If I Love The Light, Why Does The Dark's Siren Song Beckon So Compellingly?

I want to thank fellow Depression Forums members who have read my little online journal entries and made very supportive comments. It matters a great deal. Srsly.

I have been keeping paper journals here at home. But generally they turn out to be just page after page of lists. Which is wonderful -- don't get me wrong! For me, lists of things I can check off are very motivating and give me the opportunity to page back and forth throughout the book and see that I've accomplished some things and avoided doing others.

One journal is a book of gratitudes. In that book, I jot down people I want to send thank-yous to via paper card or email, or sometimes even by phone (if I have a voice).

A dear, dear acquaintance, Saskia, is a photographer. Well ... I mean that over her 70 years, she took many photographs and became quite good at it. I didn't know that until I returned from a trip to the Netherlands and was talking with Saskia about that (she's originally from the Netherlands herself), and she showed me a little photo album she keeps in her purse. I was astonished at the quality of her photos and asked where she had exhibited her work. She was so startled she laughed at the very idea. So I sat down with her and said, "Saskia, really. If you will enlarge a few of your photos and get them matted and framed, you could exhibit them. They are that good. Any gallery would be thrilled." She just blushed as pink as a Dutch tulip and shush-shushed me and sort of giggled. But the very next weekend, she came to me with four photos she had matted and framed -- and they were magnificent. One was a field of tulips; another was one of the bicycle parking lots in Amsterdam right at sunset; another was a portrait of an African woman who was washing dishes in a cafe, with her small daughter clutching at her skirt looking into the camera; another was of an elderly couple in a park filled with flowers.

I asked whether she would think of exhibiting a few of her photos in our theater lobby (my "little lobby gallery") and she agreed ........ move ahead a few weeks, and suddenly Saskia was approached by several other galleries, a couple of city park councils, and some artists' guilds to become part of a "First Friday" art group that exhibits in cafes and other local businesses.

Now she is quite famous, and every time she comes to the theater when I'm there, she hugs me and holds me and cries. And I hold her, too, knowing that at the age of 70, this woman stepped into a whole new lifetime and identity and realm of possibilities.

Saskia keeps me stocked in these beautiful handmade cards that feature her photographs. When I was going through that horrible depressive episode last year, I didn't use them, because I couldn't bear to scar them with my writing. That's why I have quite a store of them now and have been using my Book of Gratitudes to help me put fruitful words onto Saskia's cards and send them out to people and agencies that have given me aid or shown me what courage looks like or have given me joy or who are just glorious people who may not hear that often enough.

I love her so much. I hope she will never stop holding me, or think that I will stop holding her. This beautiful woman ... how can such a gigantic heart and soul fit into her tiny body?

So that's my Book of Gratitudes, "sealed with a list."

Am I allowed to tell you that I started this Book of Gratitudes at the suggestion of someone from the National Suicide Hotline? It's true. The volunteer I spoke with that night (as I have spoken to many, many hotline volunteers over the past year -- they are the very foundation of the bridge that brought me over) planted this seed in my garden of thoughts, a garden that had become choked with weeds. At first it seemed so hokey, like those rote prayers they taught in Sunday school that I didn't even understand all the words of. But ... well ... how I can leaf through the pages and see these rows of glory bound by roots of admiration and even love. Genuine love.

And still ... and still ... Still I am compelled toward darker thoughts. Why? Why? I know that following the path of that question will only leave me lost, and I should not go into such questions. Depression is an illogical place that spirals in only one direction. And I am not a one-direction soul. I prefer the smorgasbord over the entree; the array of colored M&Ms over a handful of just brown or blue; the mismatched earbobs over well-fitting accessory lines. But ... why? why? why?

To go there is to open doors that can never be closed again, to know things that cannot ever be unknown, to create logic where none exists.

Last year's depression frightened other people in my life, and even some who were just passersby. It showed the cracks I feel in myself, my brokenness, the compulsive need to fabricate narrative like a plaster cast over all that emptiness and loss and grief and pain and ... all that want and need. Need. Need.

I stopped writing last year. Just stopped altogether. No more blogging helpful tips for people looking for patient assistance programs for their medications, or where to go for bus vouchers when you can't afford to drive your car to work (or if you don't have a car), or which supermarkets will give you a $10 gift card for groceries simply if you ask ...  No more descriptions of free clinics or County Smiles dental days or how to apply for hospital fee waivers.

I'd become a beggar. A professional beggar. I wrote a grant proposal to have my home made handicapped-accessible, and the cover letter was so compelling to the grantors that they cried -- cried in front of me when I came in to talk with them -- and awarded me the largest grant in their history. I wrote another grant that got me six months of mortgage assistance, and when I blogged about the agency that helped me win those funds, a reader forwarded it to a philanthropist, and the philanthropist arrived one day at the housing agency with a million-dollar check.

And you might be thinking, "d***. That is great!"  But the day I learned about that second grant and then about the check to the application agency ... that was the week I fell into that great chasm of a new identity as a professional beggar. Someone who was so broken, so needy, so pitiable and self-pitying that I was a dark cavern plastered over with the ability to articulate pain and need and a pitch for great amounts of help needed to make me just get up to seeming NORMAL.

And I stopped writing altogether. Hardly ever a word.

Ah, the dark place called me so sweetly, you cannot imagine. I began to relish those weeks when I was too sick to tell morning from night, when I lay in bed drenched with sweat and languishing in fever dreams, when I could exist for days and nights and days and nights in some other reality, some truly altered consciousness. When I didn't CARE. I didn't feel NEED. I didn't feel ANGUISH. It was just fever and the starkly tangible corners of pain and days and nights of not knowing whether I had eaten or drunk anything or washed. I often woke myself laughing out loud from my dreams, they were so whimsical and beckoning.

Things fell away so easily then. It was so simple to let go. But nobody else understood that.

And that's how I ended up in the emergency room after a friend from Europe couldn't get me to stay awake long enough to talk with him on the telephone. He Googled "emergency services" in my town -- and SHAZAAM!, there I was, in an ambulance with him on the phone telling me story after story to keep me awake. And when I left the hospital, he made me write. He made me write to him. And then he made me promise to blog one day, to write about how much we are connected to other people, even people far away, even people we don't know very well, even people who don't know us at all.

So here I am now. Planting and nurturing this garden of lists, of gratitudes. Hoping that each item on the list, each seed in the garden, will make me yearn for sun, for light. For thank-you cards that my postal carrier picks up almost every day that I'm feeling well and even some days when I'm not.