. I want to go to school. I want to get to know my new sister (in-law, because really, she's just gonna be my new sister, screw how it came to be) and my niece, who at this point really only says "No, Baba!" but usually with a smile on her face so I don't take it personally. I want to have a family of my own, even if that means being a single mom. I don't hate the idea of living at the Lake for the rest of my life. The Bay Area is only an hour and a half away, and I've actually managed to make some friends up here to replace some of the ones I did an awesome job of shoving away.
And something happened tonight that filled me again with hope, made me think that there are possibilities of mending bridges and getting something of what I made sure I lost back, even if only in some small degree. But that's a subject for another time. Maybe :) Right now, I'm going to turn on some ambient music (thank you SIRIUS XM Chill) and read a little before I fall asleep. Sometimes life does suck, and sometimes it doesn't. I'm just learning how the former can be far outweighed by the latter, and that it can fucking rock.
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