While I remain silent for a bit...

...take a look at some of my favorite blogs in my side bar. I especially enjoyed The Perils of Divorced Pauline as she muses on the pitfalls of turning 50.

Another Fascinating News Item about Depression

I read this after seeing the link on a blog I love.  Mrs. Moon's blog itself is a pretty good antidote to depression, but for those of you who are adventurous, there might be something new coming down the pike.

Chances for LSD and mushrooms presented themselves to me back in the day. Unfortunately, I'd already had some experience hallucinating on morphine in the hospital. Think bloodbath. The blood rising from the floor like someone had turned on a tap in a bathtub. Blood dripping from the ceiling and running down the walls. Who needs more of that?

I'll have to find other ways of "letting my senses run free." Maybe if the doors of perception could be cracked open, the sky would always look like the way it did tonight as I walked home from the train.

My Brain is Just Fine

I listened intently to every word of a news story about depression on NPR this morning--the gist of it being that maybe the brains of depressed people really aren't broken, i.e. suffering from a chemical imbalance. That's an old idea, the story said; the whole lack of serotonin thing is a myth that just won't die. There's probably something going on with genetic predisposition, they said,  but there was an experiment where the subjects had the serotonin removed or deactivated from their brains, and they did not become depressed! How about that?

I've worried a lot about my serotonin. I felt better, in some ways, on anti-depressants, but I hate pills. Well, no, actually, I'm afraid of pills. The thought of side-effects is enough to turn me into a side-effectechondriac. Reading the disclosure on the medication I was taking was almost more depressing than being depressed. But I was really, really in trouble, and I knew it, so I took it.

Eventually I stopped. I was okay-ish. My divorce heartbreak was subsiding. But I still had a lot of negative stuff going on. The anxiety was killing me, but I didn't want to get back on the pills for a third run. (Third time might be an unlucky charm, right?) Finally I went to a therapist, and it helped a lot--which is what the piece on NPR claimed that talk therapy can work just as well.

So now, I'm thinking, my brain is just fine. My brain is fine. Yes, a ton of stuff has gone wrong since I was 16. (The litany goes like this: secret pregnancy that results in first child being given up for adoption, tragic car crashes, father dies suddenly, I'm hospitalized for twice for gruesome spinal surgeries, serious money trouble, two horrid depressions after subsequent children, years living with a man who wanted out but wouldn't say he wanted out while I pretended everything would be fine.) And yeah, everyone has a lot of stuff that goes wrong--some way more horrible than anything on my list, but maybe what I have is circumstances combined with a genetic predisposition, and I never have to worry about serotonin again.

I do feel I need to exercise full out every single day, take it easy with the wine, and just keep moving on down the road from Divorceville to Margaritaville, but as I make that move, it's good to think of  my brain as a lovely healthy brain.

Coincidences, Mysteries, Prefigurements, and Foreshadowing

This is a photo of my daughter C.--taken approximately twenty years ago on a family trip to Catalina Island. I think the hat might have actually belonged to the captain of the boat. I don't remember exactly, but I imagine that with three cute little girls in tow, we somehow managed to catch his attention and ended up with a photo op.

Today, after almost six years of sailing historic tall ships, C. herself passed the test that makes her a captain. The  picture was tucked in a photo album hidden away for years on a shelf in our garage, and last week as C. prepared for her captain's test, an image of her in a captain's hat surfaced in my memory.

I'm fascinated by coincidences, and have written about them here and here. And this one is one of my favorites.

Sometimes when I look into the eyes of the man who loves me, I think that he looks familiar, that I know him from somewhere a long time ago. Which seems highly unlikely. Our worlds do not appear to have ever intersected.

Over the years I've had recurring dreams about a house on hill with a grassy slope and a view. In the distance there's the shimmer of water.

photo credit: C's father