On Properly Directed Imagination (Blog #1021)

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Last night when I got home from painting at 10:30, my dad asked me, “Do you want to go WORK OUT?” Well, the television was on, and–silly me–I thought he was asking about my evening and heard, “Are you WORN OUT?” So I said, “Yes.” (Because I felt like crap.) Then he asked if I still needed to blog (the answer was yes again), which I thought he asked because he was going to suggest that I go to be early. But no, he was (I found out later) trying to figure out when we’d be leaving for the gym. Y’all, I blogged until 1:00 in the morning, and the whole time my dad was patiently waiting for me on the couch. When I finished he said, “Ready to go to the gym?”

“The gym?” I said. “I’m going to bed.”

So thirty minutes ago my dad dragged my mother into the laundry room where I was working on arts and crafts and said, “Okay, I have a witness. Do–you–want–to–go–work–out–tonight?”

“Yes, I actually would like to WORK OUT tonight,” I said. “But I have to blog first.”

So here I am, blogging.

For the last two and a half weeks I’ve been fighting a sinus infection, but–thankfully–have felt better today. (Fingers crossed this trend continues.) This afternoon I had lunch with a friend. Then I went thrift shopping but didn’t buy anything (way to go, Marcus). Then this evening I did some odd jobs for a client. Then–when I came home and Dad told me my driver’s side headlight was out–I put a new bulb in my car. Then I combed through picture frames and old book covers and matched them to some brooches I recently acquired. I can’t tell you how fun this is for me. Whenever the creative mood strikes, seriously, time and my worries fly away. Magically, I’m transported to a better place.

Along the lines of creativity, this evening in an old book I recently bought (for the cover) I ran across an article about creativity and genius by the artist Frederic Whitaker. In it he compares and contrasts insanity to genius and says, “Insanity is imagination without control. Genius is imagination under control–plus the divine spark that we call driving force.” I absolutely adore these definitions, especially considering that we all too often MISUSE our imagination. For example, both me and my dad each IMAGINED a certain conversation about our going to work out (or my being worn out) last night, neither of which was TRUE. Likewise, don’t we all IMAGINE the thoughts, behaviors, and judgments of others on a daily basis (and aren’t those imaginations often negative and, therefore, pain-inducing)?

Isn’t this too imagination without control (that is, insanity)?

More and more I believe that imagination, creativity, and genius were meant for arts and crafts projects, home building and decorating, landscaping, dancing, playing musical instruments, and SOLVING problems, not INVENTING them. Because isn’t that what’s happening when we presume to know what someone else is thinking, feeling, or doing–creating problems out of thin air? I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve lost sleep believing someone was mad at me or–worse–intentionally trying to screw up my life when–I found out later–they weren’t. Like, at all. This is where misdirected imagination leads you–into the land of insomnia, anxiety, stress, and depression.

Properly directed imagination, however, leads you out of it.

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

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And God knows you don't make everyone else happy. But this is no reason to quit or be discouraged, since doing what you love and feel called to do is never--never--about gaining acceptance from others.

"

On Depression (Blog #656)

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Lately I haven’t been feeling like myself. Whom I’ve been feeling like exactly, I can’t say. But I can say that I’ve been feeling lethargic, overwhelmed, and hopeless. In other words, I’ve been a real Negative Nancy–a wet blanket–a gloom merchant–the opposite of Rainbow Brite. Anyway, this afternoon I saw my therapist and fell apart. Well, sort of fell apart. I cried enough to dampen one-half of one tissue. Still, I could have used the whole box if I’d let myself. That “hold it together” part of me is just really fucking stubborn.

It’s had a lot of practice.

Okay, here we go. (Breathe, Marcus.)

My therapist suggested I may be dealing with what’s called Post-Surgery Depression. “People don’t talk about it, but it’s really common,” she said. Then she repeated herself. “Really common.” And whereas she didn’t hand me an official diagnosis (I’m not sure she does that anyway), we did talk about options. To take a pill or not take a pill (to get me over the hump), that is the question. It’ll be a while before I have an answer. Honestly, I feel slightly better simply having admitted everything to my therapist. “I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.” Plus, it feels good knowing a lot of people in similar or even different circumstances feel this way–unmotivated, deluged. “You’re human,” my therapist said. “There’s only so much one person can take.”

This evening I looked up Post-Surgery Depression online and read five or six articles about it. (So now I’m pretty much an expert.) From what I gathered, there are a lot of causative and contributing factors, including the stress of the surgery, the anesthesia, the use of antibiotics, the feeling of chronic pain, and (as in my case) the loss of mobility and (therefore) income. Check, check, check. I wasn’t making a ton of money before this accident happened, but what I was making was coming from dance. Now that I’m on a rehab prescription that includes six months of no dancing, it’s difficult to see how everything is going to work out. Granted, I can still teach, but someone’s going to have to call to schedule a lesson first.

