Underlying Depression

Is anyone else awake, will it ever be day again... Kate Tempest

Have to make some concessions when everything is working right
Have to count my blessings, helps me make it through the night
I’ve got love in my life as well as trouble and strife
And underlying depression

Van Morrison had it right, as so often…  I have been churning  the last hour or so, so thought I would share some of the butter created.  I had five years of pretty severe sleep problems linked to depression and anxiety, nearly three years on sleeping pills, beta blockers and tried every anti-depressant known with little effect.  I am now off all pills, and generally sleep is so much better…no longer waking up at 3 or 4 and unable to get back to sleep.  But I miss a sense of peaceful calm in my mind.  Rest is an active process now, full of tensions and inner dialogues.  My mind races around, and I have to calm it by telling it there be no dragons.  I am back in a much better space, have worked full time again, am able to walk with head held high, looking up to find the hope and beauty of the world.  I am enjoying each moment of the day, spending time with my wife and family, walking in the beauty of nature and sharing thoughts, feelings and ideas.

But some underlying tension is still there and I don’t really get  where it is coming from.  I am not working and although much stress in life comes from work, much can also come from not working, lacking a sense of purpose and fulfilment in life.  I have a pretty bad back, to the point where I have had spinal injections and am taking cocodamol to help.  My knee is sore too – hopefully not arthritis, but a pulled tendon, which is causing me pain.  I am 53, so I guess life just gets harder – my amazing mum and partner are in their nineties and somehow coping with so many physical ailments with a positive mind, so I have no excuse there!  And I have smouldering myeloma, so some of my exhaustion may just be related to that.  It also brings worries about the future, about how my life is likely to develop, which are more in focus now the depression and anxiety have lifted.  But again, I have an inspiring friend who has been suffering from cancer for years, but still shows such light and positivity in her attitude that she has shown me what is possible.  And my wife thinks it could be male menopause.  Let this man pause whilst I look that one up…  Mmmm, not sure about that one.  Although the average age is around 54, let’s just say I don’t think I am suffering from most of those listed symptoms.  Sometimes things look up.

And of course we are not short of things to worry about in the wider world.  The fantastic news service we have serves up problems of nuclear war, fundamentalist terrorism, asylum seekers, climate change, refugee crisis, earthquakes and hurricanes, Brexit (don’t get me started!), and the most powerful man in the world is a psychopathic toddler squaring up to another despotic crazy nutter who might between them lead us to nuclear annihilation.  All going well there then….

So this combination of extreme tiredness and tension seem to be my regular bedfellows, accompanying me through much of my day and night time activity.  The old philosophy or acceptance, or more simply fuck it might help me cope with this, but I do miss the old relaxed me, who slept the sleep of the just and was more able to switch off his mind and thoughts.  Is this a temporary condition, or my new self?  I have had the blood tests for anaemia, am having regular blood tests and check ups for the myeloma, have asked my GP for advice.  But ultimately medication, diagnosis and treatment are unlikely to provide many answers and the solution is more likely within my mental state.  Meditation, calming techniques, plenty of exercise, water and music are what I prescribe myself.  Illness has taught me the joy of being well, but seems to have taken away my sense of complete well-being, which I have not had for some time.

But compassionate mind training has taught me another good approach is to focus on the suffering and strength of others – my wife who has put up with so much in the last five years, my amazing mum and step dad who soldier on, my close friends with cancer and anxiety/ self esteem issues, the incredible people at the MS therapy centre, and a whole load of friends with some kind of mental or physical health cross to bear.  By focussing compassion on them, I can learn to be compassionate to myself, stop asking so many questions of myself and try to live in the awake moments of early morning, as so many do.

“At this very moment, on this very street
Seven different people in seven different flats
Are wide awake, they can’t sleep
Now, of all these people, in all these houses
Only these seven are awake
And they shiver in the middle of the night
Counting their sheepish mistakes”

There is so much peace to be found just in people’s faces – Kate Tempest

 

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A Life in Colour

A Life in Colour

The challenge as I rise from bed

Is turning greys to green and red.

