I have this wonderful self preservation/defense mechanism, I forget the vast majority of unpleasant things that happen to me in life. The more fragile I am in the present emotionally and mentally the less memory I have, and when I’m seriously stressed and at my lowest peak, I forget even the simple things, my phone number, my address. But those are the dark dark days of the worst times, which I seem to be out of now. Though my memory impairment is still pretty substantial.

But I’m thinking tonight, mostly of my long past memories that have been buried, not the recent past, not the couple of years ago when I was in and and out of rock bottom suicidality and had to dig my way through my tears and my haze to struggle to remember who I was where I lived, and what numbers I came with, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Depression is an evil illness.

My long past memories…

I know that there were a number of things that were ‘wrong’ in my childhood, that I had serious issue with. One event was the one that precipitated writing this entry. I was listening to to Tori Amos, ‘time to be a ghost’, and it’s one of my ‘happy’ depression songs. The lyrics talk about being a ghost and chasing nuns out in the courtyard. I went to private school with the nuns, and it’s there were I had a very abusive teacher. Now, perhaps I was a very sensitive child, actually I know I was, but whether it was because of a number of badly timed events in my life like this, or whether it’s my biochemical makeup, or a combination, who knows.

I was thinking as I listened to the song that If I was to come back as a ghost, it would be tempting to haunt the old bitch that was so cruel to me. But honestly, I’m not about revenge, and I certainly don’t want to be carrying any baggage into any afterlife there may or may not be. I like to have these happy fantasies of death being some kind of transcendent state. Not to heaven or any some such, I’m not a religious person, just a spiritual one. At any rate. It got me onto what I do remember of the experience, mostly the sensations of fear, anxiety, her constantly watching me for any opportunity to humiliate me. The terror of constant failure in front of her and the class, where I had always loved school before. She ridiculed me for ‘thinking I was so smart and so special, and so much better than any one else, when I was just a pathetic little…’ I was a year younger than the rest of the kids, I went into school a year early, and I had had previous offers of jumping ahead a grade, as I already had learned at home ahead of what my grades were doing, I loved to learn things. I didn’t want to go any farther ahead though, because I already felt isolated and strange compared to the other kids. I wanted to be liked, I didn’t want to be ’special and smart’ it was very obviously a bad thing.

I think I’ve spent the rest of my life in a struggle, between the part of me that loves to think, to learn, to puzzle things out, to challenge myself, to seek to create, to make art, to find beauty in everything, myself and others. Then the part of me that feels as if I do that I’m going to isolate myself from others and I will be attacked or disliked or hated for it. That some jealous nasty person is going to take my head off. The pathetic thing, is I’m trapped in that wounded place of the child, where I’m still trying to seek a way to win the friendship and the approval of that person, those people. I eat myself larger, creating a protective barrier of what I discovererd to be a lubrication in my relationship with other women. When I was thin, and getting modelling offers, and men hitting on me, I was getting bitchy looks from women my age, I was getting catty comments. I wasn’t ‘trying’ to put myself out there sexually, physically. Ironically, as I got bigger it became safer for me to be more sexually out there as it seemed I became substantially less threatening to women. The bitchy competitive looks and catty comments dissappeared… but did I dissapear too? It’s hard to know, we are who we are.

Shaped by our life events. I think the major element of my person has always been wanting to love and be loved, wanting to make friends with the world, discover and share the wonder of everything and everyone around me. It was hard to learn the lessons of societal convetions. The way kids ‘play’ the rules of belonging. I never did. I was always the odd one out, I didn’t even clique with the non-clique clique, I was always feeling I like was a far out orbiting planet. Reaching for the rest of the solar system, drawn away by star gazing, and ending up perpetually lost in space.

I know I need to love myself. I know I need to stop trying to make what happened in my childhood right. Trying to fix the unfixable. I couldn’t un-evil the jealousy of my 5th grade teacher, born of whatever childhood horrors created that hurt in her. I couldn’t ressurect my sister from her untimely death when I was 7. I couldn’t fix my mothers broken heart over her lost child. I couldn’t do anything then, I was only a child, and these were things that even grown ups can’t make better. So many other things, some things I can’t write about because they would potentially cause more hurt and unneccessary damage, to people I love. But how do we take were we are, and heal, heal when all my mind wants to do is forget. Depression is running away, the problem is, there is no where to really go, which is why one goes no where. When I was suicidal, it was trying to make material the state of being severely depressed, because being depressed is not living, it’s being dead inside. Sometimes with mourning, sometimes without. numb, or shocked, or in pain, and out again.

I’m waiting still for the spring of mental health, hoping the long long winter of depression in my soul will someday lift, and that I haven’t entered my own personal ice age.

XO
Leila