In terms of the stress of the surgery, none of the articles said it, but surgery is clearly traumatic. I mean, it’s not like they’re sawing on a piece of plywood or dicing up a fruit salad. You’re a living, breathing organism with a mind, body, and soul, and in order to repair the damage of the original injury, they have to knock you out, slice you open, run a drill through your bones, rearrange your parts, and staple you back together (no wonder you wake up bruised). In other words, you’re injured twice. As for the knocking out part, one of the articles said that being under general anesthesia is less like sleeping really soundly and more like being in a controlled coma (which is a big damn deal). The same article compared it to a city’s power plant being completely taken offline. That is, not everything “comes back on” at once. It’s more like a couple blocks at a time.

For me, I can’t quite shake that my entire world has been turned upside down. As a baseline, last year wasn’t great. In fact, it sucked, and as I’ve said before, it was my hardest ever. Sure, it included a lot of personal growth, maybe more than I’ve ever experienced. Which is why I’m constantly saying you shouldn’t work on yourself–because if you want the good stuff, plan to go through hell. They simply go hand-in-hand. (Also, to be clear, I do recommend working on yourself. It’s better than the alternative, which is long-term suffering.) Anyway, so there was hell, then this injury came along. And whereas I’ve been supported and gotten good help, I’ve also had the shit scared out of me and been totally inundated both physically and emotionally.

Someone said recently, “It’s like the straw that broke the camel’s back.” I replied, “No, it’s like the hay bale that broke the camel’s back.”

I’m not in love with the fact that I’m talking about (potentially, officially) being depressed to the entire world-wide web. After all, there’s a lot of stigma around this topic in our society, and it’s grossly misunderstood. Hell, clinical depression runs in my family, and I don’t understand it. (Once a psychiatrist told my father, “People understand depression to the extent that they’ve had it.”) Obviously, it can take on a lot of different forms. My personal experience with it is limited to feeling empty and paralyzed while I was in a no-good, horrible, very bad relationship several years ago and feeling extremely unhappy just before I closed my dance studio. In both cases, I knew something had to change.

The articles I read today about Post-Surgery Depression offered the standard advice. Be patient, get outside, exercise, don’t neglect your friends. Also, they said it was important to celebrate small victories. For example, this last weekend while in Nashville, I noticed that it was easier for me to go down the stairs at my friend’s apartment when I left on Monday than it was to go down them when I first got there the previous Friday. My natural tendency is to brush this improvement off, since it wasn’t dramatic. But the articles suggested you can find a lot of hope by recognizing incremental gains.

So to commemorate this milestone, I just ate an Oreo Blizzard from the Sonic.

But back to my not really wanting to talk about this and why I’m doing it anyway. My therapist pointed out this afternoon that I’ve chosen to make my very personal and private journey public (on this blog), and I agree. Not that I share everything that goes on in my life or head, but putting my insides on the outside is sort of what I do here, so it doesn’t seem right to stop now. Plus, because there is a stigma in our society around The D Word, I can’t imagine that will ever get better by not talking about it. And it needs to get better. I know what it’s like to feel sad, isolated, ashamed, embarrassed, different than, and less than, and it needs to get better for anyone who feels these things. And since every major stride I’ve made in terms of my mental health and personal relationships has always started with no longer bottling up, stuffing down, and keeping secrets, but rather with having an honest conversation, then I’m having this honest conversation.

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

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When you hide your hurt, you can’t help but pass it on. It ends up seeping, sometimes exploding out.

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a higher perspective (blog #38)

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Wayne Dyer tells the story about a memory he had during a spiritual experience. The memory took place before his birth, and his soul was deciding under what conditions it would be incarnated. He says that during his life on earth he wanted to teach others about unconditional love and finding their inner strength, so he knew that he first had to develop those qualities in himself. The best way to do that, he reasoned, was through a difficult circumstance. So it was at that time, before he was even born, that he decided his father needed to be an alcoholic who would later abandon him to an orphanage.

I think about this story a lot. There are a number of spiritual teachers who propose that we choose our parents, that our souls map out major players and events in our lives long before they actually happen, that there are no such things as accidents. Most of the time, I’m inclined to believe this way. Of course, the bitch of the whole thing is that once you’re here on earth (and not wherever you were before you came here), you forget all the reasons your soul had for picking out your family, your partner, your job, and even your body (you know, the one with the receding hairline).

