Puppy teeth bared to the world

It’s been a while, but late yesterday afternoon a black depressive cloud came down on me, with an intensity and an immovability that took my breath away. I simply could not believe how it felt, and spent the evening trying to distract myself, taken utterly aback by the awfulness of the experience.

The fact that I’m writing here suggests it’s not quite as bad as it was, but, damn. It shreds me up that others feel like this–as I used to–for the majority of the time.

It’s no coincidence that many of my friends are also wise in the ways of depression, and when the big stuff settles on everyday dysthymia, even if only for a day or two, we starting asking what’s causing it. A-Lee suggests a major shift in consciousness or outlook; that’s usually a pretty good example. But this time, it’s not that for me, but rather a kind of inwardly-directed version of, not to put too fine a point on it, anger.

Of the work I have to do at the moment, why haven’t I been able to finish some of it? Because of the editorial person who will be reading it. Why don’t I want them to read it? Because I don’t trust their judgement over my work. Why don’t I trust their judgement over my work? Well, that is too hot a topic for journalling, so I’ll leave it unsatisfyingly sketchy.

But damn, I feel mad, and bad (and not the Dame Kiri-posing-over-a-motorcyle-when-turning-fifty kind of bad, either). More generally, I feel that, in my work, there’s no real advocate, no true ally, in my immediate environment. So pressured are we all that, when push comes to shove, we have to take in hand our own interests and not those of others. It’s lacerating, and lonely, and a temporary outcome is that I can’t write, and therefore I loathe myself and the cloud comes down (one may reverse the last two items; I’m never sure about causality).

Anger and soul-sucking gloom don’t make for accomplished work, even in something as loose as a on-line journal. But it’s to find some sort of utility in the writing process that I’m recording these feelings, for better or for worse, in the hope of pushing through this rage, this despair. In my grandmother’s last months, she would rouse briefly from stroke-incapacitated muteness and say, I’ve got to get better. I can feel myself sinking down, thinking something like the same. Get better, do better, be better. Puppy teeth bared to the world.