Rakish? Me?

One of the attractive things about online dating is the opportunity for reinvention.  Reinvention is what I'm about right now, after all.  Or, is it recovery?  Hmmm.  I am reinventing my lifestyle, sure, but am I reinventing myself?  I don't think so.

I have always seen myself through others' eyes.  I don't trust my self-assessment, and I'm constantly checking in:  was that annoying?  diverting?  frustrating? enchanting?  boring?  fascinating?  Can I trust the reaction?  How much does it have to do with me, and how much with the other person's issues?  Online dating puts all these questions into a sharp focus, because all you have to go by are the words.  You can't be distracted by the smiles and laughter, the outward game face.  Yes, there is obfuscation and outright lying, but the words are there, ready to be dissected.  And if the grammar sucks, well that's one more thing to add to the critical mix.

So, I'm looking at other people's words and carefully crafting my own.  In the process, I realize that I am not capable of reinventing myself, not really.  My core is as it ever was, and I don't see any way to change that.  I'm not sure I want to.  A few weeks ago I had a bout of extreme weepiness.  I was visiting S;  he was working in his computer lab, and I was sitting nearby writing out my grief, tears dripping down (but I don't think he saw them).  I wrote:   I am the person I've always been.  Stronger, but still needy.  Resilient, but still fragile.  Fragile.  The song D sang to me at our wedding.

I won't share the rest of that writing....too whiny, too self-absorbed, too full of information about relationships, too full of self-recrimination, too sad.  What's important is what came next.  I was walking at sunset one day, and suddenly I felt like Sylvia Plath:  the bell jar had lifted and I was free to the circulating air.  Not only had it lifted, it was gone.  I suddenly understood what others had been seeing for so long:  in its absence it made itself known to me.  In its place was myself.

And what was myself?  At that moment, my self was walking in a landscape littered with juniper, pinon, rocks, and cactus.  The sky stretched overhead, filled with blues and fluffy whites and yellows and pinks and oranges.  The wind rushed through the branches, the mountains outlined on the horizons were grey-green rockpiles, filling in with slate blue shadows.  And I saw every detail, FELT every detail, without that deadening sense of remove.  I was actually there.  I think I took a photo and wrote a haiku, as I have been doing endlessly over the years and months of my depression.  But I didn't need to, as I have in the past.  I needed no product to prove I was there.

So, I was there, but who was I?  And why was I?  I'm still working on that.  Socrates says, Know Thyself.  Descartes says, I think therefore I am.  It seems that I have gone more elemental than that.  I feel, therefore I am.  I feel myself, I recognize myself, but I don't know myself, and I don't know what I was put here to do. (But, that's a topic for another blog.)  What I do know is that the self I want to know was muffled under a coating of stress and grief and sadness.  Pulling off that blanket and keeping it off are the tasks of the moment.

So, recovery, not reinvention. I want myself back. And it seems that it's happened, at least for the nonce.  In my recent visit with my sister and brother, I felt that.  And L did too.  He wrote to my siblings:   [She] looked good - that might have been an illusion but she appeared to be on the mend.  Yes.  I know that depression and anxiety and panic are part of me, but they don't need to define me, nor do they need to separate me from my life.  And, in the meantime, I can toy all I want with lovers and jobs and creations.  I can meet people online and at activities and through others.  I can talk story (and every tale we tell is equal parts invention and truth, our own particular truth.)  Those things I can reinvent.  It might even be necessary to do so, to move far away from the people and things and thoughts that brought me into a marriage with D.

But what I can't do is hide who I am.  The other day I was describing myself to a woman, unknown to me, whom I was scheduled to pick up at the airport:   I am 5'10", 240 lbs, shoulder length white/grey hair, glasses.  E later sent her another description:   She is a big tall woman, maybe 5'11" and perhaps 230 lbs, with sort of rakish white/gray hair, big brown eyes, and a beautiful smile.

Not much disagreement there.  But it doesn't reach the core of who I am.

Irritability

I woke up in Albuquerque and drove home in the dawn.  The sunrise was lovely further south:  feathery golden clouds outlining a sharp ridged blue-black mountain range.  Then the clouds got thicker, with wispy coverage down the slopes, and the mountain's outline went dim, merging into the clouds, which extended into the sky.  The rising sun kept climbing, trying to get above cloud cover, continuously edging it with gold, but finally the clouds won. By the time I reached home, we were socked in, the temp was 33 degrees, and the wind was whistling through the top story, where the windows are shut but not bolted.  (They will remain so until someone with a tall ladder comes by.)