The drabness of the everyday

Takes a rainbow, turns it grey.

The colours sharp are lit by sun.

Red, orange, yellow, new begun.

Green, blue, violet quickly fade

Primary, pastel, into shade.

A squirrel, seal, a worm, a whale

Don’t worry that they live so pale.

The tortoise carries well its shell

And slowly lives its long life well.

The matter in our brains is grey

That keeps us thinking, helps us play

Life is not in black and white

Not can or can’t but could and might.

And as the children march to school

It’s greyness which is made the rule

The shorts and jumpers seem so plain

Forcing kids to look the same.

A walk along a busy street

Can feel a drag upon our feet.

Pushing trolleys round a store

Less can quickly feel like more.

Another day, the same old stuff,

And keeping on can feel quite tough.

Curtains flung, we wipe the mist,

The cloud and fog and smoke persist.

But grey is not a lack of light

It carries all and dispels night.

The smallest reds, the emerald green

Are there, deserving to be seen.

Our inner prism takes each hue

And splits it, turning sharp and true.

Greyness seems a lifeless shade,

But focus makes all seem new made.

And as we age our life gets greyer,

Colour fuels our thought and prayer.

Today our life’s in black and white,

But past life’s sharp and pure and bright.

So greyness here upon my head,

Perhaps I’ll dye to turn it red.

And live each day in colours pure

And make delight of every chore.

But sometimes greyness suits my mood,

To spray it gold would seem quite rude.

The fog is numbing, muffled, cosy

It makes the thorn still feel quite rosy.

At rainbow’s end there’s golden dreams,

The bricks are yellow, lights are greens.

Eyes are hazel, green or blue,

The clouds disperse when I’m with you.

Our body’s end will be in dust,

Buildings, cars will turn to rust.

So let us celebrate the glow

And make our lives a pure rainbow!

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Not Waving….

Here is Stevie Smith talking and reading her great little poem Not Waving But Drowning on a similar theme to my swan effort…

 

And here is her take on the swan – concise, sad and beautiful;

The Bereaved Swan

Wan
Swan
On the lake
Like a cake
Of soap
Why is the swan
Wan
On the lake?
He has abandoned hope.

Wan
Swan
On the lake afloat
Bows his head:
O would that I were dead
For her sake that lies
Wrapped from my eyes
In a mantle of death,
The swan saith.

Stevie Smith

Good to read the experts!

X

The Swan Effect

Been thinking about the swan effect recently and how many people seem calm on the surface, but beneath are struggling with themselves and life.  You could say it’s the human condition perhaps.  Anyway, I wrote a poem about it.  Here it is.

Leda

Your slender neck and wings so clean

Graceful movement, so serene,

The purest feathers which you preen

Are what attracts the eye.

 

Curves and power, gliding slow,

Majestic as a river flow

Sleek and gently strong you go

Sliding steady like a sigh.

 

Ivory feathers glistening bright,

Basalt eye that hints of night,

Swimming power and huge in flight,

Along the lake you slide.

 

Beneath the water’s murky shade,

Shrivelled skin and feet of spade,

Pumping legs the space invade,

You pant and weep inside.

 

You never want the world to see

The stress of floating near to me

For grace and beauty are the key

Your every move is muffled

 

The question mark of beak and neck,

Beneath the line disguise a wreck,

Invaders will receive a peck

If feathers are but ruffled.

 

So I will surely give you space

To chase your rivals from this place.

Your moods are hidden from your face,

Your lizard legs and toes.

 

Your beauty shows the world is pure

Mere mortals must remain on shore

Your lifeblood muscles once you tore

Still frantic fever glows.

 

Water on your back in silver beads

You seem contained in all your needs,

Your fretting soul the furnace feeds

Your struggling leans upon.

 

We all can seem serene and calm,

Our feathered shell protects from harm,

Beneath the waves a fire alarm,

But up above a swan.