Many people who have had out-of-body or near-death experiences say that in between lifetimes, our soul has counselors, other souls who advise us on how best to set up our life here on earth. I guess those counselors are pretty sharp, and they say things like, “I know it’s been a while since you’ve been in a physical body, and you’ve probably forgotten how miserable it can be to have back problems. Maybe you don’t really want to go to earth this time. Take another look. It’s a fucking mess down there.” I also guess our souls are pretty determined, like they can look at the plan for a painful life, decide that the positives far outweigh the negatives, and say, “Sign me up. I can take it.”

Personally, I haven’t had a spiritual experience during which I’ve remembered why my soul decided to come to earth. But I’m constantly attracted to literature and teachers that talk about unconditional love and the idea that life is kind, so it probably has something to do with learning more about those things. As a result, I can usually look at even the most terrible events that have happened in my life and see that those are the times when I grew the most. So the older I get, the more reluctant I am to label any experience as bad. Of course, that doesn’t mean that I enjoy the difficult times, but it does make them more bearable.

These things have been on my mind today because this afternoon I went to a walk-in clinic. I’ve been coughing for a week now, and last night during a fit of coughing, I think I actually levitated and I know for certain that my chest vibrated. I’m not a doctor, but I don’t think that’s supposed to happen. So I went to the doctor and found out that I have an upper respiratory infection, probably brought on by “allergy season.”

Even as I’m typing now, I’m fighting the urge to not get frustrated because I’ve been on so many antibiotics lately (and I hate that) and because I just had that sinus surgery and it’s easy to look at the mucus that I cough up every morning and think that it didn’t do a damn bit of good. I’m so tired of getting sick (again) that my knee-jerk reaction is to label the whole thing as “bad.”

Now, that being said, I’ve done a pretty decent job today of not letting that frustration overwhelm me. Rather, I’ve thought a lot about the fact that everyone at the clinic and pharmacy was extremely kind and helpful. Insurance took care of the majority of charges, and the doctor was gentle and attentive. When I told him I taught dance, he asked if I had a studio, and when I said that I’d closed mine and wanted to move, he said, “I hope you find yourself in a place you love doing what you enjoy doing.”

I imagine that he has no idea what a simple sentence like that means to me. Most days, I keep my chin up. I can look at my life the way it is—living with my parents, in a town I’m grateful for but not in love with, having no definite plan for what’s to come next, worried my dreams won’t come true—and keep putting one foot in front of the other. But when I get sick, especially with a sinus infection, I tend to lose hope. And I’ve spent so much time being scared of and intimidated by life as a whole, that it’s a really big thing to sit in a doctor’s office comfortably and recognize the moment for what it was—kind.

I spent this evening reading another hundred pages in Andrew Solomon’s book about depression, so my parents and I talked about it, and my mom told my dad how grateful she was that he’d stuck by her for all these years. (It’s common for depressives to lose their jobs, friends, and spouses.) The conversation made me think of just how hopeless depression must feel, especially chronic depression like my mom’s. Comparatively, my sinus issues are nothing, although they do bring up that feeling of hopelessness.

When I look at my mom, I see someone who is really strong, although I’m sure she doesn’t feel that way most of the time. But she was probably one of those souls that said, “Sign me up. I can take it.” I wouldn’t presume to know what her journey is all about, but when I think about why my soul might choose a mom with depression, I imagine that it would be because it’s teaching me to be gentler with myself and others, to be more compassionate, to be less demanding. As Mom said once, “You don’t have to excel every day.”

And when I think about why in god’s name I might choose a body with tendency for sinus infections, I imagine it would be because it’s been the perfect vehicle for me to learn to love myself—no matter how I feel—no matter what condition. Additionally, it’s helping me see the world as a kinder place, a place where there is help, a place where there is hope, a place where there is rest for the tired.

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

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It's never a small thing to open your home or heart to another person.

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this present moment (blog #34)

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Dad just finished taking a shower and getting dressed. The entire house smells like twenty-five-year-old cologne. I’m gagging. Earlier today I decided that I don’t have a sinus infection but do have a cold, and I can only imagine how bad the smell would be if I weren’t congested. He must have slathered the cologne on, maybe taken a bath in it. “You smell like a French whore,” I said. “I’m going to blog about it.”

***

I spent the day coughing and reading a hundred pages in a book by Andrew Solomon called The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. It’s 445 pages of total text, and it’s not exactly what I would call light reading. But I’ve had it checked out of the library for over a month and I’m determined to finish it.