This is fine with me:  I'm trying to take care of business in the house, and that bloody sunshine keeps dragging me outside.  Unfortunately, stormy weather brings out the worst in E.  "Don't you think we should bring in those chairs?"  "No, they've lived outside for 3 years, they are fine."  "But they'll get wet."  "And then they'll dry:  it just takes a short time."  "I think they should come inside."  "They are fine outside, there's no room inside."  "Just put them in front of the door."  "That's in your path to the bathroom."  "I'm going to bring in the chairs."

I put aside the crossword puzzle and bring in the chairs.  One is against a wall in the living area, the other in the shower part of the bathroom.  It actually looks okay, but I'll have to move it every time I take a shower.  And of course, there will be a chair shlep every time we want to sit outside.

Back to the crossword puzzle.  "We're running out of toilet paper."  "No, we have 8 rolls, I checked yesterday."  "We should get more toilet paper."  "We're fine for now."  "I guess E can buy some when she gets here."  "That's 8 days from now, there's no way we'll be using a roll a day."  "I think we need to buy more toilet paper."

To distract her from this topic, I set her up to read and reply to email.  That keeps her fairly occupied, with only occasional interruptions.  "I've lost everything I typed!"  "No, it's right there, see?"  "Oh, yes....but what's that?"  "It's the letter you're answering."  "Where's my letter?"  "Right there."

In between, I try to fix the cord to the Mac.  It is almost completely severed, and tape doesn't fix it.  So, I bring the laptop next door to recharge, and then start up the Dell.  And every time I try to open a site, I get the wheeling symbol that says nothing is loading.  I click on the reload button and go to the next site.  And click on that reload button.  And then back.  And then click.  And then close the window and try again.  And then click on the reload.  And....

I can feel my jaw clenching.  E gasps and calls my name, with a rising note of panic:  "I've lost the letter!"

At this juncture, a person with access to her wise mind would put on jeans and go for a walk in the now cloudless day.  But instead, I go into my room and start going through mail and papers and desk drawers.  I find a stack of things that need to be taken care of:  bills to pay or dispute, Cobra to be answered, the Sprint iPhone to be returned, receipts to be recorded and filed, tax info to process.

What have I been doing for the past month?  Clearly, not taking care of business.

It's all sorted and put away, still undealt-with.  E has successfully emailed her letter, and I'm trying to get motivated to do something productive or creative.  Or at least, non-irritating.

Doing what you love

Over a year ago I described a traumatic experience getting together with a cellist to play duets.  I didn't realize how much that had affected me until I started getting invitations to play trios and duets here in ABQ.  I  find myself totally downplaying my abilities ("I think I've forgotten how to play....I just play in the volunteer orchestra....I've been playing in semi-professional orchestras since I was 16 but I don't practice and haven't taken lessons in YEARS....I'm the weak link in family quartet....I usually hunker down in the back of the 2nd violin section in front of the drums....") in the hopes that they will still want me but will be pleasantly surprised instead of contemptuous when we finally sit down, instruments in hand.

The most recent get-together was a little less traumatic, as the invitation came from my stand partner in APO, and she's always very gracious about my playing.  But I was going to be meeting a new violinist, so I was still wary.  I knew it was foolish to be so timid, because M wouldn't be friends with a snippy person with attitude, but then again, I hadn't expected the trashing I received back in Portland, either.

And, I've been feeling disconnected, so meeting new people and scheduling events, even fun ones, has been an effort.  As I've said before, the game face is wearing thin, and I'm not much fun to be around.

The day started inauspiciously.  I'd been up until 2 am, so I skipped yoga, alternately waking and sleeping  from 6 to 10.  Then, I dragged myself to the weekly therapy.  I was tired and my affect was flat.  But eventually we got into it and I went into full weepy mode.  "I don't know what the problem is....I'm just tired, disconnected....I don't want to do anything...."  whinge whinge whinge.  I talked about my twenties and thirties, when I planned and saved for the future (because I'd feel so stupid if I reached retirement age after all with NO savings in place), but I also made sure I traveled and did interesting things while I was young, as the future was unknowable.  I said, now I don't need to plan for the future, why am I spending my precious life doing things that drag me down?

My therapist is an unusual woman.  When I said I just wanted to quit my job and house-sit for people, she said, "why not?"  Turns out, she spent much of her 20's doing just that, house-sitting, traveling, bartering.  I thought about my friend L, who has spent two years visiting "intentional communities," and is soon getting ready to hunker down and write about it.  That would not be my schtick, but as an inspiration and a resource, she can't be beat.  As soon as I got home, I dashed off a note:

Hi L, I'm in a low grade depression, and as I talked with my therapist, I realized that what I need to do is stop working a 9-6 job in a bureaucracy. I pondered what I want to do instead and I realized that I am half-way to becoming a gypsy like you: I don't have the savings to cover it, but I've jettisoned most of my possessions and am on the way to getting rid of the rest.
So I am writing for advice. How difficult is it to locate communities where you can work and live for a few months? How difficult is it to live out of your car or alone? What skills do I have to barter? etc etc.