 

X

Dark Days of Light…

Inspired by a dear friend’s talented daughter, decided to attempt a sonnet, sitting in a coffee shop on a rainy Thursday evening.  So here it is… (Will needn’t worry!)

Dark Days of Light

The tears which fall on sodden streets of grey,

The deepest rumbling sighs and sunken eyes

Proclaim the muted fanfare, sad each day,

Display cracks and scars from which life will rise.

Regret, pity, loss and dark hollow dreams

Make jagged potholes in each soggy street*

Sun rays cannot pierce or jagged moonbeams

Penetrate fog absorbing every heat.

But in the storm’s eye’s sad unblinking gaze

We feel the warmth, mist becomes a haze

Why is life so dark? As the frame behind

To help the light stand out of soul and mind.

 

*(or those we meet?)

X

(Now I see why Shakespeare and the Romantics were so good…!)

 

A Year of Blogging Dangerously…

My first blog was on August 24 2016, so just over a year has passed since my first venture into the blogosphere.  77 blogs in 372 days, so about one every four or five days or so.  I seem to have a small but perfectly formed audience of around 100 people, but really only about a dozen who read it regularly.  (Thanks to all who take the time to read my ramblings!). Most are family or close friends who know the full context of what I am writing, but occasionally a message comes in from an exotic country – U.S.A, France, Hong Kong or Algeria of someone who has stumbled over my words in a google search and found something to comment on.  If I wanted to increase my circulation, I would put it out all over facebook and social media, tag it with various headings and leap head first into the strange hinterland of private and public that is tinternet.

But whilst I am pleased when someone new or old has read something I have written, I am not doing this primarily to promote it round the world.  It began as a way of soothing a troubled mind at 3am, focussed on working out what was happening to me.   Why was I not who I used to be?  Why could I not do the job I used to do?  Why was I tormented by anxiety, despair and depression?  By cancer?  where was my confidence, my sociable nature, my ability to walk into a shop or a pub without being plagued by extreme panic?  Gradually it became about what had happened to me, trying to put my experiences into some kind of context, exploring with words, ideas and poems what was left of me.  Then it became about who I have become, for there have been big changes in me, shifts in perspective, attitudes, feelings, sensitivity.  And maybe now it is about who I am becoming, where my future lies, what will be down the road less travelled.

It has always been a mirror, to reflect my ideas, give me a space to articulate, mostly to myself, how my Self seems to me now, how the world seems different from how it used to be.  It is a store room for what would otherwise have been scribblings in a note pad, so I know these ideas are there for myself and others in the future.  Early fears about being plagued by trolls, strangers commenting cruelly on what I have written proved unfounded.  The internet universe is a big place, so of course no-one notices the random wonderings of another disturbed mind.

Listening to Kate Tempest right now… Is anybody else awake?  Will it ever be day again?

As Oscar Wilde might have said, maybe I have written my blog so I always have something sensational to read in hospital.  It feels strange to me to read the early blogs, to feel the agony and frustration of my former self a year ago.  Well, if you think that is tough, try reading the three note books of scribblings of despair from the previous three years.  Gnawing away like a dog with a bone at how hard I was finding life, how desperate I felt at loss of job, confidence, Self.

In Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, the lead character, appropriately enough called Krapp, is discovering his old thoughts on a reel to reel tape recorder.  It is his 69th birthday and he listens to his thoughts from his 39th, alone at his desk and fast forwarding through the bits which annoy him.

Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.

Every so often he breaks off to swear, cursing both the loss of happiness and the naive idealism of his earlier self.  It is a beautiful and tragic piece on melancholy, nostalgia, death and despair, with Beckett’s typical sensitivity to the human condition.  The end, as usual, is pretty bleak, but also ambiguous and thought-provoking:

Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.

Part of me wonders how my older self, perhaps in a far worse condition, will view these ramblings.  In the meantime, to quote him again,

Ah finish your booze now and get to your bed. Go on with this drivel in the morning. Or leave it at that …

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