Returning to one of the themes of 2013, apparently...
I've been thinking, again, about loneliness. I think something we forget about depression is that the reason it's so pernicious is it taps into feelings which we remember for other reasons. A host of my friends have just graduated, either as actual doctors (my immediate peers) or Bachelors of Arts (my younger friends from school). There's one narrative I can write which is that they have all moved on, in a way which I have not. They have hit the tripwires which activate adult life. But this is daft. One of the reasons I think about loneliness so much is that I live alone, I can go for days without having a conversation at times (and thank the stars for the internet, and my phone signal, and living near enough to family to be able to visit briefly)
The truth is I'm less lonely now than I was at time with Alex (unsuprising), and probably, frankly, than I was a lot of the time with James. Having spent years wanting to disprove John Donne's "No Man is an Island" - probably because of my own narcissism, which is one of the things I'm working on at the moment, I have decided that I am happier being part of the whole.
My depression's got worse, again, but I have got a lot better at asking for help with it before the inwardly and then outwardly streaming phase. I have friends who ring me if I've been having a bad time, to check that I get up and have breakfast. I have friends and acquaintances through local services, with whom I can go to the cinema and NOT talk about my condition. I have an amusing and trivial lovelife, which will provide great interest to my future biographer (I want the one from Larkin's "Posterity", mostly because I want to be described as "one of those old time natural fouled up guys" or someone in the school of P.N. Furbank school. And OMG I just discovered that Furbank is still alive).
I went to church, today, because I'd been meaning to for a while but always busy or too depressed to leave the house the necessary half an hour before. I got there early, went to confession (occasionally I try to Do Catholicism Right) and waited around, having filled in the church census and helped some longsighted people find the right page in the missal. I ended up chatting to the chap in the pew in front of me, because he wanted to know mass times for tomorrow, and went outside for a bit (we both had loud voices, and the church has good acoustics). We were comparing African and Irish attitudes to church and family, and the distinction between sainthood and martyrs, and I mentioned that my aunties and my granny had all been nuns. Later, he asked if I wanted to be a nun, in a way which was both matter of fact and respectful. And I managed to say, for the first time utterly without feeling, that I had been engaged (easier to explain than the handfasting), but that didn't work out, and that my ex had hit me, and that was a reason why. Not the reason, but a reason. To a stranger, who'd been telling me about his brothers and Ugandan history.
I was joking with a friend, a while back, that so much writing on trauma and on how people should just leave bad or abusive situations, would make perfect sense if people did not already like or love or care about their abusers. That then we would not have "post traumatic stress disorder" but "something bad happened once and other things happened disorder, which is not a disorder at all". My main aim in life at the moment is to get to point two. I might be close-ish.
The truth is I'm less lonely now than I was at time with Alex (unsuprising), and probably, frankly, than I was a lot of the time with James. Having spent years wanting to disprove John Donne's "No Man is an Island" - probably because of my own narcissism, which is one of the things I'm working on at the moment, I have decided that I am happier being part of the whole.
My depression's got worse, again, but I have got a lot better at asking for help with it before the inwardly and then outwardly streaming phase. I have friends who ring me if I've been having a bad time, to check that I get up and have breakfast. I have friends and acquaintances through local services, with whom I can go to the cinema and NOT talk about my condition. I have an amusing and trivial lovelife, which will provide great interest to my future biographer (I want the one from Larkin's "Posterity", mostly because I want to be described as "one of those old time natural fouled up guys" or someone in the school of P.N. Furbank school. And OMG I just discovered that Furbank is still alive).
I went to church, today, because I'd been meaning to for a while but always busy or too depressed to leave the house the necessary half an hour before. I got there early, went to confession (occasionally I try to Do Catholicism Right) and waited around, having filled in the church census and helped some longsighted people find the right page in the missal. I ended up chatting to the chap in the pew in front of me, because he wanted to know mass times for tomorrow, and went outside for a bit (we both had loud voices, and the church has good acoustics). We were comparing African and Irish attitudes to church and family, and the distinction between sainthood and martyrs, and I mentioned that my aunties and my granny had all been nuns. Later, he asked if I wanted to be a nun, in a way which was both matter of fact and respectful. And I managed to say, for the first time utterly without feeling, that I had been engaged (easier to explain than the handfasting), but that didn't work out, and that my ex had hit me, and that was a reason why. Not the reason, but a reason. To a stranger, who'd been telling me about his brothers and Ugandan history.
I was joking with a friend, a while back, that so much writing on trauma and on how people should just leave bad or abusive situations, would make perfect sense if people did not already like or love or care about their abusers. That then we would not have "post traumatic stress disorder" but "something bad happened once and other things happened disorder, which is not a disorder at all". My main aim in life at the moment is to get to point two. I might be close-ish.