I have this recurring stress dream where my favorite band is playing in town and I don’t know it until it’s almost too late. Sometimes I miss the show, sometimes I barely make it. Sometimes I’m in my underwear. Like you do.
A couple of days ago, I was cheering to some friends that my therapist will be back from maternity leave soon. A friend responded, “Party down to sanity town!”
I was thinking I hadn’t felt all that depressed this winter. Then I realized that everyone else is also depressed so I’m only less depressed by comparison. It’s difficult to wallow in this temporary darkness when we are all engulfed in an existential muck. We are all Artax and we’re walking through the Swamp of Sadness. Even the most optimistic among us are Atreyu, at best — doomed to keep up that grim determination lest The Nothing descend upon us all.
I don’t trust birth.
Or pregnancy.
There. I said it.
I feel like I’m supposed to be a good little half-hippie, trusting birth and bodies and earthmothergoddessblahblahblah.
Like 2015, 2016 has been a Jekyll and Hyde sort of year. Last year it was the dichotomy between Rowan’s birth and Rowan’s existence. Something that made my life so much more difficult and scary also filled it up in amazing ways.
I recently wrote a piece for HuffPo about my general apathy for the prolonged Christmas season. The whole Christmas tree thing is slightly anxiety-producing on the best of years but this year, with a curious toddler who likes to climb things and I just was not feeling it.
Y’all. I know it’s only November. I know this, but all that does is worry me more about what the next few months will be like.