A couple of months ago, my mom and I watched Andrew’s TED Talk called Depression, the Secret We Share (30 minutes), and we both cried. So I checked out his book from the library, and Mom read it first. Having been clinically depressed for over thirty years, she identified with Andrew and marveled at his ability to put into words many of her dark feelings and difficult experiences. So more than anything else, I’m reading the book to better understand my mom and people like her.

Mom’s depression started shortly after I was born, and I don’t have many memories of her without it. I guess as a kid I didn’t fully understand, but I remember that she had to go away for maybe a year when I was six or seven to live in a hospital in Baltimore. I guess all kids are embarrassed of their parents, but I can remember thinking that my mom seemed different than the other moms. Maybe it was just that she wasn’t able to do as much.

At some point, Mom had to quit her job as a nurse. The depression was too bad. The electric shock treatments affected her memory. From what I can gather, nursing was one of the few things that she really loved about her life, something she was really good at, and I think it’s taken her a long time to come to peace with the loss.

I’ve heard all my life that Mom has a type of depression that never goes away. Her doctor says that it’s like that for a small percentage of people. Some days and some years are better than others, but it’s like she’s never really out of the woods.

When I was in my early twenties, Dad had a heart attack. I remember going to the Van Buren City Park the next day and jogging. I started going to the gym soon after that, subscribing to Men’s Health. Even Dad will admit that the heart attack didn’t scare him into changing his lifestyle. He’s heavier now than he was back then. But it certainly scared me. Looking back, the jogging, the working out, the reading—it was all motivated by fear.

I’ve spent the last fifteen years really digging into health—what it is, how we lose it, how to get it back, how to keep it. It’s taken me down some pretty interesting paths, both traditional and alternative, and I’ve learned a lot. And whereas I thought that it all started with Dad and his heart attack, I’m sure now that it actually started with Mom and her depression.

Over eight years ago, I took a class in Reiki, a hands-on form of healing that originated in Japan. I usually preface any mention of Reiki by saying that it’s really weird, but it seems like things that are weird are becoming more and more mainstream lately. Anyway, my Reiki teacher says that there is a divine intelligence that is capable of healing any illness. Anything is possible.

Frankly, I love this idea, and it actually lines up quite nicely with my Christian heritage. (I can do all things through Christ, God can move mountains, etc.) Still, there’s a big part of me that has a lot of evidence—like Mom’s depression—to the contrary. So it’s something I really struggle with, this idea of whether or not things like pain and sorrow come and go or simply come—and stay.

I think it’s a huge part of the reason that I get so frustrated when I get sick. Every illness feels like it could be permanent. I can handle a sinus infection for a week, but the thought that I’ll have to handle them for the rest of my life is pretty unbearable. Those are the times it feels like everyone else has things that get better, but I’m the exception. Worse, it feels like I’m doing something wrong. Like if there’s a divine intelligence capable of healing, it’s either not willing to, or it must be my fault when things don’t get better.

Last night I started reading a book by Pema Chodron called Comfortable with Uncertainty. I picked it up at an estate sale last weekend in Tulsa because I liked the title and because I’m not. There’s a line in the first chapter that says, “We explore the reality and unpredictability of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we let it be as it is.”

Wow.

“We try not to push it away.”

I can’t tell you how hard I try to push pain away, how hard I work to make health a permanent state of being, to make it certain. (A history of chocolate cake and cigarettes notwithstanding.) But clearly, the truth is that it’s uncertain. As Saint Teresa of Avila says, “All things pass away.” (I just got up to take some Claritin and Ibuprofen, and the house STILL SMELLS like a teenage boy who’s discovered Axe Body Spray. So—obviously—some things pass away more quickly than others.)

A few years ago, Mom’s depression started on an upswing. I can remember going out to eat with her in high school or college and her not saying a word. Now she talks and talks and talks some more. (It drives Dad crazy.) She’s still sick, but it’s a remarkable difference. And I think that’s one of the benefits of my being here now. For the longest time, it’s been easy for me to keep Mom’s illness at a distance, to personally run after health and treat someone else’s sickness like something that doesn’t concern me. Looking at it now, that’s because I haven’t been ready to admit just how scared and vulnerable I really feel about it.

So this week my goal is to do my best to lean in, to be more okay with having a cold or a mother with depression, to open up to this present moment rather than trying to push it away. And rather than wishing things were different than they are, I can look for the gift in this present moment—a chance to experience compassion for myself and others, a chance to experience my heart.

[The top photo is of my mother when she was in nursing school. Isn’t she lovely?]

Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)

"There are a lot of benefits to being right here, right now."