The depression and anxiety are getting worse this week. I’m starting to clench my jaw more, and have more trouble getting to sleep and staying asleep. Everything feels urgent, but I’m not motivated to do much. It’s clear the cocktail of medications I’m on is not working out for me.
I’m not posting much on Facebook these days. Except for today, I haven’t written a public post on this blog in several weeks. I’m not making many phone calls, or reaching out much to people to have lunch or coffee or just text and say hi. I’ve gone quiet. I’ve gone dark.
My grandfather and great grandfather were chemistry professors, world-renowned in their field, winning many awards and much recognition for their research. My grandfather’s brothers were also all professors. My stepmother had a long and successful career as a librarian in an academic library.
I’ve been drawing a lot recently. By drawing, I mean doing a combination of Zentangle and my own designs, and sometimes wilder art, all of it in my art journal.
“This is what resurrection looks like,” the priest said, by candlelight, at the Easter Vigil service. She described feeling like the “dry bones” we’d heard about in the passage from Ezekiel after her husband, mother, and father died all in the space of a couple of months.
When I stopped posting on Facebook, the first thing I missed was writing little clever posts about the world around me. I realized I had been devoting a significant chunk of my brain and my attention to noticing things and then composing a status that summarized them in a concise, clever way.
I am considering doing a scary thing. After a year and a half of saying out loud that I was letting the first draft of my book sit, but secretly poking it in my mind over and over, I am now realizing I need to let it go completely.
This week I’ve found myself tongue-tied again—not that I can’t talk out loud, but that there is a sort of silence inside myself, a part that feels incoherent and stuck and unable to express itself.
Today the PTA for my son’s elementary school sent out a well handled email about the two upcoming days that people nationwide are planning to walk out of school to protest the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. After I read the email, I found myself mindlessly playing Plants Vs. Zombies.
Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt […]