Depression, Sara, and Cake
Listening to Sara off Mamadou Diabate’s Heritage album. The whole album is good, but Sara is far and away the best track. Balla Kouyate’s balafon playing is just amazing and merges in to the rest of the music like they didn’t come up with the music, it was just always there, waiting to played and recorded.
I woke up a little after one in the afternoon. My brain still isn’t all the way awake yet. I’m still in that world that’s not quite awake yet, where sleep is still trying to hold sway. When you have no reason to get up, one o’clock is nothing.
Mom and Dad came home from the grocery store. They went to Aldee’s. Took bags from Publix to put their groceries from Aldee’s in. For some reason I just found that extremely funny. Like going to one grocery store and advertising another. Mom showed me a cake I’m supposed to make. I asked what the reason was. She said there wasn’t a reason, Dad just got a cake mix and Mom picked up some new kind of frosting and decided I would make the cake.
Maybe that’s the key. Celebrate the small things. Don’t wait for the big moments. It felt like a good day today. Let’s celebrate that. The sky was really blue today, not clouded over waiting to pour down rain. Right at this moment, I don’t know how to stop this. I know how to keep myself from suicidal feelings showing up and holding sway. Those I can fight. I can keep myself alive. But taking the depression away, that’s something else. Maybe Mom’s right. Celebrate the little things. I concentrate too much on things I don’t have (like an income, a job, a girlfriend, my own place) and on things I shouldn’t dwell on, like that bill for the bloodwork a couple of weeks ago, that college loan..
I was going to include “this depression” in that, but I think that’d be wrong. I know depression, and it works best behind the scenes, when you don’t really know it’s there, don’t really know what it’s doing. It gets steadily worse because you can’t really tell it’s there. Finally it’s too strong for you to just wave off and it holds sway. But if you know it’s there, you keep thinking about it, it can’t work behind the scenes. You can tell what it’s doing. I haven’t told anybody it’s back again, not sure who I’d tell. I know who I’m not planning to tell. I can do this. I just have to force myself to get up and be active in things. Like taking a shower. Haven’t had one yet today. And then that cake.
We’re on track six now, Fali. This is one amazing album.