Then I went to Applebees up on Montgomery to meet M and C for lunch, followed by violin trios at M's lovely house by the Sandia open space.  I was late, of course, and they were gracious, of course.  C seemed to be a cross between ML, my orchestra manager friend who sold me her bow and music when she got MS, and my friend S, who is co-owning my cat and can do ANYTHING.  She had short cropped hair and a tall thin frame and wide toothy smile like M, and a prominent jaw and sly eye-smile like S.

Turns out, she had the answer to the ant problem with my hummingbird feeder as well as lots of advice about house-sitting.  She spent two years in Chicago, living in fellow tennis players' homes and teaching.  Then she got tired of not having her OWN pictures on the wall.  (Note to self, be sure to store your art, not sell it.)

Word of mouth seems to be the name of the game. M has a friend who house-sits, solely through referrals, and that's how my therapist and C both functioned.  Of course, I don't have the network here, but I do have a network.

I was psyched!  from weepy to jubilant in one short hour.  Then we played violin trios, starting with the baroque and working our way to the classical period.  The parts were all on one page, and C had made up 3  booklets, one for each part, with highlighter to help the eye stay on track.  Since we are all 2nd violinists, we all wanted the 3rd part.  And, since the music was C's and the house was M's, I meekly took the 1st part for a few pieces.  Then we hit one with 32nd notes and I put my foot down.  From then on, we rotated booklets for each song.

I was facing the floor-to-ceiling windows, which showed the Sandias in the distance and the bird feeder in the foreground.  It was very distracting, and when the bunny appeared I had to stop and coo.  But we kept playing and playing and no one wanted to stop until I finally started stumbling over the simplest things.  And that was that.

We played for over 2 hours, and plan to do so again this week.

Then I checked my e-mail, and here was what L had to say:

Oh man, yes. "Low-grade depression" describes how I felt for most of my career.

Validation, followed by detailed and excellent blueprints for planning out a life as a nomad. I think I'm gonna do it.

manic depression

I think the weather is bi-polar. V was visiting from 1/10-1/22, and during that time we had snow, freezing winds, gorgeous sun, mellow afternoons, temps ranging from 7 to 60 degrees. I was looking up the definition for manic-depression in Mosby, and it describes the last month to a T:

Bipolar disorder, formerly known as manic depression, is a mood disorder that causes radical emotional changes and mood swings, from manic, restless highs to depressive, listless lows. Most bipolar individuals experience alternating episodes of mania and depression.

Of course, it also describes me, which is why I was looking it up. Is it possible to develop such a disorder in one's fifties, or was it always latent in me? Maybe. After all, during my pre-menopausal days, that basically described my cycle. I used to say that the only time I saw life truly and saw it clear was when I was having a period. The rest of the time I was a happy idiot: anything could bring me joy. I enjoyed small triumphs and beauties and I ignored the horrors and banalities of every day life.

And I've been a happy idiot for much of the past month and a half. Visiting the family, enjoying scenery from the train, playing music with my sisters and Mom, sledding, hiking in the woods, sharing New Mexico with V, taking pix, writing haiku, burning CDs, baking, knitting, spending time with T, watching Deadwood, discovering new books, catching up with friends....all good. I could spend hours listing and describing what's good about my life.

That's the manic phase.  And then.....

I walked into my therapist's office this morning, smiling, getting out my knitting, ready to talk. She said, "It's been awhile, did you have a good time with your friend? You're smiling..." And I starting crying and didn't stop for the next hour. 

I guess you'd say I'm in the depressive phase now.

In fact, I'm an exhausted basket case. I made it to rehearsal, but started sobbing on the drive home. I thought, this cannot be good for me, despite what my therapist tells me. I'm wiped out. And I shouldn't be driving.  So, I looked up "chemical effect of tears" in Google. I found what I was looking for: 

Emotional tears are composed of more protein-based hormones, such as prolactin, andrenocorticotropic, and leucine enkephalin (a natural pain killer), which is suggested to be the mechanism behind the experience of crying from emotion making an individual feel better.

But I also discovered a recent study that women's tears reduce testosterone in men.  So, not only am I exhausting myself, but I'm preventing myself from getting laid.

Now, that's something to be depressed about.